Around the World Wide Web there has been a lot of discussion
about s-e-x. Sarah Bessey wrote a
truly beautiful post about no longer believing the lie that she is damaged
goods. Rachel Held Evans and
Elizabeth Esther chimed in as well.
And suddenly everyone everywhere is speaking up about the damage the
purity culture has done and the unnecessary shame it has brought.
When I read Sarah’s article I wanted to stand up on my chair
and shout YES!, fist frozen in the air a la Kenneth on 30 Rock. I wanted to sit next to her 19-year-old
self at that youth meeting and tell her that she was not a cup full of other
people’s spit lugies.
Because I get it.
I spent college thinking my faith amounted to not committing the two big
sins: underage drinking (and general drunkenness) and shacking (which included,
most obviously, sex, but also sleeping over at a boy’s dorm/frat house/apartment). My faith was all about my witness to
the love of Christ. And somehow
during those four years of college the love of Christ was encompassed by
abstinence from alcohol and the opposite sex. They shall know we are Christians by our sober mornings
waking up in our own beds. That’s
how the hymn goes right?
Then I turned 21 and was allowed to legally drink and
suddenly my status as a Christian was a little shaky. I wasn’t that Christian girl who didn’t drink anymore.
Once I got married and sex was allowed the crisis of faith
really set in. Suddenly I had
nothing left to witness. All those
things that had set me apart from others were no longer forbidden. How was I supposed to bear witness to
the different life Christ calls us to now?
I had bought the lie that in order to be a “real Christian”
you had to stay a virgin until your wedding night. Of course, if you happened to have had sex before meeting
and falling in love with Christ, then you were ok—as long as you abstained from
sex from that point forward (until your wedding night). And it seemed to me that if something
happened, and you slipped up post-Christian life, well then, as long as you
confessed it to everyone you knew and never did it again then I guess you could
still be a card carrying Christian.
But to be a practicing, Jesus loving Christian while also be
having continued sex? No way. You just couldn’t be one while doing
the other. In the early days of my
faith I was told that just wasn’t allowed. You were lying to yourself and God if you tried to claim
both.
And also, sex was the only sin that really mattered to
God. So just don’t do it.
The irony is that while I held on white knuckled to my
virginity until the ripe old age of 24, I wasn’t exactly the poster child for
purity. The virginity I was
holding on to was somewhat of a technicality. Technically we
didn’t do anything before our wedding night that would have gotten me
pregnant. But practically we did a
whole bunch of stuff that I’m pretty sure Jesus would have put in the “lust
category.” But since my technical
virginity was still in tact I figured I was fine to still call myself a
Christian.
Now I obviously see the ridiculousness in this. I’ve walked this road with many
friends who’ve struggled with sex and loved God at the same time. But first I married a man who spent most
of his 20’s doing exactly that.
In the begining I wrestled with judgment over my soon-to-be
husband’s past. He wasn’t one of
those Christians that had just slipped up once. He was someone that loved Jesus and also had sex outside of
marriage multiple times, with multiple people. He was someone that in college I would have written off as
“not a legit Christian.” I would
have brushed off any wisdom he may have had to offer because I had mentally
wiped him of his official Jesus follower status when I realized he was
fornicating. I would have viewed
him as a project. Someone I could
pray, influence and persuade into the serious, chaste Jesus following
club.
The reality was simple though: he was someone that struggled
with sex, failing time and time again in the same way that I struggled with
gossip, failing time and time again.
Only gossip is a much more acceptable sin.
And so you see, I really do agree with Sarah, Elizabeth and
Rachel. As Christians for too long
we’ve held sex on this pedestal as the ultimate no no. We’ve made sex a very black and white,
in or out sin. We’ve withheld
grace from people who struggle with it, and allowed it to be the qualifier for
your title as Christian. Are you a
horrible, graceless, angry, selfish person? As long as you’re still a virgin before your wedding night
you are welcome to call yourself one of us!
In this regard I stand on my chair, fist in the air and
shout yes! Yes! Let’s abandon this lie and open the doors
to Christ’s kingdom wide open!
Let’s put down the stones and remove the heavy garments of shame we’ve
heaped onto our brothers and sisters.
Let’s find the freedom in Christ from shame and guilt and darkness. Let’s stop telling the lie that you are
damaged goods.
And yet a still quiet voice reminds me not to trade one lie
for another. If the purity culture
has gotten it wrong then how should we speak of sex? What does God have to say about our bodies? How should we handle this all?
Because the reality is I work with teenagers who are asking
for answers to these questions. I
have two kids who will one day want to know when they should have sex and with
whom and why and I want to be able to talk about it in a way that doesn’t
idolize the throne of virginity but also still takes very seriously God’s
opinion on the matter. What
exactly do I tell them?
This is a two
part-er. Tomorrow I’ll tell you
what I’ve been thinking in regards to these questions. In the meantime, what do you think?
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