Reading Francis

Maybe the Church should shut up about sex for a while. Enough, already.

Not because of hypocrisy, though there are deep layers of that.

Not because sex isn’t important.

Not because the Church has nothing worth saying about it.

Not because I disagree with what it has to say.

I think the Church should shut up about sex because it’s distracting from our mission.

Enough, already.

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One of the things we miss when we read Paul’s letters in the New Testament is his urgency, and how it leads him to prioritize. My college professor, Dr. Charles Talbert, taught us about Paul’s “eschatological expectation”; he really expected the end of the world to come any day now, and since he was given a mission to spread the Good News to as many people as he could, that urgency meant setting aside things that were good long-term plays to focus on the short-term. Get beat up by those in the synagogue? Go talk to the Gentiles. Get kicked out of town and stoned by opponents? Dust yourself and move on. Just keep moving.

That urgency meant that Paul took a pass on a lot of policy issues. Was slavery unjust? Yes. Were pagan governments awful? Yes. But reforming social orders takes time, and he firmly believed that time was not what we had, so he just focused on staying in his lane, spreading the Good News, and encouraging people not to get distracted by anything that was right and good but going away soon regardless.

Either we have lost that urgency (after two thousand years of the end not coming), or we have forgotten what the Good News actually is. And either way, it hurts us, if we believe we share Paul’s mission, which is the same one Jesus gives to his followers at the end of the Gospel of Matthew: Go spread the Good News.

At its heart, the Good News is not about what we do with our genitals. In fact, it’s not primarily about what we do, at all. 

The Good News is that, regardless of how broken we are as individuals and collectively, we are loved immeasurably and most intimately by the God who made us. God loves us more than we can grasp, so deeply that we can’t undo it even at our worst.

That is the Good News to which we are invited to respond, first by accepting that love, then by learning to return it to the God from whom it comes and share it with each other.

That’s the message that people don’t hear because we’re too busy talking about sex. In an increasingly distracted world, the Church and its members have less and less opportunity to deliver a message that anyone is going to hear. To the extent that it and we focus on a message other than the Gospel, regardless of its truth or importance, we inflict the opportunity cost of denying people who long to hear that they are loved the very Good News we’ve been commissioned to share. That’s why I wish we’d shut up about sex for a while.

Enough, already.

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The hypocrisy we focus on isn’t even the biggest one.

It’s pretty easy to make the point that Catholic leaders, all of whom take a vow to abstain from sex, seem only to want to talk about ethical issues that relate to sex. There are folks who only really hear about the Church when it’s rallying against abortion and gay marriage and drag queen brunches; others, especially those who have experienced divorce, know the Church has a problem with that, too. And many kids who go through Catholic education will only remember a heavy emphasis on sexual sin, as if the only thing that makes us Christian is denying our hormones.

Again, for Catholics, it’s hard to escape the fact that pretty much everyone with decision making authority in the Church is a man who by virtue of his vows has sworn off sex. And as they…trying not to use the word pontificate…rail against the evils of illicit sex, they face a track record of fellow clerics not merely cheating on their vow of celibacy but sexually abusing minors and sexually manipulating adults under their care and direction. In most cases, thankfully, these abuses happened decades ago, and the horror that continues is the institution’s refusal to repent of decades of covering up and excusing these truly abominable sins by clergy, though new contemporary cases still emerge often enough to prove that this demonic infestation isn’t behind us. It’s hard not to see the hypocrisy of a Church that rails against sexual sin, unless it’s committed by celibate leaders, in which case it is covered up and excused.

My Protestant and Evangelical friends, of course, are waking up to the reality that this sort of hypocritical abuse of power and demonic predation on children isn’t reserved for the celibate. Just as the Catholic sex abuse scandals ripple from country to country, so they ripple from denomination to denomination; Evangelical megachurches, like Southern Baptists, are discovering that clerical power shelters, if not fosters, horrible abuses. 

But that’s not even the biggest hypocrisy in this fixation.

When you go back to the New Testament, you can find moral lessons about sexuality and marriage. But you have to look pretty hard to find them, because they certainly aren’t central to Jesus’ moral message.

Here’s what is central to Jesus’ moral message: Love everybody. Counter violence with peace. Welcome into the center of loving community those who have been pushed to the margins. Eschew wealth and power, trading in any tangible forms of community for dependence on God and each other, just as the poor and powerless have always done.

Those are the themes that Jesus introduces His followers to in the Gospels as proper responses to the Good News. Not as its terms and conditions: Jesus runs afoul of the religious establishment primarily because He intentionally disputes the idea that obedience to the Law precedes blessedness. Non-violence, inclusion, and dependence are the palette with which we paint our reciprocation of divine love received.

The hypocrisy of the Church’s fixation on sex, even more than the obvious “do as I say, not as I do” one, is that while the Church puffs up in opposition to the sexual immorality of modern Western culture, it is mostly silent on the ways that the same culture promotes the opposite of Jesus’ primary moral themes. American culture in particular is drenched in violence, reeks of marginalization and worships independence through greed that mandates and exacerbates systems of impoverishment. By turning a blind eye to these central cultural themes and fixating on sex, the Church chooses a molehill as the one to die on in the middle of a mountain range.

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That doesn’t mean that sex isn’t important, nor does it mean that there is nothing the Church has worth saying about it. Were it not for my premise that we need to shut up for a while on the topic, I would recommend Ron Rolheiser’s chapter on the “spirituality of sexuality” in his book The Holy Longing as particularly compelling. Those who have discovered the “Theology of the Body” framework proposed by St. John Paul II also know that there is more to say about sex than a checklist of “don’t’s”. It is hard to live in the world without recognizing the ways in which sexuality shapes our understanding of intimacy and wields immense power to create and destroy life, love and relationships.

So, yes, sex is important and the Church, reasonably, has insights worth sharing about it. 

Later.

After we get out the message we were assigned to deliver. 

After people understand the Good News. 

When people are clamoring in gratitude for ways to respond to God’s love, as corollaries to peace, community and dependence, talking about the ways in which sexuality can be a sacrament of divine love and the conditions that sacramentality requires is a good healthy response.

But not before.

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There’s an assumption that those who push back against the Church’s focus on sex are just sore losers, like players in a game arguing a referee’s call that goes against them. If you accepted what the Church has to say about sex, the argument goes, you’d join that chorus rather than rage against it.

That’s not my argument. 

A Church whose teachings fully align with what I already believe isn’t worth my time and attention, because the one thing about myself that I’m sure of is my brokenness. A god who doesn’t challenge me to change, to become a better receiver and giver of love, is a god who doesn’t recognize the mess that I am and is therefore no god at all. If I am not made uncomfortable in the presence of God, then it’s because I’m not worshiping God; I’m worshiping my reflection in a mirror. If I’m not made uncomfortable by living in communion with other people (which is what the Church is), then it’s because I’m not really letting those people into my consciousness enough to recognize that they aren’t carbon copies of me.

As is true with all that the Church teaches, I agree with a lot of it, I’m not convinced but open to some of it, I find the popular application of some of it wildly distorted, and I really struggle to see the truth in a little of it. I expect the lineup of what falls in each of those categories to continue to change over my life, just as it has to date. But that’s a “me problem,” as the kids say.

My argument is not an attempt to silence the things I don’t buy into, any more than it is to elevate the things I really dig.

My argument is that we’re failing our mission by focusing on the wrong things.

Enough, already.