One of the unexpected pleasures of preaching from a lectionary cycle is discovering how often the texts have something to say about the events of the day. Whether through coincidence, divine guidance, or the simple ability of humans to draw connections, scripture proves amazingly relevant from week to week.
Case in point: the readings for the eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost and Roman Polanski, of all people.
Ordinarily, there wouldn’t be much to say about the arrest of the veteran filmmaker on 31-year-old charges. Though Polanski’s victim wants the original charges dismissed, the fact remains, Polanski skipped out on his bail, and has yet to face the court for that. So unless we’re going to encourage hiding in France for decades as a remedy to being sentenced to jail time, there doesn’t seem much room for comment from the pulpit here. But consider what this week’s Old Testament lesson has to tell us:
Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ … So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.’
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.
This, along with Genesis 1:26-28 is often taken by conservative religious believers as a repudiation of homosexuality. At its least sophisticated, the argument runs that because the various body parts fit together, that is the natural (and only acceptable) order of things. A more complex version suggests that God created humanity to encounter difference even in something as basic as sexual identity.
But a closer reading indicates that this passage is not about homosexuality at all: “‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’” God created Eve to be Adam’s companion and equal, according to this reading. They “become one flesh” in mutuality and covenant.
That, at least, is the reading of no less an authority than Jesus of Nazareth:
Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ He answered them, ‘What did Moses command you?’ They said, ‘Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’
You don’t hear much condemnation of divorce from the anti-gay crowd, at least not in the specific targeted way they’ve gone after homosexuality as a sin. That may not be a coincidence.
But notice here that Jesus has utterly nothing to say about same-sex marriage as a threat to opposite-sex couples. In fact, sex doesn’t come into the equation at all with him. It’s the breaking of the covenant that concerns this rabbi, the “hardness of heart” that turns couples away from one another.
Which brings us back to Mr. Polanski. Despite what his partisans might say, he was prosecuted not for the sin of having a sexual peccadillo, but for drugging and sexually assaulting a child. That broke the social contract that says middle-aged men ought not rape 13-year-olds, first of all. But it also broke the covenant of Genesis, of Moses and Jesus, who understood that sexual relationships are just that: relationships meant to bind people to one another. Even consensual sexual encounters for the sake of simple gratification cannot hope to meet this standard, let alone situations like Polanski’s.
That’s a high bar. As many as 95% of all Americans have sex before marriage. Though not many of us are as dissolute as Polanski, nor could many of us truthfully claim to be interested in getting it on solely for the purposes of binding covenant. They don’t call them “one-night stands” for nothing. All of which is not to try to put new limits on sexual expression. Lord knows those have gone nowhere.
But scripture does call its readers to accountability. This week’s lessons, for example, might pressure good Christian folk to explain why it is that with the apparent destruction of the sexual covenant everywhere you look, so many Christians spend so much of their time focused on particular people who are trying to uphold their relationships with one another. The Bible might also compel some people to ask why they take so much interest in Roman Polanski’s failures while ignoring their own.
After all, the famed director apparently will have to face justice, even if it is far delayed. The 95% of Americans guilty of canoodling outside of marital bonds probably are not going to find themselves in the same court. But given what sexual relationships are like today and always, one has to wonder if they’re not paying for their sins one way or another. At least one does when reading scripture honestly.
