Sexuality is: (a) deeply problematic (b) God's gift (c) a hoot.

In 1970 several thousand Lutherans were surveyed, a representative sample of the then six million ALC, LCA and LOMS members in the United States. One of the questions asked them to say yes or no to whether Jesus "felt sexual attraction." 81 percent said no. (1)

I can't help but think of the parochial schoolteacher/nun's comment on astrology in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You: "We can tell that horoscopes are false because according to astrology Christ would be a Capricorn, and Capricorn people are cold, ambitious, and attracted to Scorpio and Virgo, and we know that Christ was warm, loving, and not attracted to anybody." (2)

How do we think about this response to the survey question? On one level, it reflects the general process of idealization. When we idealize people, admire them, or see them as heroes or saints, we tend to create an image of them that leaves Out what Paul might call their "less honorable parts." It is broadly true across cultures that some degree of shaming is used in the process of socializing children regarding what they can and can't do or say or show in public. The fallout from this is that a certain taint of shamefulness attaches itself to normal, healthy human activities like peeing. When I was a child I once found myself wondering whether Jesus went to the bathroom. I knew he was supposed to have been a real human being and so he must have; but at the same time, I felt guilty even thinking about the question. This was confusing to me. Why did I feel guilty thinking about something I was supposed to believe was true? My answer today is that I felt guilty because defecation and urination were tinged with shame for me and therefore were unworthy activities for a perfect, sinless person. This may account for some of the 81 percent. While they would have to acknowledge (though perhaps with some uneasiness at the thought) that Jesus went to the bathroom, they were able to screen out sexual feelings entirely from their idealized image of Jesus.

Along with this general process of idealizing, editing out the less honorable parts, there is another factor: the longtime Western Christian suspicion that sexuality is per se sinful. The less honorable parts of the body came to be thought of as, to quote Monty Python, the "naughty bits." We can't think of Jesus as having had sexual feelings because sexual feelings are not only vaguely shameful (like farting) but also morally suspect. The need to deny Jesus' sexual feelings indicates the problem we have with our own. Given the heritage of negative attitudes about sex, it becomes very difficult for us to talk about God and our experience of sex in the same paragraph. If we do talk about God as the source of human sexuality positively construed, it's usually only a tamed, idealized, laundered sexuality.

Let me sketch two idealized pictures of God-given sexuality in Western Christian ethics: Augustine's version of sex in the Garden of Eden, and modem Protestants' view of sex in the context of loving relationship.

Augustine was basically Stoic in his psychology of the human passions; Stoicism was the default setting for psychological understanding in the West in his day. In Stoic thought, the problem with the passions (that goes for anger and grief as well as sexual desire) is that they overwhelm our reason. So Stoics believed we needed to control our passions with reason and willpower. (Men, of course, were much better at this than women!) Augustine, unlike some of the Eastern theologians, thought there would have been sex in the Garden if there had been no Fall. Sex in Eden would have been safely controlled by will and reason, undertaken to fulfill God's purpose of human reproduction. In the 1980s I told my classes, it was Yuppie sex: "I'll pencil you in for a meeting in bed tonight at 10:37." No getting carried away, no unruly pleasure that distracts from God's purpose (God's purpose, of course, is never simply pleasure). Since the Fall, according to Augustine, sex is always tainted by sin. Even intercourse between wife and husband for the sake of producing a baby cannot escape the taint of concupiscence, which is overweening desire. Sex in Eden was a truly good gift of God, but it was a Stoically ideal version of sexuality, which you and I will never experience-and probably would never want to.

In the mid-twentieth century Christian ethicists struggled with an inherited tradition-strongest in Roman Catholicism, but influencing Protestant thought as well-of casuistic thinking about sex that had an impersonal act-focus. If you're doing an approved activity with the appropriate body parts in a legitimate relationship with pure thoughts for the right reason, then maybe you're not actively sinning. Many twentieth-century ethicists looked to replace this impersonal act-focused approach with a central concern for mutually respectful loving relationship. Sex is a gift of God for the purpose of deepening the bond of love and intimacy between a committed couple as well as for the purpose of procreation.

This is a great advance over the dominant traditional approach to sexuality, where any approval of sexual activity or feeling was guarded and grudging and partial. But it still only covers an idealized portion of our sexuality. There is much in a normal person's sexuality that is not about forming an agapeic bond. Even if we're talking about sexual play in a mutually loving marriage, this picture can have trouble accounting for what's going on in the couple's minds during the sex play. And, of course, there are plenty of people who never experience a mutually loving committed relationship in which to have sex that deepens intimacy. Is sexuality not a gift to those people?

Another problem with this picture of God-given sexuality is that it tends to be individualistic, focusing on persons and their relationships and leaving culture and society in a largely unexamined background. Like pre-twentieth-century Christian thought on sexuality, this more modem Western Christian approach is not serious enough about social context, the social construction of love and kinship, the realities of power.

So here's what we do: we create an unproblematic version of sexuality which we name as God's gift but which is frankly unrecognizable as our human experience. Social realities are ignored: the gender socialization that leads many men to feel they have to achieve and compete and leads many women to fake orgasm, the construction of relationship that makes date rape and wife abuse so common, the economics of using sexual and violent imagery to sell. The weirdness of our fantasy world is ignored and, too often, projected out onto less powerful Others. As some male theologians used to project the weird and dangerous side of sexuality onto women, seeing women themselves as sexual temptation, so we often project out what makes us uncomfortable in our sexuality.

African Americans are well aware of how the dominant white society has projected its fantasies onto them, seeing black men particularly as hypersexual and as sexual threats and seeing black women either as asexual mother/servants or as loose women. Other people of color get painted by projection as well: the Latin lover, the geisha. The groups most susceptible of all to the dominant group's sexual projections are groups that are defined by sexual difference, such as lesbians and gays, vowed celibate people, and persons whose gender expression doesn't fit the norm. Sure, I say, there's weirdness in human sexuality-it's in those weird people, over there. It's not in my fantasy life, not in what I imagine during sexual play, not in what I find arousing. It's in the Gay Pride parade.

This, I would argue, is one of the reasons why there is so much pressure for a conference like this one to focus entirely on homosexuality. Our sexuality is not problematic; let's talk about the people who make sexuality a problem for us. LSTC is to be commended for resisting that pressure and maintaining that the conversation has be broader to be helpful, to have a chance of moving us all beyond polarization and ideologically stuck positions into dialogue characterized by respect for the other and humorous self-awareness.

So, let's start by acknowledging that our sexuality is problematic. What makes sexuality problematic?

First, it is many-layered. It is not just private, it is not just me and you, it is not just conscious, it was not invented by humans out of nothing, it is not discovered for the first time after puberty. Our sexuality has an evolutionary history. We are animals who evolved, and our sexual lives carry some of that history-not just the "lizard brain" of raw emotion and physiological response but also primate innovations such as female orgasm and the disappearance of estrus. Does the fact that female orgasm contributes little or nothing to reproduction say anything about the place of pleasure in God-given sexuality? Our sexuality has a personal history, starting at or before birth, with complex physiological factors influencing gender identity and the orientation of our desire, with sexual play to orgasm beginning in infancy, with the development of a deeply relational self and world. We have an unusually long childhood during which we are dependent on adults for nurture; this contributes to our unconscious bel iefs about love and power, about our own and others' love-worthiness. Our sexuality has a social history.

Like other primates, we are creatures of society, where strong desires have economic uses and both contribute to and threaten social cohesion, and where gender is a distinction of key importance in structuring power. All these layers, evolutionary, social and personal, influence behavior, motivations, and meanings that compete and coexist in us on different levels.

Human sexuality is also problematic for the same reason it is transcendently wonderful: it is fundamentally about the imagination. This is what we mean when we say that the most important sexual organ is the brain. Both the best and the worst of humanness come from our symbol-making, naming, world-shaping imagination. This imagination itself is not entirely controlled by individual conscious choice. Our imagination is socially shaped; we get our repertoire of images from the society's imaginal world, though we also contribute to that world in turn. Many of our ancestors were not just unable to experience a mutually respectful loving relationship between a woman and a man with equal power; they were unable to imagine it. Even for us, society may constrain our ability to imagine a relationship of equal power as sexy. I am famous among my friends for The List, a list I keep of movies in which there is a romance where the man falls in love with the woman for her strengths--her courage, her wit, her intelligence, her physical skill--rather than primarily for her beauty and her dependence on him. This is a short list. The dearth of Hollywood images of what I might call feminist-friendly romance does not, of course, make real-life feminist-friendly romance impossible. In fact, several of the movies on my list are based on real life: Annie Oakley, and Shadowlands, and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. Yet the lack of movies where the man's love is as admiring as the woman's probably has an effect on the fantasy life of the moviegoer. Not to mention the lack of movie images of, say, cross-ethnic romances where ethnicity is not a big deal.

Another reason why sexuality inevitably makes us anxious is that it has to do with the boundaries of the self. Human cultures are all very concerned about defining boundaries-of the group, of the body/self. Purity concerns arise cross-culturally about food, about bodily excretions, about the bleeding of menstruation or of wounds, about sexual acts and sexual emissions, about giving birth, about dead bodies- things that cross the boundary of the body. The feelings about these matters can go so deep in us that it can be difficult to distinguish the severe gross-out we feel in reaction to impurity from moral abhorrence. Mary Douglas, demonstrating the principle that dirt is simply matter that is out of place, proposed the following thought experiment: Imagine spitting into an empty, clean glass until it is full of your saliva. Now imagine drinking from the glass. Most people are seriously grossed out by that thought. Douglas contends that it's because saliva, once it is outside the body, is culturally defined as dirt. What's interesting to me about this thought experiment is that we can't claim that there is anything unnatural or immoral in drinking our own saliva; we're doing it all the time. God intends us to drink our saliva. Our revulsion at the thought of drinking a glassful of it is an indication of the power of purity concerns, even in a highly sophisticated and rationalized society where purity regulations are far less central than they were, say, in ancient Israel.

A great deal of what is said in the Bible about sexual practices comes under the heading of purity regulations, especially the two codes in Leviticus. Because purity is not such a central concern of our religious systems today, and because what purity rules we live by are generally unarticulated and taken for granted, we tend to have difficulty understanding these codes. The food taboos of kosher laws make no sense to us; even Jews have tried to justify them by claiming that they originally were about hygiene, or trichinosis, or contagion. Actually, they were ways of defining the boundary of the group and distinguishing Israel from the Gentiles. When the purity codes condemn sexual practices, for instance, with one of the words translated as 'abomination," we understand that as a word of moral opprobrium, because we're not used to such weight being explicitly placed on a matter of cultic purity. Bill Countryman, in his book Dirt, Greed, and Sex, (3) has a clear discussion of the function of the Old Testament purity codes and the enduring traces of purity concerns around sexuality in New Testament texts. For our purposes here, though, it is enough to say that the anxiety about sexual acts or bodily emissions that cross or blur the boundaries of body or gender is a major factor in motivating both biblical and contemporary attempts to regulate sexual behavior.

Finally, sexuality is problematic because sexual activity with another person involves a high degree of vulnerability and thus risk of harm. We are at least partially naked, with parts of our body that are always otherwise covered revealed to another. We lose control during orgasm, which makes us even more physically vulnerable. We are vulnerable to the passing of disease through intimate physical contact. Women who sleep with men are likely to be aware that their partner has significantly more upper-body strength and that this is an advantage which many, many men have used to dominate and harm the women they sleep with. That knowledge is a vulnerability even when one trusts this particular partner absolutely. Men and women both, in different ways, are vulnerable to being deeply shamed by a partner's insensitivity or rejection. And both men and women in fertile heterosexual partnerships are vulnerable to having their lives profoundly changed by a pregnancy, with women bearing more of that vulnerability as the ones who may get pregnant, who may have to consider abortion, who may have to change their habits for the fetus's sake, who undergo childbirth at their own risk. All this vulnerability has many wonderful consequences in the setting of healthy relationships and supportive communities, of course. The gifts of deeper intimacy that come with loving sex are a direct consequence of shared vulnerability. At the same time, the inescapable vulnerability of sex is one of the reasons why this wonderful gift of God makes us so anxious.

So, let me review: Sexuality is problematic because it is many-layered, bearing in itself complex and self-contradictory levels of meaning from personal, social, and evolutionary history. It is problematic because human sexuality is a matter of human imagination. It raises anxiety because it involves the definition and the crossing of the boundaries of the body and of gender, and it raises anxiety because to act on our sexual feelings with another requires the risk of significant vulnerability. Note that all this is true even if sin were not to enter the picture.

If the first crucial task on the way to an adequate Christian view of sexuality is to acknowledge that our sexuality (not just other people's) is problematic, the second crucial task is to distinguish the problematic from the sinful. There is sin mixed up in much of the weird messiness of human sexuality, of course; but at the same time, I would argue that complexity is God's intent for human life. The many-layeredness of our experience, the permutations and leaps performed by our imagination--these are probably the grounds of our freedom.

Genesis 1 has influenced us to imagine God's creativity as bringing order out of tohu v'bohu and setting up a hierarchy with humans at the pinnacle. The book of Job has a very different take on creation. (4) As the book of Job argues against the deuteronomic view that everyone gets what they deserve, so it also argues against the priestly view of creation as Order, where there's a clear separation between clean and unclean and a clear hierarchy with humanity at the pinnacle. In Job, the chaos-monster is made by God just as humans are (40:15); God swaddles it at its birth (38:8-9). The object lessons of the dumbfounding unknowability of creation are not "our friends the animals"--they are animals that are unclean and wild (with the sole exception of the horse, and the horse is envisaged not as a friend but as a vehicle of war). In Job, creation has no pinnacle. The humans slain on the battlefield appear in God's speech only as food for the vulture's babies (39:30). This is not a faithless or despairing view of humanity's place in God's world: Job is, after all, significant enough for God to show up and respond to his charge. It is, though, a faithful view of creation that accords better with a contemporary scientific view of creation than does Genesis 1. It sees the chaos-monster made as an integral part of the creative process, leaving room for chaos and randomness in the world as God intended it. And it is also more compatible with scientific views in that it is not anthropocentric.

Just as I would argue that Job provides a more adequate theodicy than the Deuteronomist, so I would argue that Job provides a view of God's creative process that is more helpful to a discussion of sexuality than that of the priestly writer. It is helpful particularly in distinguishing the problematic per se from the sinful. God made a problematic world, a messy world, with chaos built in. That in and of itself is not the result of sin.

So suppose I'm aroused by reading about a rape, or suppose I fantasize coercive sex when I'm having sex with my husband. This could be seen as personal sin, especially if I identify with the rapist. It could be seen as social sin; our sinful society eroticizes the act of overpowering and being overpowered. But maybe this egodystonic arousal is partly God's responsibility. Without conceding all truth to the sociobiologists, we can allow that there may be an evolutionary history to the sexual appeal of the show of power. Plus, all physical arousal is physiologically indistinguishable, so the thrill of fear is easily sexualized. The arousal of fear can heighten sexual arousal, if I am able to construe the situation sexually. Not only that, my first loves, my parents, necessarily overpowered me (though they also played with me in mutually respectful ways); that leads me to be able to imaginatively experience coercion as compatible with love. I see all of these factors as problematic, but I can see none of them as results of sin.

And what about being aroused by, say, seeing a person in uniform? Or by riding horseback? Or by just imagining riding horseback? Or by watching Denzel Washington or hearing Sean Connery in a movie? (You'll understand, I picked those two names totally at random!) None of this has much to do with mutually respectful, agapeic, committed relationships. Can we understand it as having anything to do with God? Only if we think God's interest is more in complexity than in purity, and in imagination and play as well as in other-directed love.

Given that God made a messy world, where chaos and randomness play as important a role as order, and given that God put us in the middle of the mess and not on top of it in control, it behooves us to develop a sense of humor about the weirdness of our sexuality. Not nasty humor, which shames the victim, but kind humor, which shares the shame, and by sharing it makes light of it. In the church context, sexuality is generally all taken Very Seriously; there is no room for experimentation, even (or especially!) in youth, and little room for imagination. Sex still has to have a Legitimate Purpose, which can now be growth in intimacy within a committed relationship as well as the making of babies. We do not count pleasure itself as a legitimate purpose. No fun for the sake of fun. Of course there are moral issues galore in fantasy and games--but we shouldn't let those moral concerns take the fun out of our play (as we leach the humor from the Bible). The family-systems people see humorlessness as an anxiety sympto m; the lack of kind humor is the sign of a sick system, where the anxiety is high. That's an interesting measure to apply to our attempts at sex education.

As the church has long been anxious about sexuality, it has long been opposed to the culture's ways of acknowledging the messiness of sexuality with humor. Merry Wiesner, writing on the history of weddings in Christian Europe, says that in the late Middle Ages both church and civil authorities tried to restrict the festivities around weddings, the church primarily because of moral objections to the lewd jokes, erotic songs, and other raucous behavior. Protestant civil authorities went even farther in their attempts to limit wedding celebrations; they "prohibited the reciting of obscene poetry, and forbade the guests to accompany the bride and groom to their marriage bed, a practice that had been the occasion of much drinking and joking." (5) Now, no doubt these festivities were often morally problematic, with alcohol abuse and sexist joking and some cruel humor. But the church needs to recognize that sexual joking is also a gift of God, a way of recognizing the weirdness of sexuality as something we didn't ch oose and can only laugh about, a way of sharing and defusing the shame, a way of allowing that after all we are not in control, and maybe God doesn't mean us to be.

Along with a sense of humor, we need as church to develop our sense of play and imagination. I don't want to idealize play and imagination, here; again, this is the best and the worst of humanness. Play is about making and entering an imaginal world, where we can test out capacities and ways of relating we might use in the real world. We can also imaginatively construct alternate realities, where Jerusalem is at peace and the streets are full of playing children ... or, as in Joseph's dream, where all my older brothers finally bow down to me. We don't pay attention to dreams any more, and we don't do much in church to nurture the imagination. We rarely help people develop the ability to pray with the aid of imagined pictures, or encourage them to draw a response to a biblical story, or get them to learn from children's imaginative worlds. There are not many positive images of playfulness in Christian tradition...but there is a strong thread of connecting Easter with play. There's the dance-cum-ballgame played inside the cathedral at Auxerre on Easter, (6) and the bishop of Chester playing egg-toss with the choir during the Easter services. (7) There's the legend of Mary handing out colored eggs to children for them to play with as she comes from the tomb with the news of the resurrection. (8) And for many of our children, there's AsIan, playing tag with Lucy and Susan on the morning of his resurrection. (9) Could we revive that connection, of Easter to play? Bring play inside the church at Easter? It may seem a long way from sex, but it's about body, and fantasy, and the safety to imagine, and the freedom to be silly even (especially!) in the middle of the sacred.

But let me end with something that's a little more clearly related to how we deal with sexuality in the church setting: the matter of sex education. Christine Gudorf, in Body, Sex and Pleasure, (10) argues that the purpose of most American sex education is to get kids to postpone sexual intercourse by teaching them the risks and dangers of sex. It does not talk about sex as exciting and intensely pleasurable. This is not honest about our experience of sex, nor is it accurate to theirs. In church-based sex education, we tell them their sexuality is a gift of God, but we don't suggest how that gift can be enjoyed this side of a possible future marriage. I'm not saying here that the way to do that would be to bless intercourse outside of committed relationships; rather, I think we need to start with a theology of pleasure, and a positive valuation of fantasy and solitary sexual play, and then talk about what sexual play with others entails. We also need to talk about the realities of relationship, about how resp ect and passion can and should coexist, about how jealousy is not a sign of true love but a warning sign of violence, about how boys and girls get boxed in by their respective gender expectations-boys pushing as far as they can, girls giving double messages and faking pleasure. We need to talk about these things with a sense of humor: I can imagine, for instance, having contests to come up with the funniest dirty joke that isn't sexist or demeaning. We need to critique the culture with them, looking together at the images in ads, arguing about which movies might go on The List. None of this is dealt with in most public school sex education, where, in an attempt to avoid contentious issues of values, they stick to biological facts shorn of all their personal and social context of meaning. If we can't talk about values in the church, where can we? And if we can't find a way to talk about values without being moralistic, how can we claim to be Lutheran? (Speaking of being Lutheran, when I have asked groups of ch urch people what theological beliefs or values they think we should convey in sex education, almost never has anyone suggested grace. Whether this is because grace has to do only with salvation and not with daily life or whether it is because parents really don't want adolescent kids thinking about sex to be assured that God loves them no matter what, I leave to you to decide.)

It may well be, of course, that we can't do real sex ed in the local congregation, because there are only two kids, or there are no adults willing to devote time to learning how to teach this. So we may have to resort to retreats and camp programs for some kids. But somewhere, somehow, kids deserve from us more than warnings about sex-too-soon and yet another idealized picture of God-given sexuality that doesn't have room for the complexity of their experience or ours. God made a messy world, full of wild animals and uncontrollable weather and undeserved suffering and ecstatic pleasure and other stuff that doesn't fit into our idea of order. This is the world in which we have to meet our children, with honesty and imagination, with deep respect, with moral seriousness and the grace of humor to handle our anxiety.

I hope, by now, I have made the answer to the multiple-choice question of my title clear. Sexuality is deeply problematic, it is God's gift, and it is a hoot. (d) All of the above.

(1.) Merton Strommen et al., A Study of Generations (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1972), 367, #13.

(2.) Christopher Durang, "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You," in The Best Short Plays 1981, ed. Stanley Richards (Radnor, PA: Chilton Book Company, 1981), 125.

(3.) L. William Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).

(4.) What I say in this paragraph about Job's counter-priestly view of creation is the result of my having heard Diane Jacobson speak on the book of Job, in presentations such as her Luther-Northwestern Convocation Lecture (February 9, 1992), "Creation, Birth, and the Radical Ecology of the Book of Job."

(5.) Merry Wiesner-Hanks, "Weddings," Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 266.

(6.) I learned about this from Katharine Gibson's story, "Apollon, A Gardener," in The Easter Book of Legends and Stories, ed. Alice Hazeltine and Elva Smith (New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Co., 1947), 130-45. It is also described briefly in a quotation from Yvonne Rokseth in A Triduum Sourcebook III, ed. Joan Halmo and Frank Henderson (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1996), 424-25. Rokseth's discussion of various ancient traditions of church-based dance and play at Easter also tells of the eventual suppression of such customs by (my term) the Piety Police--a suppression reminiscent of the battle of the official church against rowdiness at weddings, noted by Wiesner. In the Triduum Sourcebook III, see also the mention of "paschal laughter" on p. 475: there was a tradition that on Easter preachers should, at some point in their sermon, make the people laugh.

(7.) Venetia Newall, An Egg at Easter (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 334. Said to have happened in the church as late as 1839; later the game was moved outside to the village green.

(8.) A Yugoslav legend. An Egg at Easter, 215-16.

(9.) C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 133.

(10.) Christine Gudorf, Body, Sex and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1994), 52-54, 155-59.