Kleinig, Pornography and Pastoral Care

Transcript (edited for readability).

Appeal. If I examine myself and say, why am I drawn to pornography? Well, what does it promise me? It promises to make me feel alive, energetic. It promises life, liveliness, sexual excitement, so that I feel enlivened. But it's an empty promise, because it actually kills sexual enjoyment and sexual fulfillment. Notice here that this recognizes that the appeal of the empty thing, the idol, is life. It promises life. But the lie is that it delivers death. It deadens. There is nothing that they've done — actual sexual enjoyment doesn't increase through indulgence in pornography, it decreases. So there is the petition. There's the recognition here that this is a spiritual problem. I can't fix it up by myself. So in the psalmist's terms, I then turn to God, and I pray for his help in turning away from this idol. And I notice too the filling of the empty space that the idol fills, with the real thing: "Turn my eyes from looking at what is worthless, and give me life in your way." So instead of the delusion, give me the real thing — life in all its fullness.

I maintain that pornography is not basically a psychological or physical matter. It's a spiritual problem, a spiritual issue. It's much more than a physical thing — physical arousal. It's much more than a mental thing. It's much more than a moral thing. In fact, if you approach it morally, with do's and don'ts, and moralize about it, you actually make it worse. The more you get people to exert themselves morally and prohibit pornography, the more attractive it becomes. Paul comments on that odd phenomenon in Romans. It's basically a spiritual matter because at its core it has to do with idolatry — the worship, the service of an idol. In this case, it's the service of an unreal, imaginary body. That's my idol. I imagine it, even if it's depicted in front of me — it's not the real thing. It's a picture, it's an idol, and I serve this imaginary body, which is not the real thing. And the result of that is that I become spiritually oppressed and enslaved. I become addicted to it. I don't feel alive unless I get the kick from indulgence in pornography.

This is one of the key insights I have on this: it's used by the devil to defile and desecrate us. Now the paradox is that the devil is disgusted by our physicality and by our sexuality. He is pure spirit, and what he does to spoil the work of God is to spoil physical, sexual sexuality for us. He defiles it and desecrates it so that we turn away from it in disgust and shame and guilt.

Now I need to clarify, right at the outset, a very important issue that I think is even more prevalent in the US, and rightly so, because of your strong Puritan heritage. It's very English, it's very American, it's very Puritan, it's Australian, but it's here too, because we are part of the English culture — a misunderstanding of nudity, that nudity is bad, evil. Now I want to put this up front, and you won't make sense of what follows, or of the issue of pornography, unless you know that nudity itself is a gift of God. He made our bodies naked. Before we fell into sin, we were naked and not ashamed. There's nothing wrong with nudity. What's wrong is its abuse, its misuse. So here's a definition I'll bring up front: pornography is the denial, the rejection, of the proper function of nudity.

Now, what's the proper function of nudity? Notice too, nudity has to do with — when you're talking about nude, what's the opposite? It's clothed body, dressed body. So it has to do with the symbolism of dress and undress — dressing, undressing. Now what's the proper function of nudity? It has to do with visible self-disclosure to another person. Its proper function is visible self-disclosure — showing of yourself to the right person of the opposite sex. And that's an inherent part of bodily self-giving — that by the presentation of yourself, nude, in a nude state, to another person, you are giving yourself, or offering yourself, bodily, physically, to the other person. And that's an essential part of our human sexual experience. And particularly since the fall — because before the fall there wasn't a problem that it would be misunderstood or misused, but since the fall, nudity has a different function, which is a provocative function rather than — it's to take something from the person and demand something of a person, rather than presenting yourself to the other person.

Now, one of the lies of pornography is that because it's exciting, it's life-giving, it enlivens. The other delusion is that the more explicit the depiction, the more you show what's actually being given. Now what it presents to us is the illusion of explicit sexual intercourse, of being explicit. But in fact, it's not at all explicit — it reduces sex and sexual interaction to genital mechanics, I can put it that way. My basic beef with pornography is that it is not explicit enough. It's not explicit enough, because it only shows one dimension at best, and even that one dimension is phony. It pretends to be explicit, showing you everything — that's its temptation — but it shows little or nothing of what actually happens and is given in sexual intercourse. So there's a strange paradox: the more explicit human beings are sexually, the less explicit, in fact, we are. So we have that delusion of explicitness — and we have possibilities now of explicit depiction of sex the way we never did before. You just have to access some pornography and it's as explicit as you possibly can be — at least that's the illusion. But it's all performance. It's all phony. It's not real. And particularly, your experience of it is anything but explicit.

It's also delusive because it is actually a contempt and a rejection — a rejection of real gendered sexuality. Now I get attracted to pornography because I want something sexually more exciting than what I have in my marriage. But what I have in my marriage is real, gendered sexuality, which is always messy, and difficult. All human beings have difficulty engaging sexually with each other, because our sexual engagement is so complicated and involves the whole of us, that in most cases it's almost impossible, if not difficult, to get it all right. And particularly the older you get — you might get more experienced, but then you get new difficulties that arise. I won't go into them; those of you who are older know what I'm talking about.

And it really is — and this is very paradoxical — instead of pornography giving us an appreciation of human nakedness and its symbolism, an appreciation for sexual intercourse, it in fact exercises contempt for the sexual body, and a contempt for actual, real, bodily sexual intercourse. It involves the corruption of sexual nudity by sin. And that's not just with pornography — what the devil wants to do is mess up the issue of nudity by either — between two extremes — either we become prudish and ashamed of ourselves, and under no circumstances want to be seen naked because we don't like what our bodies are like, so there's shameful prudery and frigidity on the one hand. On the other hand, you get manipulative exhibitionism. Those are the two extremes people go to, and pornography has to do with that second one — exhibitionistic, manipulated exhibition.

Now, I spoke yesterday about "erotocide." That's, in fact, the result of indulgence in pornography — it leads to the murder of Eros, erotocide. There are more and more studies — I don't want to dwell on that, because it's different for different people — but there are studies which show that instead of enhancing sexual enjoyment, it in fact destroys Eros, libido, sexuality. So what we need, I think, in pastoring and helping people to negotiate the pornographic society we live in, is on the one hand to be careful that we don't damn nudity, but on the other hand, we need to have a positive assessment of the role of nudity in human sexuality.

Number two: what's the nature of pornography? How does it work? This is just some thoughts about it — it's a huge topic, and I don't claim to be an expert by any measure. Can I define it? First of all, pornography is the explicit depiction of genital sexual activity for the purpose of sexual arousal and masturbation. So it has its proper function in masturbation. Now, it's not a new thing — it occurred in the ancient world, but unlike our modern society, pornography was used for religious purposes in the ancient world, because human sexuality was regarded as a divine, cosmic power in pagan religions. The sexual drive was part of the life force, a cosmic power that pervades the whole cosmos. So sexual desire and arousal were always regarded, in many parts of the ancient world, as supernatural in nature. It's one place where human beings had some sense of the divine — the gods and goddesses. And it was associated with sex quite explicitly, with certain deities. So for the Canaanites, the two main sexual gods were Baal, the sky god, and his consort, Asherah, the earth mother. It was basically a fertility religion — they gave life to the earth. The rain was the sperm from the sky god Baal, and he inseminates the womb of the earth, Asherah, and gives life then to people on earth. So it has that sexual connotation. And then within these religions, you had depiction of deities in sexual guises, for the purpose — not just, as in modern times, for sexual arousal, but for sexual devotion. And it had its most extreme form with the Canaanites, as you probably know from your Old Testament, with religious prostitution. I won't go into that — it's a whole issue, very, very complicated. So much so that Hosea touches on this — Hosea talks about the "spirit of prostitution" which corrupts Israel and leads it astray, recognizing that prostitution and pornography is a religious matter, a spiritual matter — but it doesn't have to do with God's Spirit, it has to do with other spirits.

Right from the early beginning in the church, pornography was rejected by Christians at baptism — you know the baptismal formula, "Do you reject the devil and all his works and all his ways" — all his works includes fornication, and hand in hand with fornication is pornography. So it's rejected as ungodly.

Now that's a bit about the ancient world and the Old Testament. In the modern world we have something new — pornography is as old as the hills, but we have new kinds of pornography in our modern world. It started off with graphic, printed depictions of sex in magazines like Playboy, and — I forget the others — but particularly in my youth there were tons of them available, in folders, in newsagents. So it was print first, and graphic. But now it's available via video, photography, and the beauty of this is that it can be distributed uncensored via the internet — new — and you can access it in your own time, and in private, via the internet, for contemplation, self-arousal, and masturbation. It's there, as available to you as you are here with me on the internet. And then the new thing is that via the internet, it's not just one-sided, but it can be interactive, by the use of Skype and the like — interactive sexting to each other. And the beauty of it is that it's safe and secret. It's safe because you don't actually get sexually involved with another person and all the complications that come from that. And it's secret — you can do it in private, and no one but you knows about it.

Now, what's the result of habitual use of pornography? Well, I'll put it quite bluntly: what it does is it separates, it dissociates the imagination — sexual imagination and sexual desire — from a real body, and locates it in an imaginary world. So you turn away from the real body of a real woman and a real man, to a depicted idol. It's not enacted really, but fantasized. It has a physical effect on you, but it is unreal — it's a delusion. And the problem is that it escalates. You start off in a little way, but the more you use it, the more you need to use it. And it's not just the increasing frequency of it, but you escalate from normal to abnormal sexuality. So you're not turned on — if I can be quite blunt — turned on as I was in my teens by just the visual sight of a woman's breast. No — then you've got to have more extreme sexual depictions, and it goes from extreme to extreme, and you get the strange phenomenon now of bondage and all that other kinky sexuality, which has been increasingly made available pornographically.

The problem is that it doesn't actually satisfy, but it dissatisfies. It arouses desires that it cannot and does not satisfy, and so you become more and more addicted to it, and drawn to more extreme forms of it. And the result of it is that you become bored with actual sexual intercourse. And that puts strain — as is the case, and Bev knows all about this — on marriages. I don't know how many cases I've had, in my experience as a pastor, of marriages being put under difficulty and strain, if not basically emptied out and resulting in separation or divorce, from a husband's habitual use of pornography — coupled with the fact that he actually is not able to perform sexually with his wife. That's happening with women too now, by the way.

Now the worst part of it is that it leads to the disintegration of the whole person. I dissociate my mind from my body, my feelings from reality — instead of being integrated, which is what good sexual intercourse does, it integrates the whole of me — the physical, mental, imaginative, emotional, spiritual — all those are brought together. What pornography does is disintegrate everything. We break up into various parts, and more and more the reaction is: okay, you have that sexual business out here, but my real self is over here. And my real self, my soul, becomes disembodied sexually, from reality.

Now I want to have a word about the use of pornography by Christians and pastors. This is just very brief — it points to a problem that's very, very common. Talk to any counselors, and you'll find how much pornography is a problem with Christians, but also with pastors. We are sitting ducks for it. And it begins, first of all, with secret, and sometimes accidental, use. You come upon it, and think, "Oh, this looks interesting," and you become involved in it gradually and occasionally. But then it kicks in. And all of you, as pastors, know the phenomenon of "Mondayitis." You give a lot — physically, emotionally — in leading services, and in most cases you don't get much response from people. And by Sunday afternoon or evening you feel spent and empty, and in need of something to comfort you. There's emotional depletion that occurs — emotional depletion, which is also personal depletion, and spiritual and physical depletion. Kleinig has taught a lot in Doxology about acedia — that flatness. And so you use pornography, because you feel emotionally dead, to give you a charge of energy, so that you feel emotionally and physically alive. You become dissatisfied with the way things are, and you use it to stimulate you. There's a sense of flatness, boredom, emptiness, self-pity, delusion — "nobody loves me, nobody accepts me, I'm a failure," et cetera. And so you want to comfort yourself, to feel whole again. A lot of it has to do with self-pity — "if only I weren't a pastor and had another job which was really rewarding and didn't demand so much of me." And so, self-pity, and if you're inclined that way, it leads to a sense of depression.

That's a very brief summary of something that's much more complex. But then you get into a recurrent cycle. You have that habitual state of emptiness, and the need for physical and emotional stimulation, excitement, and you anticipate it with excitement. Part of the appeal of it is the anticipation. Then you actually do it, and you get some charge out of it. But once it's done, it leaves you with a sense of disgust and shame. It fails to deliver, and you feel ashamed and guilty about it.

And you need to see how the devil and the evil spirits are involved in this. The devil is a sexual killjoy, a marital killer, a murderer, and he wants to murder your ministry, if you like, and attack the congregation through you and by attacking you and your marriage. So you get the basic pattern of temptation: he tempts you to pornography with deceptive promises about it. Then, once you're involved, he accuses and condemns you. In this way he corrupts proper sexuality, he defiles clean sex, he desecrates my holiness. He gradually entraps me, with a bad conscience, in my sexual idolatry. And his ultimate aim is either to drive me out of the ministry, or to cripple my ministry. I don't know how many pastors have been driven out of the ministry by pornography — I suspect a large number. I just have incidental, anecdotal data on that, from my involvement. So that is the entrapment with it, and — okay — the most extreme outcomes are: the marriage breaks down, or becomes hollowed out, and the ministry is crippled, if not hampered — quite hampered and crippled, if not destroyed.

Right — what's the key insight for dealing with pornography, and dealing with it spiritually? First of all, as far as I'm concerned, you need to start with the importance of sight. The eyes are important for male and female sexuality — it differs, usually, between men and women, but for both, the visual is very, very important. Now, at the core of this lies the symbolic, God-given function of sexual nakedness. It has to do with visible self-disclosure, visible self-presentation, visible self-giving, for the purposes of sexual arousal and sexual intercourse. It's part of that whole sexual reality, and a very important part of our sexuality. So much so that the term used in the Old Testament for sexual intercourse — which looks like a euphemism, as if these people were prudish and didn't want to speak openly and honestly about it — I don't think it's for prudish reasons, but for deep spiritual reasons. In particular, in Leviticus, God speaks about sexual intercourse as "uncovering the nakedness" of a woman — uncovering the nakedness of a woman, or seeing her nakedness. You can look up those passages for yourself. So sexual intercourse has to do with uncovering the nakedness of a woman. Notice, here, it's taken from the male point of view — you can turn it around, from the female point of view, but it's much more complicated from the female end, I reckon; I'm not an expert, but I think so.

Okay, so it's uncovering nakedness. Because it's part of the importance of the sense of sight — like the sense of touch and all the other senses, but the sense of sight along with all the other senses. Sight has to do with hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching — it has to do with the senses. It has to do with imagination. Sight, seeing, and imagining go together. The imagination is an essential part of good sexuality. And the imagination is one of the drivers of emotion, of desire. So you get that connection: sight, sensory experience, imagination, and emotion, feeling.

Now, talking about emotions and feeling — one of the problems that Luther and the Reformers had to deal with was that, for many people at the time of the Reformation, there was no distinction between, if you like, good sexual desire, right sexual desire, and lust, or concupiscence. Luther talks about this, but Melanchthon, in the Apology to the Augsburg Confession, when he talks about the marriage of priests — which I would urge you all to read, it's the Augsburg Confession, Article 23 — distinguishes between sexual desire, in Greek epithymia, and sexual passion, pathos. Now, passion is uncontrolled, disordered desire, if you like. Epithymia is ordered, positive desire. So Melanchthon emphasizes, quite rightly, that sexual desire is something good — it's God-given. He says the natural desire of one sex for another is an ordinance of God, and he puts it in a number of different ways. He therefore distinguishes between what he calls natural affection and concupiscence, which is lust. Concupiscence is the desire to possess, to take — possessive desire, versus, if you like, appreciative desire.

So he distinguishes natural affection from concupiscence, or sexual covetousness. Natural desire, sexual desire, is constructive if it's rightly ordered and controlled — it's the desire to desire the other sex, the opposite sex, in the right way, rather than in a disordered, perverted way. So here, in sexual desire, we see one of the features of sin and the fall, which has to do with the way it disorders our imagination and emotions, our desire, what we desire, what we look for. Sexual passion, if you like, is disordered desire. And it leads then, out of that, comes the use of pornography for sexual arousal, and that's commonly associated with masturbation.

Now, two final points on this. There's a close connection between pornographia — pornographia is Greek, then Latin; graphia is depiction, and porno has to do with prostitute. So it's the depiction of prostitution — pornography — and people's sexual engagement with the prostitute. So, the depiction of fornication and prostitution — associated with porneia, which is prostitution and fornication.

Now the problem here, as I've indicated already, is that it involves the treatment of the body of another person — even if it is the imagined body — as an idol, rather than as a real person. To use modern, psychological terminology: it depersonalizes sex. But I'd go a step further and say it not only depersonalizes sex, but idolizes sex. And what it does then is dissociate visual intimacy from self-giving love, from physical, actual tenderness and affection. So it disconnects visual intimacy from actual sexual experience. And that has far-reaching consequences, physically, and across the whole of our being, from the physical through to the spiritual. And that's why sexual desire is a good index for our spiritual state, because it touches on all of our whole self. And by the way, three commandments have to do with sex, and particularly pornography: the First Commandment, idolatry; the Sixth Commandment, adultery; and the Ninth Commandment, covetousness.

Now — okay, let's see. Yeah, that's okay. Now, how can we deal with pornography spiritually? I want to look closely, as closely as we have time, and I'd urge you to get hold — if you haven't already — of Tom Winger's commentary on Ephesians. Wonderful. Wonderful commentary. I'd urge you to work through it. But before I read this passage, notice the link that Paul draws between fornication — literally, sexual intercourse with a prostitute, whether real or imagined — and impurity, and impurity not just physically, but impurity of the heart, the conscience, and covetousness, and idolatry. Notice that nexus of four things: fornication, impurity, covetousness/lust, and idolatry. And notice too the imagery here of the contrast between darkness and light.

So here it goes — and I can only touch the surface of this passage, but in this passage we have the teaching of Paul which helps us to deal with fornication, but also its sister, pornography, spiritually. He says: "Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But fornication and all impurity or covetousness" — note the connection between impurity and covetousness — "must not even be named among you, as is proper among the saints" — just underlining "saints" there, because we are saints, we are holy, and all these things are no-no's. "Let there be no filthiness" — or literally, shameful talk — "or foolish talk, or crude joking" — that sexual innuendo and sexual banter, which is out of place — "but instead let there be thanksgiving. For you may be sure of this, that no one who is a fornicator, or impure" — sexually impure — "or covetous" — sexually covetous, "that is, an idolater — has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good, and right, and true. And try to discern" — actually the Greek is "what is well pleasing" — "to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them" — underline "expose" — "for it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible. For anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, 'Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.'"

Anything exposed by the light becomes visible. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, I remind you.

Now, the starting point for freedom, deliverance, from captivation by pornography, is Christ's bodily self-giving — his love, his self-sacrifice to us on the cross, and that we receive in Holy Communion. And then, secondly, our identity as saints, who walk in the love of Christ, who've received the love of Christ — we are holy people, therefore everything we do is governed by our holiness. And thirdly, our enlightenment by Christ. Now Paul puts it rather graphically — he doesn't say "now you have been enlightened by the Lord," but "now you are light in the Lord." That's our identity — we are light. We don't just have light, but we are light, because Christ is in us.

Now, how do we deal with this in practice? Well, it's to accept and to recognize the way God deals with this — through his diagnosis, his judgment, and his remedy. What Paul touches on here is what I'd call the cycle of pornography — a cycle that goes round and round and draws us in. What's the cycle? It begins with my secret, imaginary fornication, and that leads to sexual impurity, which then, instead of satisfying, leads to sexual covetousness — I'm dissatisfied sexually, and I want things that are not given to me. Sexual covetousness leads in turn to sexual idolatry, and then the cycle goes round again — sexual idolatry leads to secret, imaginary fornication, leads to sexual impurity, sexual covetousness, which then traps us deeper in sexual idolatry.

And what it does is it plunges us into darkness. So we enter a state of darkness. The picture that Paul seems to use here is that we are sleepwalking in darkness. We're in darkness and we don't realize it — we're sleepwalking. We think we're alive, but actually we are in a state of spiritual sleep. We're involved in the unfruitful work of darkness, and the danger of this is that it leads to spiritual death, and the loss of our spiritual inheritance. That cycle goes round and round and traps us, unless God breaks into it with his law and his gospel, and delivers us from that cycle.

And the key to it is given to us in a very simple statement by Paul: "Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead, expose them." Expose them — bring them to the light. Now he's not talking about our exposure of the sexual behavior of other people, but the exposure of our own darkness to God — bringing it out into the light, the light of Christ, exposing the darkness in us to the light of Christ. And that involves, as far as I'm concerned, six things that are touched on, or hinted at, in this text.

First of all, there's the admission of the problem — to oneself and to God. To get rid of the illusion, the delusion: "Yes, this is a problem." It's a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous — the first step towards getting out of alcoholism is to admit that I am an alcoholic. "I have problems with pornography, and I'm tempted by pornography" — to myself and then to God. And notice, then, God's call to us is: "Wake up, you sleepwalker, and arise from the dead." We think we're alive, we think we are in the day, but God calls us from death to life, from darkness to light. And that leads, second, to confession and absolution, where we don't only admit the problem to ourselves, but we bring it to God, into the light of his face. And then we see, third, cleansing from our impurity and deliverance from our bondage, with the blood of Jesus, in Holy Communion. I found that for people who are addicted to pornography, one of the most helpful things is to get them not just to admit it, and maybe confess it to me and receive absolution, but to actually go to Holy Communion, and dump it on Jesus, and ask for cleansing from him, with his blood — his blood, which is not just splashed over us, but which we take into our very heart and soul and spirit, so it cleanses us and frees us from sexual impurity.

Number four, it has to do with baptismal renunciation — not just a baptism, but to renounce, an act of will: "I renounce the devil and all his works, I renounce pornography, I renounce the devil who tempts me to pornography." So, baptismal renunciation. And most importantly — and I touched on this yesterday, and this is the positive side — is the practice of thanksgiving. Paul says, instead of all this stuff that you do verbally, the sexual talk which pollutes you, instead of that let there be thanksgiving. And what thanksgiving does is recognize that sexual intercourse, my sexuality, my marriage, or even my single state, is a gift from God, rather than something I'm entitled to and can demand from God, or from my spouse, or from anybody else. So it involves thanking God for marriage, and whatever sexual engagement you have in marriage, or also, if you're single, thanking God for your single state, because it's a blessing — it's a gift of God.

So, the last thing, which is very important, is that what we're looking for is not a kind of rulebook — "how do you deal with pornography, here are the rules: first you do this, then you do that, then you do that. Now you put filters on your computer, you've got to confess it to your wife whenever you're tempted, or every time you fall you've got to tell your pastor" — you'll confess about it. So there's rulebook stuff. No — Paul doesn't throw us back to the law and rules about dealing with pornography. He says, quite simply, "Try to discern what is well pleasing to the Lord." Now there you have it — discern what is pleasing to the Lord, because what's pleasing to the Lord will be pleasing to me, and will be pleasing to everybody else. Just try to discern — it's an effort, and there's no one way, I've found, for myself and with other people I'm dealing with. I started off with, "Yeah, there's this and this and this, do this, this, this." What I now do is get people to understand themselves, to discern their own state of mind, their own soul, their own heart, their own conscience. Because for every person, the temptation to pornography is different, and because each person is different, the solution is different, and the Holy Spirit and Jesus deal with each person personally. There are different reasons why people like you and me get trapped in pornography. There are different reasons why your members get trapped in pornography. There are different reasons why people who are not Christians get trapped in pornography. And I can't do that for you as a pastor, but I can urge you, and get you, to examine yourself, and maybe to tell me what you discern as being the issues involved, and, within that too, the solution to them.

But the important thing is not to throw people back, morally, on their own limited, inadequate resources. You can't tackle this by yourself, or even just together with Jesus, on your own — it's a recognition, like the recognition of alcoholism, that I can't fix this up, I need help from outside me. That's the ultimate thing. And not to look for a simple, immediate solution — it's a journey. Even if you nail it on the head one day, Satan's going to come back, and he'll attack you from this side, he'll attack you from the other side. And so it's a journey — to recognize the vulnerability, and to practice discernment by walking. Notice the picture: walking in love. We walk together with Jesus, and we discern. And what I find interesting is that Paul doesn't say, "discern what's wrong in your life," or "discern how God is judging me, or Jesus is judging you" — notice he puts it positively: "try to discern what is well pleasing to the Lord." Well pleasing to the Lord — and that, quite simply, for me, is: I ask myself the question, do I need to keep this hidden? Not just from my wife or other people, but do I need to keep it hidden from God? Do I mind if God is seeing what I'm doing, and thinking, and feeling, and imagining? Is he pleased with me?

Right, now — how's time going? Yes. Okay. I don't know — that's the basic teaching that I want to do today. But as part of that, I'd say the urge for you to practice God-pleasing appreciation and admiration, particularly for those of you who are married. By the way, do we have any single guys here? Okay, right — this is a little bit different, but that's the way it is.

Okay, now, we have a wonderful resource for this in the Song of Songs, where God, in his word, gives us positive resources to sanctify — to purify — our sexuality with his word. It's the word of God. Now, strangely speaking, this is an odd book — by the way, I recommend Chris Mitchell's commentary on the Song of Songs very strongly — it's huge, look how big a thing it is. Okay, here in the Song of Songs we have a resource from God himself to purify our sexual imagination. Now, the whole book has to do with the imagination and desire. Technically speaking, it's in the form of a dialogue between a woman, as the main actor, and her somewhat tardy and clumsy, unresponsive lover. Now notice here, interestingly, the main character is a woman. Normally we expect men to take the lead in sexual matters — that's the way of the world — but here God urges women to take the lead. It's a dialogue, and interestingly, it's all language, it's talk. And it's a model, then, if you like, for the language of love. Love has to do with speaking — the focus is on speaking and hearing. The main organs, if you like, for sexual appreciation are not just the eyes — I've spoken about that — but the mouth and the ears.

So it begins, in chapter one, verse two, the woman says: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth." And there are probably two levels here — she wants to be kissed, but also kissing here is a metaphor for him speaking words of love to her, which is the way Luther takes it, by the way. It's that speaking love is a form of sexual kissing. So the woman says, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of the mouth." The man says, "Let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet and your face is lovely." Seeing, hearing. And the book ends, then, with the plea from the man to the woman: "Let me hear you." He says, okay, this is not just a matter of sexual intercourse, if you like, but the most important thing is listening — the sexual conversation. So you have the picture of a sexual relationship as an ongoing conversation, but it's not a closed relationship — it's open to friends of the bridegroom and friends of the bride. There's this larger circle, and it has to do with its location — and this isn't usually recognized.

Now, a lot of people say this has to do with marriage, a married couple — that's not wrong, but it's not exactly right. As I said yesterday, there's a difference in Israel between betrothal and marriage. This has to do with the drama of what occurs between betrothal and marriage — so it's the drama of courtship and foreplay, before the invitation to consummation of the relationship physically, in chapter eight, verse four. And what it has to do with is sexual awakening. The woman, the beloved, says three times, "Do not waken, do not awaken, or do not arouse or waken love, until it pleases." That's interesting, and there's a deep truth there — until it pleases. So it has to do with the gradual sexual awakening. And that sexual awakening is not so much, as people think in our society, about hooking up — the physical side — but has to do with a conversation. It's verbal. And the conversation is euphemistic — it is not explicit, although everybody knows what it's talking about. It's imagery, common imagery, but it's not explicit — it's euphemistic, it's symbolic. And that's very important, because that's one of the best ways of dealing with sexuality — it has to do with imagery and imagination that appeals to all five senses. If you like, you can go through the book with different text colors and ask: what's the imagery here — is it of sound, or sight, or smell, or taste, or touch? All five senses are involved.

And one of the basic pictures that's used is that of the woman, the body of the woman, as her garden. It's a garden with a wall around it, and there's a door, and the woman alone has the key to the door — only she can admit her lover into the garden of her body. So it's admission by invitation. It's also another picture of the woman's body as a house, but that's not as dominant as the picture of a vineyard. And the key aspect of this drama is the realization of love as self-offering, as self-disclosure — but it's primarily verbal, and only secondarily visual. The two go together — she shows herself, and the man shows himself, with words, imagery, and behind that lies the actual visual self-disclosure, which is in the future. So the picture is of self-disclosing mutual love as the restoration of Eden — visual intimacy through verbal disclosure. So, paradoxically, the man comes to see the body of the woman by what she says. It's verbal, visual disclosure.

And one of the very interesting features here is the depiction of male and female, whether real or imagined nudity, by imagery that's been taken from pagan idols. This is a fascinating insight — scholars have shown that the imagery used for the man and the woman is imagery that's used in connection with pagan idolatry. So the pagan idols have stolen this from human beings made in God's image, and what the Song of Songs does is take it back, and focus it not on an idol, but on a real human body. And the focus here is on the whole body, rather than just the genitalia. There are hints at the genitalia, which has embarrassed people very often — it's not explicit, but it's implicit. So what you have, in this book, is an exercise in imaginative admiration, with the enjoyment of real or imagined nakedness. It's probably imagined nakedness more than real nakedness — because probably more important than visual nakedness is imagined nakedness, and you can't really appreciate real nakedness without the exercise of imagination. Because otherwise the sense of sight will become fixated on the wrong things, either critically or appreciatively, but it won't be fixated on the whole person, male and female.

Now, there are four exercises in admiration, sexual admiration, that I've listed here. The first one is from a man, and his enjoyment of his wife's body — here you have the admiration of her upper torso, starting with her eyes, like doves; her hair, like a flock of goats leaping down the slopes of Gilead; her teeth, like shorn ewes, the twins; her lips, like a scarlet ribbon; her temples, like halves of a pomegranate; her neck, like the tower of David in Jerusalem; and her breasts — this is where it gets interesting — like fawns grazing among lilies. Then you have his second appreciation, and here you have the whole of her, naked, in view of the common body, whether real or imagined, starting from the bottom — and the only mention of clothing is her feet in sandals — going up to her thighs, up to her navel, up to her belly, which is compared to a heap of wheat encircled by lilies. There may be a sexual reference here, that it refers to the vagina, the whole pubic area. So: navel, belly, breast, neck, eyes, nose, head, and hair — appreciation from feet to head, whereas the previous one went from head down.

And then, interestingly and tellingly, from a female point of view, the wife's enjoyment of her husband's body, starting with his head — his hair, golden, his head gold, hair wavy and black, his eyes, cheeks, lips, arms, body, torso, legs — and then you get back to his whole appearance, and then, very tellingly, a focus on his mouth, which is sweetness — his mouth, symbolically, kissing, speaking. But for her those two go together — kissing and speaking — that's her focus. For the man, it seems that one of his fixations is on her breasts, which don't have the same connotation in the ancient world as they do for us. So note the frequent mention of the woman's breasts — you find a similar mention in Proverbs 5:19: "Rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe, let her breasts fill you at all times with delight, and be intoxicated always with her love." Breasts, in a society where breastfeeding was quite common, in public, as nurturing — being nurtured and nourished sexually.

So what we have here is a model for the healthy exercise of outspoken sexual admiration of the body. It's the language of praise, to counter what's so common with us human beings — the language of criticism and critical appraisal. We're all too ready to judge women, their appearance, and we're all too ready to be critical — what we find hard is to be appreciative. So it's the language of praise, which doesn't focus on how the lovers look, but on how they see each other — appreciatively and imaginatively. It gives us a vision, by means of this, of each other as God sees us. And to go back to what we did yesterday, how God sees us, and sees our marriage and our sexuality, is stated in theophanic terms as the relationship between Christ and the church. So, the language of appreciation, rather than criticism.

Luther has a wonderful thing to say in a wedding sermon, in which he speaks first, generally, about the husband, and then he addresses the wife. He says: "When a husband looks at his wife as if she were the only woman on earth, and when a woman looks at her husband as if he were the only man on earth — yes, if no king or queen, not even the sun itself, sparkles more brightly and lights up your eyes more than your husband or wife — then right there, you stand face to face with God speaking. God actually gives your spouse to you, saying, 'The man shall be yours, the woman shall be yours. I am pleased beyond measure'" — notice, "pleased," to hear God-pleasing — "'creatures heavenly and earthly are jumping for joy.'"

Let me conclude: it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness, I remind you. But Paul says, "Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctified as well as purified by the word of God and prayer." God offers to purify and refine our sexual imagination and desire, whether we are married or not. Sexual imagination is refined and purified by the word of God and the prayer of thanksgiving.

Let me end with a wonderful summary from C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity: "The old Christian teachers said that if a man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater. I know that some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they are wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body — which believes that matter is good, that God himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in heaven, and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy."

Thank you.