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).

Life . . . Today

My friend Wade Hodges made a big announcement today. You can read about his courage to hear God's call on his life by clicking here. Wade--you have lots of people who believe in the ways God's gifted you. Count the yes votes, and don't worry about the naysayers.

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Our small group is reading Sex God right now. I read the book when it first came out a few years back. I think it's a fantastic work about the "endless connections of sexuality and spirituality." If you have not read it, you'll love it. I know few folks who read Bell and fail to learn a great deal about the collision of scripture and life as we know it.

I particularly appreciate Bell's dichotomy of the temptation to be an angel (soul with no body) and animal (body with no soul) in light of God's work of creating humanity (body and soul). While I wish Bell would've at least footnoted C.S. Lewis (the 20th century "catalyst" for this anthropological distinction), I think Bell's right on. While many Christians bemoan the "animal" messages of our culture (What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas), the church offers an equally toxic one. Instead of talking about the possibilities of being human, we settle for stuffing sexuality and spirituality deep inside.

I also love this line from Bell. "Lust makes a promise it can't deliver on."

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One of our students at Rochester College (and dear family member at Rochester Church) lost her stepmother in a car accident. Sara (pronounced Sarr-ah) Ageno is from Jinja, Uganda. When she was a young girl, her biological parents were both killed in a similar motor vehicle accident. Another family from her local church took her in. Now, her second mom's life has been taken. Pray for Sara. Pray for peace. Pray for mourning. Pray for her to ask big questions. Pray for her to take those big questions to God.

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I preached from Jacob's prayer in Genesis 32 today. It's a remarkable prayer really. Walter Brueggemann says it is the only real full prayer in all of Torah. The thing that blows me away about this prayer is not that Jacob has the chutzpah to pray it (compared to some other stuff this is actually pretty mild). The thing that blows me away is that God goes along with this con-man, huckster. It seems God would rather work with a shady somebody than a pious pretender. I needed to hear that today. Because, before I'm a minister, I'm first a follower.