Happy new year, everyone! It’s good to be back here after a little break surrounding Christmas, visiting family, and no sermon on January 3. I’ll start out with this photo of an album cover from my days in the 1970s in the Westmont College Choir. That’s me over on the far left (my right in the picture). Fortunately the picture quality is such that you cannot see my ridiculous sideburns of the time.
As my wife and various friends can attest, my singing ability is lacking, mostly in terms of staying on tune when singing by myself. But I can do O.K. when singing in a group, especially when surrounded by others who have the same part. I remember some really joyful moments doing a Bach motet or the Vivaldi Gloria with the choir, joining in the beautiful flow of multiple musical lines, managing to stay on our bass part while hearing the other parts weave in and around us. It’s a musical experience that’s just not possible for a single voice alone, even one much more on key than mine might be.
I want to begin a short series of four sermons on a biblical view of human sexuality with the thesis that God’s creation of human beings has a beauty something like polyphonic choral music. The text is the creation of human beings in Genesis 1 and 2, specifically Genesis 1:26-28, 31, and 2:18-24. When Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them,” we are learning that God has bestowed on us a gift, the divine image, which was designed from the beginning to be shared by among and through human difference, the first of which is the difference between male and female.
Genesis 1:26 has God saying, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” Ancient Christian interpreters read this as an obvious reference to the persons of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit speaking among themselves, in the plural. Some modern Old Testament scholars believe that interpretation is misguided, but enough will allow it that I’m not embarrassed to bow to ancient wisdom and see yet another way in which the revelation of Christ shows us things in the Old Testament which could not be recognized or understood otherwise.
In any case, this Genesis 1 conjunction of that plural suggestion of the Trinity and the creation of human beings in the divine image invites us to see that image at least partially consisting in the differences among human beings. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three different divine persons yet one God, distinct and yet in unity. Human life was created to be like that, to reflect that divine harmony across differences, with the differences themselves a source of beauty and joy. And the first difference mentioned, in apposition to the creation in God’s image in verse 27, is that of male and female.
Our sexuality is a gift that is meant to be shared across the differences between the sexes. As the old trinitarian formula goes, “the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father.” Yet all are God. Male is not female, yet both are human and together reflect and image the divine unity.
I (and I would guess it’s true of many others) sing much better in a group. My voice is really meant to be shared in a choir, not heard alone. Likewise, our individual sexuality is a gift from God meant to shared first in the human family, a harmony of the inherent differences which brings forth love and joy. Beyond the family and direct sexual activity, the differences between men and women constantly refresh and bless human community and allow us again to embody and reflect the divine community of harmony in diversity.
When the creation of humanity is told the second time in Genesis 2, God says in verse 18, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The individual human being, of either sex, is created to live in community which truly reflects the image of the triune God. That community often begins in family, but does not end there. Ultimately the aim is the community of the people of God, a whole redeemed body sharing the gift of human difference, whether gender, race, age, etc. So the single person too joins in the gift of God’s image by joining with others to live together in harmony.
The starting point, then, for a biblical understanding of human sexuality, is to accept that built-in human difference as a gift meant to be shared, and in being shared to point us back toward God and the eternal sharing of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.