COMPULSIONS OF THE FALSE SELF: LUST
Texts: Song of Solomon 1:2-4; 2:10-13, 16a
and Matthew 5:27-28; 19:11-12

I tried to figure out last week how to skip the seventh of the Seven Deadly Sins and end with the sixth. Would anybody notice? But when Moses came down the mountain with the Ten Commandments he didn’t say, “Pick Five!”

Who’s not a little nervous with the topic? We’re talking about the realm of sexual desire, and there’s nothing more personal and intimate. We’re talking about a powerful energy which can be used for great good and for great ill. We’re given so many mixed messages about our body and our sexuality: Be sexy; be chaste; the body is good; sex is bad. So Jane Kenyon, the poet, speaks of “the long struggle to be at home in the body, this difficult friendship.”

Lust is the last of the seven, but the church has often acted as if it were the only serious one. When we hear the word “immorality” most people assume sexual immorality. Dorothy Sayers, the Oxford literary critic, Christian writer and mystery novelist, entitled her essay on the seven sins, “The Other Six Deadly Sins.” Here are her words:

A man may be greedy and selfish; spiteful, cruel, jealous, and unjust; violent and brutal; grasping, unscrupulous, and a liar; stubborn and arrogant; stupid, morose, and dead to every noble instinct - - and still we are ready to say of him that he is not an immoral man. I am reminded of a young man who once said to me with perfect simplicity: “I did not know there were seven deadly sins: please tell me the names of the other six.”1

But Lust belongs. Distorted or careless sexual desire can lead to great harm. Unwanted pregnancy, destroyed relationships and careers, legal hell, and in this day of HIV/AIDS, death. John Updike, whose novels are a meditation on the issue at hand, writes:

Sex has its consequences; it is not a holiday from the world.2
 

I

So where do we begin? First, counterintuitively, with the affirmation of sexual love. Hear clearly: Lust is not to be equated with sexual desire. Sexual desire is the good gift of God bringing exquisite pleasure, comfort and connection. Lust is a compulsion of the false self.

The Song of Songs is a celebration of sexual love. It is amazingly in the voice of a woman. It is a triumph of women’s experience over patriarchal control. It is Israel given a second chance at the Garden of Eden which ended the first time in shame, dislocation and distorted desire.3

We read today some of its tamer parts.

O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth
For your love is better than wine.

Here’s how to find it in your Bible: Open the Bible in the middle, that’s Psalms, then go to Proverbs, then Ecclesiastes, and there you have it:

Behold, you are beautiful, my love...
Your eyes are like doves...
Your hair is like...
I’d better stop there.

God’s first command to us was to “be fruitful and multiply.” (Who knew the commandments could be so fun!?) This could not be without sexual desire; so God made it strong, that our human species would survive. God also made it beautiful - - the poet Jeffers wrote of God’s extravagant kindness “to make the necessary embrace of breeding beautiful also as fire.”
 

II

The second point: Lust is sexual desire driven and distorted by the other six sins.

Sexual desire plus Pride equals sex as conquest, bodies collected as trophies, steroids for the ego.
Sexual desire plus Envy desires another because he or she belongs to another and not to me.
Sexual desire plus Anger turns to the violence of rape, or to sexual cruelty.
Sexual desire plus Greed never has enough. “Sex is like money,” John Updike quips, “only too much is enough.” Sex plus Greed exploits our children and youth for financial gain - - as in the entertainment and fashion industries. It creates a sex industry that is as surely a form of trading in human flesh as slave markets of old.

Sexual desire plus Gluttony craves to be filled; it is the demand for instant gratification. It is a drunken party with terrible aftermath.

Sexual desire mixed with Sloth is an abandonment of our best selves. It is the daughter of despondency and despair, a desperate attempt to feel something, to find worth. It is giving up of the self which does not lead to life but is another way of dying. It says “what the hell” and goes through the motions.

Sexual desire in humans is rarely simple. It is an expression of deeper needs, hungers, conflicts, wounds and compulsions.

III

Third point: In view of the awesome power of love and sexual desire, the Hebrew and Christian communities provide in scripture some time-proven rules. There are prohibitions against adultery, rape, incest and the sexual exploitation of others, especially the young. These are all destructive of the human spirit, of relationships, and of the social fabric of community.

Jesus took a conservative position on divorce because he saw the law of Moses being used to give men a convenient excuse to discard their wives. The law of Moses was given because of the hardness of our hearts, Jesus said. The deeper intention of God is found in Genesis: The lifelong joining of a man and a woman, lifelong covenantal relationships.

We have a special obligation as a church to our young to provide what Stephanie Paulsell describes as “sheltering the evolving sexual self.”4 We teach our young the goodness of their bodies, the dangers the world presents in regard to sexuality and the sanctity of their own personal choices. They should learn about their sexuality in church not just in the back seat of a car, on TV or on the Internet. It’s part of the spiritual practice of “honoring the body.”

Paul encountered two opposite but equal errors in Corinth. The first was the worship of the body: If it feels good, do it. Feed on demand. The second was the despising of the body: If it feels good it must be sin. Paul tried a third way: The body is not divine to be worshiped; the body is not evil to be despised; it is the temple of the Holy Spirit. So glorify God in your bodies.

He also said: “You are not your own: You were bought with a price.” Here’s the image behind it. You were a slave in ancient Rome. God has bought your freedom. Your body now belongs to no one except you and the God who made you. You are free.

In church we learn day by day the wisdom of knowing when to say yes and when to say no. The Pill issued in a new era of sexual freedom, but it has not turned into the kingdom of love. For some it has become the tyranny of having to say yes. Until you are free to say no you are not truly free to say yes.

IV

There are many things to say but little time, so I move along. I would say this: God wants for everyone the experience of loving and being loved, of desiring and being desired, of connection and intimacy and belonging. But sexuality is not the only avenue to these blessings, regardless of what culture tells us. The erotic is deeper than the sexual. It is a life-force that brings joy and creativity and connection, that energizes us to make our world better, that is, to quote the poet, Audre Lorde, “the deep yes within the self.”5

And I’d say this: Often compulsive sexual behavior comes from the wounded self. Sexual self becomes part of your disinherited self where it lives in secrecy and shame. It comes from experiences of sexual abuse which comes in many forms. Poet Michael Ryan traces his sexual addiction to his being molested at the age of five. Then came a life dominated by secrets and self-loathing, and behavior both self-destructive and harming to others. A woman sexually abused as a child may feel that she can only be healed by another sexual relationship - - which often puts her back into an abuse-cycle. She, to use the words of Michael Ryan, “believes down to the microbes in her blood cells that her human value equals her sexual value.”6

This is perhaps one of the great lies of our culture: Equating our human value with our sexual value.”

V

What does the gospel have to say to us? There is the form of the gospel which is the law, giving us sturdy rules for living. We’ve covered that.

There is the deepening of the law by Jesus to include the disposition of the heart, not just the actions of our bodies. “You heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ Jesus said, “but I say to you” - - and here’s the most literal and accurate translation I know - - “every man who looks after another’s wife in order to have her sexually has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Jesus knew the issues are deeper than actions. The inner life is at risk.

Then there is this most curious saying of Jesus read today:

....there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are some made eunuchs by men, and there are some eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus celebrated married love at the wedding feast of Cana. He seems to have had a deep attachment to Mary Magdalene, and she to him. Our Lord had testosterone, and he knew human desire. But, as I read the Gospels, he chose singleness and celibacy because of the greater urgency of his calling to announce the kingdom of God.

People, no doubt, cast aspersions on him. But life is more than sexuality, however good a gift that is.

What else do we see in Jesus? He seemed particularly and startlingly tender-hearted toward those who’d made sexual mistakes. Perhaps because these are so connected with the need to love and be loved, perhaps because their culture, as ours, tended to make sexual sinning the mother of all sinning.

He forgave the “woman of the city” (of the streets) who wet his feet with her tears and anointed them with perfume.

He forgave and defended from death by stoning the woman caught in the act of adultery. The male half of this tango, by the way, or not so by the way, was nowhere to be found. And he gave new life to the Samaritan woman he met at Jacob’s well.

She was alone, shamed and scorned. She had been married five times and was living with a sixth. Who can judge? Throw the first stone? Who knows the whole story of any life?

Jesus asks a drink of water from her. She is startled that he would do so. Jesus ends the conversation offering her a new kind of water: Everyone who drinks of this well’s water will thirst again, he said, but the water I give will become in you “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” She replies. “Sir, give me this water.”

Frederick Buechner says that Lust is “the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.”7 What we crave is often the opposite of what we need.

Jesus comes with water. It is the water of grace and complete forgiveness. It is the water of newfound self-respect: “Do not be ashamed.” It is the water of new life, what I call here “the transformation of desire” - - not the repression of desire, not even the sublimation of desire, but the transformation of desire. It’s where our deepest energies are united with the Spirit of God so that they are used for our wholeness and for the healing of the world. Through our transformed desire we are given by God and we bring to the world joy, love, passion and light.

Is this possible? Day by day, degree by degree. As we open ourselves to the Divine Love, and move toward what John Wesley saw as the “perfection of love.” George Herbert, the British parson and poet, was speaking of the transformation of desire in his poem, “Love II”:

Immortal Heat, Oh let thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it: let those fires,
Which shall consume the world, first make it tame;
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,

As may consume our lusts, and make thee way.
Then shall our hearts pant thee: then shall our brain
All her invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymns send back thy fire again....

All knees shall bow to thee; all wits shall rise,
And praise him who did make and mend our eyes.

Nancy Elizabeth Foil, Baptist pastor and close friend who died of at age forty-three, our calligraphy artist for this series, formed the words of the day into a drop of water. Is it the living water Jesus offers? Is Jesus placing it even now on your tongue? Is it a tear? Of sorrow, of joy, of turning, of relief? The holy is near. The holy is always near.

1 Creed or Chaos, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), p. 65.
2 "Lust”, New York Times Review of Books, June 20, 1993), p. 29.
3 For a fuller exposition of Song of Songs along these lines see Walter Brueggemann, Solomon: Israel’s Ironic Icon of Human Achievement (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 206-214.
4 Stephanie Paulsell, Honoring The Body: Meditations On a Christian Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), p. 148.
5 See Paulsell, op.cit., p. 144.
6 Michael Ryan, Secret Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995).
7 Wishful Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 54.