It's Not All About Sex

In Ocean City NY, it is against the law to slurp your soup.  In Greene NY, it’s illegal to eat peanuts and walk backwards on the sidewalks during a concert. In New York State, women may go topless in public, providing it is not being used as a business. Also in our state, while riding in an elevator, one must talk to no one, and fold his hands while looking toward the door.

Obviously, such laws are relics of a previous era.  They were written in a time of travel by horseback and predate the age of computers, or even electricity for that matter.  We can safely ignore them without fear of slipping into some downward spiral of immorality.  “First it starts with wearing hats indoors and before you know it horses are tied improperly!”

Some suggest that the Ten Commandments are further examples of such outdated rules.  Which is curious since few people advocate stealing, lying and murder as admirable behavior.  When proposals are made that we have moved beyond the laws on these famous stone tablets, there is usually one commandment in particular the proposer has in mind.  It is this one, “You shall not commit adultery.”  In fact CNN founder Ted Turner suggested just such an update to the Decalogue a decade ago.

After all, we live in an era of friends with benefits, websites to hook us up with others seeking affairs, and our old standby, the one night stand.  How can we be expected to follow such an ancient rule?  Hasn’t the world changed?  Hasn’t there been a paradigm shift in sexual mores?  Don’t we live in a generation, the likes of which no one has seen before? 

Ah, but we talked about that a couple of weeks ago. The commandment to honor our parents is God’s corrective for generational narcissism, the belief that our generation is somehow special or unprecedented.  As we will see, these Ten Commandments, or ten utterances of God are not just a random list of rules.  Instead, I believe they inherently all build one another.  When it comes to these principles for living, our generation is not so special.  God’s same ethical imperatives that applied to our ancestors also apply to us.  In fact, they apply even more so to us.

How can that be, we wonder? Aren’t these rules merely cultural artifacts from a world that no longer exists?  For instance, in a place like ancient Israel, how did you define adultery in a society where men had more than one wife?  Ever wonder that?  I did.  Although I don’t recommend asking it in Sunday School as a young child. I rarely hear preachers from the Religious Right ask that question. 

True, in its original context, this commandment referred to a married man having a sexual relationship with a married woman who was not his wife, or one of his wives.  To the audience which first heard this commandment, the real offense of adultery was not that marital vows were broken or feelings were hurt.  The offensive thing about adultery was that one man was taking another man’s property, namely his wife.

On hearing that, one might very well conclude, that perhaps this commandment is in fact outdated.  We do not view women as men’s property.  After all, not even the most puritanical of Christian fundamentalists think that way anymore.  So is this commandment based in a chauvinistic mindset that no longer exists and is therefore irrelevant?  Can we just toss it aside like a century-old law requiring us to face forward in an elevator? Although I don’t recommend breaking that one either.

If this commandment were only about specific cultural or sexual practices, then I suppose we could toss it aside.  First, I don’t believe God ever endorsed such misogynous concepts.  Second, this commandment is about something much bigger than ancient patriarchal ideas about women or changing cultural ideas of sexual norms.  This commandment against adultery is not about living together, sex before marriage or homosexuality. It is not a warrant for the church to peek into every bedroom for sexual behavior and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down.

At its core, adultery isn’t about sex, or particular sexual practices.  It’s about relationships.  It’s about fidelity and faithfulness.

A few years ago, I was sitting in a reception area waiting for an appointment.      As I waited, the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation with the receptionist, obviously hitting on her.  His conversation revealed a little more than I cared to know about him.  In an effort to impress the woman behind the desk, he boasted about his great marriage, but also about the exciting weekend he had planned with his girlfriend.  He was going camping with the girlfriend, and returning to his wife the next day to celebrate their wedding anniversary.

The receptionist looked at him, a bit confused.  I think she had no desire to become Woman #3, “Wow! Going camping with another woman. You must have an open marriage.”

“Oh no,” the man explained, “My wife doesn’t know anything about it.”

There lies an inherent moral issue with adultery - deceitfulness, the breaking of trust, and inauthenticity. How can a relationship be life-affirming, truly mutual and even holy, when there is deception about something so intimate?

So does that mean adultery is OK, as long as you don’t lie about it?  Granted, some couples agree to be non-monogamous.  Depending on the decade they describe themselves as swingers, partakers in open marriages, or polyamorous - there truly is nothing new about our generation.  But let me ask you something.  For those of you who have met or know people like that, haven’t you found that they usually are screwed up in some other area of their life?  Has the whole “we’re married but we see other people” ever really worked out for anyone? 

Jesus said we would know people by their fruit and I believe the fruit of those kinds of relationships speaks for itself.  Don’t such practices, although touted as sophisticated, always seem to end with someone getting hurt?  Have you ever heard a kid brag about parents who act that way?  Aren’t they usually embarrassed by them?

There’s a reason for that.  I believe, we are hard-wired to desire deep relationships in which people are faithful and committed to us.  That is why having someone cheat on us hurts so bad.  Think of nastiest split-ups of which you know, possibly your own.  When does it get nasty?  Isn’t it usually when adultery comes into the picture?  Adultery leads to the desire for revenge, violence, even murder. Ask any cop.  When there is a murder in some idyllic suburb that hasn’t seen a killing in twenty years, what is usually the motive?

The reason we are hard-wired for faithful relationships is because we are all created in the image of God and God desires to be in a faithful committed relationship with all of us.  God understands the pain adultery causes in a relationship, because God knows what it’s like to be cheated on.  Throughout the Hebrew Bible, when the people turn away from God, God always compares them to a wayward cheating spouse.  Read the Book of Hosea, in which, to demonstrate Israel’s infidelity in worshipping other gods, God directs the prophet to marry a prostitute.  I think it was an early forerunner of performance art.

When you experience the pain of someone cheating on you, you can talk to God knowing that God knows what that feels like.  If you’re in a marriage that is experiencing the pain of infidelity right now, you can know that no matter what happens, God is with you.  If the marriage ends, God will get you through it.  But in some cases, God can transform people’s behavior and healing and restoration are possible.  I’ve seen it happen.  And if you’re someone who is cheating on your spouse, you have to end that relationship the second you walk out of here today.  You need to come before God, knowing that through Christ, God can forgive you, and give you a new start in life.

Our relationships, whether with God, or within our marriages, only exist as much as our faithfulness and fidelity to them.  Without faithfulness and accountability to each other, there is no relationship.  Our marriages are real, not because a state issues us a license, but because of the faithfulness of the couple to each other.  Our relationship with God is real, not because we agree with particular theological ideas, but because of our faithfulness to God and God’s faithfulness to us.

We are faithful to God, when we follow God’s ways of walking humbly and seeking justice.  God is faithful to us when we experience deep faithful relationships and the abundant life of true community.  God gave us this commandment, not to spoil our fun or to be repressive. God created sex as something good (and I might add He did a really good job).  God gave us this command so that we could more deeply experience life and love.  In short, to be more like God. 

For all our efforts to dispose of this commandment, Jesus took it even deeper.   He said that it was about more than people having affairs.  Even looking at someone else with lust, he said, was the same as committing adultery.  That’s setting the bar pretty high.  For me, hearing those words makes it easy to control my lusts because whenever I hear them, I immediately picture Jimmy Carter.  And no offense to Jimmy, but his image is pretty good at overpowering any lustful thoughts.  I picture him because, as some of you remember, he shocked reporters some thirty-five years ago by confessing he had often committed adultery in his heart. Jimmy has said some crazy things and he gets dumped on a lot.  But he’s always been one of my heroes because he is one of the few politicians who tells the truth of what it means to follow Jesus.  He said he committed adultery in his heart and if we are honest, so do we all.

Lust is a powerful force.  Recently, Discover Magazine featured an article on the biological motivations behind the Seven Deadly Sins.  They reported that researchers have discovered that the state of mind we call lust causes huge changes in our brains.  Analysis shows that this emotion literally sets all areas of the brain buzzing and creates intense almost uncontrollable desire.  That desire leads us to make bad decisions, even ones that override our innate programming for self-preservation.  It leads us to self-destructive behavior, to treat others as mere objects, to hurt those around us, and to destroy families and children.  It diminishes life and moves us away from the life-affirming things God does in the world. 

That is why adultery, not sex, is so evil and destructive.  God’s commandment against it is not rooted in sexual repression nor prudish morality, but in life-affirming love. As the people of God, as the community of Christ, we are often too busy with arguing about where we want the Ten Commandments hung, then actually living out their true meaning.  We are often too busy legislating and condemning the particulars of people’s sexuality, rather than encouraging and supporting faithful, honest and loving relationships.

Those relationships are a mirror of our relationship with God - faithful, pure and unadulterated.

 

Comments

[one]

What if I do actually know a very healthy, happy couple in an open marriage? They are not without their human flaws, but their polyamory doesn't seem to be one of them.

[Don Heatley]

Then I would say your anecdotal experience is different than my anecdotal experience ;-)

I would be interested to learn about the spiritual lives of those in open marriages. Do they see faithfulness to God as a core value? In particular, are there those who consider themselves followers of Jesus who are in open marriages? If so, how do they reconcile that with Jesus' teachings, especially regarding his call to intensify faithful relationships with God and neighbor?

[one]

Actually, this couple is not Christian. Yet they are probably the cutest and sweetest couple I know, as are their additional relationships. Basically, polyamorous relationships tend to fail because of human failings, but this couple's relationships work because of just the right combinations of the right personality traits, plus a healthy amount of trust and lack of jealousy.