Sexuality and Faith I: Celebration and Commitment
The Rev. Dr. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
January 9, 2010


Reading: Song of Songs, Chapter 2

I am a rose of Sharon,
a lily of the valleys.

2 As a lily among brambles,
so is my love among maidens.

3 As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among young men.
With great delight I sat in his shadow,
and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
4 He brought me to the banqueting house,
and his intention towards me was love.
5 Sustain me with raisins,
refresh me with apples;
for I am faint with love.
6 O that his left hand were under my head,
and that his right hand embraced me!
7 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
by the gazelles or the wild does:
do not stir up or awaken love
until it is ready!

8 The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
Look, there he stands
behind our wall,
gazing in at the windows,
looking through the lattice.
10 My beloved speaks and says to me:
‘Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;
11 for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
12 The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtle-dove
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.
14 O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,
in the covert of the cliff,
let me see your face,
let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely.
15 Catch us the foxes,
the little foxes,
that ruin the vineyards—
for our vineyards are in blossom.’

16 My beloved is mine and I am his;
he pastures his flock among the lilies.
17 Until the day breathes
and the shadows flee,
turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle
or a young stag on the cleft mountains.

Reading: From Use of the Erotic by Audre Lorde





Message: Sexuality and Faith I: Celebration and Commitment

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2011.

I will come again, my love,
though it be ten thousand miles.
The Scottish are good at devotion, aren’t they –
or maybe it’s not a Scottish thing,
as much as a poet thing.

After all, is there any more romantic and powerful poetry about love,
about devotion, about sex,
then the Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon,
from which both our introit
and the first reading were drawn.

For I am faint with love . . .
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills . . .
and he says, “Arise, my love, and come away,
for now the winter is past . . .”

Well, that’s not quite true here, is it?
Winter isn’t done with us yet,
despite last week’s thaw,
but winter seems to me a fine time
to think together on this most essential question
of life, religion, and meaning:
sexuality.

It’s a complicated topic,
and it’s an important one.
It’s a topic that bears some careful consideration,
and requires, it seems to me,
some subtlety and thoughtfulness.

So I’m going to spend three weeks talking about sex with you all.
This is not a one-day stand.
I want, right up front, to invite your conversation –
with me, with each other.
As Salt n’ Pepper put it:
let’s talk about sex.

How many of you remember that song, by the way?
That’s my generation.

Let’s talk about it.
As many of you know, I was raised in this faith tradition,
and we have prided ourselves on our sexuality education
for more than a generation.
When I was a teenager, I took the precursor to the Our Whole Lives
program which Andrew spoke about in the chalice lighting:
this program was called About Your Sexuality, or AYS.

AYS, and OWL after it, exemplify the liberal religious approach to sexuality.
As it should be, our approach to sexuality
is very much like our approach to the rest of the important issues in life
and theology.

It is the liberal mediating approach.
It seeks to mediate – the find the right balance –
between the wider culture and the wisdom of tradition.
The middle ground between the new and the old,
between progress and inheritance.

And we need a balance, don’t we?

Start with the message of the wider culture:
largely, this is a message of hook-ups, of sex sells, of painless pleasure.
It is a land of beautiful people doing what makes them happy.

There are parts of this modern culture around sexuality
that are really troublesome:
violence and abuse, about which I’ll say more next week.
Part of the modern culture is international sexual slavery traffic:
young women, girls and boys,
refugees and runaways,
kidnapped, duped, coerced into sexual slavery,
locked up in converted apartments in Thailand and Moscow
and basements in LA and suburban Jersey and all over the world.

The modern culture also includes other things that seem troublesome:
the sexualization of children and young teens,
which seems to happen earlier and earlier all the time.
The widespread availability of sexual images
has facilitated a massive increase in addiction to such images,
an addiction, like any other,
which can destroy lives, marriages, and families.

These things, and others, which are part of the scene,
are death-giving, soul-destroying, deeply hurtful parts of our world.

These kinds of practices, these results,
these things which cause harm to actual human beings,
which imprison and limit human flourishing,
these things are a betrayal of the gift of sexuality.

Instead of the romantic, the beautiful, the passion,
that sustains and creates, that is joyful and hopeful,
these kinds of practices make sex and sexuality
into tools of harm.
Instead of celebration, mourning.
Instead of freedom, slavery.
Instead of love, hatred of self and others.

This is not to say, however,
that all the aspects of modern culture,
when it comes to sexuality,
are bad.
Some of them seem to me to be good things.

We’re not all the way there yet,
but we’ve made a lot of progress when it comes
to honoring the diversity of human beings.
I’m talking not just about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folks,
though that’s a huge shift,
but also that people are just different,
and that they are turned on by different things.
We don’t expect everyone to be the same anymore –
and modern culture mostly has a live and let live attitude;
whether it’s BDSM or polyamory or voluntary celibacy or whatever –
that’s the modern culture attitude : whatever.
If it works for you, if everyone is a consenting adult,
then sure, go ahead.
And the internet here is a help –
as folks who thought they were “unusual” or even alone
discover they aren’t alone.

I also think our modern culture is getting better
at celebrating the gifts of sexuality,
recognizing that sexuality is a natural part of life,
in all the stages of life,
that getting turned on is a good thing,
that it gives us energy and courage and hope,
all these things that Audre Lorde talked about,
whether we are turned on by another, or by something else that moves our soul:
music or art or nature or the work of justice or whatever helps us come alive,
and recognize that our bodies are gifts,
worthy of celebrating.

The liberal religious impulse is to try to distinguish between these things.
Some parts of modern culture are hurtful, even evil.
Other parts are great, and sure and strong signs of progress.
We shouldn’t use a broad brush.
We shouldn’t say, oh, it’s all bad.
Nor should we say, oh, it’s all great.

For those of you who have been Unitarian Universalists for a long time,
this is a bit of change.
30 years ago, a lot of our congregations and a lot of our ministers –
including ministers who served this church –
fully embraced the modern culture of the time.
We were the church of freedom,
and so if the modern culture said anything goes,
then anything went.
Including professional boundaries,
a sense of decorum,
and a lot of marriages and families.

There were some good things that came of that era:
our commitment to equality for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people –
later adding transgender folks –
started back then.
But there was a lot of pain, too.

I think what’s changed is not just that we are
figuring out what parts of modern culture are good,
and what isn’t,
but we are also more attuned and attentive
to the wisdom of tradition.

This is what liberal religion is supposed to do.
Theologically, we are animated by trying to find the sweet spot
between orthodox religion and secular unbelief,
to say there is a middle place,
a place with spiritual power but without dogmatic creed.

And we can say the same about sex:
some things in the traditional wisdom are right.
Some of the insights of our ancestors are helpful.
I mean, it’s not like they were all cold fish –
look at the Song of Songs, for example –
our ancestors were just as turned on by sexuality
as we sometimes are,
and they understood it to be a gift,
a blessing and a wonder.

Some parts of tradition we have clearly rejected,
and rightfully so:
the domination of women by men, most significantly,
the sense that only one way of doing things is acceptable –
the kind of sexual imperialism, sexual colonialism
which characterized parts of our human history –
this we find unhelpful.

I can’t help when I think of what we have rejected
of the traditional bounds of sexuality to also recall
that the college I attended, Whitman College in Washington State,
a liberal arts school, had as its mascot the Fighting Missionaries –
it has been founded by Presbyterians and Congregationalists as a seminary,
more than a hundred years ago,
and we had a chant:
a kind of mockery of the tradition we were amused by:
Missionaries, Missionaries, We’re On Top.

I’m sure some of you will remember nothing about this sermon
but that line.
That’s OK.

I’m very much OK with mocking and making fun
of the unhelpful leftovers of a puritanical oppression.
Sexuality is a gift, and part of that gift is playful, and amusing,
and so if that’s that only thing you remember, that’s OK.

But I hope will you also remember this:
not everything from the traditional wisdom about sexuality is wrong.
I don’t think fidelity and faithfulness to one’s promises and one’s partner
is wrong.
I think it’s right.

I think the tradition is right that marriage is a sacred commitment,
an expression of love before and in the presence of the holy,
and is neither trivial nor absurd.
It is work, and it calls upon us to grow and change through our lives,
but is an expression of loyalty and courage
that I find admirable and worthy of respect.
That is not to say that all marriage’s should,
or should have, continued forever –
things don’t always go like we hoped.
But marriage is still a good thing.
I would like to see us restore the sense that marriage is worthy of respect,
that it is worth fighting for,
that all people who are willing to enter into such a dance
should have their promises treated equally under the law.

I also think those aspects of the tradition
that treat sexuality with a kind of reverence:
that it is something worthy of respect,
something that we speak of without excessive course-ness,
something where some measure of decorum, at least in public, is appropriate –

I think those parts of the tradition are wise too,
if for no other reason than respect for the diversity of life experience
in any public gathering.
Some have been deeply wounded, some haven’t.
Some have had many sexual partners, some none at all.
People are different, and when we talk about sex,
we should do so not to shock, not to hurt, not to impress,
but to be tender and caring –
to be loving –
with one another.

The liberal religious approach to sexuality,
then, like the liberal religious approach to theology and life,
is to take the best of the modern world
and the best of tradition,
and to try to put them together.
Another way of saying this is that we should be about putting two themes together:
celebration and commitment.

Celebration and commitment –
we celebrate,
we celebrate with thanksgiving,
the gifts of our bodies,
these feeling moving loving beings
that are us,
we celebrate the gift of sexuality,
the stir in our heart felt by princes and pages and everyone else,
we celebrate passion and joy and being turned on,
we celebrate freedom and individuality,
and we celebrate mutuality, unity, the dance of life.

We celebrate, and we celebrate commitment:
the commitment to keep one’s promises to another,
the commitment that sustains families and communities,
the commitment that is beautiful and deep and moves like the tide
through the sands of time.

We also celebrate and honor our commitments:
our commitments to equality,
of women and men and all people,
to people whomever they love
and however their beautiful bodies might be shaped, hued, or put together.

Our commitments to justice:
that all might be treated equally under the law.
Our commitments to freedom:
that we might live and let live,
that whatever works for consenting adults is really none of our business,
except to say, good for you if that’s good for you.
Our commitments to human beings:
that people come before ideology,
that we should measure what is good and what is not
by how it affects actual human bodies;
and most of all,
our commitments to the spirit of love,
to the love that brings us into being,
sustains us in being,
transforms us when we cannot transform ourselves,
and receives us back at the end of our lives –
our commitment to the love of life and living,
of which healthy sexuality is the expression,
our commitment and our celebration
of the love that moves through all things,
that moves in a dance,
giving our lives their joy, their hope, and their meaning.

us to go the distance,
to go the distance to celebrate life,
to go the distance to keep our commitments,
to go the distance to stand on the side of love.
So we’ll sing our Sung Benediction,
then we’ll hear the Proclaimers as our postlude.
You want to dance in the aisles on your way out, go ahead.