Weird Sex and the Bible

A Series On Sex, Gender, and the Bible

I want to ask a question. What does the Christian Bible have to say to us about gender and sexuality?  

I’ve intentionally qualified this question because most people do not read the Bible nor do they have any idea what it teaches.  Instead, what they know comes from their impressions from Christians and the way they incorporate various parts of the Bible’s message into their lives.

While the Bible has much to say about human sexuality, how the message has been translated falls extraordinarily short of today’s cultural assumptions.  It’s not the Bible’s fault that it’s become so misunderstood or misrepresented. That fault needs to be placed elsewhere.

But that’s not the purpose of this series. My purpose in this series is to explore the contours of human sexuality through the Christian Bible, to (re)discover from a Christian perspective the beauty and mystery of God’s intention for humanity, and to find common ground with those whom we love the most but perhaps find themselves outside of its scope.

I have no desire to point fingers at anyone or group but merely to explore texts and themes to try and make some sense of the message for those I love.

Neither do I want to foster any guilt or shame.  Most human beings that I meet have a deficit balance of self-worth. So piling on more shame only contributes to a deepening hole in their spiritual struggles.

I wish to avoid that altogether. However, when reading the Christian Bible, one can’t help feel a sense of their own shortcomings (including myself).  And I’m afraid, there doesn’t seem to be a workaround for this problem.  St. Augustine taught that guilt and shame is the necessary consequence of sin. So I realize that exploration of such a sensitive topic necessarily fosters feelings of guilt, shame, anger, or even embarrassment.

Yet, the astonishing message of the Christian Bible is that these negative feelings are not the end result of the human condition nor the culmination of the Christian life.  Instead, faith, hope, and love are, with the greatest of these being love.

In my experience as a pastor, I’ve encountered far too many Christians and non-Christians harboring deep wells of regret for past sexual behavior. And I’ve even found some describing the distance between who they are and what the Bible teaches as a spiritual wedge, a proverbial glass ceiling that can never be overcome.

I believe, however, the ultimate message of the Christian Bible teaches that God removes these wedges and shatters the glass through his action in the world. In fact, if anything, that’s my goal of this series: for my readers to (re)connect to the Bible’s core message of God’s profound love for the world.

Where to begin?

Let’s start with God. I’m going to refer to God as the “God of the Bible.” When I describe God as the “God of the Bible,” I mean the God that appears before us in the Christian Bible; specifically, the God revealed in the sixty-six books of all Protestant Bibles. 

I’m talking about the God found in the Bible left by well-intentioned individuals in various hotel and motel rooms.

And I’m referring to the God testified to by the ancient Christian creeds.

What does this God have to say to us?

Not everyone, if not most people, believes in this God. You might not believe in this God.  But if this God is real as the Christian Bible claims, then understanding God’s message would be advantageous for every human being and not just Christians. However, if the God of the Bible is a myth, as some say, we don’t really need to worry about it, and we can do whatever we want. But that is a profound risk.

At the very least, better understanding the message of the Christian Bible can aid in opening up dialogue and improve communication with our family, friends, and neighbors who might disagree with what we believe or fail to understand what the Christian Bible teaches.

Before we can say anything about God, there is something that we should address right up front. Everyone, including orthodox Christians, comes to the Bible with biases, beliefs, and opinions that control how we read the text. Presbyterian theologian John Frame described these biases, beliefs, and opinions as presuppositions — beliefs that control other beliefs. 

Presuppositions come in all shapes and sizes. Many of them we inherit from our parents, teachers, and friends.  Others we develop on our own.  And still others we inherit through social media, tv shows, and movies.  

Just as a filter changes shadow and light in the selfies we take on our mobile devices, our beliefs color how we see and interpret our lives, experiences, relationships, world, and indeed the way we read the Bible. In a way, we know what we choose to see. What we see, then, reinforces what we believe to be true and then choose to see.

Let me give you an example from pop culture. In 1999, Indian filmmaker M. Night Shamalayan released his first blockbuster hit, “The Sixth Sense.” The film told the story of a child psychologist named Malcolm Crowe, whose eleven-year-old patient, Cole Sear, had the unusual ability to talk to the dead, i.e., a sixth sense.

Early on in the movie, during the initial intake, Cole reveals to Malcolm his strange ability. Here’s the transcript from the scene.

Cole Sear: I see people. They don’t know they are dead.

Dr. Malcolm Crowe: Dead people like, in graves? In coffins?

Dr. Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?

Cole Sear: Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead.

Cole Sear: all the time, they are everywhere. They only see what they want to see(1)

Like the dead people seen by Sear, we are not always aware of how our beliefs shape our reality.  We believe we’re regular people.  Yet within the recesses of our mind are controlling thoughts shaping and forming what we see and how we see it.  We don’t even know they are present.  We “only see what ‘we’ want to see.” 

Our brains are wired to filter information to make efficient use of the data we receive each day.  Unfortunately, this means that we can sometimes miss details that are literally in front of our eyes.  In the book, The Invisible Gorilla, authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons write about our brain’s capacity to attend to one detail while unconsciously ignoring others. (2)  

They developed an experiment where participants were asked to watch a video and count the number of times six players passed a basketball to test their hypothesis. In the middle of the video, a man dressed in a gorilla suit appears. He’s there for nine seconds. After the video concluded, participants were then asked to report how many times the ball was passed and whether or not they saw the gorilla. Approximately half of the respondents said they missed the gorilla. 

When participants were asked to watch it again and look for the gorilla, only then did they actually see the gorilla.

Our beliefs work the same way. They remain in the background of our minds filtering the data we receive.  It is only when someone points out the proverbial gorilla in our lives when we begin to see what is in front of us.

When our controlling/limiting beliefs are confronted, we might experience a visceral reaction. We get angry, disgusted, or shamed by someone or something we watched, saw, or heard.    Or we might merely write off the contrary viewpoint as naive, old-fashion, or even intolerant and narrow-minded.

Most of the time, our negative assumptions about the Christian Bible come from our experiences interacting with other Christians or from a bad church experience or from a jaded professor or teacher who delights in distorting its meaning. Or it can come from carelessly flipping through the Bible and reading it without any idea of its context or meaning. 

Whether our experiences are negative or positive, our beliefs will significantly influence what we believe and feel about the God of the Bible.

These thoughts and emotions become powerful filters for our thinking, shielding us from any possible discomfort it creates in us. Like Shamalayan’s dead people, we see only what we wish to see, not even aware that our fixed mindset may be completely closed to any possibility of a different point of view.  

Expanding our mindset is uncomfortable.  But I suggest it is precisely this discomfort that we must explore and confront to help us process the message of the Christian Bible.

Why is it so hard? Carol S. Dweck explains:

“When people hold to a fixed mindset, it’s often for a reason. At some point in their lives, it served a good purpose for them. It told them who they were or who they wanted to be ( a star, talented child), and it told them how to be that (perform well). In this way, it provided a formula for self-esteem and a path to love and respect from others.” (3)

Dweck’s insight is crucial for our understanding of the Bible’s message on human sexuality and gender. If we find ourselves apprehensive towards what it has to say, it may be because up to this point, we have a different set of beliefs that have given us our identity and told us how to behave. 

Until now, it’s worked for us. Our beliefs have shaped and informed our identity.  And may have even stimulated the way we understand our purpose to be in this world. But it may be keeping us from expanding, growing, and even exploring the even deeper truths of the God of the Bible.  Something, then, must give. 

Reading the Bible Weirdly

I want to suggest if we’re going to expand our mindsets and honestly listen to the God of the Bible, then we first must learn how to read it. Second, we must recognize that in many places it’s just plain weird.

Let’s start with the main character of the Bible’s story, Jesus.

He constantly was challenging the mindsets and beliefs of His disciples, crowds who followed him around, and the enemies who naturally reacted against him.   In fact, in a way, he seems to pattern his whole ministry around disrupting the perspectives of those he encountered, reframing what it meant to worship the Lord God.

In Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, he made statements that were so contrary to the values and mores of the day, that it often left his audience amazed while scratching their heads (Mt. 7:28-29). 

For example, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs” (Mt. 5:3 CSB).

Luke’s Gospel makes a slightly different point yet more personalized, “Blessed are you who are poor because the Kingdom of God is yours” (Lk 6:20 CSB).

The poor and the sick, like today, were despised.  Their circumstances directly resulted from their ethnicity, allegiances, intelligence, or even some sin committed by their parents or grandparents. To be poor was to be a nobody. So when Jesus starts his sermon off by saying, “Blessed are the poor,” he’s making a statement that would have blown the minds of his audience. 

Blessed are the poor? That’s just plain silly, even weird. Yet, the Gospels repeatedly record how many were initially drawn to Jesus’ message because it was so initially attractive.

In the Gospels, Jesus constantly challenged the mindsets and presuppositions of his audience.  He did not come as a political savior to restore ancient Israel’s David kingdom, at least not in the way some thought.  Neither did he come only as a prophet like Elijah or a rabbi, capable of performing mighty miracles. No, he came as God’s very Son and savior of the world.

To the crowds, he challenged their mindset that their problems could be solved by money or power. In the ancient world, poverty was never a pathway to political gain, particularly against the might of the Roman Empire.  

To the religious leaders whose pride and contempt blinded them from “true religion,” he challenged their pious understanding of God by breaking one of their most sacred customs, the Sabbath. He even went too far, in their minds, when he associated himself with God by calling God his father.

Over and over again, Jesus confronted the selfish and self-centered mindsets present in everyone he encountered by saying things like the following.  “The first shall be last.” “Repent.” “Take up your cross and follow me.” “It’s easier for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “You must be born again.” “I am the bread of life.”

And perhaps the most difficult and truly the weirdest statement of all, “Truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” (John 6:53-54). What was Jesus, some kind of reverse vampire?

These statements, frankly, were as weird then as they are to us today.  But that’s the point. 

To be a follower of Jesus, then, was to pursue life so counterintuitive to the human condition and expectation that onlookers would think his disciples were weird. Jesus’ disciples required a complete overhaul of their understanding of what it meant to be human as God intended.  Jesus called his disciples to life so eccentric they can only be described in opposing terms – a light in the darkness, the kingdom of heaven versus the kingdom of this world, and so on.

Michael Frost captured this idea brilliantly when he defined the word weird as eccentric. Building off the old English meaning, he goes on to say that eccentric or weird means to be “out-of-center.” So a Christian has made God the center and focus of their life.  That is, according to Frost, the true meaning of eccentric. “A true conversion to Christ involves displacing me and becoming ‘truly off center'” or weird. (4)

So as we look at the Bible’s message on sexuality, let me suggest that we must apply the same eccentric framework as Jesus. We need to read the Bible weirdly. Then, and only then, can we understand what the Bible has to say to us today?

In today’s cultural environment, the Bible’s message, as I will propose, is weird.  But that is its brilliance and challenge.

Here is the driving point to consider as we ponder human sexuality. You may not like or agree with what the God of the Bible has to say, or me for that matter.  However, by confronting the message of the Bible to its readers, perhaps we may discover an important truth that should cause us to, at a minimum, reconsider our views of sex, gender, and identity.

What I hope, then, to accomplish in this series is a helpful reflection on what the God of the Bible has to say to us living in the 21st century and not just 1400 BCE or the 1st century.

The question is, are you brave enough to be viewed as weird?

Questions to consider:

What do you currently believe about human sexuality and how is different or the same as the message of the Bible?

What areas do you find most difficult to accept?

Why do the Gospel writers present Jesus as constantly disrupting the mindsets of those around him?