DESIRE 101- Part 6

Totally Yours
Copyright © 2006

Like the rest of creation, our bodies and the bodies of other people are meant to be understood as God’s love to us. Bodies are the way we see and experience each other; and we are those who were created to show forth the dazzling glory of God. This explains why the human form is so darn fascinating and enjoyable.

Remember how it works. It is God’s glory that truly attracts our hearts. Imagine a dark and cold piece of glass that suddenly sparkles with shimmering splendor when a bright light is placed behind it. Creation shines forth with beauty and splendor because it is being lit from behind by the glory of God himself. Every one of us, following the example of our Father Adam, have seen those sparkling stones (whether money, knowledge, nature, relationships… or whatever God’s gift may be) and have sought to take them and use them apart from the Light. We sneak them down from their backlit pedestal and tuck them into our pocket so that we can “really” enjoy them. Can you guess what happens when we get into the next room and pull them out again? They don’t look the same. They appear and feel cold and dark. They aren’t beautiful anymore. Should we be surprised?

Do you remember how the manna gathered against God’s instruction turned to worms?[i] If we grasp at creation apart from God, we not only miss out on God but also loose our enjoyment of creation as well, at least in the long run. If we seek Him through the joys of creation, then…well, we receive them both. Seems an easy choice, doesn’t it? But people make the wrong one all the time. Can you see why sin is called folly?

What is the key to truly enjoying the many gifts of God? It is to thankfully see them as his gifts- to bless them. The opposite of joyfully receiving a gift is to whine and plot for something that wasn’t given.

Men, women and the loving acts they were fashioned for can be wonderfully glorious. But they have also been refashioned by sinful people so that they feel and look cold and dark. We need to receive them as God intended them. We have to see them correctly. We need to understand what part of God’s glory they reflect.

For people who just don’t understand, there are always rules. But rules often mislead us into thinking that what we should and shouldn’t do is an arbitrary decision. Can you imagine how odd it would be to tell a child that a toy truck mustn’t be bounced? I can see it happening, though. Can’t you? Why? Isn’t it because we expect a child to be a little shaky when it comes to reality? How much better is it when a child has learned for himself what a truck and ball are for? When he does, he won’t try to load dirt into the ball or smack a truck with a bat. Both are a really silly use of balls and trucks. The key is to realize what a ball and a truck are, what a ball and truck mean, and so what a ball and truck are for.

(Just so you know, our problem isn’t simply that we don’t understand. I might have given you that impression. It’s worse than that. We are unhappy with the fact that we can’t determine the nature of reality for ourselves. We hate that someone else is Creation’s Creator. We resent that we aren’t in charge. There’s nothing we can do to change the fact that God is God and we’re not; but people never seem to tire of pretending that it isn’t true. The result is that we live in a make believe world and distort the only reality that truly is.)

O.K., So we’ve seen that men and women, both apart and together, are special image bearers of the “oneness” and “manyness” of the God who exists as love. But there’s also another way that God’s people have considered the relationships within the Trinity. Instead of focusing on how God is within the Trinity itself, this perspective looks at the way God works outside of himself in creating, preserving and redeeming the world.[ii] This is perfectly proper since God has revealed much about this aspect of himself. We just need to remember that what God does truly reveals who he is. Anyway, when we look at his works we see a very special relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. Theologians call these types of relationships covenants.

One of the best places to see this covenant in action is in the way our Lord describes his task as something he has been given to do.[iii] Given by whom? Given by God the Father. There is both obedience and hierarchy. The Father commands and Christ obeys. Some have seen this as an indication that Our Lord is less than the Father. They do so only because they have believed the modern idea that being equal in value means that persons must be equal in functions. Our God teaches us differently.

This relationship between the Three has as its focus the glory and blessing of the other. Remember we’re talking now about what they do. It is the Son’s life to obey the Father. It is the Father’s delight to bless the Son. It is a covenant of love in which each of the persons of the Trinity gives himself wholly to the others, denies himself to bless the others, and humbles himself to glorify the others.[iv] This covenantal relationship mirrors the unity of being we’ve already discussed. In fact, in John 17 Christ says that he and the Father are one. He then prays that we (his people) will be one with him and one with each other just as he and the Father are one.[v] This can’t be talking about the oneness of being we’ve talked about before. As close as we may come to another person, we can never be one as Christ and the Father are one. They are one. What must St. John mean?

St. Paul gives us the answer when he declares that marriage is an image of the union between Christ and his people.[vi] (We ought to be expecting it by now; but did you notice God has done it again. Something intrinsic to who He is has been imaged into the fabric of creation. Men make covenants because God himself exists in covenant.) Marriage says something about Christ and his Church; and so about Christ and his Father. Likewise, the Father and Son say something about Christ and his Church; and so, something about marriage.

What might the Father’s actions toward the Son and Christ’s actions towards the Church teach us about marriage? Commitment! The Father has committed his all into the hands of the Son. Christ is His Word. He is the final declaration of who and what God is. If he were to muff it up, there would be no undoing of it. But God’s reputation was always safe. Don’t you agree?

Christ took complete responsibility for creation. In fact he became (he put on) creation. What she did, he was willing to answer for. Should there have been any doubt about how things would turn out for her? Was there ever a chance that things would get to hard or messy for her husband to deal with? No. There’s no way Christ would let that happen. How do we know that there was total commitment? Because we know there was complete love.

This is what marriage was created to make visible: God’s total loving commitment.

Remember how I said that the Covenantal Union is tied to God’s Union of Being: God’s actions reveal who he is? If lovemaking images this union of being and marriage images the covenantal union, what must men and women do to keep from telling lies about God with their bodies and their relationships? How must lovemaking be viewed, if we are to receive it as the gift that God truly offers? How do we keep it from turning to worms?

Lovemaking and marriage go together. Not only like chocolate chip cookies and milk (although they should), but like heat and light. There should never be one without the other. If we find either alone, something unnatural is going on.

When two bodies unite they are declaring “I belong to you, forever. I give myself to you totally.” How sad to know that someone is saying such a thing but lying the whole time. What a terrible thing to say about God.

The desire to be with someone we love is so strong, that often people want to say this thing with their bodies before they are willing to say it with their mouths. They believe that because they are ‘in love’, they are committed. But isn’t that what a marriage is…a serious “I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is” commitment?[vii] Isn’t it a vow before God and witnesses that you belong to each other alone… “til death do us part?” If people are avoiding marriage, aren’t they avoiding commitment? If they do have a commitment, is it really any more than “I’ll stay with you until I decide I don’t want to stay anymore?”

Do you see the lie in refusing to actually commit while saying “I belong to you forever- I give myself to you totally” with our bodies?

“I promise!” looses it meaning on the lips of someone who habitually breaks their promises. No matter how sincere they might be, they have no way of really sharing what’s in their heart.

A new habit of integrity can repair the damage, but the heart remains mute until the healing is complete.

It may sound as if our bodies just “say” things. This isn’t really true. What we do with our bodies brings to pass what it is we are saying. For example, do you hug someone just to let them know that you care for them or to actually care for them even more by doing it? Isn’t it both? Making love doesn’t just say people want to be one, in a very real sense it makes them belong to each other.

This is a big deal. And everyone feels the truth of it.

Because the pleasure that can be received is so intense, sometimes people who don’t even care for each other at all try to act as if what they are doing with their bodies doesn’t mean anything. They know it’s not so, though. People who have given themselves away over and over to many different people often arrive at a place where they feel hollow and empty. Do you know why? Giving yourself totally to someone who isn’t willing to really, in every way, give themselves back is a sure way to end up used and hurt.

Lovemaking has been compared to Scotch tape. It was meant to hold two people together. But what happens to a piece of tape you try to use over and over. How well does it bind? Do you see what I mean?

There’s a beautiful word for this ideal. It is Fidelity. Its beauty comes from all the wonderful virtues that it fulfillment requires: Faithfulness, justice, compassion, self-control, and above all, self sacrificing love. Each of these things is offered to the other when we offer to them our Fidelity.

But fidelity to our husband or wife is also fidelity to the thousand of men and women who live around us. Faithful love making binds a husband and wife together and opens them up to the likelihood of children. Lovemaking is the warm fire around which a household gathers. When you consider that households are the bricks of society, then you can see that all great nations have their foundations laid between the sheets of a million marriage beds.

Like any other great power, it is suicidal to allow sexual desire to go unbridled. Sometimes people act as if its power or “naturalness” makes attempts to control it unnatural. But they’ve got it exactly backwards. It’s simply not true that our lack of real fidelity is no one else’s business. Every honeymoon evening a man and woman join hands with the other men and women whose great round dance spins out home, community, nation and world. To love only one person is to dance with all the others. It is to take and keep our place in the great frolic. When we turn loose, when we reach to pluck another from the line, when we take the gift without joining the dance at all, we dance alone; and home, community and nation begin to break apart and turn to shadow. [viii]

We can simplify this a great deal. God has written rules for those who haven’t grown up enough to see what that gorgeous man or woman mean. These rules are very clear. Don’t make love with anyone but your husband or wife.

But simplifying it into dos and don’ts might allow us to miss the excitement and beauty of it all. For those who want to understand the delicious world that he has given us God says “Remember. Love-making is at the heart of marriage. Marriage is the image of God’s Self-Giving love. Eat it up. Devour it. But protect it so it doesn’t spoil.”

For many people this part of their lives is shameful and embarrassing. Not because they’ve done anything wrong, but simply because it is what it is. I hope you can see that the Trinitarian understanding of sexuality makes the important and dignified glory of this part of our lives very clear. But that presents another problem for some people. If this way of loving carries so much spiritual significance, then perhaps it is being misused unless it is performed with the solemnity and seriousness of a Levite entering into the Tabernacle of God. Perhaps it misleads unless each and every sexual encounter is as ecstatic as our Triune God’s existence.

Maybe you can figure this one out on your own, but let me give you a hint. Everything and every action bear the awesome weight of communicating God’s glory. The question is really about whether joy, laughter and play are legitimate images of God’s existence. Many Christians believe they’re not. These people are very fond of gray flannel, cold morning showers and boiled chicken. But I believe they are mistaken. Do you know why? Because I believe that God created the heavens and the earth- all things visible and invisible. Not only did he give us what we need, but he gave us that which is pure extravagant pleasure- peacock feathers, umpteen varieties of cheese and… the beauty of men and women who will never belong to us.

Christ pointed to children, not craftsmen or ascetics, as examples of his Kingdom. And this seems perfectly fitting when you consider which activity best images how our Triune God spent eternity. I can remember you asking me long ago “What did God do before he made the world?” Do you remember what I told you? Was he most like a minister gravely and diligently preaching through the Law or does a group of laughing children lost in a game of “ring-around-the-rosy” come closer to God’s life within himself?

Painful sacrifice can glorify our God, but only in a fallen world. Laughter and play, however, were before the world began. Loving roughhousing, giggles, and the healing forgetfulness of the outside world that only a well played game can provide don’t lessen the bedroom’s sanctity- they are part of its Holiness.[ix]


[i] Exodus 16:20
[ii] Theologians refer to the first as the Ontological Trinity and the second as the Economical Trinity
[iii] John 8:29
[iv] Smith, Ralph. Eternal Covenant (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2003) pg 52
[v] John 17:11, 20-23
[vi] Ephesians 5:23-32
[vii] Genesis 2:12-25, Mark 10:6-9
[viii]
[ix] “The maxim for any love affair is ‘Play and Pray’; but on the whole do not pray when you are playing and do not play when you are praying” Charles Williams as quoted by Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1999) p126


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