On Sex in The Pulpit

By Tripp Hudgins, straight white guy

Tripp Hudgins
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read

Our unwillingness to speak positively about human sexuality or simply our bodies from Christian pulpits is a kind of illness in the church.

Yesterday at my church we had the assigned readings for the day. The first was from the Song of Solomon which is ancient erotic poetry preserved for us by various Jewish and Christian traditions. It has also been reinterpreted time and again to represent the relationship between God and God’s people. I have no problem with these interpretations. That said, we are also afraid to allow it to simply stand as eroticism. With such incredible metaphors for human bodies and human desire, our historical fear of human desire trumps the obvious eroticism and insists that we re-interpret the work.

The Song of Songs, Frantisek Kupka c. 1904

The reading from James was a wonderful parallel. It reminded us about what true religion is. It is the care of the poor in the window. It is care for those in need. That’s true religion. If you want to honor God, care for those in need. Straightforward. Simple.

He missed an opportunity to say something positive about human desire as opposed to speaking about what happens when it comes off the rails.

The reading from Mark, however, presented a different kind of challenge. This is the story of Jesus speaking about what goes in the body versus what comes out of the body. He was having a debate with some Pharisees who were pretty keen that everybody wash their hands. Not all of Jesus disciples did so. This caused quite a stir.

Now, the sermon I heard was fine. The preacher offered a very progressive view on how desire gets distorted. He didn’t suggest in anyway that Homosexual desire, as an example, is a distortion. He just said that distortions happen and such distortions are usually a sign of a human being’s interior struggles. Somehow we have taken something beautiful like love and affection and dis-ordered it in someway, put the cart before the horse. It was fine. I just feel like he missed an opportunity.

He missed an opportunity to say something positive about human desire as opposed to speaking about what happens when it comes off the rails. He had the Song of Solomon right in front of him. He had an example of true religion right in front of him from James. I don’t know what persuaded him to avoid saying something positive about human desire. I don’t know if it was some kind of prudishness or an awareness of somebody else’s prudishness in the congregation. But there are really wonderful ways of discussing how beautiful the human body is and how beautiful sex is.

In Jesus’ short list of sins, what we see are ways that pleasure can be distorted. But we don’t see is what Jesus actually thinks about pleasure. The preacher has to do some imaginative work.

They would have to extrapolate from the tradition… Perhaps from the Song of Solomon and the book of James. Then we could talk about them subversive nature of pleasure. We can preach about the problems of a religious tradition that is afraid to address the subject of sexual pleasure for fear that it might lead to the distortions of healthy sexual expression. We can preach about what we have learned over the centuries regarding the complexity of human existence and human sexual expression. We can step out of the traditional Western Christian binary and embrace the glorious plethora of gender expressions available today.

But that didn’t happen.

Looks like I’m gonna have to make it happen.

Tripp Hudgins

Written by

he/him/all y'all • previously featured at Sojourners, Bearings, and Religious News Service • Insta: @biscuitsandbanjos.

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