davebarnhart.net

Monday, January 24, 2005

Sex and the Bible

(This is a repost from my old blog - 11-04-07. It’s seed material for a project I’m referring to as Your Vulgar Bible.)

So when was the last time you heard a great sermon on the Song of Songs? Yeah. Me Neither.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how absolutely prudish we get when it comes to talking about sexuality in the church. No, I’m not advocating for more “sexual liberation” or whatever. I mean simply talking about what the Bible actually says about sex and sexuality, gender differences, and so on.

Let me start with a story.

Have you ever read the book of Ruth? I remember in a 3-6th grade Sunday school class and learning about Ruth. I remember the Sunday school teachers - two middle-aged, wonderful, loving women, who must have been saints to put up with me - telling us the highlights of the story. They told us about how Ruth pledged her loyalty to Naomi, saying, “I will go wherever you go. Your people will be my people. Your god will be my god.” And I remember thinking, “so what?”

And then I remember the big climax of the story. She and Naomi meet Boaz. He’s kind to her. It’s clear where this is headed. Naomi arranges a marriage between the two of them. There’s this strange ritual of first-refusal involving sandals and the purchase of a field. I remember thinking that this story was just plain weird.

Here’s one part that really flummoxed me. Ruth goes to him while he is “cheerful with wine,” and she lays down at his feet. And there, in our Sunday school handout, there was a cartoonish drawing of a European-looking woman kneeling down at his feet, with a smile on her face, while he startles, wakes up and gapes at her. This, we were supposed to infer, was some sort of ancient ritual proposal of marriage. Boaz was apparently very honored with this bizarre act of submission. He thanked her for this “service.” I wrote it off. Just one more weird ancient ritual that has nothing to do with me.

It wasn’t until college that I got it. We were studying Chaucer, I think, and we heard about how “feet” and “hands” have always been euphemisms for genitals. The next time I heard a reference to the book of Ruth, it clicked.

My initial reaction? Anger. I was angry at the cartoonist who drew the picture of Ruth. I was angry at my Sunday school teachers. I was angry at church and all the oblivious Christians who read from their Bibles with the same enthusiasm and excitement as they would read Care and Cleaning of Your New Vacuum Cleaner. Nobody had told me this was a story about sex. In fact, it seemed like there was a vast conspiracy to cover up the fact.

I don’t know what I should have expected. Certainly not a pornographic cartoon of Ruth “servicing” Boaz some other way. The author leaves the act up to the imagination, anyway. And I certainly don’t expect Christians who believe the Bible is an instruction manual, or a map, or a divinely-inspired version of Life’s Little Instruction Book to hear these stories as anything other than examples of how we are supposed to behave. So over time, my anger and frustration have mellowed somewhat. But it still doesn’t change the fact that I felt lied to. And we continue to lie by omission and by obfuscation.

Ever tried to have a conversation with a Christian about circumcision? They have no clue. Folks, we are talking about removing the foreskin of a man’s
penis. The Hebrew Bible even takes the chance to yuk it up a few times at pagan expense. David was to collect a small mountain of foreskins. Dinah’s brothers used the procedure as a strategy for revenge. It was a symbol of conversion and the covenant, as well as a symbol of domination and of sexuality. The Bible talks about it frequently. Do we? Nope. Occasionally it gets a little air time when we read about “circumcision of the heart,” but even then it is an oblique reference. We only mention it to spiritualize it.

Again, I was in college and seminary before I understood that “pillar” was a reference to a stone phallus. That “prostitutes” were often pagan priestesses. Apparently this knowledge is too wonderful for high school students to
know.

Why is this important? Because many authors of the Bible were aware that we have a tendency to worship sex and death. The stories of God’s calling Abe and Sarah, letting barren women become pregnant, working through humanity’s sexual desires, all of them incorporate sexuality into a larger drama that depicts God as the God not only of fertility, but of creation, redemption, and judgment. There is no fertility god but Elohim, the God of hosts. Haven’t you ever prayed about your sex life? Whose name often gets called out when people make love?

And we who are charged with teaching people about the Bible, we allow the perception that God is anti-sex. No wonder those whose faces are thrust into commodified sex every day suspect that the church has nothing relevant to say to them. It’s like Sex and the City vs. Pie in the Sky. Give me the former any day.

It is especially frustrating living, as we do, in a pagan culture which calls itself Christian. We still have prostitutes (many of whom are celebrities - high priests and preistesses of fertility) who earn money for their temples (the culture industries) by selling their bodies. We sacrifice children on the altar of these gods and goddesses. What else do you call Abercrombie and Fitch’s marketing thong underwear to 7 year olds? We teach young women they can be anything and do anything they want, as long as they try to be exactly the consumers we want them to be - as long as their chief value comes from being sexually attractive.

At the same time, our Christian church preaches asceticism and support of a cultural structure which feeds the problem. Kids hit puberty at age 10, and the average age of marriage is now 27. Our solution? Promise rings. Yes, you have to go 17 years without sex, during your prime reproductive years. And, by the way, don’t touch yourself. I mean, it may be okay if you do, but we fire people if they talk about it. It’s better if you are ashamed and guilty about it. Meanwhile, the pagan temples produce movies like American Pie

What would it mean to acknowledge the God of creation and redemption as the God of sex and fertility? Why do we not tell the real story of Ruth? Or Esther? Or the Most Sublime of Songs? Are we so afraid that kids are going to say, “well, if Ruth did it, it must be okay to have non-penetrative sex outside marriage.” (By the way, they already do say those things). Would this story not make a great sermon to a church who consistently expresses outrage at young women who get pregnant in order to escape their home life? Here’s a story about a woman who takes control of her desperate situation by using the one thing left to her. And guess what? She was a foreigner. A pagan, someone for whom switching religious loyalty was as natural a decision as following her mother-in-law, whom she loved. And guess what else? She was David’s grandmother. That’s right. KingDavid.

Is there a possibility that we could conceive of a sexual ethics that would take into account the actual stories in the Bible? I don’t mean a return to 700 B.C.  I’m not exactly sure what such a sexual ethics would look like. Something beyond our normal categories of conservative and liberal, I think. We might have to rethink right and wrong with regard to the social injustices that we impose on people. Maybe sex before marriage is not quite as wrong as, say, creating an extended form of adolescence that lasts until you are thirty years old. I’m not advocating premarital sex, or starter marriages, or any of the other failed strategies we have developed so that we can maintain our economic and cultural perversions.

Look, one of the most dynamic groups in my congregation are the young adults. Most of them are single. Most of them are struggling with sexuality and purity and the choices they make in light of the faith they have been raised in. It doesn’t work. The Bible belt has more teen pregnancy than other region of the country. But we do not get taught, in the Bible belt, what the Bible actually says. We teach kids that Ruth lay down at Boaz’s feet. His literal feet. The ones with toes on them. Is it any wonder that so many also believe women are to be under men’s feet in political and social terms as well? Is it any wonder that, in spite of their religious beliefs, they make poor sexual and relational choices? Jesus says “woe to anyone who makes one of these little ones stumble.” Our system is one giant stumbling block.

What would it be like if we taught young women that they have other sexual choices available to them? What if we gave them power over their own destinies and futures, the way Ruth and Naomi took charge of theirs? What if we taught that sexual pleasure, like food and wine, is not bad, but that like food and wine can be misused and, like them, can destroy or enhance our lives? What if we had communities of sharing and of giving that made abortion irrelevant, because all babies would be born into a loving extended family?

Look, I am really, really, really suspicious of theologies of the erotic. I think they would often set up a God of sex and fertility in place of the God who creates, sustains, and redeems. I think it is vital that we don’t get too syncretic. I believe theologians often import pagan values from our sexualized culture, baptize them, and call them Christian. Nor do I think that we should speak too formally about “God’s good gift,” and make it so pure and holy and ideal that it becomes an idol in a different sense. But what I find when I read the Song of Songs or the book of Ruth is a God who acts in concert with human sexual desire, sometimes blessing it, sometimes frustrating it.

Nor do I know how to work this out in practice. I was thinking earlier, for the new worship service, that it would be cool at some point to have a man and a woman read the Song of Songs as a drama. I pictured two stools behind two screens, backlit, so you could see the actors’ shadows. They would alternate between the man’s part and the woman’s part, and they would use a translation that didn’t pull any punches. You know what? I wimped out. It’s too erotic. I felt bad about wimping out until I turned to Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message and I found that he, too, wimped out. He goes with the less sexual translation whenever he can (compare with the NASB or Darby’s translation).

I don’t blame him. It’s too much. The whole ambiguous door-knocking/coitus interruptus thing is just difficult to speak without blushing. And, amusingly, the woman isn’t completely undressed in his translation. She’s wearing a nightgown. Probably flannel. And I bet she has those very unsexy flip-flop slippers with the fuzzy tops. And she’s wearing rollers in her hair. Yeah, that’s safer. You might even get away with reading that in church. No chance of anyone’s feet getting aroused when they hear that.
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(1/14/2006): There’s a follow-up post on sex in the Bible here, and a link to an excellent Google answer about premarital sex here. I wish that the author had mentioned the example of Ruth!

Also, for how the Bible deals with “vulgar” subjects, you might want to read this post.
Updated again 10/21/2006