What We Thing-ify (by Jonathan Storment)

The Seven – Lust

This is the season when pastors all over the world are trying to write Advent sermons from the same handful of passages that we turn to every year.  As a preacher, I get how hard and challenging it can be to speak a fresh word into a story that people have heard a thousand times.  So here is an idea (somewhat tongue in cheek), what if we did a Christmas sermon on the vice of lust?  Think about it, every December we start talking about God impregnating a virgin with the Messiah, and how Joseph, the fiancé, had to take cold showers for nine months.

These days, that story seems as impossible as ever, but maybe for different reasons. It has always been hard to believe that God would make a virgin pregnant, but ever since Freud taught us that behind everything is a desire for sex, it is even more difficult to believe.  Not because we don’t believe in the virgin birth, but because we really don’t believe in virgins.

A few years ago, when the DaVinci Code was all the rage, the Methodist bishop Will Willimon spent an evening talking with students about the book.  Willimon pointed out that he didn’t think the book tells us anything about Jesus,

But it tells us a lot about us. Specifically it’s curious that we are so interested in the sexuality of Jesus, his possible romantic attachments, Mary Magdalene as a girlfriend…We can’t imagine a human being who is not obsessed with sex.  We cannot follow a Savior for whom sexuality was not a major, defining concern.

Maybe historic Christianity has been too repressive about sexuality, but I have come to believe it might be that the people who have gone before us asked the question what does it take to get the world to realize that these good gifts from God aren’t in themselves God?  Because, let us be honest, I don’t think we realize that.

You have probably heard the statistics before.  We spend $16 billion annually on pornography.  And it is not just our money that we are sacrificing to this idol.  ABC News reported that pornography costs employers $11 billion annually in lost productivity.  We spend an incredible amount of money and time on something that can never be satisfied.  Because the nature of lust is that it cannot be satisfied.  You can never get enough of what you don’t really want.

There is one old Catholic Saint, John Paul the Great, who said that the opposite of love is not hate.  The opposite of love is use.  I think that is right.  When we really love someone we fight for them to become the person they really are.  In the words of Gregory Popack, when we use a person we thingify them, we reduce them to a tool.

And it is not just the other people whom we hurt.  A California State University study published in the Journal of Sex Research found that engaging in casual sex produces a lower sense of well-being and greater chance of experiencing anxiety and depression.

I think it is important to remember how gracious and compassionate Jesus was to people who were sexually immoral.  In classic Christian theology, this is one of the seven deadly sins, but it is not sees as a sin of maliciousness, but a sin of weakness.  For some reason over the years, we have come to associate this particular vice with more shame and condemnation than something much more malicious like pride.

C.S. Lewis once even suggested that God allows for us to fall into the softer vices like lust (sexual immorality) to save us from self-righteous pride that can really destroy our soul.  Of course, that is not to say that Jesus doesn’t have a high calling on our sexuality, it is just important to remember that it is Jesus who is calling us there, and to remember what Jesus is like.  God is always calling us to greater joy, and the reason Christians have made lust one of the seven deadly vices is because it slowly takes away your freedom, your joy, and your capacity for intimacy.

In other words, it is not that we are punished for our sins, it is more that we are punished by them.  Thomas Aquinas pointed out that the reason we feel so unhappy when we reduce ourselves and each other to our reproductive organs is because it is a form of death.  After all, death is the unnatural separation of body and soul.  Lust is a form of death (a deadly sin) because it unnaturally separates the body from the soul in our relationships.

The problem with lust, is like all of the deadly sins, in the proper context it can be a virtue.  Jeff Cook points out that since there is no word for lust in the Greek, the New Testament uses the words epithymeo and epithymia – words that denote a deep craving of the heart.  And Jesus uses these words…about Himself!

Our deep cravings and desires are not bad, the problem is often we are deeply craving the wrong things in the wrong ways, or in the wrong order.  I think the reason sexuality is such an idol in our culture, is because in a world that doesn’t know how much we need God, sexuality is the last transcendent thing that we know of.  It is the only way we have of getting outside of ourselves.

So, like the worship of Aphrodite or the ancient cults that practiced temple prostitution, we put the weight of worship on our sexuality, unaware that this is an ancient idea.  It’s important to remember that when Christianity was first introduced to the world it was understood as good news in this regard, especially to sexual minorities & women!  Christianity says what it does about human sexuality not to squash our joy but to lead us to a greater one.

Aquinas once wrote, Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures.  Early Christians (and most world religions actually) warned against the vice of lust not because they were against pleasure, but because it was a poor substitute for something real.

So in this season of talking about virgins, while we try to follow one, remember that Jesus Himself lusted, but he lusted (deeply craved) something more than just a fleeting sexual experience.  At the Last Supper Jesus actually uses the language of lust.  He tells His disciples I have eagerly desired [epithymeo epithymia] to eat this Passover with you.  Jesus wants what all sexuality points to, but rarely can deliver.

Beneath all sexuality is a desire to be connected in an intimate community – to be known and to know.  And if that is what you are lusting after, take heart, that is a craving God loves to satisfy.