“Our bodies, our sexuality, are of the greatest power there is. It is the power of joy for joy’s sake and love for love’s sake. The power of creation and generativity. It is the very power of God.”

Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, September 2, 2018.

The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away”
++

I want to begin this morning with a couple invitations. They are simple invitations. To look, to listen, to feel.

They are also invitations involving you and your body so it is so important that you know that they are invitations and not commands, that you have the power to choose. You should always have the power to choose where your body is concerned.

They are simple invitations … and they are also invitations involving you and your body that are happening in a church. And while churches should be the safest of places for bodies, our churches have not been. For many, maybe you, they have been toxic and dangerous places for bodies. So again, remember that it is your body, and you have the power to choose.  You should always have the power to choose where your body is concerned.

I invite you to look at your body.
As much as you want.
Wherever you want.

What voices inside you are speaking as you look and what are they saying?
What stories does your body have to tell?
What feelings, what emotions are welling up inside you as you look at your body?

I invite you to look at your body. If you want and choose, you can even touch your body. Feel your body.

Now, I invite you to close your eyes, to listen and truly hear these words.

Your body is good
Your body is beautiful.
Your body is powerful.
Your body is yours

Not because I say so.
My opinion about your body does not matter.
God says so.

Your body is good.
Your body is beautiful.
Your body is powerful.
Your body is yours

Yours to enjoy
Yours to control and yours to choose to lose control.
Yours to withhold and yours to share
Yours to love, yours to love with and yours to be loved.

Your body is good.
Your body is yours.

As you wish, open your eyes.

Thank you for whatever way you were able to engage those invitations, even if it was just staying in this room while I gave them.

For some of us, those invitations might have seemed like nothing, seemed easy, maybe even seemed silly. But for others of us in this room those invitations were hard and uncomfortable perhaps even painful and terrifying – and I am so grateful for you even staying in this space while I made them. Grateful for your courage and your trust.

I am aware of the power I am dealing with in this sermon. If you are feeling uncomfortable and scared listening right now, know that I am feeling uncomfortable and scared preaching. Because I am aware of the power I am dealing with here. And because, maybe like you, I have my own complicated relationship with my body, my sexuality and the messages I have received about them from the church that raised me and that we share today.

Our bodies, our sexuality, are of the greatest power there is. It is the power of joy for joy’s sake and love for love’s sake. The power of creation and generativity. It is the very power of God.

Our bodies. Our sexuality. They are good. In their many shapes and sizes and orientations and quirks. They are good. They are beautiful. They are powerful.

Your body.
Your sexuality.
They are yours.

Yours to enjoy
Yours to control and yours to choose to lose control.
Yours to withhold and yours to share
Yours to love, yours to love with and yours to be loved.

I am saying this over and over and over again because we don’t hear this enough in our lives and we hardly hear it at all in the church. In fact, for generations unto millennia the church has said the opposite. And the damage it has done and the dehumanizing empires it has sustained are incalculable.

And so, if nothing else happens today, I want you to hear a voice from the pulpit of a church saying:

Your body.
Your sexuality.

They are good.
They are beautiful.
They are powerful.
They are yours.

Yours to enjoy
Yours to control and yours to choose to lose control.
Yours to withhold and yours to share
Yours to love, yours to love with and yours to be loved.

The readings our lectionary give us today are a window into this truth of the goodness and power of our bodies and our sexuality and about how our bodies, particularly the bodies of women and children, have been used and abused and that goodness, beauty and power denied.

The first reading is from Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is a wonderfully erotic poem. It is a celebration of lovers of bodies and sexuality … of their own and each other’s. It is a celebration of sexuality that is about power and mutuality, enthusiastic and joyful consent and creativity. It is the poetry of everything Jesus dreams when Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love God, love one another and love self and a reminder that we do those things in and with our bodies. We do those things as wonderfully embodied sexual beings. Beings with power and choice.

Ellen Davis in her brilliant commentary on the Song of Songs says “the sexual and the religious understandings of the Song are mutually informative… each is incomplete without the other…. Our religious capacity is linked with an awareness of our own sexuality…. Sexual love provides many people with their first experience of ecstasy, which literally means ‘standing outside oneself.’”

Our bodies. Our sexuality. They are holy. They are good. They are beautiful. They are powerful. They are ours. They should be celebrated and not shamed.   And yet that is not what our world has done. That is not what the church has done.

In the Gospel reading this morning, the church does with the disciples’ bodies what it has throughout the centuries done particularly with the bodies of women … and that is impose a purity culture on them that is about domination and exploitation.

The church, the religious leaders, call the disciples defiled – unclean – because of how they use their bodies.   The church, the religious leaders, are telling the disciples that the goodness, the beauty, the power of their bodies is conditional … and that it is the church that will determine the rules of purity, the rules of acceptability and decency.

The church has done this from our beginning. We have constructed a canon of scripture and a corpus of theology to support it.

Marcella Althaus-Reid in her groundbreaking book, Indecent Theology, writes “theology is a sexual act, a sexual doing, based on the construction of God and divine systems which are male and worked in opposition (and sexual opposition) to women…. Specifically, the sexual regulation of women’s life has been the element which gave coherence to theology, considering how pervasive and sustained has been that reflection through the centuries.”

Throughout the centuries, the church has been in bed with empires who have deep economic and political interest in the control of bodies. Of using bodies – black and brown bodies, women’s bodies, economically oppressed bodies– for production and reproduction for the generation of wealth for the wealthy and consolidation of power for the powerful. Of controlling the use of bodies as a way of maintaining dominance of patriarchal, heteronormative and white supremacist systems.

As men, the church has given us our own messages about our bodies and sexuality, messages that imprison us in toxic theologies of domineering masculinity and internalized shame. That women’s bodies are to be pursued for sport in betrayal of our own deep desire for mutual caring.

Even worse is what the church has done to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and gender nonconforming and more persons who have been told not only that you must deny who you are but that God does, too. Who have been told not only are you not worthy of love but that you literally should be put to death.

And then we see what the church has told women

That your desire doesn’t matter

That your sexuality is a commodity to be saved only for the enjoyment of a man in the context of a heterosexual marriage

That if you celebrate and use your bodies and sexuality in any way outside of that, you will be stained and cast aside and never, ever be good and never, ever be loved.

That it is up to you to conform to a standard of modesty so that men will not be tempted and aroused.

That guilt and shame is just God’s way of telling you that you are a sinner who needs to repent.

The natural consequence of this abuse is a toxic church where sexual abuse is not only rampant and concealed … but put right in front of us and ignored but the victims of it shamed.

It is a church that has driven LGBTQ+ persons to isolation, illness, and suicide.

It is a church where women and children continue to have their power denied, their agency over their bodies stolen, their bodies and sexuality abused and their voices silenced without acknowledgment and healing for them or accountability for their abusers. Where women’s bodies are judged and shamed and women’s leadership marginalized and denigrated – all this with deep, traumatic, personal cost.

It is a church and a world where, just this past Friday, Bishop Charles Ellis, while leading Aretha Franklin’s funeral, reached around and groped the breast of singer Ariana Grande.

The Google hits pointing this out? 390,000.

The Google hits discussing whether Ariana’s dress was too short? 49 MILLION.

The quote-unquote “apology” from Bishop Ellis? That he hugged and touched everyone whether they wanted it or not because, apparently, he feels everyone’s bodies are there for his using and there for his taking.

The response from the church? Silence. Because for the church and for the world this is just

business
as
usual.

And so today, it is time.
It is time. It is time. It is so past time.

It is time to sing into being a different world and a different church.

It is time to sing into being a world and a church that sings:

Your body.
Your sexuality.
They are good.
They are beautiful.
They are powerful.
They are yours
…and truths will be told and believed
…and wounds will be healed
…and abusers will be held accountable and only restored to community when not only confession but reparation is made.

It’s time to sing into being a world and a church where our bodies and sexualities are celebrated instead of shamed. Where we recognize and revel not only in the erotic truth of the Song of Songs but also in the poetic truth that a God who became human in Jesus is a God who loves bodies of all sorts, shapes, sizes and colors … a God who loves bodies, including yours. Love without conditions. Love without limits.

That a God who became human in Jesus is a God who thrills at the enthusiastic, consensual touch of bodies – their own and others – and loves if you do, too.

That a God who became human in Jesus is a God who is bisexual, homosexual, asexual, heterosexual and more – and loves that you are, too.

That a God who became human in Jesus is a God who – just like us — can experience wonderfully embodied intimacy and love in a relationship that lasts a lifetime or the holiness of a single night. That, as Althaus-Reid writes, “we may learn that God is a God of moments and that moments can be different but the momentary is also divine.”

It is time – long past time – for we as the Church to sing this new, safe world into being. It is time – long past time – for we as the Church to sing the Song of Songs. Where embodied love and intimacy exist not for any utilitarian purpose, not to be used or abused, but as a joyful, delightful, ecstatic end unto themselves.

Becca Stevens writes from the experience of our sisters at Thistle Farms who are recovering from their own lives of sexual exploitation: “We have been taught that our sexuality is a commodity and have learned to live in a spirit of mistrust and manipulation. In community, we claim ourselves again, saying no to people and institutions that are not part of the healing of our bodies, minds and spirits. We are sexual beings made in the image of God. We are spiritual beings made of flesh and bone. We are allowing one another the dignity of experiencing our spirituality and our sexuality.”

That is the church, that is the world it is time for us to sing into being. The church, the world of the Song of Songs.

Where we revel in the truth that “we are sexual beings made in the image of God. We are spiritual beings made of flesh and bone.”
Where the only voice you hear is the one that says:

Your body.
Your sexuality.

They are good.
They are beautiful.
They are powerful.
They are yours.

Yours to enjoy
Yours to control and yours to choose to lose control.
Yours to withhold and yours to share
Yours to love, yours to love with and yours to be loved.

Today.
Tomorrow.
Always.

Alleluia.
Amen.