Fidelity has to be Achieved [“Faith at Work” part VII]
2/22/48
Scripture: Matthew 5: 27-32
Text: Exodus 20: 14; “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
There is a popular mental association of the word “morality” with sex behavior. That is what is meant by many people when they use the word “morality.” A newspaper speaks of someone having been arraigned on a “morals” charge, and it is immediately understood by the reader that what is meant is serious misconduct in the relations between the sexes.
There may even be some few people who suppose that the chief function of religion is to legislate and regulate this particular area of human behavior. All of which is grotesque and false in its emphasis.
Morality is not one particular set of human acts. It is a matter of all human actions and of the attitudes which prompt our actions. Moral questions are matters concerning decent life in its entirety. The relationship between the sexes is but one small fraction of the whole area of human morality.
The falsity of our popular use of language at this point is evident when we note that a person may be wholly innocent of any sexual offense and yet be an evident evil person. The free employment of slander and tale-bearing gossip may reveal a detestable character in one who has never committed adultery, nor came near doing so. Popular speech is thus wrong in making sexual offenses equivalent to immorality.
However there is a partial justification - or at least explanation - for the ordinary language in the fact that sexual corruption has been shown in history repeatedly as a symptom of a sick and decaying society. It is serious. The right ordering of conduct between the sexes is so important to any culture that any culture which fails to deal with the problem realistically is likely to go to pieces.
Gross sexual indulgence has been shown, as in the later periods of ancient Rome, to be the symptom of a rotting civilization and the cause of further decay. A rotten civilization puts an absurd emphasis on unbridled sexual pleasure both in practice and in literature.
Now it is no cry of “wolf, wolf” to remark that our own system of life is here in jeopardy. There is a dangerous lack of respect for marital fidelity among far too many folk in our time. We have not reached the evil days of Rome’s decline, but our tendency is in that direction - all our power and modern progress notwithhstanding. We are not given, as an entire people, to orgies of self-indulgence. But many of our people are alarmingly unrestrained. Unless we change our course, ultimate disaster is certain.
Though it is foolish to suppose that sexual behavior is all of morality, it is equally foolish to avoid any consideration of that area when speaking of human behavior. The seventh commandment of the Decalogue - “Thou shalt not commit adultery” - is there because generations of human experience have proved its importance. It is fully as important as the sixth - “Thou shalt do no murder.” In fact, one ancient version of the Bible, the Greek Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, puts our seventh commandment before our sixth, thus reversing the order in which we read them, and perhaps emphasizing its importance.
It is obvious that the whole field of conduct between the sexes is vastly important in human consciousness, that it involves one of the most powerful urges known to mortal experience, and of course involves, too, the manner in which human life continues through the succeeding generations.
The subject occupies a very large share of our literature in all its references to love-making both respectable and illicit. Among the plainest-speaking literature is the Bible itself where no words are minced. The story of David and Bathsheba, and some of the Deuteronomic code, as well as other passages, are set forth in remarkably straightforward language. If you haven’t realized this, review it sometime.
Now the main lines along which the mating urge should be handled are, fortunately, quite clear. It is now generally recognized that it is a mistake to suppose that sex consciousness can be suppressed. This urge is a part of our created being. It is implanted in human life for a good and useful purpose. It is God-given. It can be a matter of very great inspiration and beauty - and should be so. The beauty comes not by denial and repression, nor by indiscriminate expression, but by discipline and self-direction. Apart from discipline, this urge can become ugly, harmful, degenerative, and destructive of both soul and body.
There is little danger of undue repression now, as there may have been at some earlier periods of our history. There is far more danger of the opposite tendency - to glorify undue liberties on the supposition that what is “natural” is right.
The temporarily comfortable philosophy that whatever urge is “natural” is all right has far too wide a popular appeal. It happens to be a fallacy and an exceedingly dangerous viewpoint.
Some people seem to tell a lie quite naturally. It is natural for some men to kill others. It was regarded as natural for some of Hitler’s henchmen to torture people at Dachau, just as it is natural for a satisfied cat to play with a terrified and helpless mouse, or a tiger to claw a fawn. It is natural for a hungry child to help himself to an apple at the store. Used in a moral context the word natural has almost no meaning. It refers simply to what is -- not at all to what ought to be.
A life wholly uninhibited and undisciplined would be wholly disordered, -- and probably short, too. A person who has not learned to discipline of saying “no” definitely and frequently, to his own numerous and varied desires, as well as “yes” on proper occasion, has never learned to live above animal existence.
Now it is interesting to see Jesus’ sense of proportion and emphasis at this point. Entirely pure in his own self-direction, he yet appeared less severe toward sexual offenders of some kind, than toward those who transgressed the spiritual laws of love to God and man. Note his shaming of the men who brought to him a woman taken on what our newspapers would call a “morals charge.” It was a memorable utterance: “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.”
Without in any way excusing it, it may be said that the sexual sin may, in certain cases, be the minor sin - one of bodily temptation, largely biological in expression. The real sin of fornication or adultery is the degrading effect on human character! It is an expression of selfishness - disregarding the spirit of the Golden Rule and the welfare of far more people concerned that just the self.
The well-being of whole families, and of whole communities, is involved in the sexual relationship. It is never completely a person’s own private business. Some matters are harmless, trivial, of no particular concern for anyone else. But sexual relations always affect another. They either build, or trifle with, human affections and loyalties; they harm or help others; they are never neutral. So-called free love might make sense if it were like playing solitaire. But it isn’t like solitaire!
That is why the matter receives just as direct and unyielding treatment in the experience-tested Decalogue as does murder. It always affects others. If you don’t believe that, talk with some father who, man though he is, cries for the first time in years over the fact that one of his daughters is to become an unwilling, unmarried mother. Talk with a wife who knows that her husband is pursuing an infatuation with another woman. Talk with a disillusioned bridegroom who finds himself in a hospital fighting a vicious disease following a hasty, foolish marriage to an unstable and unworthy woman. For better or for worse, these things always affect others! See the radiant look on the face of a man and a woman over their first baby. Watch a new grandfather try to control his pride -- or a fond grandmother hover around hoping she may be as useful as she wants to be. Of course -- others are affected!
So great is temptation in the sexual realm, so powerful the urge, so serious the consequences of mistake, so glorious the consequences of right conduct, that we need something powerful to control us.
Most powerful of all such controls is a voluntary one -- I mean a noble conception of marriage. Marriage, as slowly developed in our Christian culture, is one of the glorious products of our faith.
What it means is that one man and one woman determine to unite their two separate destinies. Standing in the spiritual presence of God, engaging together in a religious act, they freely pledge, in the presence of their friends, their life-long devotion each to the other. The power of this vow, taken sincerely and without reservation, is incalculable. The two can live together far more wonderfully than each has lived separately. This reality becomes deeper when there are children who belong to both. Instead of denying the many expressions of sexual consciousness and experience, marriage glorifies them.
Marriage is even more important than love. Love may begin - and should - in the courtship which precedes marriage, but grows vastly more in a true marriage. Marital love is a product, created by mutual respect, service and sacrifice. This service and sacrifice can exist normally between married people only if the bond of their marriage is accepted as a permanent one. Love before marriage may be mostly a romantic fiction. It is but the possibility of the love that can and should be, during the years of marriage.
This needs to be said in the face of the over-sentimental Hollywood mentality, and the terrible rising popularity of serial polygamy, in a divorce rate that runs as high as one broken marriage in every three solemnized! “Marriages” may not be made in heaven, but marriage is!
Divorce is sometimes justified, but the circumstances are far less frequent than are popularly supposed. A whole sermon could be prepared on this subject. For the present, I’ll leave it to you to write and preach your own, remembering that fidelity, both within marriage and before marriage, is something to be achieved by our human purpose and determination to direct a human instinct nobly.
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Dates and places delivered:
Wisconsin Rapids, February 22, 1948
Waioli Church, February 23, 1975