Sexy All Over

I'm giving a message/sermon/teaching this Sunday on sexuality in our culture. I cannot shake this story from my mind as I rest in this week's lectionary's text from 2 Cor. 5: If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation.

In 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Gonin led a group of British soldiers in liberating a large concentration camp. In his journal, he gives an account of the dehumanization they'd encountered:

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men, women and children collapse as you walked by them . . . One knew that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it. One saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene , with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women croutching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves . . . [a} dysentery tank in which the remains of child floated.

The troops cared for the victims of genocide in ways that go beyond description. One by one. Wounds bandaged, tears wiped, stitches sewed, broken limbs put into casts. These soldiers demonstrated in a powerful way, what it looks like to look at the world, and fellow humans with “new creation” eyes.

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity (Rob Bell, Sex God, 30).