Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
It is tempting to begin this sermon with a raft of statistics that demonstrate contemporary American and Christian attitudes about sexual behavior. In my reading to prepare for this sermon, almost all writers on the Seventh Commandment give in to this temptation. They cite figure after figure calculated to show that current morality, even among evangelical Christians, has “gone to hell in a hand basket,” as my father-in-law used to say.
However, I prefer to start out our work on this commandment differently. Rather than open with a graphic picture of just how bad things are, I’d like to share with you an image fresh on my mind of how good things can be.
Recently, Jane Ebner has been in the hospital and then in a nursing care center, recovering from her broken hip and shoulder. It has been a tough time. She was already sick with the flu when she fell. The first day in the hospital, some pain medication shut down her kidneys and she developed a low sodium count. She was delirious for about 48 hours. When I visited she called both her husband and me “devils.” After four days, she finally had surgery on her hip. But then she developed pneumonia which only began to clear up a few days ago.
Through all of it, every day for over two weeks, Jane’s husband Don has been by her side. He arrives first thing in the morning and only goes home once Jane has had dinner. She can only use her left hand, so he stays to help her eat. Don has patiently smiled through being called a devil, through handing her Kleenex when she coughs up stuff, and through a bout of diarrhea that hit her this week. He fluffs up her pillow, holds her water cup, and walks alongside while she does physical therapy, all of it with a cheerful spirit of love for the woman he has been married to for sixty years.
Jane herself would admit that she has not been an easy patient to care for, but Don hasn’t missed a day and hasn’t complained once. This couple has learned very well what it means to be faithful to each other in marriage. I’ve no doubt that if it were Don in that bed, Jane would be every bit as faithful to him.
So it is with Don and Jane that I want us to begin thinking about what it means to keep the Seventh Commandment, to remain faithful in marriage, to refrain from committing the sin known as adultery. These two people in their eighties have a lot to teach us. I wish that every couple thinking about marriage could go spend an afternoon in the nursing home with the Ebners. It would a more valuable lesson in marriage than anything I can offer in the course of pre-marital counseling.
I know others of you have been in the same kind of situation, staying faithful beside a spouse in need. You as well have learned these lessons. So I think you would echo my assertion that such faithfulness is beyond price. The question that I want us to consider, therefore, is “How do you get there?” How can we become men and women who stand by the commitments we’ve made to each other, no matter how difficult it turns out to be?
In the words of the title I, with some regret now, gave this sermon, how do we “bullet-proof” our marriages? How do we create relationships such that whatever life fires at us the bond between husband and wife will remain undamaged? As foolishly simple as it sounds, one way is by keeping this commandment, by not committing adultery.
Now you may be thinking that long-term care for each other has very little to do with avoiding adultery. Sticking by a sick spouse when you are old is one thing. Not having an affair when you are young is something entirely different. Yes, they are different, but it’s going to be much harder to do the first if you haven’t done the second. Adultery puts the possibility of growing old together in serious jeopardy.
In seminary, during my summer as a student chaplain in the hospital, I visited a sixty-year old man who had heart surgery. I wondered why his wife and family were not more concerned about his condition. They didn’t visit or seem to care very much. One of the children filled me in. “Chaplain,” he said, “my dad slept around on my mother through their whole marriage. You can’t expect her to be too worried about him now.” Adultery robs a marriage relationship of hope for mutual care and respect that can weather hard times.
Therefore, though you would never know it from watching almost any prime-time television program, sexual sin is very serious business. God makes that clear by placing a command against adultery in the Ten Commandments.
The areas of life touched on by the Ten Commandments are like system files on your computer. Your machine has thousands of files stored on it. You can safely play with most of them. Edit, move, or delete ninety-nine out of hundred files and you may lose a little information, but your computer will keep working just fine. Mess with those system files, however, those that end “.dll,” “.exe,” “.ini,” or, heaven forbid, your Windows Registry file, and you can trash the whole works. Even rebooting won’t help. Only some really good tech support is going to be able to save you and even then you may lose all your data.
God put sex in the Ten Commandments because it is crucial to the human operating system. Mess around with sex and you can lose everything. God is not some uptight cosmic hall monitor who wants to keep everyone from having any fun. He is a loving Father who knows much better than we do what is and what is not good for us. He told us not to commit adultery because adultery is always a disaster for our lives. It doesn’t matter if you think you are getting away with it, adultery will ruin you. At some point down the road when you expect love and joy to boot up like normal, you’ll be staring at a blank screen.
You see, the major reason God wants us to keep sex within the bounds of marriage is that moving it to any other arena messes up our relationship with Him as well. God hates sex outside of marriage because good sex, good, genuine physical love within a marriage is supposed to be a picture of our relationship with Him. It goes back to those first two commands to have no other gods and make no idols. Over and over, the prophets told Israel that to break those two commandments was to “go a whoring” spiritually.
In fact, you can read in the little book of Hosea that prophet’s story when God told him to marry a woman who God knew would commit adultery. Hosea’s own feelings of betrayal and pain became a living parable of how God feels when we turn away from Him. When we turn to other gods and idols, God is like a husband sitting at home thinking about where his wife is, who she is with, and what are they doing together.
The New Testament reinforces that sexual imagery for our relation with God in even more specific terms. Jesus used parables about weddings to teach us about His love for us. In Ephesians 5 Paul writes that the unity of husband and wife as “one flesh” is a profound mystery, but that it is a mystery founded upon and based in the unity of Christ and the church. And the last great scene of the Bible in the book of Revelation is pictured as a wedding, the eternal union of Jesus and us, His church. Sexuality lived as God meant it to be is a graphic picture guiding us to God.
But when the human side of this divine picture is disturbed and distorted by sexual sin, it loses its significance for us. A man cheating on his wife cannot fully grasp the imagery. “God loves you like you love your wife,” no longer means what it was meant to. The whole idea becomes twisted and confused.
Please allow me a little more computer talk. Most of you are familiar with “icons.” They are those little pictures on your computer screen that you click once or twice to get things rolling. On my screen there is a little image of a mailbox. I click it and up pops my e-mail program and I can collect my messages. And there’s also a little graphic of an artist’s palette and a paint brush. Click on it and I can edit photos, create new graphics, etc. The icons are tiny pictures representing the programs I want to run and leading me to them.
However, if something goes wrong with the way an icon is set up; if I start playing around with my system and change the path the icon follows, or move some files around, then the connection can be broken. I click on my little mailbox and either nothing happens or I get a message telling me the program can’t be found. That image no longer leads me to my e-mail like it’s supposed to. And that is what happens to sex when we misuse it. It is supposed to lead us to God. Adultery and other sexual sin ruins the image, and breaks the connection.
Therefore, adultery is sin because it violates something sacred. Catholics call marriage a sacrament, a means of grace. We do not use that language, but still speak of God’s institution of marriage and the fact that it is holy. It is holy because God created this relationship so that men and women could lead each other to His love just by coming together in human love.
You can see, then, why God takes adultery seriously enough to give it a commandment all to itself. It is not just a matter of human relationships. Just as much as any of the other commandments, it is a sin against God.
So you can also understand how it is that Jesus when preaching the Sermon on the Mount treated the Seventh Commandment the same as the Sixth. He didn’t cut us any slack at all. He reinforced this law until it seems nearly impossible to obey. Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Jesus’ warning makes it plain that we are not out of the woods when merely physical chastity has been observed. The marriage covenant is damaged by thought as well as deed, by looking as well as acting. “Look, but don’t touch” is a rule that works for children in a china shop, but it falls far short of the true spirit of the Seventh Commandment.
Notice how important where we started is. If your aim is not the kind of love and respect which will keep you by the bedside of a sick spouse, or if you do not acknowledge that sex is an image of God’s love for us, then it will seem as if looking really isn’t as bad as touching. Physical sexual sin, after all, might give you an STD or make you pregnant. No amount of lustful looking is going to give you AIDS or conceive a child. Without that deeper spiritual perspective on marriage you might think whatever you can get away with in your mind has no ultimate consequences. But because lust diminishes your love for your spouse and damages your perception of God’s love, its consequences are real and vast.
Therefore you and I are constantly in grave relational and spiritual danger. We can commit adultery with the click of a mouse or the purchase of a magazine. You don’t have to run off to Tijuana with a blond in a red convertible to break your marriage vows. Just sitting and imagining it will do the job just fine. You don’t have to spend a real week with Clint Eastwood in Madison County. Read the book, rent the video and spend an evening wishing you were Meryl Streep. You will be forsaking your marriage just the same.
Not that you or I should fall into the trap of supposing that “Since thinking it is just as bad as doing it, I might as well go ahead.” No, there is still a huge difference between lust expressed in the heart and lust expressed by the body. Don’t compound the sin by adding the physical dimension. Both are wrong. Both real and imagined adultery cause untold damage to our lives and to our relationships with God and others.
On top of all this, Paul and the apostles recognized that the Seventh Commandment as taught and expanded by Jesus not only prohibits those deeds which are technically adultery, but also all sexual activity outside of marriage. God’s law is broken not just when you are married and sleep with someone else or sleep with someone else’s spouse, it is broken by any and all sexual activity that occurs outside the bounds of a marriage covenant.
I’ll break my word and cite a statistic. It is now expected that fifty percent of men and women under the age of 30 will live together before marriage. Unmarried couples cohabitating is the fastest growing household type in our country. The Seventh Commandment opposes that arrangement also, because sex without the commitment of marriage also distorts our picture of God. If we cannot make lasting commitments to each other before getting into bed together, how can our lives reflect the fact that God is lastingly committed to us? Because He is. He is so committed to us that He does not give up on us regardless of our adulteries.
Our situation is dismal. Just as last week we were confronted by the fact that most of us are, in our hearts, murderers, so in this commandment we face the truth that, in one way or another, almost all of us are adulterers. The consequences of this sin are played out daily in divorce and abortion and disease, as well as in homes where love has disappeared and couples remain together in quiet misery. The only true hope for the situation is the fact that God does not give up on us.
As I said, God told the prophet Hosea to marry a woman who was bound to stray. She was a prostitute. She left Hosea for another man. And then God told Hosea to take her back. In Hosea 3:1, the Lord says “Go show love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods.” Our only hope is that God has that sort of unrelenting love for us. He does not give up on us, even when we give up on Him. As Paul wrote to Timothy, “if we are faithless, he will remain faithful.” Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery and He will forgive everyone of us.
The consequences of adultery are horrible, but the worst consequence of our faithlessness is already done and over. By sinning against the love of God written into our own lives as men and women, you and I sent Jesus to the Cross. God loved us so much that He chose to bring us back even at the price of His own Son.
Therefore, to answer the question I asked early on, the way to end up like Don and Jane, the way to learn lifelong commitment to God and to each other, is to learn to live sexually in the light of the Cross. It’s not as simple as asking “What would Jesus do?” because Jesus was never married. But in His sacrifice on the Cross Jesus showed how the best and deepest joy is found in any aspect of life.
In a sermon on sex, please permit me to be a little explicit. Just as I have been saying, physical lovemaking, in its right context in marriage, is the image of God’s love for us. And the clue to the whole matter is pictured right there in the act of sex. At its best, isn’t the most exciting aspect of making love the response of the other person? Doesn’t the greatest pleasure happen when you forget about yourself and get totally involved in what the other person is feeling? The best sex happens when each person gives up what he or she wants in order to find fulfillment in what the other wants.
It is true physically and it is true spiritually. It runs counter to all the emotions and desires that make adultery and lust so popular and so powerful. No wonder Paul said it was a mystery. The way of the Cross, the way of life in Jesus Christ is to quit seeking your own pleasure, die to yourself, and live for God and others. Whether you are married or single, old or young, that is the kind of life we were meant to live.
In our Gospel lesson from John 10, Jesus said that His sheep are threatened by thieves whose only object is to kill and destroy. Adultery and all kinds of sexual sin are thieves. They promise much, but they will only rob you, taking in the end even the pleasure they gave you and killing your spirit. By itself, sex will never make you happy. That is why Christians have always believed that being single is just as good a condition in God’s eyes as being married.
But Jesus said He came not as a thief but as the Good Shepherd. He came not to take away our joy and pleasure but to give it. When we seek our fulfillment in Him rather than in fleeting moments of lust, we will discover that He is giving us what we wanted all along. In His grace and way of living we find real life. As He said, and as I know Don and Jane would tell you, in Jesus Christ we find abundant life.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj