Super Bowl Obscenities
Children's sermon
Illustration
Preaching
Sermon
Worship
Object:
Dear Fellow Preacher
By comparison with other countries of the Western world, many persons in the United States obviously consider personal morality far more important than matters of social ethics. We understand the prominent Washington hostess who said, "If you can't say anything good about anyone, come and sit by me." We are obsessed with tabloid reports of sexual escapades (even when there are no apparent victims) but blast about the deaths of thousands of war victims or the plight of the unemployed. "What would Jesus do?" is a question all Christians need to ponder, not least when we are arranging our hierarchy of values.
In this issue of The Immediate Word, James Evans asks us to reflect on what it is that is obscene. He draws on the recent Super Bowl event to lead into Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Plain about what is truly blessed and what woeful. Team members add their own distinctive insights and provide illustrations, worship resources, and a children's sermon.
SUPER BOWL OBSCENITIES
Luke 6:17-26
by James L. Evans
Janet Jackson's breast-baring stunt during the Super Bowl has outraged viewers, religious leaders, family groups, and politicians. During the biggest half-time show of the season, pop star Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake climaxed a grinding dance routine with Timberlake tearing off a portion of Jackson's costume, baring her right breast on live national television. Although only visible for a few seconds, the appearance of a bare breast in prime time has ignited a firestorm of protest. CBS, which aired the game, and MTV, which produced the half-time show, have apologized. Jackson and Timberlake, while admitting they planned the stunt, have also apologized.
But the furor continues. Charges that CBS violated longstanding anti-obscenity standards have led the Federal Communications Commission to launch a full investigation, according to FCC chairman Michael Powell. In reaction to the event Powell called the display a "classless, crass and deplorable stunt."
Other groups, such as the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, have also expressed their outrage.
"It's a sad day when parents can't even let their children watch the Super Bowl without having to worry about nudity creeping into their living rooms," said the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins in a statement.
"The FCC has rules about indecency for a reason, and they must use this opportunity to make an example of CBS and MTV which produced the half-time program. This clear breach of FCC standards must not go unpunished," said Perkins.
"The entire half-time show was tasteless and not family-friendly," he said. "CBS should know better than to turn the half-time entertainment over to MTV, which relishes its ability to shock. CBS would do well to adhere to the adage: if you sleep with dogs you'll get fleas. I am sure there is a lot of scratching going on at CBS today."
The American Family Association voiced their dissatisfaction with the half-time performance, claiming "CBS deliberately allowed Janet Jackson to expose her breast on public airwaves. CBS had full control of the show and should have prevented the broadcasting of nudity to children," said AFA chairman Don Wildmon in a statement. "They knew something like this was going to take place and did not take the necessary steps to stop it."
The Gospel on Obscenity
These reactions, along with many others, demonstrate dramatically our culture's ambiguous relationship with all matters sexual. On the one hand, the outrage being expressed clearly reflects the effect of Puritanism on our social mores. The furor over Janet Jackson's breast reveals how reactionary our culture is to any sort of perceived sexual deviancy. This puritanical influence results in a repressed sexuality, fueled perhaps by lingering Victorian notions that sex in all its forms is bad, the result being that sex has been driven into the underground of our conscious awareness. Lurking about in the shadows of our subconscious, sex functions as a powerful unseen force affecting us in ways we are not always fully aware of.
Which explains the other side of our ambiguous relationship with sex -- it is everywhere. Functioning with the power of a forbidden taboo, we are mesmerized, and manipulated by the many sexual innuendoes that sell products in advertising, serve as humor in sitcoms, and drive a thriving pornography industry on pay-per-view cable and the Internet. As we see and hear sexual messages everywhere, we begin to realize that just because we don't talk about it or see it in prime time does not mean we are not thinking about it -- a lot!
Not that any of this excuses the actions of Jackson and Timberlake. If anything they are guilty as anyone of exploiting our sexual situation for their own gain. But the outrage directed towards their behavior aims too low. Instead of merely voicing our offense over gratuitous nudity and sexual exploitation, the community of Jesus is armed with a far more devastating critique of the bump-and-grind half-time show.
The Gospels record two different versions of Jesus' sermon: the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5--7 and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6:17-49. It is in Matthew's version that we find Jesus' most telling remarks regarding human sexuality (Matthew 5:27-32). Jesus' reinterpretation of the meaning of adultery and divorce is much more than a mere puritanical repudiation of casual sex and throwaway marriage. In both instances Jesus offers a profound critique of the way the powerful are able to exploit the powerless.
In the conservative Jewish society of Jesus' day, women, except in rare instances, were completely without power. Marriage was often a transaction between families in which a woman would move from her father's house to her husband's house as if she were so much livestock or other tradable goods. Men, especially powerful men, were able to do with women pretty much what they wanted. Even pious men, those at least giving lip service to the law, could find ways around the adultery prohibition by means of creative divorce.
Jesus' insight that lust is the same as adultery is more than just the recognition that evil behavior is born in the imagination, an idea that eventually becomes a behavior. His insight also condemns those attitudes and relationships that reduce other human beings to the level of mere objects. For men to view women only as objects to be owned and used for personal pleasure denies women their essential humanity.
That's why pornography and gratuitous sex is obscene. It is not merely the appearance of nudity or whatever vulgar acts might be displayed or acted out; it is the emptying of humanity of its essential value and dignity. The whole process reduces humanity to the level of mere products to be consumed and then discarded. This is a serious distortion of the view of human life celebrated in Scripture.
Other Obscenities
While the sexual antics of Jackson and Timberlake certainly deserve the criticism of the community of faith, the magnitude of our outrage may reveal a certain preoccupation with sexual sin. Focusing so much energy attacking sexual deviancy may be distracting us from other legitimate concerns. Sexual deviancy is not the only thing Jesus talked about -- and it is not even the concern he talked about the most. If we take an honest look at the heart of his message, sexual practice becomes almost a side issue, a residual effect growing out of a more basic problem.
This is amply demonstrated in Luke's presentation of the Sermon on the Plain. Luke understands the mission of Jesus as having everything to do with power in social relationships. The signals are present in the narrative almost from the beginning. We hear Mary singing, "He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly" (Luke 1:52). In Jesus' inaugural sermon we hear him say that God has called him to "let the oppressed go free."
In Luke 6:17-26 power relations are set in stark contrast and in almost exclusively economic terms. The poor, despised in first-century culture as bearing the curse of God, are pronounced "blessed." The rich, regarded by that same society as bearing the blessing of God, have "woes" pronounced over them.
Jesus is not condemning wealth as inherently evil or poverty as inherently good. Jesus is criticizing a political and economic system that allows the wealthy and powerful to exploit the weak and the poor, and to do so in the name of God. By reversing the polarity on "blessing" and "woe," Jesus is able to put these relations in a different theological light. Once the aura of divine blessing is removed from the wealthy and the curse of poverty is removed from the poor, then the chance of economic justice and social relationships based on love become a possibility.
Obscenities Old and New
As we move from the ancient world to our own, Jesus' words reveal that we are in the grip of obscenities far more egregious than the mere baring of a breast.
Economic Obscenity: While not being nearly as direct in our assertions that the rich are blessed and the poor are cursed, our economic practices certainly suggest that we believe it. We have in this country millions of homeless people, and millions more living and working at bare subsistence wages. Efforts to address these matters are often met with strident opposition. Those who would receive public assistance are often characterized as lazy, or substance abusers, or criminally dangerous.
On the other hand, we seem not to mind that off-shore tax shelters for rich individuals and corporations make it possible for the wealthy to keep a far higher percentage of their income than most working people can. Many large corporations receive huge government subsidies that have been called by some "corporate welfare." Over the last decade the gap between the earnings of CEO's and their employees has grown exponentially. The gap between the rich and the poor has likewise expanded considerably.
Analyzed in the light of Jesus' blessings and woes, the growing economic disparity in our culture represents an economic obscenity. But where is the outrage?
Violent Obscenity: Since 9/11 our culture has embraced militarism with a renewed vigor. Military violence has always been a major part of our national story, but the fear and disease provoked by terrorists and an ongoing war on terror has deepened our commitment to and fascination with the practice of war.
Waging war has long been a serious concern for the Christian community. We have struggled with Jesus' words, "Love your enemy" and "Turn the other cheek." We have formulated responses ranging from stubborn pacifism to agonized just-war justifications, but at no time has the Christian tradition found cause to celebrate the acts of war.
We also celebrate violence in other ways in our culture. Children who watch television, on average, will have viewed 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence by the time they reach the seventh grade. Not only do we celebrate violence as a force to save us; we look to violence to entertain us.
Living in the presence of such an exuberant celebration of violence can only be viewed as obscene -- an obscenity of violence. Where is the outrage?
Loss of personhood: In a recent lecture Walter Brueggemann described our culture as being in the grip of "commoditization." Everything and everyone is eventually reduced to the level of product. Everything is for sale. Everything is usable and disposable. Everything has a price. We have become the sort of people one commentator described as "knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing."
Reducing all reality to the level of product affects the way we approach everything from the environment to personal relationships. It also has a profoundly devastating effect on the way we view human life. As products, we are easy to exploit and are tempted towards exploitation. Whether as employers expecting more while paying less, or as employees whose compulsive work habits destroy health and family, as products we are drawn into a web of relationships in which we literally sell ourselves.
This loss of the value of the person and the resulting exploitation and commercialization of the self is obscene.
Opposing the Obscenities
Walter Brueggemann has said that the Super Bowl is our great cultural festival celebrating our cultural core values: greed, militarism, violence, and of course, sex. It should not surprise us that those very elements would come to focus in the act carried out by Jackson and Timberlake. Jackson's costume was in the form of some futuristic warrior. The dance routine was erotic and suggestive. The act of tearing away the breast cover was simulated rape and violence against women. The whole scene was draped in the opulence and extravagance of a football game so expensive that ordinary people cannot attend.
And all of it was obscene.
But our outrage must have more substance than merely complaining about flashes of nudity. Jesus' challenge to us is to resist and denounce all in our culture that dehumanizes and de-personalizes our neighbor.
It begins with a simple discipline. We learn to say with Jesus a proper blessing on what is blessed, and a resolute woe on what is not. Without downplaying the offensiveness of what Jackson and Timberlake did, the teaching of Jesus challenges us to confront the other obscenities that were showcased during the Super Bowl -- not only during the half-time show but throughout the game. Perhaps even the game itself.
Our failure as Christians to voice little or no concern about these other obscenities may mean we have not fully heard what Jesus was trying to say. More likely, however, and more troubling, is the possibility that there is no offense because there is consent.
Team Comments
Carter Shelley responds: Jim, you have done well to move us from the titillating scandal of Janet Jackson's exposure to the far more damning everyday obscenities that we as Christians often do not recognize as such or exert any effort to redeem. For that reason, I would alter the lead title for this week's The Immediate Word from "Super Bowl Obscenities" to the question "What is obscene?" Your placing of sexual obscenities at the beginning of your entry makes sense, yet I was glad when you moved on to discuss other forms of obscenity Christians are guilty of propagating and justifying.
For me, the part of your material that comes through the strongest is your discussion of gender injustice, violence, war, and greed. The danger preachers run in emphasizing the sinfulness and exhibitionism of Janet Jackson's conduct at the Super Bowl is being able to smugly condemn her actions while allowing those of us in the pews to feel self-righteous and superior because we would never do such a thing! (The fact that few of us have the physique to draw such attention for good or ill is beside the point, yet I can't resist pointing that out since more Americans are guilty of overeating and underexercising our bodies -- another form of obscenity -- we expect the medical system to deal with the health consequences caused by our lack of self-control and respect for our own God-given bodies.*
I am nowhere near as outraged by Janet Jackson's stunt (for which she is bound to pay dearly in lost endorsements, concerts, etc.) as I am by the ongoing flood of sexualized content available every night of the week on television -- and I am not including HBO or other paid, subscription TV in this realm for which the viewer has choices. Rather, I am totally dismayed by the unrealistic portrayal of sex as wonderful, fun, carefree, and consequence-free. Rarely is there any indication on film, in music, or on television that a quality sex life requires selflessness, love, a commitment to one's partner over time, and -- frankly -- hard work. Most couples who enjoy a long-term, loving, and satisfying sexual relationship with their spouse know that good sex doesn't just magically happen any more than straight A's in college, a job promotion, or a well-developed sermon magically happen.
In your introductory comments you mention the outrage of the "Family Research Council" and the "American Family Association." It would be helpful to me and perhaps to other subscribers to know the function of each of these groups and who sponsors them. Also, I thought the term "punishment" used by Tony Perkins was a great example of how punitive we are as a nation. While he may have been right that having MTV provide the half-time entertainment instead of say, Disney or PBS, pretty much guaranteed a sexualized half-time show, why are he and others are not offended by the showgirl garb worn by the teams' cheerleaders? I think we are all culpable in that all Christians need to ally themselves with those of us who are feminist Christians and both name and vociferously object to such sexploitation of women. It is indeed an obscenity that the best-known American women, the most successful, rich, and famous ones have become such through strategic use of their physical beauty as actresses, models, rock stars, or trophy wives than ever attain strong recognition through climbing the corporate ladder or becoming a college president.
By the way, PBS aired a two-hour tribute to Muhammad Ali on February 8 as part of its celebration of Black History month: Muhammed Ali: Through the Eyes of the World. In watching Ali's progression I was impressed with his willingness to say aloud on television, by radio, and in confrontations with the U.S. government and court system his reasons for refusing the draft. Ali's physical success as the World Champion boxer made him a powerful role model for many oppressed people of color throughout the world -- a key point the program emphasized -- yet it was his courage in naming racism for what is was that made him truly great. Ironically, Ali's greatest strength, his incredible speed and skill as a boxer, was also his greatest tragedy as he now suffers from pugilistic dementia and Parkinson's disease. Football is not the only sport that seems more suited to the Coliseum in ancient Rome than a Houston Superdome; boxing also perpetuates a great obscenity.
While, regrettably, there are plenty of examples of abject poverty in the United States, a current film that beautifully (and painfully) illustrates the obscenity of poverty is City of God about children in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Its director, Fernando Meirelles, has been nominated for an Oscar, so more theaters are likely now to show it, and rental copies should be available soon.
I'm currently reading The Purpose Driven Life, by Rick Warren. I'm not sure yet what I think of it as a useful guide for Christians. Warren's use of scripture strikes me as wholly appropriate at some points and as manipulative and distorted in other places. It also concerns me that he blithely seems to dismiss childhood traumas and tragedies as something to get beyond and get over, which seems simplistic, casual, and cruel when those circumstances included the horrors of physical abuse, incest, or torture. But one point he makes from the get-go is that human beings are not commodities. We are children of God, created by God, called by God, and our true purpose is not satisfied or fulfilled through material goods, worldly success, or the search for self-actualization. Our true purpose is found in God -- in loving God, in serving God. The rest of the book is designed to help us determine how we live a God-directed, Christian life, which should line up appropriately with Jesus' beatitudes, life, death, and resurrection. In that way, Warren's popularizes Christian values and mission for twenty-first century Americans, and offers an antidote to the real dangers of commoditization that Walter Brueggemann observes.
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*Having gone over to the other side last year by turning 50, I am now a faithful subscriber to the AARP's Modern Maturity. It offers many excellent articles on ways older Americans can be more proactive in our health care. One of the biggest contributors to quality of life for senior citizens is regular exercise, which helps keep one's mind sharp, alleviates depression, combats osteoporosis, and extends both quality and possible length of life. It's never too late to start.
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Carlos Wilton responds: The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1973 case of Miller v. California, defined obscenity as something that (1) is prurient in nature; (2) is completely devoid of scientific, political, educational, or social value; and (3) violates local community standards.
Whether or not this year's Super Bowl half-time show met the Supreme Court criteria is up to the viewers to decide. (Judging from the outraged reactions from commentators around the country, it seems that many viewers would indeed identify these criteria as being present.)
A far more interesting question, theologically speaking -- and one that you raise so clearly -- is what Jesus considers obscene. Or, to put it another way, WWJS? -- What Would Jesus Shun?
The "woes" in Luke's version of the beatitudes point us toward an answer. The rich, the comfortable, the happy, the well regarded: these are the ones on whom our Lord pronounces woe.
These harsh words cause us Americans to sit up and take notice. They're not the gospel we're used to hearing. Don't we live in the land of opportunity, where -- at least in theory -- the career track of J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie is open to all? Doesn't our Declaration of Independence celebrate "the pursuit of happiness?" Isn't "the American Dream" to become wealthy? If so, then why does Jesus pronounce woe upon us?
Many of us think we know what sin is. It's synonymous with that other three-letter word that begins with the letter "s": sex. Yet sexual sin is conspicuously absent from Jesus' list. Could it be that there are other sins he considers more heinous and therefore more worthy of mention?
It's a dangerous thing, of course, to argue from silence. There's no reason to suspect that Jesus' sexual ethics were any different from those of most other observant Jews of his day. Yet the fact that he singles out other sins for particular mention probably does suggest that he considered these more of a pitfall for his listeners.
The Russian Christian novelist Leo Tolstoy has a well-known parable he calls, "How Much Does a Man Need?" It's the story of a peasant named Pahom, who dedicates his life to the avaricious search for more land.
"If I have plenty of land," Pahom considers, "I shouldn't fear the devil himself." Unbeknownst to him, at that very moment the devil is hiding behind the stove. He resolves to grant Pahom's wish.
Pahom comes into some money, and is able to buy 40 acres. He's overjoyed to be a property owner -- but his joy doesn't last for long. He begins to wonder what it would be like to own 125 acres -- and lo and behold, he's able to do so. No sooner has he signed the deed to this property than he hears tell of a distant, wilderness country, where land is selling for even cheaper. He cashes in his investment and goes off in search of this new bonanza.
In the far-off country, there's so much unclaimed territory that the people there offer him as much land as he can walk around in a day. Pahom sets off, walking as fast as he can, driving himself ever onward, knowing that the faster he walks, the more territory he can call his own.
When Pahom finally returns to his starting-point, he falls down dead, from exhaustion. It is then that the significance of Tolstoy's title becomes clear. "How much land does a man need?" he asks. You can probably figure out the answer: "Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed."
Harlan Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, made and lost several fortunes during his lifetime. In his old age, he became a philanthropist, giving his money away. Maybe Colonel Sanders was a reader of Tolstoy, for he once remarked, "There's no reason to be the richest man in the cemetery; you can't do any business from there."
This whole matter of greed -- traditionally numbered among the "seven deadly sins" -- is of all sins among the most dangerous. It's dangerous because it's so seductive. Greed whispers to practically everyone, from the corporate CEO right down to the kid bagging groceries. It whispers, "What you have is not quite enough. You deserve more! And by the way," says Greed, "it doesn't really matter if you cut a few ethical corners laying hold of what's rightly yours. Isn't everyone else doing it?"
The result of all this is not only that dishonesty flourishes but that you and I are blocked from ever feeling satisfied, ever feeling truly thankful for the good gifts God has given.
George Murphy responds: The biblical prophets generally speak about situations in their own cultural setting, and in that role among Jews of the first century Jesus wouldn't have had much occasion to condemn Jackson-Timberlake style exhibitionism. It simply didn't happen there -- though such things and much worse were part of the surrounding Greco-Roman culture of the time. The fact that Jesus didn't spend a lot of time criticizing something doesn't automatically mean that we should accept it.
Just what is the significance of the type of display that went on at half-time of the Super Bowl? Frankly I found the whole half-time performance so tiresome that I wasn't paying much attention and missed "the exposure." I suspect that there are a lot of preachers like me who simply don't appreciate the whole MTV style of a younger generation, for good or ill, and we need to be careful that we don't lose a lot of young people over questions of musical taste. But more than that is involved.
One message that is communicated by such displays is that there really are no standards of sexual behavior that anyone needs to pay any attention to. You can do anything you want to, at least between consenting adults. (And the limits of even that last qualification get pushed.) The whole category of obscenity in sexual matters, defined in terms of "community standards," becomes vacuous if there are no community standards, or if the standard is just "anything goes." If Osama Bin Laden was watching the half-time show from his cave in Afghanistan, he was given a classic example of what he considers to be the decadence of the United States.
But of course sex doesn't stand alone, especially on the big screen. We all know how it's used to sell cars, beer, and everything else under the sun. "The commercials," which have become the major aspect of the Super Bowl festival for a lot of people, often make use of sex, and these appeal to people's greed and covetousness which are so much a part of American consumerism should be seen as part of a whole package of which the Jackson-Timberlake event is one item.
It might seem a stretch to link sex and consumerism theologically -- until we remember the ways in which the Bible uses sexual immorality as a symbol for something deeper, namely, idolatry. Think of Hosea, Jeremiah, or the quite explicit imagery of Ezekiel 23.
The fundamental problem with adultery is unfaithfulness, not that there's something intrinsically bad about sex. And idolatry is unfaithfulness, not to one's marriage partner but to God.
Idolatry in its deepest sense is the fundamental sin, a violation of the First Commandment. The distinction between idolatry and faithfulness is the distinction in our First Lesson (Jeremiah 17:5-10) between those who "trust in mortals" -- in any created thing -- and those who "trust in the LORD." It is what underlies Jesus' distinction between those who are blessed and those to whom woes are spoken.
The "need" for more and more things, a need created and nurtured by the culture of consumerism, and which many Americans think really is a "need" and not simply a "want," is "covetousness," and as such seems to get relegated to the tail end of the Ten Commandments. But in Colossians 3:5 we're told simply that "covetousness" (RSV) or "greed" (NRSV) is idolatry. Luther develops this idea more fully when he explains the First Commandment in the Large Catechism (Theodore Tappert, ed., The Book of Concord [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959], p. 365). After saying that a person's "god" is to trust and believe in something with one's whole heart, he goes on:
Many a person thinks he has God and everything he needs when he has money and property; in them he trusts and of them he boasts so stubbornly and securely that he cares for no one. Surely such a man has a god -- mammon by name, that is, money and possessions -- on which he fixes his whole heart. He who has money and property feels secure, happy, fearless, as if he were sitting in the midst of paradise. On the other hand, he who has nothing doubts and despairs as if he never heard of God. Very few there are who are cheerful, who do not fret and complain, if they do not have mammon.
These last words remind us that simply being poor is no guarantee of being faithful.
It's all too easy, with the condemnations in our texts and with the examples of Super Bowl sex and commercialism before us, to focus a sermon entirely on "woe." That word needs to be spoken, but it will have no lasting effect if there is not also the word of promise that Jeremiah and Jesus both speak to those who put their trust in God rather than in mortals or in wealth.
Related Illustrations
A Roman Catholic priest was retiring, after many decades of service to the church. Reflecting back on the tens of thousands of confessions he'd heard in his time, he told of hearing many a commandment broken. Yet never once in all those years, the priest admitted, had he heard anyone confess to breaking the Tenth Commandment, "You shall not covet." He pointed out, with some irony, that God cut the Tenth Commandment just as deeply into Moses' stone tablets as the nine other ones -- the ones about honoring parents, and not killing, and not committing adultery and all the rest. How odd that no one seems to remember Number Ten!
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"A permanently available visit to the underworld."
-- Dorothy Sayers' definition of pornography
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"Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins -- hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust -- came from the soul.
"But these preachers I'm talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body. Their own bodies were soft from disuse or dry with self-contempt. And those very bodies that they neglected or ignored or held in contempt, they expected to be resurrected and to live forever. And they thought this would be heaven."
-- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
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Commenting on the irony of a culture that permits teenagers to pose in sexually suggestive ads but resists allowing sex education in schools -- in other words, a society deeply uncomfortable with sex, but attracted to it all the same -- Barbara Kingsolver writes:
"Our religious and cultural heritage is to deny, for all we're worth, that we're in any way connected with the rest of life on earth. We don't come from it, we're not part of it; we own it and were put down here to run the place. It's deeply threatening to our ideology, at the corporate and theological levels, to admit that we're constrained by the laws of biology. And yet there it is: sex, the ultimate animal necessity, writhing before us like some alien invader to mission control. We can't get rid of it. The harder we try to deny it official status, the more it asserts itself in banal, embarrassing ways."
-- Barbara Kingsolver, "Taming the Beast with Two Backs," in Small Wonder: Essays (HarperCollins 2002), pp. 226-27.
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"The sexuality of Jesus consists in his openness to strangers and friends, the physicality of his healing, the sacramentality in his approach to food, the tolerance he displays in the face of sexual transgression, and his espousal of a philosophy based on love. Only a worldview mired in materialism could fail to see the sexuality in this expansive and inclusive erotic philosophy.
-- Thomas Moore, in The Soul of Sex
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"The Victorians, we are told, loved death and feared sex, and hence they embraced a culture of death and mourning, and constructed strong taboos against sex. We, on the other hand, love sex and fear death, and our taboos are of a different sort. We delight in sexuality, we pander to the sensual, and we have made Calvin Klein a very wealthy man. Death is not something we want to understand or to know; death is somehow unfair, and in this country it is culturally unconstitutional, violating our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Thus, when death intrudes, particularly among the young, we respond in terror, anger and fear."
-- Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1996), p. 212.
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Country songwriter Butch Hancock describes his experience growing up in Lubbock, Texas: "In Lubbock we grew up with two main things: God loves you, and he's gonna send you to hell; and that sex is bad and dirty and you should save it for the one you love. You wonder why we're all crazy."
-- U.S. Catholic, cited in Current Thoughts & Trends, July 1998, p. 12.
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"Sexual satisfaction is more important than job satisfaction, but less important than family, money and religion, according to a survey of adult Americans to be released Friday. The survey, designed to assess the attitudes of Americans toward sexual health, found 82% of 500 adults ranked a satisfying sex life as important or very important. "Loving family relationships" was ranked as important or very important by 99% of those surveyed, while financial security was a point behind at 98%. In third place was religion and spiritual life at 86%. Job satisfaction was last in the survey, rated as important or very important by only 79%.
-- Infobeat News, 4/30/99
Worship Resources
by Chuck Cammarata
As usual, I have a couple of alternatives for you this week. The first call to worship is more traditional, the second a bit different.
CALL TO WORSHIP 1
LEADER: There is no greater love than this; that a life would willingly be laid down for others.
PEOPLE: This is what our God,
LEADER: The creator behind the universe,
PEOPLE: Has done for us.
LEADER: For while we were yet sinners,
PEOPLE: Jesus Christ gave his life,
LEADER: That we might be cleansed of all sin,
PEOPLE: And receive the gift of eternal life.
LEADER: Our God is so good!
PEOPLE: Our God is so good!
LEADER: Let us praise God
PEOPLE: With hearts and hands and voices.
All: AMEN.
CALL TO WORSHIP 2
The liturgist should begin this call to worship by explaining:
In many parts of the Christian church there is a culture that uses posture to signal openness to God. One such posture is praying with hands held upturned. This posture signals that I am open to receive whatever God wishes to give to me in this moment:
My mind is open to receive truth and insight,
My heart is open to be changed,
My emotions are open to be healed.
Let us pray our way into the presence of God with our hands upturned as a sign of hearts,
minds, and emotions prepared to receive all that God wishes to offer.
The liturgist should then lead the congregation in a prayer of opening up to the presence of God's Spirit, something like the following:
Spirit of the living God, we desire to experience your presence, your movement, your guidance, even your chastisement if that is what we need.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION 1
LEADER: Here it is
PEOPLE: Plain and simple, Lord,
LEADER: We keep it to ourselves.
PEOPLE: We hide it from others
LEADER: We are embarrassed by it.
PEOPLE: It hasn't really changed us,
LEADER: So we have little to say that could really be called good news.
PEOPLE: Forgive us for half-hearted living
LEADER: That prevents us from being filled with your light
PEOPLE: And shining your love
LEADER: For all the world to see.
PEOPLE: Amen.
ASSURANCE OF PARDON
Know without a doubt that you are forgiven; but also know this, that you have been forgiven for a purpose. That purpose is that you might become holy and be a witness in your family, and workplace, and community, and beyond, for Jesus Christ.
So rejoice in your forgiveness; get about the business of becoming holy and allowing God to burst forth from you. Amen.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION 2
This prayer is a narrative prayer simply read to the congregation. It includes as part of the story an assurance of pardon.
Long had they been estranged, the daughter having taken a path she knew her father would not approve. So she moved away. Never answered his calls or returned his mail. She eradicated every evidence of him from her life. And then she heard that he was ill. Cancer. It was going to get him. She wanted not to care, but there was still something in her, some spark of love for him. So she went. At the hospital she hoped he'd be asleep. She would give him a little kiss on the forehead, say a prayer over him, and be gone.
But her plans went awry. Although the years and the cancer had despoiled his face, when she saw him she saw only the daddy who once held her near, sang sweet songs to her, and kissed goodnight. She took his hand and sat for hours by his bed.
And then, when she'd just about given up all hope that he'd awaken, his eyes blinked open, "Ahh," he said, "My sweet Susan. I love you."
She wept. He died. But not before he spoke to her the words of her salvation, "I love you."
We are often like her -- abandoning our Father. But our Father -- like her father -- is always ready to say, "I love you."
PARISH PRAYER
God of all giftedness, author of every talent and blessing, fill us with a knowledge of the abundance and richness you have bestowed on us, and teach us to use our gifts and blessings as fountains from which to slake the thirst of those in need. Teach us to give generously of our abundance and to share of the gift you have given -- the gift of yourself.
HYMNS AND SONGS
All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name
Here I Am Lord
In Christ There Is No East or West
Jesus Loves the Little Children
Our God Reigns
Where Justice Rolls Down (contemporary)
Do You Hear the Mountains Tremble (contemporary)
A Children's Sermon
by Wesley T. Runk
Luke 6:17-26
Text: "Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets" (v. 26).
Object: Use ads for celebrities in the newspaper, magazines, from the Internet, etc. You may take this as far as you believe your congregation will allow you to educate your children against the teachings of the world (wealth, fame, position).
Good morning, boys and girls. Today we are going to take a look at some famous people. Do you know anyone famous? (let them answer) Does a famous person live next door to you or in your neighborhood? (let them answer) Do you see your father or mother on TV very often? Do you have a neighbor who is in the newspaper often or on the cover of a magazine? (let them answer) Do your friends make tapes or CD's or spend their nights in places like Hollywood, New York, Paris, or London?
I brought along some things I found in the newspaper and magazines. I even found a few things I copied from the Internet. Are any of these people your friends? Does your mom have her picture taken like this? Does your father dress like this? (let them answer)
Let's read what they say about some of these people. It says the women are beautiful, sexy, and very exciting. Does anyone write those things about your mom? Let's see what it says about the men in our pictures. It says that they are powerful, hard to talk to, wealthy, and very attractive. They go to a lot of big parties, but I wonder if you or your moms or dads have ever been invited to one of them.
Sometimes we wish we were like these people. It seems to us that we would like to be as pretty as they are and I think some of your mom's are just as pretty. We would like to be as handsome as some of the men are -- and I think your dads are also very handsome. We would like to be pretty, handsome, and rich like they are so that we can have millions of dollars. We would like to live in houses like they do with men servants and maids. We would like to drive their beautiful cars and have many of them. Wouldn't it be fun to have our own airplanes that are as big as Air Force One or yachts that can sail the oceans? Wouldn't it be great if we could just pick up the phone and talk to the president or Michael Jordan or anyone we wanted to talk to. And just once wouldn't it be great to be able to dress like Dion Sanders or Michael Irvin and be called the heavyweight champion of the world? These are the great celebrities and when people say the celebrities are their friends then they are really something special.
But they have problems. Michael Jackson has big problems, his sister Janet has big problems, and that means the whole family has problems including their closest friends. Kobe Bryant has problems, big problems, and so do his wife and their families. Just because everyone knows your name does not mean that you are too big for the world in which we live.
Jesus said in his sermon, "Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets." It can happen to us when we want to many things and will do anything to have them. People may make you important, very important but you should never forget who you really are in this world. You came into the world, as a child of God and you will one day die as a child of God and not someone more important than God.
The next time you see someone really famous think of how dangerous they live and how easy it is to forget that God is God and we are his people. Amen.
* * * * *
The Immediate Word, February 15, 2004, issue.
Copyright 2004 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
By comparison with other countries of the Western world, many persons in the United States obviously consider personal morality far more important than matters of social ethics. We understand the prominent Washington hostess who said, "If you can't say anything good about anyone, come and sit by me." We are obsessed with tabloid reports of sexual escapades (even when there are no apparent victims) but blast about the deaths of thousands of war victims or the plight of the unemployed. "What would Jesus do?" is a question all Christians need to ponder, not least when we are arranging our hierarchy of values.
In this issue of The Immediate Word, James Evans asks us to reflect on what it is that is obscene. He draws on the recent Super Bowl event to lead into Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Plain about what is truly blessed and what woeful. Team members add their own distinctive insights and provide illustrations, worship resources, and a children's sermon.
SUPER BOWL OBSCENITIES
Luke 6:17-26
by James L. Evans
Janet Jackson's breast-baring stunt during the Super Bowl has outraged viewers, religious leaders, family groups, and politicians. During the biggest half-time show of the season, pop star Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake climaxed a grinding dance routine with Timberlake tearing off a portion of Jackson's costume, baring her right breast on live national television. Although only visible for a few seconds, the appearance of a bare breast in prime time has ignited a firestorm of protest. CBS, which aired the game, and MTV, which produced the half-time show, have apologized. Jackson and Timberlake, while admitting they planned the stunt, have also apologized.
But the furor continues. Charges that CBS violated longstanding anti-obscenity standards have led the Federal Communications Commission to launch a full investigation, according to FCC chairman Michael Powell. In reaction to the event Powell called the display a "classless, crass and deplorable stunt."
Other groups, such as the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, have also expressed their outrage.
"It's a sad day when parents can't even let their children watch the Super Bowl without having to worry about nudity creeping into their living rooms," said the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins in a statement.
"The FCC has rules about indecency for a reason, and they must use this opportunity to make an example of CBS and MTV which produced the half-time program. This clear breach of FCC standards must not go unpunished," said Perkins.
"The entire half-time show was tasteless and not family-friendly," he said. "CBS should know better than to turn the half-time entertainment over to MTV, which relishes its ability to shock. CBS would do well to adhere to the adage: if you sleep with dogs you'll get fleas. I am sure there is a lot of scratching going on at CBS today."
The American Family Association voiced their dissatisfaction with the half-time performance, claiming "CBS deliberately allowed Janet Jackson to expose her breast on public airwaves. CBS had full control of the show and should have prevented the broadcasting of nudity to children," said AFA chairman Don Wildmon in a statement. "They knew something like this was going to take place and did not take the necessary steps to stop it."
The Gospel on Obscenity
These reactions, along with many others, demonstrate dramatically our culture's ambiguous relationship with all matters sexual. On the one hand, the outrage being expressed clearly reflects the effect of Puritanism on our social mores. The furor over Janet Jackson's breast reveals how reactionary our culture is to any sort of perceived sexual deviancy. This puritanical influence results in a repressed sexuality, fueled perhaps by lingering Victorian notions that sex in all its forms is bad, the result being that sex has been driven into the underground of our conscious awareness. Lurking about in the shadows of our subconscious, sex functions as a powerful unseen force affecting us in ways we are not always fully aware of.
Which explains the other side of our ambiguous relationship with sex -- it is everywhere. Functioning with the power of a forbidden taboo, we are mesmerized, and manipulated by the many sexual innuendoes that sell products in advertising, serve as humor in sitcoms, and drive a thriving pornography industry on pay-per-view cable and the Internet. As we see and hear sexual messages everywhere, we begin to realize that just because we don't talk about it or see it in prime time does not mean we are not thinking about it -- a lot!
Not that any of this excuses the actions of Jackson and Timberlake. If anything they are guilty as anyone of exploiting our sexual situation for their own gain. But the outrage directed towards their behavior aims too low. Instead of merely voicing our offense over gratuitous nudity and sexual exploitation, the community of Jesus is armed with a far more devastating critique of the bump-and-grind half-time show.
The Gospels record two different versions of Jesus' sermon: the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5--7 and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6:17-49. It is in Matthew's version that we find Jesus' most telling remarks regarding human sexuality (Matthew 5:27-32). Jesus' reinterpretation of the meaning of adultery and divorce is much more than a mere puritanical repudiation of casual sex and throwaway marriage. In both instances Jesus offers a profound critique of the way the powerful are able to exploit the powerless.
In the conservative Jewish society of Jesus' day, women, except in rare instances, were completely without power. Marriage was often a transaction between families in which a woman would move from her father's house to her husband's house as if she were so much livestock or other tradable goods. Men, especially powerful men, were able to do with women pretty much what they wanted. Even pious men, those at least giving lip service to the law, could find ways around the adultery prohibition by means of creative divorce.
Jesus' insight that lust is the same as adultery is more than just the recognition that evil behavior is born in the imagination, an idea that eventually becomes a behavior. His insight also condemns those attitudes and relationships that reduce other human beings to the level of mere objects. For men to view women only as objects to be owned and used for personal pleasure denies women their essential humanity.
That's why pornography and gratuitous sex is obscene. It is not merely the appearance of nudity or whatever vulgar acts might be displayed or acted out; it is the emptying of humanity of its essential value and dignity. The whole process reduces humanity to the level of mere products to be consumed and then discarded. This is a serious distortion of the view of human life celebrated in Scripture.
Other Obscenities
While the sexual antics of Jackson and Timberlake certainly deserve the criticism of the community of faith, the magnitude of our outrage may reveal a certain preoccupation with sexual sin. Focusing so much energy attacking sexual deviancy may be distracting us from other legitimate concerns. Sexual deviancy is not the only thing Jesus talked about -- and it is not even the concern he talked about the most. If we take an honest look at the heart of his message, sexual practice becomes almost a side issue, a residual effect growing out of a more basic problem.
This is amply demonstrated in Luke's presentation of the Sermon on the Plain. Luke understands the mission of Jesus as having everything to do with power in social relationships. The signals are present in the narrative almost from the beginning. We hear Mary singing, "He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly" (Luke 1:52). In Jesus' inaugural sermon we hear him say that God has called him to "let the oppressed go free."
In Luke 6:17-26 power relations are set in stark contrast and in almost exclusively economic terms. The poor, despised in first-century culture as bearing the curse of God, are pronounced "blessed." The rich, regarded by that same society as bearing the blessing of God, have "woes" pronounced over them.
Jesus is not condemning wealth as inherently evil or poverty as inherently good. Jesus is criticizing a political and economic system that allows the wealthy and powerful to exploit the weak and the poor, and to do so in the name of God. By reversing the polarity on "blessing" and "woe," Jesus is able to put these relations in a different theological light. Once the aura of divine blessing is removed from the wealthy and the curse of poverty is removed from the poor, then the chance of economic justice and social relationships based on love become a possibility.
Obscenities Old and New
As we move from the ancient world to our own, Jesus' words reveal that we are in the grip of obscenities far more egregious than the mere baring of a breast.
Economic Obscenity: While not being nearly as direct in our assertions that the rich are blessed and the poor are cursed, our economic practices certainly suggest that we believe it. We have in this country millions of homeless people, and millions more living and working at bare subsistence wages. Efforts to address these matters are often met with strident opposition. Those who would receive public assistance are often characterized as lazy, or substance abusers, or criminally dangerous.
On the other hand, we seem not to mind that off-shore tax shelters for rich individuals and corporations make it possible for the wealthy to keep a far higher percentage of their income than most working people can. Many large corporations receive huge government subsidies that have been called by some "corporate welfare." Over the last decade the gap between the earnings of CEO's and their employees has grown exponentially. The gap between the rich and the poor has likewise expanded considerably.
Analyzed in the light of Jesus' blessings and woes, the growing economic disparity in our culture represents an economic obscenity. But where is the outrage?
Violent Obscenity: Since 9/11 our culture has embraced militarism with a renewed vigor. Military violence has always been a major part of our national story, but the fear and disease provoked by terrorists and an ongoing war on terror has deepened our commitment to and fascination with the practice of war.
Waging war has long been a serious concern for the Christian community. We have struggled with Jesus' words, "Love your enemy" and "Turn the other cheek." We have formulated responses ranging from stubborn pacifism to agonized just-war justifications, but at no time has the Christian tradition found cause to celebrate the acts of war.
We also celebrate violence in other ways in our culture. Children who watch television, on average, will have viewed 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence by the time they reach the seventh grade. Not only do we celebrate violence as a force to save us; we look to violence to entertain us.
Living in the presence of such an exuberant celebration of violence can only be viewed as obscene -- an obscenity of violence. Where is the outrage?
Loss of personhood: In a recent lecture Walter Brueggemann described our culture as being in the grip of "commoditization." Everything and everyone is eventually reduced to the level of product. Everything is for sale. Everything is usable and disposable. Everything has a price. We have become the sort of people one commentator described as "knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing."
Reducing all reality to the level of product affects the way we approach everything from the environment to personal relationships. It also has a profoundly devastating effect on the way we view human life. As products, we are easy to exploit and are tempted towards exploitation. Whether as employers expecting more while paying less, or as employees whose compulsive work habits destroy health and family, as products we are drawn into a web of relationships in which we literally sell ourselves.
This loss of the value of the person and the resulting exploitation and commercialization of the self is obscene.
Opposing the Obscenities
Walter Brueggemann has said that the Super Bowl is our great cultural festival celebrating our cultural core values: greed, militarism, violence, and of course, sex. It should not surprise us that those very elements would come to focus in the act carried out by Jackson and Timberlake. Jackson's costume was in the form of some futuristic warrior. The dance routine was erotic and suggestive. The act of tearing away the breast cover was simulated rape and violence against women. The whole scene was draped in the opulence and extravagance of a football game so expensive that ordinary people cannot attend.
And all of it was obscene.
But our outrage must have more substance than merely complaining about flashes of nudity. Jesus' challenge to us is to resist and denounce all in our culture that dehumanizes and de-personalizes our neighbor.
It begins with a simple discipline. We learn to say with Jesus a proper blessing on what is blessed, and a resolute woe on what is not. Without downplaying the offensiveness of what Jackson and Timberlake did, the teaching of Jesus challenges us to confront the other obscenities that were showcased during the Super Bowl -- not only during the half-time show but throughout the game. Perhaps even the game itself.
Our failure as Christians to voice little or no concern about these other obscenities may mean we have not fully heard what Jesus was trying to say. More likely, however, and more troubling, is the possibility that there is no offense because there is consent.
Team Comments
Carter Shelley responds: Jim, you have done well to move us from the titillating scandal of Janet Jackson's exposure to the far more damning everyday obscenities that we as Christians often do not recognize as such or exert any effort to redeem. For that reason, I would alter the lead title for this week's The Immediate Word from "Super Bowl Obscenities" to the question "What is obscene?" Your placing of sexual obscenities at the beginning of your entry makes sense, yet I was glad when you moved on to discuss other forms of obscenity Christians are guilty of propagating and justifying.
For me, the part of your material that comes through the strongest is your discussion of gender injustice, violence, war, and greed. The danger preachers run in emphasizing the sinfulness and exhibitionism of Janet Jackson's conduct at the Super Bowl is being able to smugly condemn her actions while allowing those of us in the pews to feel self-righteous and superior because we would never do such a thing! (The fact that few of us have the physique to draw such attention for good or ill is beside the point, yet I can't resist pointing that out since more Americans are guilty of overeating and underexercising our bodies -- another form of obscenity -- we expect the medical system to deal with the health consequences caused by our lack of self-control and respect for our own God-given bodies.*
I am nowhere near as outraged by Janet Jackson's stunt (for which she is bound to pay dearly in lost endorsements, concerts, etc.) as I am by the ongoing flood of sexualized content available every night of the week on television -- and I am not including HBO or other paid, subscription TV in this realm for which the viewer has choices. Rather, I am totally dismayed by the unrealistic portrayal of sex as wonderful, fun, carefree, and consequence-free. Rarely is there any indication on film, in music, or on television that a quality sex life requires selflessness, love, a commitment to one's partner over time, and -- frankly -- hard work. Most couples who enjoy a long-term, loving, and satisfying sexual relationship with their spouse know that good sex doesn't just magically happen any more than straight A's in college, a job promotion, or a well-developed sermon magically happen.
In your introductory comments you mention the outrage of the "Family Research Council" and the "American Family Association." It would be helpful to me and perhaps to other subscribers to know the function of each of these groups and who sponsors them. Also, I thought the term "punishment" used by Tony Perkins was a great example of how punitive we are as a nation. While he may have been right that having MTV provide the half-time entertainment instead of say, Disney or PBS, pretty much guaranteed a sexualized half-time show, why are he and others are not offended by the showgirl garb worn by the teams' cheerleaders? I think we are all culpable in that all Christians need to ally themselves with those of us who are feminist Christians and both name and vociferously object to such sexploitation of women. It is indeed an obscenity that the best-known American women, the most successful, rich, and famous ones have become such through strategic use of their physical beauty as actresses, models, rock stars, or trophy wives than ever attain strong recognition through climbing the corporate ladder or becoming a college president.
By the way, PBS aired a two-hour tribute to Muhammad Ali on February 8 as part of its celebration of Black History month: Muhammed Ali: Through the Eyes of the World. In watching Ali's progression I was impressed with his willingness to say aloud on television, by radio, and in confrontations with the U.S. government and court system his reasons for refusing the draft. Ali's physical success as the World Champion boxer made him a powerful role model for many oppressed people of color throughout the world -- a key point the program emphasized -- yet it was his courage in naming racism for what is was that made him truly great. Ironically, Ali's greatest strength, his incredible speed and skill as a boxer, was also his greatest tragedy as he now suffers from pugilistic dementia and Parkinson's disease. Football is not the only sport that seems more suited to the Coliseum in ancient Rome than a Houston Superdome; boxing also perpetuates a great obscenity.
While, regrettably, there are plenty of examples of abject poverty in the United States, a current film that beautifully (and painfully) illustrates the obscenity of poverty is City of God about children in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Its director, Fernando Meirelles, has been nominated for an Oscar, so more theaters are likely now to show it, and rental copies should be available soon.
I'm currently reading The Purpose Driven Life, by Rick Warren. I'm not sure yet what I think of it as a useful guide for Christians. Warren's use of scripture strikes me as wholly appropriate at some points and as manipulative and distorted in other places. It also concerns me that he blithely seems to dismiss childhood traumas and tragedies as something to get beyond and get over, which seems simplistic, casual, and cruel when those circumstances included the horrors of physical abuse, incest, or torture. But one point he makes from the get-go is that human beings are not commodities. We are children of God, created by God, called by God, and our true purpose is not satisfied or fulfilled through material goods, worldly success, or the search for self-actualization. Our true purpose is found in God -- in loving God, in serving God. The rest of the book is designed to help us determine how we live a God-directed, Christian life, which should line up appropriately with Jesus' beatitudes, life, death, and resurrection. In that way, Warren's popularizes Christian values and mission for twenty-first century Americans, and offers an antidote to the real dangers of commoditization that Walter Brueggemann observes.
*****
*Having gone over to the other side last year by turning 50, I am now a faithful subscriber to the AARP's Modern Maturity. It offers many excellent articles on ways older Americans can be more proactive in our health care. One of the biggest contributors to quality of life for senior citizens is regular exercise, which helps keep one's mind sharp, alleviates depression, combats osteoporosis, and extends both quality and possible length of life. It's never too late to start.
*****
Carlos Wilton responds: The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1973 case of Miller v. California, defined obscenity as something that (1) is prurient in nature; (2) is completely devoid of scientific, political, educational, or social value; and (3) violates local community standards.
Whether or not this year's Super Bowl half-time show met the Supreme Court criteria is up to the viewers to decide. (Judging from the outraged reactions from commentators around the country, it seems that many viewers would indeed identify these criteria as being present.)
A far more interesting question, theologically speaking -- and one that you raise so clearly -- is what Jesus considers obscene. Or, to put it another way, WWJS? -- What Would Jesus Shun?
The "woes" in Luke's version of the beatitudes point us toward an answer. The rich, the comfortable, the happy, the well regarded: these are the ones on whom our Lord pronounces woe.
These harsh words cause us Americans to sit up and take notice. They're not the gospel we're used to hearing. Don't we live in the land of opportunity, where -- at least in theory -- the career track of J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie is open to all? Doesn't our Declaration of Independence celebrate "the pursuit of happiness?" Isn't "the American Dream" to become wealthy? If so, then why does Jesus pronounce woe upon us?
Many of us think we know what sin is. It's synonymous with that other three-letter word that begins with the letter "s": sex. Yet sexual sin is conspicuously absent from Jesus' list. Could it be that there are other sins he considers more heinous and therefore more worthy of mention?
It's a dangerous thing, of course, to argue from silence. There's no reason to suspect that Jesus' sexual ethics were any different from those of most other observant Jews of his day. Yet the fact that he singles out other sins for particular mention probably does suggest that he considered these more of a pitfall for his listeners.
The Russian Christian novelist Leo Tolstoy has a well-known parable he calls, "How Much Does a Man Need?" It's the story of a peasant named Pahom, who dedicates his life to the avaricious search for more land.
"If I have plenty of land," Pahom considers, "I shouldn't fear the devil himself." Unbeknownst to him, at that very moment the devil is hiding behind the stove. He resolves to grant Pahom's wish.
Pahom comes into some money, and is able to buy 40 acres. He's overjoyed to be a property owner -- but his joy doesn't last for long. He begins to wonder what it would be like to own 125 acres -- and lo and behold, he's able to do so. No sooner has he signed the deed to this property than he hears tell of a distant, wilderness country, where land is selling for even cheaper. He cashes in his investment and goes off in search of this new bonanza.
In the far-off country, there's so much unclaimed territory that the people there offer him as much land as he can walk around in a day. Pahom sets off, walking as fast as he can, driving himself ever onward, knowing that the faster he walks, the more territory he can call his own.
When Pahom finally returns to his starting-point, he falls down dead, from exhaustion. It is then that the significance of Tolstoy's title becomes clear. "How much land does a man need?" he asks. You can probably figure out the answer: "Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed."
Harlan Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, made and lost several fortunes during his lifetime. In his old age, he became a philanthropist, giving his money away. Maybe Colonel Sanders was a reader of Tolstoy, for he once remarked, "There's no reason to be the richest man in the cemetery; you can't do any business from there."
This whole matter of greed -- traditionally numbered among the "seven deadly sins" -- is of all sins among the most dangerous. It's dangerous because it's so seductive. Greed whispers to practically everyone, from the corporate CEO right down to the kid bagging groceries. It whispers, "What you have is not quite enough. You deserve more! And by the way," says Greed, "it doesn't really matter if you cut a few ethical corners laying hold of what's rightly yours. Isn't everyone else doing it?"
The result of all this is not only that dishonesty flourishes but that you and I are blocked from ever feeling satisfied, ever feeling truly thankful for the good gifts God has given.
George Murphy responds: The biblical prophets generally speak about situations in their own cultural setting, and in that role among Jews of the first century Jesus wouldn't have had much occasion to condemn Jackson-Timberlake style exhibitionism. It simply didn't happen there -- though such things and much worse were part of the surrounding Greco-Roman culture of the time. The fact that Jesus didn't spend a lot of time criticizing something doesn't automatically mean that we should accept it.
Just what is the significance of the type of display that went on at half-time of the Super Bowl? Frankly I found the whole half-time performance so tiresome that I wasn't paying much attention and missed "the exposure." I suspect that there are a lot of preachers like me who simply don't appreciate the whole MTV style of a younger generation, for good or ill, and we need to be careful that we don't lose a lot of young people over questions of musical taste. But more than that is involved.
One message that is communicated by such displays is that there really are no standards of sexual behavior that anyone needs to pay any attention to. You can do anything you want to, at least between consenting adults. (And the limits of even that last qualification get pushed.) The whole category of obscenity in sexual matters, defined in terms of "community standards," becomes vacuous if there are no community standards, or if the standard is just "anything goes." If Osama Bin Laden was watching the half-time show from his cave in Afghanistan, he was given a classic example of what he considers to be the decadence of the United States.
But of course sex doesn't stand alone, especially on the big screen. We all know how it's used to sell cars, beer, and everything else under the sun. "The commercials," which have become the major aspect of the Super Bowl festival for a lot of people, often make use of sex, and these appeal to people's greed and covetousness which are so much a part of American consumerism should be seen as part of a whole package of which the Jackson-Timberlake event is one item.
It might seem a stretch to link sex and consumerism theologically -- until we remember the ways in which the Bible uses sexual immorality as a symbol for something deeper, namely, idolatry. Think of Hosea, Jeremiah, or the quite explicit imagery of Ezekiel 23.
The fundamental problem with adultery is unfaithfulness, not that there's something intrinsically bad about sex. And idolatry is unfaithfulness, not to one's marriage partner but to God.
Idolatry in its deepest sense is the fundamental sin, a violation of the First Commandment. The distinction between idolatry and faithfulness is the distinction in our First Lesson (Jeremiah 17:5-10) between those who "trust in mortals" -- in any created thing -- and those who "trust in the LORD." It is what underlies Jesus' distinction between those who are blessed and those to whom woes are spoken.
The "need" for more and more things, a need created and nurtured by the culture of consumerism, and which many Americans think really is a "need" and not simply a "want," is "covetousness," and as such seems to get relegated to the tail end of the Ten Commandments. But in Colossians 3:5 we're told simply that "covetousness" (RSV) or "greed" (NRSV) is idolatry. Luther develops this idea more fully when he explains the First Commandment in the Large Catechism (Theodore Tappert, ed., The Book of Concord [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959], p. 365). After saying that a person's "god" is to trust and believe in something with one's whole heart, he goes on:
Many a person thinks he has God and everything he needs when he has money and property; in them he trusts and of them he boasts so stubbornly and securely that he cares for no one. Surely such a man has a god -- mammon by name, that is, money and possessions -- on which he fixes his whole heart. He who has money and property feels secure, happy, fearless, as if he were sitting in the midst of paradise. On the other hand, he who has nothing doubts and despairs as if he never heard of God. Very few there are who are cheerful, who do not fret and complain, if they do not have mammon.
These last words remind us that simply being poor is no guarantee of being faithful.
It's all too easy, with the condemnations in our texts and with the examples of Super Bowl sex and commercialism before us, to focus a sermon entirely on "woe." That word needs to be spoken, but it will have no lasting effect if there is not also the word of promise that Jeremiah and Jesus both speak to those who put their trust in God rather than in mortals or in wealth.
Related Illustrations
A Roman Catholic priest was retiring, after many decades of service to the church. Reflecting back on the tens of thousands of confessions he'd heard in his time, he told of hearing many a commandment broken. Yet never once in all those years, the priest admitted, had he heard anyone confess to breaking the Tenth Commandment, "You shall not covet." He pointed out, with some irony, that God cut the Tenth Commandment just as deeply into Moses' stone tablets as the nine other ones -- the ones about honoring parents, and not killing, and not committing adultery and all the rest. How odd that no one seems to remember Number Ten!
***
"A permanently available visit to the underworld."
-- Dorothy Sayers' definition of pornography
***
"Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins -- hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust -- came from the soul.
"But these preachers I'm talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body. Their own bodies were soft from disuse or dry with self-contempt. And those very bodies that they neglected or ignored or held in contempt, they expected to be resurrected and to live forever. And they thought this would be heaven."
-- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
***
Commenting on the irony of a culture that permits teenagers to pose in sexually suggestive ads but resists allowing sex education in schools -- in other words, a society deeply uncomfortable with sex, but attracted to it all the same -- Barbara Kingsolver writes:
"Our religious and cultural heritage is to deny, for all we're worth, that we're in any way connected with the rest of life on earth. We don't come from it, we're not part of it; we own it and were put down here to run the place. It's deeply threatening to our ideology, at the corporate and theological levels, to admit that we're constrained by the laws of biology. And yet there it is: sex, the ultimate animal necessity, writhing before us like some alien invader to mission control. We can't get rid of it. The harder we try to deny it official status, the more it asserts itself in banal, embarrassing ways."
-- Barbara Kingsolver, "Taming the Beast with Two Backs," in Small Wonder: Essays (HarperCollins 2002), pp. 226-27.
***
"The sexuality of Jesus consists in his openness to strangers and friends, the physicality of his healing, the sacramentality in his approach to food, the tolerance he displays in the face of sexual transgression, and his espousal of a philosophy based on love. Only a worldview mired in materialism could fail to see the sexuality in this expansive and inclusive erotic philosophy.
-- Thomas Moore, in The Soul of Sex
***
"The Victorians, we are told, loved death and feared sex, and hence they embraced a culture of death and mourning, and constructed strong taboos against sex. We, on the other hand, love sex and fear death, and our taboos are of a different sort. We delight in sexuality, we pander to the sensual, and we have made Calvin Klein a very wealthy man. Death is not something we want to understand or to know; death is somehow unfair, and in this country it is culturally unconstitutional, violating our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Thus, when death intrudes, particularly among the young, we respond in terror, anger and fear."
-- Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1996), p. 212.
***
Country songwriter Butch Hancock describes his experience growing up in Lubbock, Texas: "In Lubbock we grew up with two main things: God loves you, and he's gonna send you to hell; and that sex is bad and dirty and you should save it for the one you love. You wonder why we're all crazy."
-- U.S. Catholic, cited in Current Thoughts & Trends, July 1998, p. 12.
***
"Sexual satisfaction is more important than job satisfaction, but less important than family, money and religion, according to a survey of adult Americans to be released Friday. The survey, designed to assess the attitudes of Americans toward sexual health, found 82% of 500 adults ranked a satisfying sex life as important or very important. "Loving family relationships" was ranked as important or very important by 99% of those surveyed, while financial security was a point behind at 98%. In third place was religion and spiritual life at 86%. Job satisfaction was last in the survey, rated as important or very important by only 79%.
-- Infobeat News, 4/30/99
Worship Resources
by Chuck Cammarata
As usual, I have a couple of alternatives for you this week. The first call to worship is more traditional, the second a bit different.
CALL TO WORSHIP 1
LEADER: There is no greater love than this; that a life would willingly be laid down for others.
PEOPLE: This is what our God,
LEADER: The creator behind the universe,
PEOPLE: Has done for us.
LEADER: For while we were yet sinners,
PEOPLE: Jesus Christ gave his life,
LEADER: That we might be cleansed of all sin,
PEOPLE: And receive the gift of eternal life.
LEADER: Our God is so good!
PEOPLE: Our God is so good!
LEADER: Let us praise God
PEOPLE: With hearts and hands and voices.
All: AMEN.
CALL TO WORSHIP 2
The liturgist should begin this call to worship by explaining:
In many parts of the Christian church there is a culture that uses posture to signal openness to God. One such posture is praying with hands held upturned. This posture signals that I am open to receive whatever God wishes to give to me in this moment:
My mind is open to receive truth and insight,
My heart is open to be changed,
My emotions are open to be healed.
Let us pray our way into the presence of God with our hands upturned as a sign of hearts,
minds, and emotions prepared to receive all that God wishes to offer.
The liturgist should then lead the congregation in a prayer of opening up to the presence of God's Spirit, something like the following:
Spirit of the living God, we desire to experience your presence, your movement, your guidance, even your chastisement if that is what we need.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION 1
LEADER: Here it is
PEOPLE: Plain and simple, Lord,
LEADER: We keep it to ourselves.
PEOPLE: We hide it from others
LEADER: We are embarrassed by it.
PEOPLE: It hasn't really changed us,
LEADER: So we have little to say that could really be called good news.
PEOPLE: Forgive us for half-hearted living
LEADER: That prevents us from being filled with your light
PEOPLE: And shining your love
LEADER: For all the world to see.
PEOPLE: Amen.
ASSURANCE OF PARDON
Know without a doubt that you are forgiven; but also know this, that you have been forgiven for a purpose. That purpose is that you might become holy and be a witness in your family, and workplace, and community, and beyond, for Jesus Christ.
So rejoice in your forgiveness; get about the business of becoming holy and allowing God to burst forth from you. Amen.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION 2
This prayer is a narrative prayer simply read to the congregation. It includes as part of the story an assurance of pardon.
Long had they been estranged, the daughter having taken a path she knew her father would not approve. So she moved away. Never answered his calls or returned his mail. She eradicated every evidence of him from her life. And then she heard that he was ill. Cancer. It was going to get him. She wanted not to care, but there was still something in her, some spark of love for him. So she went. At the hospital she hoped he'd be asleep. She would give him a little kiss on the forehead, say a prayer over him, and be gone.
But her plans went awry. Although the years and the cancer had despoiled his face, when she saw him she saw only the daddy who once held her near, sang sweet songs to her, and kissed goodnight. She took his hand and sat for hours by his bed.
And then, when she'd just about given up all hope that he'd awaken, his eyes blinked open, "Ahh," he said, "My sweet Susan. I love you."
She wept. He died. But not before he spoke to her the words of her salvation, "I love you."
We are often like her -- abandoning our Father. But our Father -- like her father -- is always ready to say, "I love you."
PARISH PRAYER
God of all giftedness, author of every talent and blessing, fill us with a knowledge of the abundance and richness you have bestowed on us, and teach us to use our gifts and blessings as fountains from which to slake the thirst of those in need. Teach us to give generously of our abundance and to share of the gift you have given -- the gift of yourself.
HYMNS AND SONGS
All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name
Here I Am Lord
In Christ There Is No East or West
Jesus Loves the Little Children
Our God Reigns
Where Justice Rolls Down (contemporary)
Do You Hear the Mountains Tremble (contemporary)
A Children's Sermon
by Wesley T. Runk
Luke 6:17-26
Text: "Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets" (v. 26).
Object: Use ads for celebrities in the newspaper, magazines, from the Internet, etc. You may take this as far as you believe your congregation will allow you to educate your children against the teachings of the world (wealth, fame, position).
Good morning, boys and girls. Today we are going to take a look at some famous people. Do you know anyone famous? (let them answer) Does a famous person live next door to you or in your neighborhood? (let them answer) Do you see your father or mother on TV very often? Do you have a neighbor who is in the newspaper often or on the cover of a magazine? (let them answer) Do your friends make tapes or CD's or spend their nights in places like Hollywood, New York, Paris, or London?
I brought along some things I found in the newspaper and magazines. I even found a few things I copied from the Internet. Are any of these people your friends? Does your mom have her picture taken like this? Does your father dress like this? (let them answer)
Let's read what they say about some of these people. It says the women are beautiful, sexy, and very exciting. Does anyone write those things about your mom? Let's see what it says about the men in our pictures. It says that they are powerful, hard to talk to, wealthy, and very attractive. They go to a lot of big parties, but I wonder if you or your moms or dads have ever been invited to one of them.
Sometimes we wish we were like these people. It seems to us that we would like to be as pretty as they are and I think some of your mom's are just as pretty. We would like to be as handsome as some of the men are -- and I think your dads are also very handsome. We would like to be pretty, handsome, and rich like they are so that we can have millions of dollars. We would like to live in houses like they do with men servants and maids. We would like to drive their beautiful cars and have many of them. Wouldn't it be fun to have our own airplanes that are as big as Air Force One or yachts that can sail the oceans? Wouldn't it be great if we could just pick up the phone and talk to the president or Michael Jordan or anyone we wanted to talk to. And just once wouldn't it be great to be able to dress like Dion Sanders or Michael Irvin and be called the heavyweight champion of the world? These are the great celebrities and when people say the celebrities are their friends then they are really something special.
But they have problems. Michael Jackson has big problems, his sister Janet has big problems, and that means the whole family has problems including their closest friends. Kobe Bryant has problems, big problems, and so do his wife and their families. Just because everyone knows your name does not mean that you are too big for the world in which we live.
Jesus said in his sermon, "Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets." It can happen to us when we want to many things and will do anything to have them. People may make you important, very important but you should never forget who you really are in this world. You came into the world, as a child of God and you will one day die as a child of God and not someone more important than God.
The next time you see someone really famous think of how dangerous they live and how easy it is to forget that God is God and we are his people. Amen.
* * * * *
The Immediate Word, February 15, 2004, issue.
Copyright 2004 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
