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The Sins He Died For: Lust
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 28, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Samuel 11, selected verses I Corinthians 13
“When Eve bit into the apple,” writes Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, she gave us the world—beautiful, flawed, dangerous, full of being…and planted in my blood and bones and flesh a variable human love, the intoxication of the body. She (not Mary) is the mother of my children, born in travail to a world of suffering their presence may refresh…Even the alienation from God we feel as a direct consequence of her fall makes us beholden to her. The intense desire for God, never satisfied, arises from our separation from him. In our desire—this desire makes us perfectly human—is contained in our celebration and our rejoicing. This mingling, melding, braiding of good and mischief in every human soul—the fusion of good and bad in intent and in act—is what makes us recognizable (and delicious) to one another; without it—without the genetically transmitted knowledge of good and evil that Eve’s act of radical curiosity sowed in our marrow—we should not desire to know and to love God, we should have no need of him. We should have no need of one another…of a one and perfect Other. Eve, the occasion of our fall from grace, is also the occasion of our salvation. …Eve’s legacy to us is the imperative to desire. Babies and poems are born in travail of this desire, her great gift to the loveable world. So with words that presume our sin to be the occasion of our salvation, we come to consider the one sin whose explication we all have been waiting to hear: the sin of lust. The research for this sermon was, to say the least, exciting. From Paul to Augustine, from Aquinas to Immanuel Kant, I began to learn about the evolution [or devolution] of Christianity’s judgment upon sexual desire. Yet I also discovered, under the tutelage of two post-modern writers, that while we are heirs of lust’s troubling history as a deadly sin, we who dwell east of Eden must also do business with the biblical tradition in which knowing and being known is more than a euphemism for sexual intercourse. We begin with a very basic question the church lately has forgotten or been afraid to ask. “How,” asks John Updike incredulously, “can sexual desire be a sin?” Updike asks this in his article on lust, an article that appeared over a decade ago in the New York Times Book Review summer series about the “Seven Deadly Sins,” and though a long time coming, was the impetus for this series. In the first place I discovered, as I began to read the history of the church’s take on lust, that my top of the head answer to that question, and so my definition of lust-as-opposed-to-love can be traced to the philosopher Immanuel Kant. For Kant, love is that which “wishes well, is amicably disposed, promotes the happiness of others and rejoices in it” whereas lust “objectifies the other person, using him or her as a mere means, a tool of one’s own purposes.” On the one hand, then you have Paul’s chastity and on the other David’s murderous desire. Moreover, says Kant, lust makes of the other person “an object of appetite; as soon as the other person is possessed and the appetite sated,” says Kant, “they are thrown away ‘as one throws away a lemon that is sucked dry.’” In sum said a friend to me, lust is all about me and love is all about the other. But Kant simply represented the 18th century destination of a long road of theological reasoning, a road whose origin is usually located at a baptistery in Milan. There, around A.D. 387, the young Augustine was converted to Christianity. This is the saint who confessed, of his youth, that he “had been woefully at fault, particularly in early adolescence. I had prayed to you for chastity,” he wrote, “and said, ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.’” Shortly after his conversion, his youthful prayer was answered. In obedient response, he banished the woman with whom he had lived and loved since his teens, the woman who was the mother of his son. Some have taken the guilt over that turn in Augustine’s sex life as the psychological origin of the doctrine of original sin, a doctrine many blame for the demonization of lust in Western society. Later in his career, he would remind his congregation “that when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they had been ‘ashamed’; they had covered their genitals with fig-leaves. That was enough for Augustine,” said his biographer Peter Brown. “‘Ecce unde. That’s the place! That’s the place from which the first sin is passed on.’ The shame at the uncontrollable stirring of the genitals was a fitting punishment for the crime of disobedience.” Sexual feelings, in other words, were a punishment for disobedience, “a torture to the will.” Therefore, it is the loss of control in the sexual act that seems to be the problem, seems to be the sin we know as lust. From Augustine, we turn to Thomas Aquinas who characterizes even marital intercourse in terms that include “filth…foulness… vileness…or disgrace.” Here an understanding of natural law takes over in matters of human sexuality, making actions that accord with nature a virtue and actions that depart from nature a vice. At first glance, it would seem our “doing what comes naturally” would certainly leave room for sexual desire! But keep your pants on! For according to Aquinas, “Nature is not what we find by looking around us now. It is the way things would have been if Adam and Eve had not sinned, unleashing lust in the human world.” Given the fall, reason and restraint of the will must prevail over any human passion such that even within marriage, sexual intercourse should become no more than a handshake. Given this history, it is not surprising that the ladder of virtue implicit in the writings of these ancient theologians still runs its tapes through our poor heads: “Virginity is best,” they said. “After that, matrimony without sex is fine, and next best is matrimony plus pleasureless procreative activity. Procreative activity accompanied by pleasure is pretty regrettable; but worst of all, because it would turn your wife into a whore and your home into a brothel, is to act for the sake of pure sexual pleasure.” Well, where does this leave us after two thousand years of responding to the so-called sin of lust with will power, social control and, Freud notwithstanding, a massive effort to repress what just may be connected by God’s mercy not only to the occasion of our fall from grace, but to the occasion of our salvation? Says John Updike, in a move that makes of this dark history a sin in and of itself, “Lust which begins with a glance of the eye, is a searching, and its consummation, step by stop, a knowing.” So Simone de Beauvoir, in her novel The Mandarins, tells of Nadine who gives knock out drops to a man so that she may climb in bed with him. When Henri wakes and realizes what has happened, Nadine explains, “I wanted to get to know you…When you sleep with someone, it helps break the ice.” The desire at the center of all our desiring is the longing to know and be known. It is for such intimate knowledge, given and received, that we were made. Augustine said as much himself in relation to God: our hearts are restless, he prayed, until we rest in thee. It is no coincidence that the biblical word for sexual intercourse is simply “to know.” Yet the risk of being known through and through requires so much more of the human heart than the risk of using or being momentarily used and cast aside…even requires more than living and loving by the strict letter of the law. To be known by another, to be subject to another’s fears, dreams, hopes, failures, is to live in a vulnerability human beings can sustain only in the context of a great trust and tenderness. How then, we wonder, is such trust and tenderness secured? If we hold to the culture’s definition of human vulnerability as that relationship in which we are most subject to being wounded, criticized, attacked, easily hurt or tempted, such vulnerability needs the law for protection, and it often does! Marriage and sex within marriage alone was instituted not first to legitimate romance: it was to protect the rights of the most vulnerable. But if the vulnerability for which we were made is known supremely in Him who took upon himself our flesh and so our human frailty all the way to the cross, then the only trustworthy and tender relationship to which we may look for help is revealed, somehow, in Him. Perhaps we should note how he loved and draw up rules of like behavior for ourselves. Though like sex, if it is about technique, we might as well just shake hands! An inexplicable leap is all that will do, a leap that finds us trusting, to our utter amazement, we do not fall but are found and kept from falling by the God who loves us. Now if you and I really ever believed we were loved by the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ, if we really came to trust our hearts and minds and souls and strength into his keeping, then the gospel is that we will begin to know ourselves as set free from all mean use of the other for a vulnerability and love we could never dare without Him. That is why “a Christian sexual ethic,” writes Lehmann, “has another concern entirely than that of providing a check upon promiscuity and prostitution. This concern is to offer a context within which sexual intensity can be creatively related to sexual sensitivity because sexuality itself has been transformed from a biological to a human fact, from an elemental drive which [we] have in common with animals to a distinctively human relation, ‘inwardly shaped and guided by what is specifically human in human nature and by what gives fundamental meaning to human life.’” Of course we cannot ignore the fact that because of human sin, our capacity to hurt one another in matters of the heart and by way of the flesh is still enormous. Yet God’s power to keep us from the hurtful risks of vulnerability is curiously circumscribed by the way in which God has loved us: not by coercion but in freedom and all the way to the cross! “The course of faithfulness,” then [the “how to” if you will], “is not the course of safety through conformity but of the risk of obedience in faith and hope and love. When, embarked on such a course,” says Lehmann finally, “faith is met by infidelity, hope by disillusionment, love by loneliness, and the risk of obedience by the haunting sense of disobedience, the point of renewal is discovered again to be where it has been from the beginning. It is the point of encounter with him who reigns in forgiveness and renewal over every human failure and defeat.” It is knowing and being known by him whose love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Thanks be to God! Amen. |