Celebrating Sexuality

Human sexuality is something to do with the person I am, at the very deepest level. I remember once reading comments from a geriatrician, who said that assessing an elderly person’s sense of their sexuality was a way of assessing whether, or not, they still had a sense of personhood. If my own sense of my sexuality is about my personhood, then accepting my own sexuality must go hand in hand with a sense that God accepts and loves me as I am. There is no moral question about who I am, but there will be moral questions to answer about how I treat others and whether my relationships with others are creative and affirming, or destructive and abusive.

Sex is not about what I do, to whom and with what, as if human sexuality can be stripped back to focus only on what I do with my dangly bits. Such a view of sex lacks any depth or understanding of human nature. Any teaching on sexuality needs to be wider and deeper and to focus on what it means to be human and therefore sexual. It follows that seeing the face of Christ in every person I meet must mean accepting their humanity, their personhood and their sexuality. Again, if we seek to proclaim a renewed creation, in terms of the Kingdom of Heaven, we will want to speak to what builds society and how our expressions of sexuality might be creatively person-building and not destructive either to ourselves or to others.

Without seeking to police the lives of others, as Christians we will want to share our joy in human sexuality and promote loving and stable relationships between those who seek to celebrate a deep and committed relationship with another. Without seeking to condemn, or even demonize, those growing towards mature and committed relationships (and often making mistakes on the way), Christians will want to point to the example of Christ and the transforming power of living in a relationship of sacrificial love towards another. What we point to, by way of illustrating an ideal, is important, just as how we do that. We need to hold up what is beautiful and what we celebrate, rather than denouncing the sexuality and relationships of others. Just as talking about sex, as if this is simply a matter of genitals, is narrow-minded and unhelpful, so using terms like ‘heterosexual-marriage’ really fails to do justice to a beauty we are seeking to celebrate. Marriage, between a man and a woman, is not beautiful, creative, person-building or Christlike, if the relationship is soured by power-games and abuse. A loving, creative, affirming and self-giving relationship, lived out over many years by two people of the same gender, may well reveal something of the love of God and be a place where true joy can be found. That is certainly something that has been thrown into sharp focus for me when conducting funerals and dealing with pastoral sensitivity to the surviving partner.

I recall the memorial service, in Salisbury Cathedral, for John Austin Baker, who was once our bishop. Bishop Peter Selby, speaking of Bishop John’s scholarly mind and open-minded search for truth, said that John had been the main writer of ‘Issues in Human Sexuality’, which (somehow) is still upheld as some kind of authoritative statement on human sexuality. Yet within a month, Bishop Peter said, Bishop John had declared that the arguments in this document are unsustainable. We cling to an unsustainable and joyless position, like a drowning person might cling to an inadequate lifebuoy. We could be proclaiming the joy of being fully human, in all the beauty of our God-given sexuality, and seeking to share what it means to find liberation and new life as people who know in our lives a love that will give all for us.