The Community That’s NOT Constituted by Sex: Our Missing Theology of Celibacy – by Mark H. Rich

Read Olin Sletto’s Essay, “What Constitutes ‘Welcome’?”
Read Andreas Teich’s Essay, “LGBTQ Ministry and the ELCA”

LGBTQ Ministry in the ELCA I

NOTE TO READERS:  This week on ecclesio.com, three Lutheran pastors offer perspectives on ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America since the 2009 Churchwide Assembly vote to allow for the ordination of practicing gay and lesbian persons.  Mark Rich begins the conversation; Olin Sletto and Andreas Teich offer their insights on Wednesday.

I and many smart Christians I know have been frustrated for a long time over the obsessions over sex that have soaked up and wasted so much of the energy and time of the churches. As the size and social importance of the mainline churches wane and as the needed work on discipleship languishes, we fiddle with sex and seem unable to do otherwise.

The excellent Christopher Lasch described this malaise back in 1994 (speaking here about American politics):

Most of my recent work comes back in one way or another to the question of whether democracy has a future… Americans are much less sanguine about the future than they used to be, and with good reason. The decline of manufacturing and the consequent loss of jobs; the shrinkage of the middle class; the growing number of the poor; the rising crime rate; the flourishing traffic in drugs; the decay of the cities – the bad news goes on and on. No one has a plausible solution to these intractable problems, and most of what passes for political discussion doesn’t even address them. Fierce ideological battles are fought over peripheral issues. Elites, who define the issues, have lost touch with the people… The unreal, artificial character of our politics reflects their insulation from the common life, together with a secret conviction that the real problems are insoluble. [emphasis mine]  The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

Looking again at Lasch’s list of ills, I see that some progress was in fact made on a few – for example, the decay of some of the cities and the rising crime rate. But it has to be immediately added that this latter was mainly addressed by locking up huge numbers of young black men, not through a real solution.

The fecklessness that Lasch described about the larger society describes too well the mainline Protestant churches now. Our battles over sex have been exactly those fierce ideological battles fought over peripheral issues. Those battles over sex are not somehow inevitable. They were quite deliberately chosen and cultivated by Republican and evangelical activists beginning in the late 1970s in order to skew our political and theological discourses and so cover up the revolt of the elites that has ruled our politics for the last 30 years. As Chesterton observed wryly, “The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all.” And that escape by the elites from government and, I must add, from the gospel as well has been accomplished under demonic cover of decades of futile and unnecessary arguments over sex and biblical authority.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is more than adequate to this challenge, but we must have the wit to know it and the spirit to apply it. The gospel has very much to say about rich and poor – indeed, these issues are central to the gospel – and that message has been very much thwarted by the peripheral fights over sex. We Christians will never see straight about our role in society and the gospel force that we are called to bring to it until we put sexuality issues back in their peripheral place. And we will never see clear about sexuality until we have a proper appreciation of the significance and force of celibacy, which is an essential part of the gospel contribution to our human discourses over sex. It is this appreciation of celibacy that will remind us that the church of Jesus Christ is neither defined nor constituted by sex at all, that the church is a wholly spiritual creation, and that most of our fights over sex are actually unnecessary.

The main thing I noticed about the ELCA’s social statement on sexuality upon first reading it is how it completely avoids discussing celibacy. The statement only contains one brief reference to celibacy as something gay people must observe, according to the lights of some other anti-gay Christians. This silence about celibacy obviously won’t do. There are many good things in the statement, but this omission is nearly sinful. The only thing saving it from outright sinfulness is that Protestant Christians are so utterly clueless about celibacy. It’s almost unfair to expect anything sensible from them about celibacy.

This is not the venue for a full discussion of celibacy, but let me make five points about celibacy. First, it has no direct reference to issues of gay or straight simply because celibate persons do not engage in sexual relations altogether. As Paul rightly put it, a celibate person lives her or his life primarily toward God and, by God’s call, eschews the closeness of human sexual relations in order to privilege their relation with God (cf. 1 Cor. 7). Second, celibacy is a witness forward to the resurrection of all, in which sexuality will no longer be necessary because death has been cancelled (Mark 12). In this way celibate persons are also a witness to the rest of us of the power of the resurrection proleptically present now. Third, it also witnesses, in a uniquely personal way, to the paradigmatic role of Jesus Christ in the church and in the lives of his followers. Several prophets were celibate before Jesus, but now with the gift of the Spirit his prophetic office becomes broadly spread out among his people. Fourth, we live in a culture in which sex has once again become a god. No other phrase adequately describes the obsessive mediatisation of sex that we are witnessing in our days, causing both its hyper-presence and its cheapening. Nothing witnesses to the spiritual fullness of human life apart from sex (not over against sex) more strongly and clearly than celibacy. The witness of celibacy demonstrates that the divine status the culture bestows on sex is at best unnecessary and at worst idolatry. Finally, celibacy is a mark of the church’s wholly spiritual being and calling. This is the point we have to pursue further.

In a culture soaked in and obsessed with sex, we cannot overstress that the church is a community that is not constituted in any way by sex. We are literally created by God through the Word of God, both verbally and sacramentally enacted, and sex has literally nothing to do with this. This is why the gospels go to such extraordinary lengths to avoid any association between Jesus and sex. Not only does he not have sex himself, he is not even brought into being through sex. Contrary to the accusation of the sex industrialists, this is not a hatred of sex. It is a strong spirituality that simply does not depend upon sex. It is not anti-sex, it is simply the power of God, of which celibacy is one powerful witness.

So the very perversity of the current sex battles is that by engaging in them we are in effect sexualizing the church, re-defining it in sexual ways, making the church into the guardian and bastion of heterosexuality and family life. That may be Mormonism, but it is neither the orthodox Christian gospel nor the genuine church. We cannot assert this too much in the face of so much sheer worldly foolishness.

The decision of the 2009 Churchwide Assembly of the ELCA to allow the ordination of clergy who are practicing homosexuals neither hurts nor harms the church, precisely because the church itself is created by the Word of God through the Spirit of God and not by sex. Christians, whether gay or straight, are not made Christian by their sexuality but by the Word of God, Christ.

The gift of celibacy is an essential part of the church’s forthright witness of the gospel itself. It helps empower our witness to the full spiritual dignity of human life and culture that counters the sex-obsessed and personally-degrading culture around us. People need to know that life, society, and culture do not have to be defined by any of the big gods of sex, money, death, and power, but can be founded instead on the (non-sexual) love of God. This gospel is nothing less than life out of death.

So can we now please get back to the major fights of the gospel in our time against the gods of Mammon and Molech? Because they are really creating hell on earth right now.

Read Olin Sletto’s Essay, “What Constitutes ‘Welcome’?”
Read Andreas Teich’s Essay, “LGBTQ Ministry and the ELCA”