What in Carnation?*

Christianity is differentiated from its sibling faiths of Judaism and Islam by several key theological premises. The one that has caused the most difficulty for Christians through time is the notion that God became human and dwelt among us, not because the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is itself problematic but because we have had to maneuver around what it means that God became fully human for 2000 years. We don’t like to think about the carnality of human living when it comes to Jesus: what does it mean that God actually had a body with all its needs, wants, and oddities? The book Everyone Poops, so beneficial to parents doing potty training for at least a generation, does not lie. Jesus pooped. He no doubt got a stomach virus a few times in his life. He likely needed to blow his nose more than once in his life.

And he undoubtedly had sexual urges. 

That’s what it means to be a human being. But those who have dealt with the notion of Jesus as a sexual being holistically have faced great anger from the keepers of dogma, especially the Roman Catholic Church, which is prone to issue prohibitions against novels and movies as well as scholars who try such exploration. The Last Temptation of Christ and The DaVinci Code come to mind in the fictional category. While some Mainline Protestant denominations are more flexible, the idea that Jesus might actually have been attracted to a woman, let alone actually had “sexual relations” with a woman, still causes raised eyebrows among many Christians. Some have even proposed that Jesus was—gasp!—gay or bisexual, and if you came to the Gospels with no prior knowledge of the story, a guy hanging out with 12 other men in the wilderness for a year or three could certainly raise the question, at least in modern times. But we don’t talk about any of this. At all. Ever. Or hardly ever. Kudos to Paul Oestricher for thinking about it on Good Friday, of all days. For the record, I’m inclined to think that Jesus was married and that he started his ministry after his wife and child died in childbirth, but this is not even hypothetical, just a leap of logic with a soft “What if…” landing. Sorry, Mssrs. Lincoln, Leigh and Baigent, no sangreal for us (fun ridiculous read, though).

This is, I think, why so many of the current controversies within Christianity have to do with sex. As the theology of the Incarnation developed in the first four or five centuries of the faith, all things bodily became “less than” the spiritual and soul-related aspects of life. Alongside this developing separation grew an understanding that Mary the Mother of Jesus remained a virgin for her entire life, which put sexual modesty and motherhood at the top of desirable qualities in a “good Christian woman.” At the risk of oversimplifying greatly, over time sex became a “necessary evil” for procreation and thus in much theology, both articulated and assumed, only allowable within holy matrimony for the purposes of conceiving a child. 

Priestly celibacy of male priests is a facet of Roman Catholic theology about who is worthy to be a priest in the church. There’s no biblical basis; we know that at least one of the 12 Disciples was married because Jesus healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, and it’s likely that many if not most of the others were or had been married, as well. It wasn't even a thing until the Vatican realized that priests were leaving entire church estates to their children; as implemented in the Middle Ages, it was a byproduct of the laws of inheritance, not of the degradation of sex as an act of love. As we know from Italian history (also, Jeremy Irons) and from The New York Times, the expectation of celibacy hasn’t stopped priests from having children with parishioners or nuns in the 900+ years since its imposition.

Nor, in any other church but most vividly at the moment in independent Baptist and Southern Baptist Convention congregations, has the expectation of moral purity prevented (mostly) male church leaders from abusing their power to have sexual relationships with teens—boys and girls—and women in their churches. It is particularly painful to note that this most recent series of revelations has happened in churches which preach “purity culture”, expecting young people, but particularly girls, to remain chaste until marriage. (I for one can’t wait to read Nadia Bolz Weber’s new book on the subject.) When young people are deprived of safe outlets for exploration of their newfound sexuality because they will be “spoiled” or “garbage” if they aren’t virgins on their wedding days, and further they are deprived of accurate sex education to help them navigate consent, safe sex practices, and emotional readiness for commitment, these young people are particularly vulnerable to grooming by predators who do not want their actions to become known (AKA, pedophiles, see below). Adult women in patriarchal churches can find themselves on the defensive easily enough when a man with power wants her and the incentive to remain silent is the same: shame.

And then we get to the sad news out of St. Louis on Tuesday, that of the re-entrenchment of traditional views of sexuality and marriage in the United Methodist Church. No denomination is perfect on the issue of LGBTQIA inclusion, but most Mainline denominations have moved with deliberation and joy toward full inclusion, including ordination, lay leadership, marriage, baptism of children of couples, and even baptism for those who desire to be known in the Christian community by their new name during or after gender transition. But the church of my childhood, youth, and seminary education has gone another way because for many people, when the Bible disagrees with science in several fields, psychiatry, sociology, and society, the Bible is always right. The current lived experience of human beings, of spirits embodied, of physical images of God, is found wanting in the face of the laws written for an Iron Age society living first in the wilderness and then as a nation-state on the highway between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent.

Granted, the UMC, unlike most other American denominations, is a global church; while a substantial proportion of American members are liberal/progressive, the conservatives in America have the weight of the much more conservative global members on their side. I have a fear that Christianity, when it arrived in many of these countries around the world with the colonizers from Europe and the United States, usurped many a far more holistic understanding of human sexuality and gender held by the inhabitants of these countries, and if this is true, it is yet another egregious abuse of power for which repentance is necessary.

The fallout from the UMC vote to further restrict the actions of clergy with regard to LGBTQIA issues won’t be known for a while. I do know this much: I have clergy friends in the UMC who have now been told in no uncertain terms that they are not welcome because they are gay or lesbian who are wondering what happens to their entire careers. I have clergy friends who will have to tell their gay parishioners that they as clergy would literally be breaking church law and will be subject to suspension if they preside at the couple’s long-planned wedding—which, by the way, can no longer be held in the sanctuary where they come to worship every Sunday morning. I have friends who will wonder if they can continue to attend a congregation that that agrees with the decision and friends whose congregations will wrestle with whether to live their Gospel call for inclusivity within a Wesleyan tradition that they create new or to seek relationship with another denomination that won’t be “home” for a long time. And all of them will shed tears because there will be people in their churches and even in their families who won’t understand or won’t care about the harm done by this decision.

Neither celibacy nor homosexuality has anything at all to do with pedophilia. While it is true that some pedophiles exhibit a preference for one gender or the other, pedophilia is generally a crime of opportunity. The priests who were inclined to such behavior naturally had more access to boys that girls simply because of the ways of the church; they could groom their victims over time and impose silence using shame as a weapon. I remain sadly convinced that some of the last victims of predatory priests will be the altar girls who finally had their chance to serve in some dioceses, as well as girls who attended schools that were made co-ed along the way. 

If we had a proper relationship with our bodies and our sexuality, it would not be hard to understand that healthy sex requires consent of both parties. Children and teens are unequivocally unable to give consent to an adult. And when there is a significant power differential or anything that can be weaponized by one party or the other about the relationship to cause harm, it’s not consensual (which is my argument for fidelity in marriage because affairs can ALWAYS be weaponized).

These things will continue to plague us as long as we refuse to deal with the carnality of Christ and the fact that we are carnal beings. Sexuality is a beautiful part of God’s gift to us; perhaps when we stop being scandalized at the prospect of Jesus kissing a girl and liking it (or even a boy and liking it!), we will start to get a handle on our own misuse of sex as a weapon, sexuality and gender as dividers, and shame as a method of control in our churches. Because it really isn’t just the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the United Methodist Church. It happens in congregations of every denomination and no denomination. We know more about it now, of course, but I don’t think all the safe church policies in the world will stop it until we have real conversations about what in carnation we really mean when we talk about the Incarnation of Christ.

Love,
--Dr. Ruth

*Yes, I know the saying is “What in tarnation?” My first lesson about the Incarnation came from a UMC pastor who heard me say “What in carnation?” about something, corrected me on the saying, and then told that God becoming human is called “the Incarnation.” I was in second grade. It stuck :)

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