Love Runs Both Ways

All right, my name is Anthony. I get to serve as one of the co-lead pastors. Pastor Tonetta is taking a little bit of a vacation post-my sabbatical, so you can send good vibes her way. She takes a much-deserved break. We are in—this is sort of like the third of a trilogy of sermons. So we're in a sermon series called Hot Takes, and then for the past two weeks, I've been preaching on 1 Corinthians 5, 1 Corinthians 6, concluding my little trilogy of sermons with 1 Corinthians chapter 7. Again, another content warning for today's sermon. We're going to have frank conversations about sex, relationships, singleness.

We're going to name coercion and abuse in relationships, and church teaching about sexuality that has harmed people. So again, please take care of yourself. Step out if you need to. Grab some headphones and put those in if you need to. It's all okay. And there is Table Kids in our student ministry available. And, you know, if you're an adult who needs that too, that's okay as well.

No, but we are finishing up on these really complex, tangled issues that Paul has been addressing on sex, relationships, coercion, bodies. And there are these two things happening in the book of 1 Corinthians. Just to review, there is what Paul has heard.

So Paul planted the church of Corinthians, and then went on his merry way, and then would receive letters or word through the grapevine as he was hundreds of miles away. And he's hearing from Chloe and Chloe's people about some of the issues that the Corinthian church is facing, and is responding to those. And there's also a lost letter that Corinth sent to Paul, and Paul is responding to that.

So when we take a look at our scripture, you're going to see, now concerning the things that you wrote, all right? And this is Paul's responses. So you're on one end of an email chain or one end of a telephone call.

You're not getting both ends. We're reading between the lines. We're doing some kind of archaeology of what do we think was said, and what do we think Paul has meant.

Today's main idea is that love runs both ways, and that God calls us to peace. Therefore, the only thing we owe one another is love. Love runs both ways, and God calls us to peace.

So the only thing we owe one another is love. If you want to take notes, you can go to table.center. You can see my notes.

You can take your own and email them to yourself. And, of course, follow along in your Bibles or on the screen. Would you just help me collect myself?

Would you pray with me? Spirit, Christ, Creator, we believe and we declare that you are in this place. And we are continuing to tackle tough topics and subjects that I know stir things up in a lot of us.

God, I pray for myself, selfishly for myself, that I would not say anything stupid, harmful, hurtful. And that the words that I am about to preach would set people free, would loose binds, would be a salve on wounds. And God, I pray for this congregation as well, those in this room, those online, those who are going to listen to this podcast or a video later, that you supernaturally, God, would allow your voice to speak.

And that any mistakes I made are somehow erased, that your truth shines through. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.

Amen.

So I'll say from the get-go, I am deeply indebted to a guide to spirituality and sexuality that our very own Tanetta, Pastor Tanetta, wrote. So if you search for Tanetta Landisina, a guide to spirituality and sexuality, that will lead you to the QCF website, Queer Christian Conference website, where she put together this guide to spirituality and sexuality. It's like a booklet.

It's maybe 70 pages, something like that. It is filled with wisdom, as most things that Tanetta writes are. So I'm going to be using some of those resources.

I also encourage you to go look at that yourself. But she actually opens up from a poem from Adrienne Rich called Diving Into the Wreck. And it says, I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.

And many of us, if we did not grow up in purity culture, if we did not grow up in a highly controlling or abusive spirituality and religion, we've at least been next door neighbors to it. And it pervades our culture, American culture, about the assumptions about what marriage, sex, relationships look like. And there has been a lot of shipwrecks because of that, those teachings.

Teachings that enforced people to stay in abusive relationships or who were bound to duty sex or obligation sex. Or people who were told that your body is not your own. And so you've got to do whatever your spouse, usually a male spouse or partner, tells you to do.

And many of you all have left. And you were right to leave. But now we've got to build something else.

And I think for quite a few of us, we know what we don't believe about sex and marriage and relationships and dating and all of that. But we also need to build something new, worth believing in, worth having a foundation for our relationships in. And so we see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.

What treasures can we find in scripture, believe it or not, about sex and relationships? What treasures can we find about our own embodied wisdom and the collective wisdom in the room? So we look down, we look at the damage, and we find what's still worth believing.

We're going to 1 Corinthians chapter 7 today. And we are going to look at these questions that Paul has received from the church of Corinth. We grieve what we lost from bad teaching, bad culture, bad relationships.

And that grief is part of the healing. Remember 1 Corinthians 5, about the story of the man who was having coercive sex with his stepmother. And Paul's response to the church is, you should have grieved.

So grief is often a first step of building something new, of a death. And then we have to move from sorrow to joy. We don't stick in the sorrow.

We move on to joy. And this is not just something that happens once. The five stages of grief are not just this linear thing that you go through.

It's a pattern. It's a cycle. It's waves.

So we move from sorrow to joy today, and hopefully next week, and hopefully next hour, and so on. So this, what I'm going to say, all serves as an introduction for three main topics. But by way of introduction, Corinth writes a letter to Paul.

We don't have it. All we have are his answers. Chapter 7, and much of the first letter of 1 Corinthians, is Paul answering the mail.

And it's about sex, and marriage, and singleness, and separation, and widowhood. And these 40 verses are very, very tangled up, so we're not going to do verse by verse. It would take us three hours, and I don't need any more critics.

So we're going to do this a little bit more topical than the past two weeks. And the other thing to keep in mind over all of the letters of 1 Corinthians is that there is some amount of crisis happening. So if you just read 1 Corinthians 7 at a sprint, you'll see that Paul is addressing a whole bunch of different questions, and seems to keep referring to some sort of present crisis.

Some scholars think that Paul was under the delusion that Jesus was going to return any day. And so you should stay single because Jesus might return any day. You should stay married because Jesus might return any day.

You should stay in whatever state that you are in because Jesus might return any day. That's what some scholars believe. Other scholars think, no, there's just literally some sort of crisis happening in Corinth or in the region that Corinth was in that Paul was responding to.

And there's some, like, linguistic reasons why we may think that's true. There's also some historical archaeological reasons that might be true, reasons dealing with famine, others like sort of social-political uprisings happening. Take whichever one you want to take.

I tend towards more that Paul is responding towards a particular crisis and not thinking that Jesus is returning any moment. Regardless, Paul's answers are dealing with a particular moment that's no longer true of our own. All right?

Are you with me? All right. So it's timely, and we have to do the work of figuring out what is timeless.

But some of these questions aren't all that different than questions we might ask today. What if two people get married and one of them becomes a Christian and the other one does not? What do they do?

What if two people get married and one of the people abandons their spouse? What happens to the first spouse who didn't abandon the marriage? Are they allowed to get married again or are they stuck in the marriage that someone abandoned?

What happens in cases of, like, oh, two people got engaged and now you find out that maybe there's no more food or maybe there's an economic crisis. Do you have to stick with the engagement or are you allowed to break off the engagement to go deal with the crisis? These are some of the questions.

There also seems to be two theological errors happening in Corinth, some of which we've addressed, but there's two camps or parties, both of which are trying to get to this sort of super spiritual state. They want to be ultra-Christians in some way.

They want to have some sort of power and much of the sort of underlying themes of first Corinthians is that if you want to have power, you've got to look like Jesus and Jesus looks a lot like self-giving, self-sacrificial love. But the way that these people, these two different parties, were thinking about power was one was about becoming sort of super ultra-spiritual.

I am so spiritual, I am so connected to the spiritual realm and the kingdom that I don't even need sex. I don't need bodies. I don't need relationships.

It was aestheticism of, you know, the physical world, we'll leave it behind. God's going to destroy bodies. God's going to destroy, you know, food.

Sex is not really part of my future, so why does it need to be part of my life now? And then there was another party of folks who thought, well, because everything is, you know, going to hell in a handbasket and everything's going to be destroyed anyway, I might as well do whatever I want with my body.

And so that's some of what we've been addressing these past couple weeks of, well, then I can take the prostitute and I can have coercive sex with that person. None of it really matters. So you have this kind of contrast of angels and beasts.

Oh, we're going to be like the angels anyway, so start acting like an angel now. Or we're all basically just, oh, what's that old song? You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals.

Let's do it like they do it on the animal channel, right? We're just nothing but beasts, right? Those are the two things that Paul's responding to.

Lauren Winner in her book, Real Sex, says, many of us try to live as angels or as beasts ourselves. We might swing the pendulum towards the super spiritual. We might swing the pendulum towards we ain't nothing but mammals.

And purity culture is definitely the angel era. And the market is the beast era. Purity culture says, you know, sex is something that is kind of gross and kind of icky, so don't think about it too much.

And then usually, purity culture sort of devolves into the beast era, era of like, well, now that you can have sex, take it whenever you can get it. Or, you know, purity culture ultimately is about the control of bodies anyway, so maybe it's a horseshoe shape and they're not that far apart. Some number of us lived one and swung to the other.

Paul is trying to answer both. The other thing, we're still sort of in introduction here, is Paul is very willing to mark his own words down a level. So, this is all chapter 7, verse 6.

He says, I give this as a concession, not a command. Verse 10 says, I'm not saying this, but the Lord is saying this. And he's talking about divorce.

But in verse 12, he says, this is me and not the Lord. Verse 25, he says, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion. Verse 40 says, I think I too have the Spirit of God.

So, Paul is very willing to say, like, this is just advice. He's sort of playing jazz with the advice that he's given. He's doing a little bit of figuring out as he goes, because these are new questions for a new kind of people.

And he tells us how much weight to put on what he's saying. I think, this is my opinion, I think I have the Spirit of God, so I'm probably worth paying attention to. So, the chapter ultimately is advice, and Paul says so.

Now, the church turned Paul's words into laws, and we'll get into this, literal laws in some cases. But Paul didn't. I think Paul would sometimes be, no pun intended, appalled by the ways, literally no pun intended, it just popped into my mind.

I think he would be appalled by some of the ways that we treat his own words. He'd be like, why are you still talking about me? He's writing to a church, one church, a single church, in a time of crisis.

Another thing to keep in mind, the culture about relationships in the first century, very, very, very different than today. Even though 1 Corinthians 7 is all about romantic relationships, or what we would consider romantic relationships, the word love shows up zero times in 1 Corinthians 7. Agape, one of the Greek words for love, shows up lots of times in the rest of the letter, and we'll get to 1 Corinthians 13 at some point.

But love does not show up in this chapter. Romantic relationship is a very modern phrase and idea. It's not Paul's.

Paul instead uses words like debt, authority, agreement, peace, anxiety. We also should name his world assumed one man and one woman, a patriarchal household that assumed slavery. Our world is very different, and we make very different assumptions.

And I am okay admitting I think Paul got much further than most of his culture and world did. And I'm also okay admitting I don't think Paul got all the way there in terms of the implications of a love-shaped life, a Jesus-shaped life, and how that shows up in relationships. So I think we can build on Paul's foundation without living in his house.

Does that make sense? All right. So there are three foundation stones we've got to talk about when we're talking about relationships.

Mutuality, peace, and covenant. Mutuality, so how do we function together? Are we equals?

Are you more powerful or less powerful than me? Peace, this thing that God has called us to and seems to be a high value for how Paul is playing his jazz, answering these questions, and giving his opinion. And then thirdly is the idea of covenant.

What do we owe one another? We're part of a culture. We're part of a society.

We're part of relationships. No human is an island. And so I'm not going to just going to live like every person for themselves.

I owe you something. You owe me something if we want to make this work. So how do we do that?

So to build our foundation, we start in verses 3 through 5 and the concept of like ways or in the same way. The Greek word is homo, hamaias, where we get the word homo, as in homosexual, same-sex attraction. And in verse, I'll just go ahead and read 1 Corinthians 1 through 5.

So Paul says, now concerning the matters about which you wrote, quote, again, remember from last week, we don't know where the quotation marks start and end. There is no punctuation or quotation marks in the original language. So we have to make some guesses as interpreters and translators about where those quotation marks go.

But we have a pretty good, pretty good ways of figuring this out. And it seems like Paul is quoting the Corinthians. So he's not saying this himself.

He's quoting the Corinthians, quote, it's good for a man not to touch a woman. Verse 2, but because of cases of porneia, this key, key word from these three chapters, sexual immorality or sexual exploitation, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. Verse 3, the husband should give to his wife what is due her and, this is our key word, likewise or in the same way, the wife to her husband.

For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. So our first hot take for the day is that the husband, verse 3, should pay his wife what is owed, and likewise the wife her husband.

Now, there's this situation where men or perhaps men and women are trying to be super spiritual and they're not touching their wives. And Paul says, hold on a second. And he responds to this idea with the concept of what is owed.

It's a money word. It's used in terms of debts. And he's using it in terms of what's owed in a marital or sexual relationship.

That if you agree to live together and have sex together, and then one partner says, actually, I'm super spiritual. I don't want or need sex anymore. The other partner could be like, well, I didn't agree to that.

What's going on? And Paul is saying, no, you made an agreement. You owe something to each other, and you should follow up on what you owe.

And look at who owes first. The husband is the one who pays his wife what is owed. And the Torah in the book of Exodus actually already had some expectations about husbands not withholding sex from their wives.

And then Paul adds this word, likewise. There's this sense of mutuality that the expectations of one partner apply to the other partner. And please note that there is no command for anyone to collect or take.

You don't get to collect the debt or take in order to pay your debt. So no spouse or partner, and what Paul is saying, no spouse or partner gets to say, hey, you owe me sex, you owe me your body, and so I'm going to take it for myself. And even though this is all sort of innuendo, and it seems clear that we're talking about sex, it seems to be a principle that applies to basically anything that we could owe each other in a

relationship. Now, I want to do a quick little exercise. So the way the letters worked in the first century is that you had, you know, a small minority who was literate, okay?

And most folks were only functionally literate to accomplish their jobs, but not, like, masterfully literate to read a complicated rhetorical letter like Paul's. So Paul would write a letter, he'd send it off with somebody, and then that person would go and deliver the letter. And to deliver the letter doesn't mean just handing somebody the letter.

It means to get up in front of everybody and to read the letter, okay? So somebody is here reading this letter out loud to the churches or a variety of house churches in Corinth. And the way that you received a letter was not just to be, like, sitting and listening.

You'd be sort of ruckus about it. It was sort of like a group sport of, like, how to respond to a letter. I, when I lived in Iowa, I got to be part of, like, see the Iowa caucuses for, like, how they choose their people in the primaries for different candidates.

And Iowa folks, like, they're pretty, it was like, I spent 10 years of my career as, like, a worship leader trying to get these people to respond emotionally in worship. Like, they're pretty, like, the frozen chosen, shall we say. Except at caucuses, all right?

Because you had everybody in their corner for, like, I want Buttigieg, and I want, you know, Clinton, and I want whatever. And they'd all get in their corner, and they'd all be shouting and yelling at each other, trying to convince each other to pick a side for the caucus. Something similar is happening with the letters, is that somebody's up here delivering the letter on behalf of Paul, and the congregation gathered is responding actively to how the letter is being read.

So imagine, let's have the folks identifying as male in the room, identify as male, and you're going to respond vocally, verbally, out loud to this letter. And the folks who identify as women, you're going to identify vocally, both negative and positive, okay? So I say, because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife.

And what do you say? Okay. Hip, hip, hooray, right?

Something ruckus. Yeah, every man gets a wife. Woo!

Right? And each woman should have her own husband. Yeah, right.

We're dealing already with the cultural distance, right? Paul assumes everybody's straight, right? There's a problem.

There's a problem. Okay. For the wife does not have authority over her own body.

And the men pretend you're a first century man. It's okay. No one's, I'm not recording this to put it on your resume.

Okay. And the men are like, yeah, yeah. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body.

But the wife does. Do not deprive one another. Except perhaps by agreement for a set time to devote yourselves to prayer and then come together again.

Do not deprive one another. And everyone says, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Okay. Okay. In other words, don't be so super spiritual that you're withholding sex from your partner.

So, this letter is being read out loud. And Paul is like sort of, he keeps shifting expectations on people. Again, assuming that everyone in this room that Paul is reading out loud to or the deliverer of the letter is reading out loud to is sex or is straight and wants to have straight sex, which is not the assumption that we're going to make today.

Right?

The first half was normal in Corinth. The wife does not have authority over her own body. This was normal, standard teaching that everybody assumed.

A husband had a claim on his wife's body. So, all the men shear and all the women sort of groan and, yeah, okay. But Paul keeps going and says, likewise.

The husband does not have authority over his own body. This is incredibly, incredibly rare. There is one other instance of a philosopher saying something similar to a group of elite students in Athens.

Of anything close to this concept that a husband does not have authority over his own body, but his spouse does, his wife does. Nobody in the first century world made this assumption. So, Paul, and this one other philosopher that we can find, has this idea of mutuality in marriage.

It's self-giving. It's a relationship of complete trust. It's a handing over to one another.

The Jewish rabbis talk about it in terms of zim-zum, that you sort of withdraw into yourself in order to make room for someone else. And in that mutual withdrawing and making room, you create something new and beautiful and larger than what the two of you separately would have been. Nobody gets to hold title over anybody because everybody holds a claim over each other.

And as we talked about last week, God holds the deed to everyone. You were bought with a price. Now, in Roman law, adultery was always about the wife.

A married man could use an enslaved woman or a prostitute, and it was not considered adultery. And the wife could not charge the man. So, when Paul says that the husband's body belongs to the wife, he closes that door.

Last week, we talked about the man who buys a body. And this week, Paul is taking away the cover for abuse at home. You are owned by someone else.

There is no possibility for either withholding or abusing. And the protection reaches past the couple to the women most exposed to married men. Now, three phrases carry these verses.

One is the idea of paying what is owed. The command is to pay, to give to your spouse what they are due. Nobody is told to collect.

Verse 5, we get the idea of not defrauding. This is the same word that Paul used last week for siblings who cheat on each other in court. And this idea of by agreement.

The one exception for withholding physical affection for each other is through a decision to do it for prayer. Which, again, very different sort of cultural expectations. It's not something you hear a lot about today.

But in other words, Paul is saying you don't get to use your spiritual life or your ministry or your job or the fact that you're a missionary or whatever to withhold sex or relationship from your partner. If I were preaching to a room full of pastors and preachers and missionaries, I would really hammer this home. Because it's very common in the ministry world to be like, oh, my ministry is too important for our marital relationship.

Paul says that's garbage.

One little historical aside I found is that back in like 13th, 14th, 15th century, the way that you decided cases of like marital rape and things like that is you would go to the ecclesiastical court. So the church court. And men would want to go crusading, okay?

They want to leave Europe and go to the Middle East and try to reclaim Jerusalem or just go kill some Saracens or something like that. But the men had to, based off of 1 Corinthians 7, get permission from their wives in order to go crusading. And this is the quote.

But because they had to get the wife's permission, quote, because his departure would deprive her of the sexual solace that he owed to her. And women would literally take their husbands to court over the matter. Hey, Joe Blow wants to go crusading, but I said no because he hasn't given me my sexual solace.

And they would go to court in front of a judge and be like, tell him to stay home with me and have sex. Which is just phenomenal. Well done.

14th century women. Now, hear me. None of this means you lose the right to say no.

In church law and church courts, you had this concept of conjugal debt. Meaning spouses owed each other sex. And it was equal on paper, but in practice, it was always the men who got to collect on the conjugal debt and not the women.

In English common law, a wife was never allowed to take back her consent. So once you entered into the marriage covenant, that was assumed to be a lifetime of consent. And it wasn't until 1991 that marital rape became a crime in England.

In 1993, that marital rape became a crime in every U.S. state. So it took hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of years. So what happened to these verses is a very, very sad story in church history.

We kept the likewise on paper, but we turned it into practice, into something that just kept the patriarchy going. Purity's culture's version is that a wife must never say no to her husband. That you owe it to your husband to have sex with him whenever he wants, or otherwise, he may be liable to cheat.

Which is just, to be clear, bullshit theology. Amen. So to make this clear, no one owes their body on demand.

Your no to any partner, and let's sort of zoom out for a bit, because this is all in the concept of marital relationships. Our culture is very different, where sex can happen in lots of different contexts. But your no is always allowed, no matter the context.

And your no is not fraud. If this verse has ever been used against you, somebody took the likewise out. In any relationship, married, partnered, queer, straight, monogamous, or not, nobody gets to hold the title over anybody.

If you're asexual, in a relationship, that means you aren't broken. And if you and your partner want different things, you get to decide together. And if you have treated a partner's body as something that's owed or due to you, you have to stop.

Your body is not, their body is not yours to take. So, foundation one is this idea of likewise and mutuality.

Foundation two is the idea of peace. So, verse 15, skipping ahead a little bit. Paul says, in a case of an unbelieving partner leaving the marriage, Paul says, Let it be so.

In such a case, the brother or sister is not bound. It is to peace that God has called us. A few verses earlier, Paul does pass along the Lord's command about separation.

Verse 10, don't separate. Again, this seems to be in a particular case of crisis, where it seems like couples are wanting to separate, sort of for fear of their lives, maybe going back to their families of origin, because they're assuming that they might die soon.

Paul uses the words of Jesus to say, No, no, no, you don't need to do that. And then he addresses a case that Jesus did not address, which is the idea of a non-believing partner leaving the relationship. And when talking about relationship, Paul uses two contrasting words in this chapter.

One is the idea of being bound together. So it's this word for almost like string or rope or tape bringing two pieces together. So that's one concept that Paul seems to be for.

We are bound together in some way. And then the second idea is the idea of enslavement. And he contrasts these two things and is trying to identify the tension.

That there are cases where we are bound together. You owe something to me and I owe something to you. How do we figure that out?

But it should never sound like enslavement. Yes, covenant binds, but what it does not do is enslave. So Paul's value is that, Okay, if I have to figure out these cases that nobody has ever had to figure out before, the value I'm going to hold on to is that of peace.

God has called us to peace. And there's similar things going on. Verse 32, he says, I want you all to be free from anxieties.

And verse 35, I'm not going to throw a noose on you all. So Paul is telling us how he wrote chapter 7 and the principles that he is using to answer these questions. God wants us to be at peace.

I want you to be free from anxieties. I'm not going to enslave you or throw a noose on you all. So believe it or not, Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 7, he's not trying to restrict people.

Paul has this reputation of being this sort of anti-sex and everybody stick together in abusive relationships. But Paul is quite clear that it's the opposite. I want you to have peace, free from anxiety, not throw a noose on you all.

He wants people free. So my take on this is, if a teaching about sex and relationships leaves you feeling unpeaceful and anxious, and like there's a noose around your neck, you're teaching against scripture. Are you with me?

God's peace I think speaks to at least three groups who might be in this room or watching this morning. There are people in relationships where the relationship has become slavery. There are celibate people, and celibacy was used as a sentence on you and not a gift.

And there are single people, particularly single people who don't want to be. And it's okay to be single, and it's also okay to not want to be single.

So for the people in bondage, there's actually a case back in Exodus 21. And we don't have time to get into the weeds, but it's somewhat unclear exactly what the case is supposed to be about. But at least we know there is a husband and there is a wife.

And in verse 11, it says, if the husband does not do these three things for her, the three things being provision, the provision, the sex, and shelter, then she can go without debt and without paying money to the husband to divorce, basically. So the oldest law in the Bible about what a husband owes his wife says, if the husband doesn't do it, the woman gets to go free.

And Paul's case in chapter 7, verse 15, is a partner who leaves. So I think it makes perfect sense to say if your partner has made your home a place of harm, you don't have to be enslaved to that. Leaving abuse is not sin, and it's not abandoning God.

Some of you were told by a pastor that you had to stay in an abusive relationship, and I want to say that pastor was wrong. I also want to say that divorce is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Divorce can be a form of being unenslaved, of getting the noose off your neck.

And divorce is far, far, far better than abuse. For celibate people, celibacy has been used as a way to make sure that queer people don't have sex. And it has been used, again, as a noose, as a form of enslavement.

But celibacy is always treated in Scripture as a gift and not a sentence. 1 Corinthians 7 says, everyone has their own gift or charisma from God, one this way or one another. Matthew 19, the words of Jesus says, not everyone can accept this word about staying celibate, but only to those whom it has been given.

Paul was single, it seems, or maybe possibly widowed. Jesus was single. And Jesus says that celibacy is only for those whom it's given.

Too many churches have handed queer people celibacy as the price of belonging, but that is a noose that Paul refuses to use. Celibacy chosen freely is beautiful, and celibacy imposed is harm. If you've chosen celibacy by conviction or by calling, I want to say that we honor that here, and it's not something that gets talked about a lot, but it is something that's beautiful.

Henry Nouwen, quoting Thomas Aquinas, calls it a vacancy for God, of making yourself in all possible areas of your life open and available. And some folks have connected asexuality with celibacy, and there's lots of different kinds of asexuality, so I don't want to pretend like anybody's a monolith. But if you are asexual and you have chosen celibacy, you're not repressed, you're not broken or missing something.

Whatever shape your life takes, it's whole. Now, some of you are single, and you are happy as a clam. You love being single.

Great. You are welcome. You are a full, honest human being in this place.

And some of you, I dare say many of you, are single and don't want to be. I've had more meetings than I can count with people who basically just needed someone to pray with about the awful dating scene in Washington, D.C. So what I'm not going to do is I'm not going to tell you that your singleness is a gift if it feels like a loss.

Some people think that Paul wanted folks to be single for all time. But Paul's preference for singleness was his opinion. And again, for a particular time of crisis.

So I just want to say that wanting a partner, wanting sex, is not a failure of faith. And grieving that maybe your life does not look like you thought it would at 25 or 30 or 35 or 40 or whatever. That grief is allowed here too.

And I also want to say that you have family here. Jesus says whoever does the will of God are siblings and parents. So it all gets to belong.

So finally, with those two foundations of mutuality and of peace, we can go on to foundation number three, which is that of covenant, what we owe one another. And this third foundation has to sit upon the first two stones. Or otherwise, the foundation of covenant will be rotten.

You have to get mutuality right and you have to get peace right. Otherwise, covenant will become enslavement. Once the claim runs both ways, mutuality, once nobody is held in bondage, peace, we can actually ask what we owe one another.

Because what we're not teaching, and what I don't want somebody to come away today with is the idea of anything goes. Paul says in a different letter, in the book of Romans chapter 13, he says, Owe no one anything except to love one another. Owe no one anything except to love one another.

The one debt that doesn't get paid off is the debt of love. And love doesn't get collected. It's freely given.

What does the covenant look like in scriptural terms? One example is in the book of Hosea, where Yahweh, God, is speaking to his people, and he says, I will betroth you to me forever in righteousness and in justice and in steadfast love and in mercy and in faithfulness.

You shall know the Lord. So when we make promises to one another as friends, as a church, as a community, as partners, romantic partners, sexual partners, a covenant needs to sound something like this. Not enslavement, not something unpeaceful, but something that has to do with steadfast love and mercy and faithfulness and righteousness and justice.

And then you shall know, knowing someone all the way down. That is what we owe one another. In Pastor Tanetta's Affirmation Guide for Sexuality and Spirituality, she puts together a couple different authors here on the screen and again in the notes on Table.Center for nine criteria

of building a sexual ethic that is more free and more fruitful, producing something positive in the world than purity culture, and also not just anything goes. She gives nine criteria for any faithful relationship. And they have to be understood not as a rule book but as values, as questions that every relationship from, you know, friendship and colleagues and co-workers all the way up

to romantic and sexual relationships, questions that can be asked of those relationships. And these questions work for celibate people, married people, partnered people, monogamous and non-monogamous and polyam folks. All of these belong.

Now we don't have time to go through all nine in depth but very, very quickly. The lens is the idea of vulnerability. And then you have a couple which are the floor which is don't do any unjust harm and free consent.

Two that you have to keep growing in, mutuality and equality. Hard ones, the ideas of commitment, fruitfulness, I'll explain what fruitfulness means in a second, and social justice. And then over all of it is this umbrella of mutual concern.

So the lens is that of mutuality. The sort of Genesis 2 idea of the two first human being naked and unashamed in front of each other. Belonging to someone.

And this is true of friendship. It's true of neighbors. It's true of all kinds of relationships.

Belonging to someone means some level of being exposed to them. And that's only safe to expose yourself, your soul, your personality, much less your body, when shame and coercion are gone. To do no unjust harm means you're not harming someone's body or heart or spirits.

Harm also includes failing to care. Free consent means a no in any shade puts someone out of bounds. Lying and betrayal takes away someone's choice.

So no lying as a form of coercion. Mutuality and equality, which we've talked about today, they follow this path together. And it's more than a line that you cross once.

Mutuality and equality are something that you continually are growing in in your relationships. You're thinking about power and money and age and status. And that can sometimes make consent more complicated.

But when we stop thinking about that, those relationships become unjust. Commitment means that some form of covenant, contract, agreement, made on purpose together. And in her guide, Tanetta says that the quality of the commitment matters more than its form.

Fruitfulness and social justice. So fruitfulness, not meaning you got to make babies. Okay?

The idea that sex is only okay if it can make a baby has been used to bludgeon people who can't or don't have children, including queer folks. That's not what we're talking about with faithfulness. The question or fruitfulness.

The question with fruitfulness is, is this love open to something beyond itself? We're probably all somewhat familiar with like those couples who become so sort of obsessed with themselves that they can think of nobody else but themselves and we all kind of like get skeeved out by that.

At least I do. I don't know. Fruitfulness says like, yes, of course, be obsessed with each other, love one another, and also have some fruit that bears something good in the world, which is connected to the idea

of social justice. It's not just about not doing harm, but is the relationship actually producing something worthwhile in the world? And then the idea of concern.

Seeing somebody as a whole person, not just a willing body. Simone Weill, the philosopher, thinker, writer, she says, attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. And Paul assumes partners know how to pay attention and how to please each other.

He says in verses 32 and 34, I want you to be free from anxieties, but the married person is anxious about the affairs of the world and how to please their partner. So like knowing how to please your partner, it's a biblical concept.

Okay? And that concern needs to extend to all of our relationships.

So to recap, likewise is a claim in relationships that run both ways, that there's a level of mutuality, that no one owes their body on demand, that we owe one another peace in our relationships, and that when we have to make tough choices about what relationships continue and what relationships need to come to an end, about how we think about sex and consent and all of that, we are called to peace.

No one is enslaved, no one is sentenced, and no one is unfinished. End covenant, that we owe one another love. And the only debt is love.

So if you take one thing home today, I want you to take this idea that love runs both ways, that God calls us to peace, and the only thing we owe one another is love. Would you pray?

God, you are a God of mutuality and peace. You lived this out when you took on flesh and became human like one of us. You know what it is to bend down low, to take the towel, to wash the feet of friends and enemies.

You know what it is to love fully and to do so freely. God, for all of us listening where something said today has touched something raw and tender, I pray that your spirit in this place and in this room would give healing, that you would release the bonds of slavery, whatever guilt or shame that someone might be feeling right now about their sexual past, their relationship past, about not being

where they wanted to be at this point in their life. God, I pray that you would heal them of that shame, that you would remove it, that there is no room for shame in a room that is filled with your mercy and grace.

Pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.