Laura Ruth 7-24-16

text: Zechariah 9:14-17 ?? Song of Solomon 4:1-16

So I want to tell you I’ve gotten a lot of help with this sermon and I want to start with some help that I got from Theresa Lynch from Salt N’ Peppa. “Let’s talk about sex, baby. Let’s talk about it, you and me. Let’s talk about all the good things and all the bad things that may be. Let’s talk about sex.” Let us pray:

Oh God may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts and bodies together be acceptable to you, O God my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

Our scripture says in Zechariah, the Hebrew scripture, God will save God’s people on that day. They will sparkle in God’s land like jewels in a crown. How attractive and beautiful they will be. We’re in the middle of a sermon series on dignity and last week Nina preached on dignity and food. It was an amazing sermon. I heard it on the website and you can hear it there also. Nina defined dignity for us for the series by starting with the dictionary. Nina found dignity in the dictionary for us and this is what it said “a state or quality of being worthy of respect or honor. A sense of pride in oneself. Self respect.” And then Nina added her own spiritual definition which I liked very much. She said. “A spiritual state of unconditional loving oneself and others. We show a respecting of God and ourselves and all other beings. Dignity,” she said, is relational. “We hold dignity for ourselves and we hold dignity for each other.” And then I want to add my own definition, that I think that for us and our congregation, dignity is a container. It is a well or reservoir, a vessel or a basket or a box, if you will, that holds the boundaries of our body, mind, soul matrix. This vessel is molded and made by experimenting with and expanding our capacity for living in community. What we’re working on here together as a people and as individuals is making this vessel of dignity a well out of which we might act in the world and not be ashamed.

Towards this end, we have to talk about sex because everybody’s either having sex or they’re not. They’re either thinking about it or they’re not. They’re wishing for sex or not but we’re all busy with sex because sex is a thing, Amen? Say it louder. Beloved, we need to stop acting like we didn’t have sex last night or stop acting like we might not turn on the air conditioning unit when we get home this afternoon, settle down for a little afternoon delight and a nap, which I hope you will do. We act like we didn’t do that when we were younger and we worry that just because we use a walker to get around we might not be able yet to do that but we want to. Beloved, we need to stop acting as if we don’t touch ourselves or touch each other because all of this acting takes our sweet energy that arises out of our passion which we may use in order to engage the world for love or for justice. Because when we don’t talk about it and act like it doesn’t exist, all of that comes out twisted. Amen?

So, baby, we’re gonna talk about it and let’s get to it. Sex has been around since God created us and talking about sex has been around since we were created by God. God made our complex bodies and minds and souls and God knows what our bodies feel like and want and desire and crave. The scripture says that God loved us so much that God became human and don’t think that Jesus didn’t feel or know or want or grab just like every child does when the parent says “Child, don’t do that at the dinner table and don’t do it in public.” Amen? We have a written record of sex in our sacred scripture that Sara read so beautifully. I was stirred, were you not? The Song of Songs is a collection of love or sex poems, our earliest erotica from over 2,600 years ago based on Mesopotamian poetry which is even older. What Sara read from even has a literary form well known in that time and in those parts. For example, “Your breasts are like twin gazelles” and this is a literary device for naming a body part which has a double entendre based on how that body part is spelled. It is a thing, erotica, in our sacred scripture.

But beloved there have been obstacles and complications to talking about sex and doing sex. For some of us, but not all of us, the act of sex leads to pregnancy. I know you’ve heard about that. And when women are unable to name how their lives will be, it’s complicated to risk having a child or bringing a child into the world. The sex that we are and the sex that we have gets twisted by homophobia and misogyny which sometimes are not distinguishable from each other. Men have sex in particular ways so that they aren’t known as gay and women have sex and receive sex in particular ways so that they’re not known as ball busters. And the sex that some of us have is actually violence against us in wartimes and in our homes.

Racism affects the sex that we have. We who are white who have learned not to express ourselves, not to move when we are moved, not even to move during sex, are ashamed of ourselves and we export that shame onto people of color and we say they are the ones who are dirty and they are the ones who do the things actually we long to do. And our people of color have internalized these messages and have tried to act like white people so as not to be thought as dirty, so as not to be taken out of this life by violence. Oh beloved. It was only 52 years ago that a man and a woman of different colors could have sex and get married legally, much less a woman and a woman or a man and a man of different colors.

Our churches and our cultures have taught us that sex is bad and so we hide what we do. We find ourselves becoming dull to what we need and want and it brings nothing but shame to us. Beloved we are made, biology don’t you know, and in the book that Ben Perkins gave me to read “Sex at Dawn: How we mate, why we stray and what it means for modern relationships” The authors Christopher Ryan and Cicilda Jetha speak about our biology. They speak of the urge to procreate that is so in our DNA that when we become teenagers and become able this desire consumes us. I remember it, Lord don’t y’all? We snuck kisses. We hid in the bushes. There was no one to teach us about the urge in us. Beloved, biology chooses us, decides for us. We don’t necessarily decide for it. We touch ourselves and we want to be touched. We explore sex and it doesn’t matter who or how many times the pastor, the mother, the doctor, the teacher, the father say no, we did it. We will. And our kids will. Our work is not to ignore ourselves. Not to ignore what humanity or evolution bids us do. The work is to help ourselves be safe, to slow down. To be ready when there’s no slowing down. To support ourselves and our children as we learn, as we make mistakes. And even when our children bring us home a child.

I have to say that I went to Barbara Walnut this week because I was so shy and embarrassed, I went to her house and said “Hey Barbara, are you coming on Sunday?” And she said “Why” in her dignity “Yes I am.” And so I said “You know, I’m so shy about preaching about sex in front of you, you know, because in the gay community we had no healthy mirrors to tell us about when we could have sex: before marriage or after, there was no such boundary and so we made things up for ourselves. We tried to do the best that we could but we didn’t know how and there was nothing in the culture that reflected back to us, not in books, not in movies, not in our communities, healthy sexual expression. So we did the best that we could.” And Barbara and I talked about it. In her generation many many people went to their honeymoons, if they had waited, not knowing what was gonna happen. Not knowing what was gonna go on. Not knowing what was okay or not. And some people in Barbara’s generation and in mine and in yours didn’t wait until marriage and so the people who came up with a child disappeared and we had no way of knowing what had happened to them.

This book “Sex at Dawn” talks about why men stray in relationships and they’re not the only ones, but most particularly they talk about men, that there’s this evolutionary thing in them. They are made to create babies and evolution has given them a mechanism that when they live in a home and are at home that desire is hard to rise so that incest is less possible in a home. Isn’t it good to know that? Isn’t it good to be able to say to our partners, “My dear one, come away with me.” Let us figure this out. Because the biggest sex organ of all is our frontal lobes, our brain is the biggest sex organ we have. The last man I dated when I was a teenager, he was a quadriplegic and no jokes about that, okay? This beautiful man Randy he had no feelings below his sternum but he told me years later that he had such a satisfying sex life including orgasm because he was using his beautiful and highly developed and enlightened mind.

Beloved we have conflicting sexual needs. For novelty and for security and couldn’t we figure that out between ourselves? Couldn’t we say, “Hmm, honey, would you like to get a little novelty on tonight?” Or “My love, not tonight, for I need to be secure tonight.” We believe that there are limits to how we may express ourselves sexually, that there’s only one right way to have sex or not have sex. But God made our bodies and minds complex and receptive. And what is done consensually that causes us to call on God, oh, that is holy. And it is the negotiation between consenting adults that allows for our dignity, dear ones.

What we are doing, then, what we want to do then, my beloved, is to begin to notice what dignity feels like in sex. No more sneaking around unless thats the novelty that you agree on. No slinking about. No twisted energy. Beloved, notice what your partner needs and wants and if it feels good and whole, if it is whole and sexy, if it is whole and tender, if it is whole and rough, then do it. But if it isn’t lovely for you, then stop and say “I don’t like that, but I like this…” If you have shame around sex, tell someone, but only tell someone who deserves your story. Tell them about your shame and say “When I do this, when I feel this, when I experience this, I feel shame.” Because you know, beloved, shame can’t bear the light of day. For in the light of day, shame dissolves in about twenty minutes. (laughter) It’s true, empirically so. Your friend or your lover hearing your shame might remind you that there is nothing wrong with the way you feel, what you want, what you do, that there is nothing wrong with you, that you are within your dignity. But also, they may learn something from you and feel so relieved.

Beloved, get information and share information. I have never met a more less-talking people than Northern people. Lord have mercy, when I was in the choir at church at home in Athens, Georgia, we talked about it all the time. We talked about maybe that we would get a gross order of vibrators so that we could get them at a cheaper rate. Honey, y’all have to talk to each other. Tell somebody who deserves your story. Ask them how, and how much and when and where and why. Beloved, learn to speak of your desire, checking shame, saying “I desire this” and “I desire you. Would you be with me in my desire? May I be with you in your desire?” And get agreements. Get consent. Try to understand when you are using sex as you might use food or alcohol or shopping, that is as a substitute for something you need or want. This is my desire, beloved, that we stop acting as if we have no sex. I wish for us ways of sex that are dignified and safe. I wish that we teach this to our children. I wish that the sex that we do or don’t do fills us with love for the universe and for God, love for nature and environment. I wish that the sex that we have invigorates us and causes us to experience serenity, so that in our serenity we distinguish what can be controlled and what cannot be controlled. I have a desire that when you come to church on Sunday morning rosy cheeked or plum cheeked, whether you have a partner or not, having sung the name of God the night before, ready because you did it the night before to tip your head back and sing and howl and fall into ecstatic prayer and praise because God is good. Beloved, we have important work to do, to dismantle racism, to end the economy of excavation which depends upon rape of bodies and oil and coal and earth. Our work is to love God, to love our bodies and souls and might and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And our ecstasy is a tool of enlightenment, a tool of our salvation. And in the words of Bruno Mars, “You bring me to my knees. You make me testify. You make a sinner change his ways. Open up your gates because I can’t wait to see the light and right there is where I want to stay. Your heart takes me to paradise. Your heart takes me to paradise.” Amen.