Sermon: Lust, the Vice

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Lust, the Vice

By Charles Rush

October 13, 2002

got a message on the answering machine this week from one of our church members. They said, “Chuck, my wife and I are sitting outside the Church trying to decide whether or not to come to Church on Sunday. The sign says you are preaching on Lust. Is that a virtue or a vice?”

Lust would be funnier if it didn't cause people so much heartache. The deeper reasons as to why people have affairs are almost always very complex, but quite often the actual moment when the bridge is crossed is quite simple and powerful. Men say to me, and very few people talk about this subject “I don't know why I did what I did. Looking back it almost seems silly. I was just swept away.” And they get that far away, blank look, knowing all that they put at risk, that uncomprehending look when you realize that you know yourself, but you don't really know yourself after all. You baffle yourself.

As a friend of mine is fond of reminding me, “Reverend, God has given men two wonderful organs, their sexual organ and their brain… But only enough blood to run one at a time.”

Lust is a primordial emotion that takes hold of us, a great power like a charging stallion beneath us. Spiritually we must find the bit to control its' enormous strength or else, we too, will look like fools thrown in the air to hit the ground hard.

If you should think, that because we are children of the sexual revolution, that somehow we have to deal with issues never before faced by open societies, think again on the subject of lust. I am afraid to report that while ancient Greece and Rome were far more traditional than we are today, they were also much wilder than we are.

Greece and Rome, had male and female gods in their pantheon dedicated principally to lust. Eros, the Greek god of Lust became the god Cupid in Rome. These were the male deities that put the spell on women to enchant them into erotic frenzy. And Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of lust, became Venus in Roman religion. She was the goddess of fertility and the primal ‘urge to merge' that held at least as much mystery to the ancient people as it does today. These gods and goddesses were chiefly engaged in mischief. They would enter human affairs from time to time to mix things up and throw people off balance, to create opportunities and problems, to stir the boring pot of human affairs. An apt description of the power of lust.

To the novice student of Greek and Roman religion, it is surprising just how frisky the gods were and how much time they spent they spent seducing other gods and humans as well. Even old Zeus, the great father of the gods, the high god, so to speak. He seduced Danae, Europa, Io, Leda, Leta, Metis, Semele, et alia. It is a long list of conquest, each with a twisted plot full of intrigue, betrayal, deception, and lust. The stories about Zeus are not too different from Brazilian soap operas come to think of it. With a spiritual leader like this, little wonder the lesser gods were just as wiley and beguiling.

I can only mention one today, Aphrodite, the goddess of desire. The poet Hesiod says that Aphrodite was born out of the white foam on the ocean which was itself created when another god Cronus castrated his father Uranus and tossed his genitals into the sea. I'm sorry, but we just can't compete with a story like that in the Bible. We just don't have anything that graphic or gutsy.

Aphrodite was a goddess of such stunning beauty that every god in Olympus wanted to marry her. Her hand was eventually won in marriage by the god Hephaestus, a god who was noted for his ugliness.

Aphrodite was not faithful long. And this is the interesting part, she had her first affair with Ares, which I think is very significant. Ares is the Greek god of war, not just war as such, but specifically the stuff of battle itself: the rage, the fear, the courage, the chaos, and the irrational changes of fortune. In other words, the goddess of desire had an affair with the god of violence. Now we are getting serious lust. They had two children, by the way, Deimos, which means in Greek ‘the panic you feel that puts you to impulsive flight', and Phobos, which means ‘fear unto dread'.

It is difficult for us to imagine just how regular and long lasting these were as spiritual realities in the ancient world. It is difficult for us to remember how often armies or pirate bands raided villages and stole anything they could, including women and children. Sex and violence proved to be a potent and dangerous combination.

There is a conversation recorded in the Odyssey that must have been illustrative of conversations husbands and wives had in every generation for hundreds of years in that era. It takes place between Helen and her husband Paris. Helen was the most beautiful woman of her era in Athens. She was stolen away by Paris, the most handsome Trojan soldier and the Prince of Troy. They had a torrid love affair. The Athenians attacked Troy, for a lot of economic and political reasons, but Helen, this woman, was the straw that led to the war. The Athenians wanted her back. Then, as now, it was an affair that actually got people moving.

The Athenians have laid siege to Troy and they and winning. Paris has been fighting a campaign out in the plain in front of the city. One night he is exhausted and afraid, so late at night retreats back into the city walls to find his wife. They discuss the state of the world. He shares his anxieties about his men, about the fact that they could lose. Helen, a powerful woman, hears him out in empathy. She waits. And then at the right time she launches into this speech about how sad it will be if he dies and how much she loves him, all that they have shared together.

Then she describes the fate that will befall her should the Trojans lose the battle, how she will be publicly raped, how she will be dragged off by one of the Athenian generals- and she mentions several of them by name- how she will be his personal sex slave for the remainder of her days on earth, degraded, humiliated. You get the picture. And this is the G rated version of the story. The real version, the real conversations husbands and wives had can get very graphic and personal. Paris becomes livid with rage at the thought of others conquering him and his wife.

She reminds him that real men don't let this sort of fate befall those they love, that he needs to get back out there and destroy the enemy utterly. And after he does, the scene implies, when he comes back, he gets anything he wants like a hero. It is a steamy mix of fear, anger, honor, and lust… And it is all necessary to motivate men to stand in the breech and endure, digest and live the rest of their lives with the graphic horror of hand to hand combat.

Sex and violence, so regularly combined in Greek warfare, became an almost routine part of Rome conquest. Fairly early on as the Roman republic began to expand and become an Empire, the army would go on a several day rape and pillage rampage, once they had conquered a new territory.

Julius Caesar, commenting on the Cataline's army in 63 b.c. said this. “Maidens and boys were raped; children were torn from their parents' embrace; married ladies were subjected to the conqueror's pleasure; temples and homes were looted; there was slaughter and arson. In short, everything was filled with weapons, bodies, blood, and lamentation” (Catiline 51.9).

By the time he reported on this it was already a 2 centuries old problem. The Romans couldn't control their army. And as the Empire became more and more decadent, Rome stopped even trying to control it, and just used it as an instrument of terror. If regions did not pay their taxes on time, they sent in the rape and pillage platoons. The army would destroy everything and carry off what they didn't destroy. It sent a very graphic message to neighboring regions. One of the perq's for the soldiers was being able to take home some of the things they seized- women also. This was the Roman method for market expansion and debt collection… the god of violence and the goddess of lust had an affair and together they bred the twin children panic and dread. This went on year after year for centuries.

It permeated the whole of society in ways I can only hint at. The Romans invented the Gladitorial games, which, in the late part of the Empire, went on for three days in Rome and attracted 60% of the populus, with a break for lunch. [I might add that the movie Gladiator was a remarkably accurate depiction that was actually understated for a change]. Imagine watching people kill each other all morning and going out for pizza.

These Gladiatorial holidays were matched with drunken orgies on just as grand a scale. We fret and frump about President Clinton's picadillo's. But just after Jesus died, Gaius Caesar became emperor in 37 a.d., and he openly slept with all three of his sisters, treating one of them like his wife. He had a fund raiser once using the wives of the Roman senators and other boys to set up a brothel. In his own life, excess led to excess, much as one can say about the broad outlines of the Roman Empire as a whole. Gaius Caesar is more popularly known by his nickname, Caligula.

Personally as socially, lust feeds on itself. We need more and more of it to sustain that same intensity of intoxication. Curiously, it is fleeting like a mirage. The intoxication is never quite what it was. That is why internet porno sites walk you through progressively- more fetish, kinkier kink at each level.

It turns out that our souls, our character, does not work like an etch-a-sketch. You can't just erase what you recently indulged in and start over. It all gets tangled together in our spiritual psyche and forms us, for better and worse. I remember a sober volume I read for my dissertation on SS guards, relatively normal people when they joined, who indulged themselves in sadism for months on end, only to discover, like characters out of Dante's Inferno that they had lost their ability to be normally intimate with their spouses even when they wanted to be.

Spiritually, we are daily becoming what we are becoming, just a little at a time, so little that for the vast majority of us, we don't even notice until we've become someone we don't really recognize anymore.

Christianity was born into a world where there was a lot of weird sexuality and weird violence unfortunately. Because for many Christians, the Roman society around them was so evil, that they decided that only spiritual option was a total renunciation of sexuality altogether and a total withdrawal from the world- and so were born monastic, ascetical communities that disassociated themselves from the world almost completely and set up alternative spiritual communities of prayer, fasting, simple living, worship and study.

Unfortunately, we had too many Christians that renounced sexuality as a solution to the challenge of lust, among them some of the writers of the Bible. St. Paul, for example, says that celibacy is the highest way one can prepare oneself spiritually. I have an argument with St. Paul on this subject I intend to take up with him in heaven. He didn't say it could be a higher way, he said it is a higher way and I think he needs to amend that. In the world that he lived in, I can understand why he said it, but I still think it needs amending.

We had too many people in the Church, like St. Augustine, who struggled for 30 years with his lover, struggled with the social expectations of his religious and upper class Mother, and one presumes some kinkiness that he never detailed, living thankfully before the Jerry Springer era. But somehow, Augustine worked through all of that and came to the conclusion that sex was at the root of what makes men lose control of themselves and he projected all of that angst on women as the root of the problem. When he became a theologian, he went on to argue that Original Sin was introduced when Adam and Eve had sex with each other. I wish he had amended that too.

So in the Christian tradition, we have said a great deal about what is wrong with sex and lust, but very little about what is right about it and where we ought to be headed if we hope for some spiritual integration sexually.

St. Thomas had a nice way of putting our sensual selves conceptually. He used to say that desire was not bad in and of itself. It becomes a problem when it is misdirected. Then it becomes a perversion of the good. That is what evil actually looks like, it is a perversion of the good.

God created us sensual, erotic beings. God blessed our sexuality as a good thing. In our scripture this morning, St. Paul lists a number of spiritual qualities that we are trying to achieve. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against these, says Paul, there is no law. This is where we are headed. This is what we want to be about. This is our growth direction.

So the question for us sensually is how can our sensuality grow us in kindness, gentleness, generosity, peace, love, patience, joy, and faithfulness- or togetherness, intimacy? Is our sensuality serving these ends? How are we forming ourselves? Is our sensuality making us and our lovers and our friends more humane? More integrated? More authentic?

I'm afraid the Church has been too little help here because what we have done, broadly speaking, for the past 1800 years is to suggest that our sexual selves are over here and our spiritual selves are over here. And we are not going to talk about our sexual selves, so that they are just independent, or repressed. But we have not articulated any sense in which sensuality might actually be a positive force in our spiritual formation. For the most part, we've only talked about what can go wrong.

At any rate, sexuality is not comprehensive enough. For we are not sexually active the whole of our lives. All of us go through periods of our lives where we are alone or for a variety of health reasons, we are not sexually active. But spiritually speaking, we are always sensual beings. Sensuality is the transcendent dimension of the sexual. It involves the expression of our souls in the spiritual dimension of human existence than our simple biological urges. And it is far broader than mere sexuality, really involving all of the ways that our persona radiates love, acceptance, caring, understanding, comfort, the quest for the beautiful, the touching, the humane.

It is a touch. It is a glance. It is a card made out of construction paper, glue, crayons, and Popsicle sticks on Mother's Day. It is our intimate contact with others, shaping them and ourselves. Because of that, sensuality also can degrade itself spiritually into the opposite of love, acceptance, caring, etc… Our destructive capabilities are spiritual too- just negative.

That is why it is so important to return our focus to where we want to be headed. St. Paul said we should focus our sensual selves, we should orient our sensual, spiritual selves towards manifesting the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

If we don't, as we know, it is too easy to fall into enmity, jealousy, strife, anger, quarrels, dissension, factions, envy and abusive intoxication. Don't feed this dimension of ourselves or give it an opening to dominate us.

Lust reminds us that our sensual selves have enormous spiritual power to shape ourselves and others for good or for harm. It ought to be a reminder that when our higher selves are shaping our sensual expression, we are wonderful forces of healing, affirmation, love and beauty. It is a reminder that if our higher selves are not daily channeling our spiritual energies, they can get away from us, start to control us, and that we can actually abdicate direction of our lives and be ridden by forces we loose that are too strong for us to control in our psychic anemia.

So I close with this morning with a tone of advice that I wish St. Paul had communicated more clearly. Our sensual selves are agents of healing and love but keep them on task because they can also become our undoing and debasment. As Sargent Phil used to say at the end of assignments on the old T.V. show Hill Street Blues, “Hey, hey, people… Let's be careful out there.”

Amen.