Lenten Sexuality

A journey of vulnerability to the cross

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.”

― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art 

(from The Way Down is the Way Up - 6 Week Devotional by Justin Whitmel Earley)

As we enter into this Lenten season, I’m challenged to consider the shape of human sexuality through this arc of the Gospel story—the difficult or painful parts of our lives that we like to dismiss or cover-up but that Jesus came to touch. Essential to Lent is accepting our vulnerability as humans (“from dust to dust”), seeing our need for life from above, and embracing the way of sacrifice, particularly, through Lent’s cross-centered vision.

The contemporary narrative of sexuality emphasizes personal empowerment, pleasure, and expression, and the Christian narrative of sexuality emphasizes generational creation, covenant fidelity, and self-giving unity, all in harmony with God’s order. While there are points of overlap between the two narratives—like the affirmation of sex, authenticity, and love—their divergences are profound. Notably, a story of sexuality that fits the Christian Lenten arc recognizes not just the goodness of all of creation, but also with the ever present vulnerability we feel deep in our bones, namely the deep vulnerabilities in our experiences of sexuality. Since leaving God’s embrace in Eden, every person longs for that original belonging, joy, and wholeness, so each person gathers what fig leaves they can to (attempt to) cover over the shame, grief, and weakness common to us all. While many things were distorted in the Fall, since leaving Eden’s garden, sex – initially created as a humble, yet beautiful, act within a healthy marriage of man and woman – has been lifted up as the fig leaf of fig leaves, an essential answer for the self-empowerment and self-fulfillment we crave.

Yet after the fall, knowing the worthlessness of sexual idolatry, God shepherded his wayward children and gave them several laws about sexual practice (i.e. Leviticus 18). These were not arbitrary religious anti-sex laws, but were timely protections of the natural order that Israel inhabited as members of human families and households in their contexts. Israel needed these guardrails to keep themselves from idolizing sexual desire and pursuing godless ecstasy or selfish ambition. Even now within Christianity, we are still prone to following the world’s path, prone to glory in erotic sexual experience; while progressive Christianity may do this more obviously at times, this may even be evidenced in attempts to see sex, rather than marriage, as an icon of God, or in purity culture’s promises for providing the “best sex”.

Yet, while we too often focus on sexuality obsessively and myopically, we don’t want to pendulum swing into ignorance, legalism, or stoicism, but rather give sexuality the loving attention it demands. Notably, we must not constrain our attention to the fences of sexual ethics. These—the “do”s and “do not”s—will not be sufficient to guide our travels through the landscape of human embodiment and sexuality, even if certain rules prove to be indispensable barriers and path markers. To travel wisely and truly steward sexuality, we must be attentive to the larger patterns of creation¹, community, and our own bodies. We must see the purposes in the natural law of God’s good order. We must trust that a holistic and humble appreciation of sexuality will direct our paths to self-understanding and, in Lenten-fashion, to the vulnerabilities of our nature. In God’s very good creation of male and female, we quickly see that God does not make us independent and self-sufficient, but that our original design is for mutual support and interdependency². Indeed, the marriage of husband and wife is provided as the first³ covenant relationship to address the needs, dependencies, and vulnerabilities of familial care—think especially of the vulnerabilities surrounding childbirth and raising infants, how a mother needs support in pregnancy and delivery, and the incredible dependence of a newborn on their mother. Yet, while poignantly illustrative, the dependencies that make us vulnerable to pain and neglect go beyond marital partnership and childcare. In the long haul of our lives, our human needs and longings always go beyond anything that this world can provide, let alone what marriages can provide for in this age⁴. The finite nature of human relations and the infinite depths of our own hearts and lives redirect our attention above the plane of sexuality to our deep longing for God and for his holy breath to fill our weak lungs. Jesus embraces the vulnerability of his (and our) mortality, and goes to the cross so that God's redeeming grace could meet us in our place of need.

Worldly narratives of sexuality often focus on individual desire. A truer narrative about sexuality (and necessarily marriage), is one that sees a bigger picture—the grand picture of God as the great Creator of a good order for the flourishing of the whole creation. And the cross of Christ, which we anticipate in Lent, tells an even bigger and more radical story. It says that we must follow the way down (sacrifice for others) in order to find the way up (union with the living  God). We must carry our crosses—embrace a vulnerable lifestyle—before finding resurrection. This is our path within Lenten sexuality.

Jesus, Son of Man, give me the courage to admit my weakness before you and others, that I might be made strong in your perfect grace.

1. For example, could meditating on the Genesis 1 archetypes of (brother) sun and (sister) moon help us understand ourselves? Or what might we learn from the ways sexuality functions in sexually dimorphic trees, bees, and apes?

2. What Genesis 1 and 2 show, 1 Corinthians 11 makes interdependency between the sexes more explicit by naming that while Eve comes from Adam, all men come from women.

3. But not the only covenant for partnership in life and family. Covenants of brotherhood, sisterhood, and God-parenthood, among others, are other covenants integrated into the kinship and familial bonds and responsibilities that we have towards one another. For example, David and Jonathan’s covenant brotherhood led to David taking care of Jonathan’s disabled son, Mephibosheth, and even not killing him as a potential rival to the throne.

4. And lest we overestimate what marriage provides, I’m eager to remind us that marriages are temporary covenants for purposes in this age, and that they will not continue in the future age of the resurrection.