Well before Christmas we purchased a gift for our daughter and son-in-law. My wife had located on-line a set of Star Wars mugs which they wanted. I placed the order and they arrived a few days letter. I picked up the box from our front porch and started upstairs to show Beth it had come. Near the top the box slipped from my grasp and bounced down the stairs with the horrible sound of glass breaking. The gift was broken before it was even received.
For the past three sermons I’ve been exploring human sexuality as God’s gift to us, offered in our creation as male and female, celebrated in the beauty of marriage, and being well-received even in celibate singleness. However, our text for this Sunday, Romans 1:18-32, shows that the gift of sexuality is constantly being broken in our lives. The breakage may be caused negligence like my careless handling of a package or by the willful damage of abuse or deliberate rejection of God’s design. Or the gift of sexuality may even “arrive” broken by physical disability or a disordered desire.
Though Paul clearly understands some sexual activity to be sinful in verses 26 and 27, his argument is that such behavior is more the result–“God gave them up”–of a prior rejection of God and His designs for human life than it is the cause. In other words, the gift of sexuality is more often broken by inattention and carelessness about one’s relation to God and others, than by a deliberate intent to ruin and pervert the creation design of male-female marriage.
In practical and pastoral terms, the upshot is that there is a great deal of sad and painful brokenness in our lives around sexuality. That pain is definitely not all nor even in a majority about homosexual behavior. Because we turn away from God to our own wills, His gifts get broken in us all the time and we end up doing sinful things and hurting one another constantly, regardless of sexual orientation.
Homosexual behavior is only one way to break the gift of being created male and female. Heterosexual promiscuity, pornography, and prostitution are far more prevalent than any homosexual behavior and are reflect our breaking of God’s gift just as much.
The beginning point for healing of the brokenness begins where Paul goes at the beginning of chapter 2, after a long list of all the ways human life is broken by sin. “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”
Yes, the Bible teaches that homosexual behavior is sinful. Yet it also teaches that we are all sinners. If we have not broken God’s gifts to us in that one particular way, we have broken them in other ways. The only hope we have for healing is the grace of Jesus Christ, offered to broken sinners. That grace given through the Cross is the broken body of our Lord raised up again, so that we who have been broken through sin might also be raised up with Him.