SEX, MARRIAGE, and HAIRSTYLES

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

July 13, 2008

 

Song of Solomon 1:1-4; 4:1-7

1 Corinthians 6:9-20; 7:1-9; 11:2-16

 

Nicholas Lash is a British theologian who teaches at Cambridge.  Something he said in a recent interview with Martin Marty has stuck with me.  Lash suggests that we should read the black marks on paper that constitute the Bible—the words if you will—as if they were the script for a play or the musical score for a symphony.   What he means is this:  It is the reader’s responsibility to supply insight and imagination to the Bible just as an actor or musician does with a script or score, to interpret and act out what it means in our own context.  He likens the study we are doing of 1 and 2 Corinthians to a “creative exploration of the life, activity, and organization” of the Corinthian community so that we might produce the play or symphony in our own situation to the glory of God, just as Paul and the Corinthians were doing in theirs.[i]

 

With this in mind let us now turn to the drama for the day, one drawn from concerns that arose in the early life of the house churches that sprang up in southern Greece about the year 50 in the first century.  We’ll see this as a three act drama centered on sex, marriage and hairstyles.  Lights, camera, action![ii]

 

Sex.  I imagine a few of you are here today just because of the titillation that comes from the word itself.  After all, our society is saturated with sex.  So was Paul’s.  Just listen to the script for Act 1.  

 

ACT 1--SEX

[Read 1 Corinthians 6:9-20]

 

A rallying cry for Corinthians both within and outside the church was “All things are lawful for me,” or as the expression is better translated in the New English Bible, “I’m free to do anything” I want.  In this understanding, the individual is sovereign.  

 

For Paul, this narcissistic outlook has been abrogated by having become a member of the body of Christ.  “For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.”  He is almost screaming at the Corinthians to set aside the ways of the world as a result of having been washed, sanctified, and justified “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”

 

A quick look at Paul’s indictment of the morés of his day is all one needs for ascertaining what Paul believes the Corinthians are being saved from: 

 

Do not be deceived!  [Paul had to be yelling to himself as he wrote

these words to the Corinthians.]  Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers,

male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers,

robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom  of God.

 

It’s quite a list.  Needless to say, in our day and age two words jump out at us.  Revilers, robbers and idolaters are left off the hook in most sermons.  Even fornicators and adulterers get a pass.   We are quick to place male prostitutes and sodomites on center stage.

 

Let’s take a quick look at these two words.   The word for male prostitutes comes from the Greek malakoi and literally means “soft ones.”  It’s not the ordinary word for male prostitutes and probably referred to young boys who prostituted themselves as the playthings of adult, heterosexual males in the baths and pagan temples of Corinth.

 

The second word, translated sodomites, has been found nowhere else in ancient Greek literature prior to Paul’s use of it here and in 1 Timothy 1:10.  The word in Greek is arsenokoitēs.  We’re quickly aware that the word “Sodom” is not in the text.  Translators have made this leap into everyday English because the Greek does seem to reflect the Old Testament idea of one who lies  with a man as with a woman.   

 

The point I’m making here is that Paul is not dealing with men who are in committed, long term relationships in this passage.  His theme is fornication of all sorts, recreational sex, sloppy narcissistic trysts.  Is he not absolutely on target when cries out against making our bodies one with prostitutes of every sort?  Is he not correct in pulling us back from the abyss of sinning against our own bodies and thereby giving lie to our claim that we are part of the body of Christ?

 

We’ll return to this matter in our epilogue.  It’s now time for Act 2.

 

Act 2—MARRIAGE

[Read 1 Corinthians 7:1-9]

 

A puzzling paradox is at work in Corinth.  We’ve just finished talking about the Corinthians’ struggles with rampant sexuality—behaving as if they were free to do anything that felt good at the moment because of God’s freely given grace in the person of Jesus Christ.  At the same time, some in the community responded to the preaching of Paul and others on the approaching end of the age and the second coming of Christ by asserting that even among married couples, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman.” 

 

You can see how one could have arrived at such a conclusion based on Paul’s preaching about the shortness of time before the end.  This is what was much later to motivate Shakers and others in American history to forego sexual relations.  Paul had also held himself up as an exemplar of the celibate life, wishing that both widows and widowers could exercise enough control of their sexual urges that there would be no need to marry.  But “it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”

 

What follows in Act 2 is extraordinary and even revolutionary for Paul’s time and maybe even our own.  Paul describes the mutuality of the love between a man and a woman is words so tender and so touching we are caught up short.  Remember, Paul was raised in a tradition that said a man was in such complete control that he could divorce his wife by merely writing on a slip of paper:  “She burned dinner last night and I’m done with her.”  I’m not kidding; archeologists have unearthed just such a document.

 

Now we find Paul saying that being married includes both husband and wife freely giving conjugal rights to one another.  “For the wife does not have authority over her own body.”  That sounds like the same-old, same-old of the first century world.  So what’s new?  This is:  “…likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.”

 

Wow!  Here is a new ethic of mutual love and responsibility within marriage being forged in the Christian communities in Corinth and elsewhere in the Roman world.  It’s grounded in the theological understanding of each person being an integral part of the body of Christ and thereby deserving respect and honor in church, in the world, and in bed.   Paul is so caring and so realistic that he even suggests that conjugal time-outs are proper for periods of prayer and, I would add, the repair of emotions and feelings and one’s body as well.  But nothing can be done that is not part of a mutual commitment to reciprocal love.

 

One of the things that strikes me about Paul’s advice to those he cares so deeply about in Corinth is that, contrary to what is often said about him, he really is asking them to celebrate decent, caring human love with that very same passion we hear in the beautiful Song of Solomon. 

 

Cherith Fee Nordling, who teaches theology at Wheaton College in Illinois, calls us to be like Paul in celebrating what it means to be human:

 

It is ironic that as Christians we are so very bad at talking about

our basic sexuality as males and females in daily relation to God

and other females and males.  If ever there was a people enabled

to live truly embodied lives of joy, pain, beauty, loss, discipline,

delight, wonder, and celebration, you’d think it would be those

who live and move and have their being in Jesus Christ, the

Incarnate One….[iii]

 

We’re now ready to move to Act 3, with its odd-sounding theme of “hairstyles.”  What can this have to do with sex and marriage? 

ACT 3—HAIRSTYLES

[Read 1 Corinthians 11:2-16]

 

This is a very difficult passage to decipher.  First of all, what’s the issue?  It seems to have something to do with veils covering the heads being removed in church.  But you know what:   the word “veil” is never mentioned in the Greek text.  About the best scholars have been able to figure out is that some of the women in the house churches had let their hair down!

 

In Paul’s day, it was unseemly for women to be in public with their hair loose—that is flowing naturally.  Loose hair in public signified a loose woman!   The custom was to bind up their hair  on top of their heads, forming the covering referred to in our passage.  It appears that in the Corinthian churches some women had taken absolutely to heart Paul’s  teaching that in Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew or Gentile, but all are one, all are on equal footing before God.  So if men’s hair could be worn naturally, so could women’s.  Or could it?

 

It doesn’t take much reflection on what Paul wrote to the Corinthians on this matter to discover that he’s at his wits end.  People have so taken to heart his teaching about oneness in Christ that all sorts of social barriers are falling to the wayside—including women coming to worship with what for him and many of his contemporaries were disheveled, unseemly hairstyles.

 

He flails away, trying out an argument totally at odds with his prior statements about the equality before God of men and women.  At one point he declares that a man is the image and reflection of God, and a woman merely the reflection of a man.  “So there, as a man I’m telling you to go to your room and put your hair up!”

 

Paul realizes the sloppiness of his thinking and quickly changes course and acknowledges that he does really not want to rest his case on a doctrine of the subordination of women, for “just as a woman comes from man, so man comes through woman.”  Finally, all he can say is that it isn’t natural for a woman to display long hair in church, and that none of the other churches he and others have founded are letting women get away with letting their hair down.   So quit it!

 

This is not Paul at his best.  I think it’s good to see him in this light.   He is dealing with the way the Christian Gospel bumps up against the morés and customs of the societies in which it is preached and lived.  What’s happening in Corinth is that the genie of the subordination of women has escaped the bottle and things are careening toward chaos in Paul’s mind.  He wants this genie back in bottle so that worship in the Corinthian house churches can remain on an even keel. 

 

Our play draws to a close with a hint of tragedy, with the dream of equality before God and one another not quite realized, with a tantalizing taste of almost but not quite, already but not yet.  The Gospel has begun its liberating work that will henceforth send ripples across the course of human history like a rock tossed in a pond on a summer’s afternoon.  Each and every generation will be challenged to do as Paul and the Corinthians did,  prayerfully and courageously determining for themselves how the Gospel is to be preached and lived, always placing the person and work of Jesus Christ at the center of every conversation and every debate.

AFTERWARD

 

Often at the conclusion of plays and symphonies these days, the director or conductor, the actors or musicians come down to talk with the audience about the meaning of what has just transpired.  I’ve come down today to do just that.

 

You might rightly ask me to say a bit more about what sex, marriage and hairstyles have to do with our congregation and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), right now.  We too have a genie out of the bottle, one that has to do with the place of gays and lesbians in the life of our church.  The General Assembly that just met in San Jose passed an overture that permits presbyteries to consider the full scope of a ministerial candidate’s faith and life, and not rule a person out just because they may acknowledge that they are gay or lesbian.

 

All that Paul had to say about sexuality and about marriage are relevant to this discussion.  Sexual license is not a good thing for any of us.  Mutuality and respect for the other are essential to the good life.  And seeing all our actions through the lens of what it means to be part of the very body of Christ is always to be our starting point.

 

The issue before the church today is not really the baths of Corinth where men had dalliances with boys.  No one I know thinks this is a good thing.  What is before us is the issue of committed relationships between gay and lesbian persons and whether or not the church will include them and honor their gifts as they live out their lives of joy, pain, beauty, loss, discipline, delight, wonder, and celebration—along with the rest of us.  This reality was not in Paul’s frame of reference, but it is in ours.

 

We’re headed into some pretty stormy waters in our own Presbytery in the coming months as we debate a proposed amended to our Form of Government that takes out restrictive language about the ordination of gays and lesbians to the offices of pastor and deacon and elder, and replaces it with the time honored understanding that each ordaining body is to seek leaders who “live lives obedient to Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church.”

 

I had intended to say more about all these things, but our play has ended and the time is late.  I’d like to invite you to an Adult Forum at 9:30 next Sunday where we can engage one another is the kind of give and take that befits us as members of Christ’s body. 

 

As we ponder sex and marriage and hairstyles we will do well to take to heart what Trum Simmons read to our children today:  “People are different all over the world.  But remember this.  Joys are the same, and love is the same.”   

 

 

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Sex, Marriage, and Hairstyles