Sex and the Church — An ordained single woman and The Discipline

“Immorality including but not limited to, not being celibate in singleness …” is among the chargeable offenses of persons who have made a covenant to ordained ministry in The United Methodist Church. These offenses are listed in ¶2702.1 in The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church 2008.

This particular offense was accepted by a close vote in 2004 as a change to the Discipline by the General Conference, the denomination’s highest policy-making body.

As a single person, who is an ordained elder in The United Methodist Church, I want to use the Wesleyan Quadrilateral to discern the wisdom and difficulties in this rule. This essay is predicated on my belief that sexuality can be morally and fully expressed only within a relationship by two consenting adults who are without monogamous commitments or covenants with any other partner.

This essay is also predicated on the fact that important power dynamics exist which must be considered within any clergy/lay relationship. These dynamics preclude sexual intimacy unless there is consultation with a community of persons concerned about both individuals.

Experience

I have been ordained as an elder within The United Methodist Church for almost 15 years. I was ordained while married and a mother. I divorced for very powerful reasons and thus became a single mother as clergy. At this writing, I am an empty nester, appointed into a clergy role outside the local church.

Each of these stages introduced different dimensions to my understanding of my sexuality.

Each of these stages introduced different dimensions to my understanding of my sexuality. Throughout these personal transitions, that understanding has always been influenced by my role as a charged with the administration and health of a faith community.

I had three dating experiences as a clergy person after my divorce. They occurred before the 2004 rule was adopted. I have not dated since October 2004.

I quickly recognized upon the institutionalization of the 2004 rule that dating would be almost impossible. This rule provides a vehicle for anyone who may have a vendetta to harass a clergyperson who is single. A couple of such vendettas, for example, could stem from unhappy parishioners or a dating partner who doesn’t want to break up.

You don’t actually have to be not celibate to be called before a Board of Ordained Ministry to answer charges of immorality. Accusation of such conduct is enough, proof or no proof.

It does not matter what the state of your heart might be; how full of integrity to oneself and the journey that God has asked of you; how you’ve been hurt by another’s dishonesty; how you’ve struggled with self understandings and the healing of your injured sense of yourself; or how traumatized you are by the charges you now must answer.

You will be taken in front a group of your peers and asked to explain yourself, delving into the most intimate of life’s issues. What happens in that situation is anyone’s guess.

This demand for celibacy as an unmarried clergyperson leaves little room for the heart’s search to find a home in our human world.

Tradition

We are extraordinarily confused by years of theological tradition and imaginative biblical reflections on: the “perpetual” virginity of Mary; a supposedly celibate Jesus; apocalypse-intensified end-times apostles suffering with thorns in the side; and effusively generous women errantly assumed to be asking for forgiveness from some sexual sin.

We are extraordinarily confused by years of theological tradition and imaginative biblical reflections.

All these and more have filtered through 2,000 years of interpretations — including 1,500 years by mostly monastically celibate patriarchs.

Few matriarchs’ writings have made it into our pulpits and books of discipline. For that matter, most of the matriarchs who could read and write in the first 1,800 years of Christian interpretation were also part of a celibate community. Many of those “married to their Lord” found in their spiritual and prayer lives a powerful, slightly strange sexual intimacy with the risen Jesus.

As non-biblical as these ancient interpretations of the sexual powers of women as temptress, whore and Madonna may be — and the corollary need for males to resist that temptation — they have become the foundation of our sexual ethics and expectations of pastoral leadership. They have justified the theological stuff of our “just say no to sex” world.

Reason

Yet, I can’t look at this great creation of such deep, creative erotica as found in an orchid, the mossy green of the deep forest, the coral reef, the refreshing fullness of a spring rain, a passion of a thunderstorm, a hill of daffodils, a playful, diving dolphin, a roaring ocean, the open flower in the desert, the rich textures of rock and sand or the vividness of the sun rising across the ocean announcing the potential of a new moment in time, or the sun setting across the city in the evening announcing a coming nighttime of dreams without wondering what if …

We all know that a wedding and its exchanged promises are not the dividing line between moral and immoral sex.

I cannot look at this great creation with its ebbs and flows, its rivers and mountains, the starry sky, the waxing and waning moon, and her relationship to women’s cycles without wondering what if …

I cannot look at this great creation without wondering where we might find ourselves if we insisted that rather than “just say no,” we explored what expressions of rich, loving, abundant, heart-filled, kind, honest, truly mutual, vulnerable human sexuality might look like.

Though our delusions are rich, I think we all know that a wedding and its exchanged promises are not the dividing line between moral and immoral sex.

We’ve forgotten what’s essential about our life together on this earth. To label true expressions of intimate, sexual love of our unmarried ethical leaders as innately “immoral” seems a bit off.

When I look at the essential task of God’s people in a world full of abundant fecundity and life:

When I wake up to a nation that spends a minimum of $700 billion on its military but can’t find the meager percentage of this needed to make sure the nation’s schools, hospitals, health care, universities have what they need, I can’t help but wonder why.

These, to me, seem to be the true, essential tasks of clergy ethical focus. That which is immoral might need to be expanded in our Disciplinary mandates to a moral mandate for all clergy. Whether married or single, this moral mandate would compel clergy to lead the way to curb excessive consumerism, and excessive consumption that steals, rapes and abuses the earth without shame and that makes women’s bodies a commodity, objectified, stolen, raped, bought and sold.

Perhaps resisting these evil powers, injustices and oppressions needs to be the focus of our chargeable offenses. God’s ability to give us power to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves is even in our baptismal covenant.

Of course, the only way to do this within the Discipline is to refocus the incredibly intense energy that’s been present at the past General Conferences over requirements to “just say no,” whether in gay relationships or in straight. We need to determine to use the love in our hearts for the coming of the good, just and empowering kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Scripture

Scripture tells me repeatedly to passionately love this world and its people. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and body and love your neighbor as yourself. Love is “patient,” “kind,” “does not seek one’s own,” “does not seek to be right,” but loves with all one’s heart, mind and soul.

Jesus’ relationship with women was passionate.

These qualities of a committed love cannot happen unless we’re passionately dedicated. The God I believe in is neither detached nor aloof. And despite some of Hollywood’s portrayals, this is true of Jesus, too.

Jesus’ relationship with women was passionate. The charismatic, healing nature of Jesus’ relationship to women stuns us who are women. Women so trusted Jesus they were willing to risk crossing lines of social and political taboos of their own breeding, of touch, of oil poured out on feet, heads, of open dialog with strange men in daylight, of speaking of intimate feelings, sitting at his feet in living rooms.

Jesus’ way healed unbearably deep pain within hearts and minds. And those women who broke these taboos were deeply affirmed by Jesus, not condemned!

Jesus opened up so much passionate power that the late first- and early second-century church, as seen in the writings of Paul and Timothy, had to wrap it all up again to shut women up, make sure they sat down and for God’s sake, kept their sensuous hair covered.

Jesus affirmed in his very response to women, his embodied healing love. His way was love and it is not a far stretch to see these embodied qualities of touch, healing, vulnerability, strength, acceptance, affirmation and effusive generosity as that which makes for “good sex.”

If I had my way, the Church would stop feeding the illusion that a wedding is the boundary between moral and immoral sex, between good sex and bad.

If I had my way, the Church would take leadership in a conversation with its constituents that would foster growth onto perfection in deep, powerful ways around our sexuality. The Church’s place is to enable its people to be more able to personify healing love in all our relationships.

What if within this context of the 21st century, we focused on the way that good sex, within a trusted relationship, is mutually healing, mutually humbling, touching, mutually vulnerable, connected to God’s deep and powerful mysterious grace?

What if we held our sexual lives as sacrament? What if we began to talk about what sex Jesus would have had: sex that heals, touches, loves, is patient, kind, does not insist on its own way, which determines that some of the shame in our lives needs to be redeemed, healed, loved, touched again?

What if we determined that our sexual expressions of this love is part of God’s creative, wild, abundant abandon, and part of a “for God so loved this fecund, creative, wildly, passionate, colorful, diverse, energy-filled world.”

Imagine a Church that talked like this. Imagine a church that helped us to govern our hormonal attractions not with shame or “We told you so!” and “just say no” impossibilities. Imagine a Church without the attitude that a wedding or a hymen is the dividing line between moral and immoral.

Imagine a Church that spreads the good news that we will only fully manifest the gift God has given us through mutual trust as in a sacrament shared with deep affection in the hands, the touch, the healing, the humbling mutuality of deep communion and prayer. Imagine a church that taught us what it was to enter our most vulnerable, imperfect bodies and risk the mystery of being made whole by the love of God.

Imagine how many of those things that everyone is afraid of — embodied in a fearsome rule such as that in Discipline ¶2702.1 — would dissolve as we began to truly govern ourselves knowing when “moral sex” is ready to be manifested with a partner and when it is not.

Imagine that world. I want that world.

Discussion questions

1. How do we use the powerful energy of sexuality to transform such a broken world without adding to its brokenness?
2. What does good, healing sex look like? Imagine anew.
3. What deep and pervasive images do each of us hold about women as temptress, women as sinful, women as the ones we must restrict if we are to have a safe society? What scriptures come to mind? Look at those scriptures. Read feminist biblical explorations of the same scriptures. Come back and discuss your explorations.
4. How does this play out in our national policies in the United States around the human right to health care, reproductive care and aid to single women?
5. What pervasive images do we hold in our minds of the mandate, the normality of male power and dominance? How does this dominance play out in sexual relationships, our rules for society and our understandings? How did Jesus address such a power imbalance in his address of women? How did he affirm their bodies and stories?
6. How has tradition interpreted that affirmation? What would it be to stop thinking about the biblical word addressing the lives of virgins and whores and to begin to see how the love of God addressed such systemically evil misogyny through Jesus’ touch, his eyes, his hands? Listen to women’s explorations of this. Listen to men’s exploration of the same.
7. How might we encourage our single clergy members to experience a full, vibrant understanding of their sexuality, whether they are abstinate, celibate, married or single?
8. How might we refuse the weight of misogynist biblical interpretations, patriarchal traditional interpretations of women’s sexuality in our Disciplinary mandates? How might we refuse to allow these interpretations to form the ground for continued irrational and harmful experience?
9. What if we determined to focus as a Church on what it is to love one another as we love ourselves, whether this side or that of a wedding? Where would you place sexuality within that curriculum?
10. What are the ethical foci around which we must ask our clergy to lead in this world?