Sermon: Re-humanizing Objectified People
Date: August 24
Scripture: Matthew 5:27-32
Speaker: Paul Walker

Jesus continues his antitheses statements by addressing adultery and divorce. The Law prohibited adultery, which is having sex with anyone other than your spouse. Jesus goes further than the law by speaking against the root cause of adultery: lust. Lust is when we look to desire and intentionally foster sexual temptation and arousal through the imagination. Jesus is against lust because it causes us to dehumanize others and treat them like objects. Similarly, Jesus speaks against the dehumanizing practice of men writing certificates of divorce to their wives for "any reason”(19.3). The relaxed practices of divorce in Jesus’ day empowered patriarchal structures and disempowered mutuality in marriage. Jesus has in mind a view of sexuality that is grounded in covenant faithfulness, mutuality, love, and goodness. When our sexuality is grounded in merely gratifying personal desires, we run the risk of going down the path of destruction. Jesus is teaching that when you treat people as objects for your gratification you are moving in a direction that is absolutely contrary to the direction of the Kingdom of God. This is a road that moves away from life and love toward destruction and the fires of Gehenna. So as DMC seeks to follow Jesus— how might we ground our view of sexuality that is life-giving and not destructive? What does it look like to live into a sexuality that is grounded in covenant faithfulness, mutuality, goodness, and love?

Desired Outcome: To encourage folks to live into an alternative view of sexuality and relationships based on covenant faithfulness which refuses to objectify and dehumanize others.

Quotable Quote: “Perhaps, the most important thing to say here, though, is that Jesus certainly didn’t want his hearers, or the later church, to get embroiled in endless debates about what precisely was allowed. Far, far more important to think about how to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth! And in the area of sexual behaviour, the answer is clear, bracing and just as challenging today as in the wider pagan world of the first century. Sexual desire, though itself good and God-given, is like the fire of Gehenna, which needs firmly keeping in place. Saying ‘no’ to desire when it strikes inappropriately— in other words, outside the context of marriage— is part of the most basic Christian discipline.” - N.T. Wright, Matthew For Everyone, pg. 48-49