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STEAMY SERMONS IN THE SUMMERTIME

It’s a dilemma faced by every public speaker: how to “hook” your audience. And I’ll never forget the way one orator achieved it. It was a Christian summer camp meeting in Mississippi, one of those weeklong events where believers gather for all the great music and preaching and watermelon and homemade ice cream. Some people stay in tents, others bring in their RVs; the local motels are all booked solid. But there comes that moment when, after the song service and the announcements and the special music, the coordinator points to you and says: “You’re on!”

And in this case the speaker had to face an auditorium full of teenagers. It was hot; they were sweaty; they’d played a lot of basketball that day, and as soon as this guy would shut up and sit down, they could resume the game. Or the PDA with their girlfriends. (That’s “public display of affection,” for those of you who’ve never been to camp meeting.) And standing up front before the restless crowd, this guy knew all that. He knew he had to jolt them, get their attention.

And so he did a reliable thing. He opened his Bible and he turned to the Old Testament chapter of II Samuel 11. Which is part of the holy Word of God. And for the next 30 minutes he treated those kids to the steamiest, raunchiest, X-rated, graphic depiction imaginable of the story of David and Bathsheba. I mean, the way this youth pastor told it, you couldn’t have run it on HBO or Showtime. He omitted no colorful details; he didn’t censor a thing. In fact, he embellished II Samuel until you would hardly recognize the tale. And when he was done, the kids all went “Wow!” . . . and staggered out into the hot Mississippi night, their faces flushed with excitement.

You wouldn’t think that a Christian preacher could violate the Bible by telling a story from the Bible, but listen to the apostle Paul’s counsel here in Ephesians 5:3, 4 . . . and you tell me:

“But among you there must be not even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.” Now verse four: “Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving.”

We’re told that the Greek word aischrotes only occurs once, right here, in the New Testament, and it means “revolting, shameful conduct,” and also “filthy, obscene speech.”

Immediately, as we read these verses, you and I both realize what a delicate Wednesday dilemma I’m in even now. Our topic is, essentially, “careful talking about sex.” Abusing the privilege of talking about sex. And here, in talking about TALKING about sex . . . we’re talking about sex! Am I doing the same thing as that Mississippi preacher? Taking the low road just to jolt you, to wake you up as you drive to work?

There are a couple of ideas to consider here — and we should, in light of the above, do so extremely carefully. First of all, friend, the Bible certainly isn’t prudish. The “sex” stories are obviously right there in the Word of God; II Samuel 11 stares us in the face. Many a teenaged boy has found all of these stories, and dog-eared back a page corner so he and his friends could snicker over them later. But these true-life experiences are there to teach us sober, important lessons. Sex is a powerful force, a wonderful, God-given drive — we’ll return to that in a moment — and the Bible doesn’t shy away. There is nothing wrong with people discussing it, or a preacher expounding about it. And let me even say that it’s all right to smile. We found a marvelous paragraph from C. S. Lewis’ old book, The Four Loves, and he writes poetically and very frankly as follows:

“We must not be totally serious about Venus. Indeed we can’t be totally serious without doing violence to our humanity.” Now notice this: “It is not for nothing that every language and literature in the world is full of jokes about sex. Many of them may be dull or disgusting and nearly all of them are old. But . . . banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess instead.”

I hope every married Christian couple can remember with a smile an amorous encounter where something went amusingly wrong. It’s all right to laugh and appreciate the silly things we do while trying to express or “make” love to that person God gave us. But we all know that there is thoughtfulness, and cheerfulness, and delight . . . and then there is also shallow and low and ugly. I don’t want to pick on HBO or Showtime or Warner Brothers, but there are on our TV screens and in the books that are sold at the airport a million depictions of what Christians rightly and protectively call “the act of love” . . . and the beauty has been totally destroyed. You know it and I know it.

In his Tyndale New Testament Commentary, Francis Foulkes refers to this warning of Paul’s — where God’s good gifts are taken down from heaven to hell.

“Now suddenly,” he writes, “we are turned from the contemplation of the self-giving, sacrificial love of Christ to love’s perversion in adultery and sexual abuse. . . . ‘Immorality’ and sexual perversion of almost every kind might be included under the word porneia” — what does that little bit of Greek remind you of? — “translated fornication in [the King James]; it involves all that works against the life-long union of one man and one woman within the sanctity of the marriage bond. Such immorality may be regarded either as uncleanness, or as covetousness.”

Let’s go back to these two verses in Ephesians and realize together that what Paul is really condemning here is the prostituting, or cheapening, of God’s good gifts. We’ve already mentioned that good sex is a holy thing. But then there is immorality and pornography. A desire to work hard and earn money and buy things is positive; in fact, we just studied last week, at the tail end of Ephesians 4, that God’s people are commanded to work and save. But then there is greed. Good gift – wrong use. There is such a thing as good conversation: cheerful visiting by the fireplace, sharing Jesus Christ with a friend, delightful banter and wordplay and puns and riddles and innocent humor around the lunch table. But here in verse four, Paul reminds us that there is also “obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking.” A good gift taken down and stained in the satanic sewers.

Listen to how the beautiful Message paraphrase instructs us in this art of high conversation:

“Though some tongues just love the taste of gossip, Christians have better uses for language than that. Don’t talk dirty or silly. That kind of talk doesn’t fit our style. Thanksgiving is our dialect.”

Friend, I know there are times when “silly” is all right. There is, perhaps, a birthday party where a bit of “wit” or even a taste of loving “roast” is warmly appreciated. So this involves the ever-difficult fine line, the shade of gray. Let’s faithfully remember the always safe “WWJD” — what would Jesus do? Would He tell this joke, or even laugh at it? Christ enjoyed happiness and humor and parties; He was a marvelous storyteller and people loved to be around Him. But somehow He always knew how to keep even laughter on the high road, never the demeaning or trashy one.

It’s funny how research detours sometimes help you out. We were trying to find that C. S. Lewis quote about the humor in romance, which is buried in a compilation book containing The Four Loves. But one section over, in another bestseller of his, Reflections on the Psalms, is this equally helpful advice:

“A Christian would be wise,” he writes, “to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful and so forth. Not because we are ‘too good’ for them. In a sense because we are not good enough. We are not good enough to cope with all the temptations, not clever enough to cope with all the problems, which an evening spent in such society produces. The temptation is to condone, to connive at; by our words, looks and laughter, to ‘consent.’ . . . We shall hear vile stories told as funny; not merely licentious stories but (to me far more serious and less noticed) stories which the teller could not be telling unless he was betraying someone’s confidence.” Can we all say “ouch” right there? “. . . Things we hold sacred will be mocked. Cruelty will be slyly advocated by the assumption that its only opposite is ‘sentimentality.’ The very presuppositions of any possible good life — all disinterested motives, all heroism, all genuine forgiveness — will be, not explicitly denied (for then the matter could be discussed), but assumed to be phantasmal, idiotic, believed in only by children.”

What do we do then? Sometimes silence is a gracious rebuke. Sometimes a few well-chosen words — “I just don’t agree with that” — can stimulate a positive discussion. Sometimes you do have to walk away, at the risk of “seeming a prig,” as Lewis puts it.

One commentator pointed out that the apostle Paul must smile as even he indulges in a play on words right here, suggesting that God’s people trade in eutrapelia, “the grace of WIT,” for eucharistic, “the TRUER grace of thanksgiving.”