Preaching Connection: Sexuality

Home » Preaching Connections » Sexuality

Reading for Preaching

reading

The Four Loves

“We can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a friendship than a love affair.  Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; friends hardly ever about their friendship.  Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side,...
Explore
reading

“Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity”

Summary: There are three lies we tell each other about premarital sex: (1) If you do it you’ll feel bad the next morning. Nope. Not necessarily. It’s only an emotional scare tactic. The terrible truth is that even our feelings have been affected by the Fall, so they’re not entirely reliable. We’re like the prodigal...
Explore
reading

One More Sunday

Joe Deets, a libertine, a seducer, speaks: “It’s always been like a hunt. The right wind direction, camouflage, weaponry. All the right words. Walk lightly and move ever closer. Never be hasty. Never give up. It’s been my avocation. And once they are caught and when finally the novelty is gone, and the loving is...
Explore
reading

“The World: The Ascent of Man; What’s It All About, Alpha?”

Here’s a piece about a specific form of amorality deriving from sociobiological determinism: it’s hypocritical to practice fidelity if evolution meant males to be sexually dominant and promiscuous. It’s a remnant of the teaching of the Marquis de Sade,that any male should be able to have sex with any female he wants; nature says so...
Explore
reading

Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York

“La Guardia knew he had scant chance of convicting new dealers of selling smut, and he was wary of being charged with censorship. So he had sanitation trucks confiscate salacious magazines from street vendors under his authority to collect garbage.”
Explore
reading

A Married Man

P. 237  John Strickland’s wife Clare consults a priest (Father Michael) as she contemplates adultery: he writes: “The problem which even celibate priests can appreciate is that marriages go stale; that husbands and wives grow to find each other less attractive–even unattractive. The longing for a lover is often an expression of nostalgia for youth....
Explore

Additional content related to Sexuality

Commentary

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

When Paul asserts that God’s dearly beloved people’s bodies are “a temple [naos]* of the Holy Spirit [Hagiou Pneumatos],” (19) he makes a claim that’s more extraordinary than most Christians may realize. This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s preachers might consider helping our hearers more fully appreciate that claim’s astonishing nature. Christians as a “temple of the…

Explore
Commentary

Colossians 3:1-11

Few issues roil the 21st century North American church more than those that revolve around human sexuality. North American Christians spend much time arguing about extra-marital sex, same sex attraction and marriage, as well as gender dysphoria. Churches and denominations are dividing, whether formally or informally, around the appropriateness or inappropriateness of various sexual behaviors….

Explore
Commentary

Song of Solomon 2:8-13

Are the people who put together the Common Lectionary winking at us this week?  The Lectionary across its three-year cycle contains exactly ONE text from the Song of Songs (or the Song of Solomon) and this is it.  But it occurs on the same Year B Sunday when the Gospel lection is from Mark 7…

Explore
Commentary

Ephesians 5:8-14

Few Lectionary texts begin more mysteriously than this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson.  “You were once darkness,” Paul reminds Ephesus’s Christians, “but now you are light in the Lord” (8). The apostle seems to assert that God’s adopted sons and daughters don’t just naturally live in spiritual darkness.  We naturally are spiritual darkness.  God doesn’t just summon…

Explore
Commentary

Song of Solomon 2:8-13

This is first and only time the Song of Songs appears in the Revised Common Lectionary, and it is an odd time.  I mean that the reading clearly refers to the first days of spring, while we are in the last days of summer.  What can we do with this oddly timed and controversial reading?…

Explore
Commentary

Genesis 38

Genesis 38 has to be near the top of the list of least-preached texts in Scripture. There’s death (by the hand of God no less), sex—both in marriage and outside of it, and lots of things that parents might not be ready to have their kids understand (i.e. parents are too embarrassed to have to…

Explore
Commentary

Genesis 39:1-23

Power, Sex, and Serving God in Prison This passage has all of the drama of a soap opera.  The scene opens with Joseph having moved from his abysmal treatment at the hands of his brothers to serving the captain of Pharaoh’s guard. It is likely that Potiphar is the head of Pharaoh’s armed forces.  In…

Explore