Posted on 03/12/2009 3:51:36 PM PDT by SJackson
Debra Haffner delights in the reactions she gets when strangers ask her what she does for a living.
"I'm a minister and a sexologist," she says.
They blink their eyes and try to reconcile what seems to them to be two opposing forces. Religion in the U.S., after all, seems to have quite a reputation for trying to stifle the joy of sex. So how could she joyfully live in these two worlds of church and sexuality?
"Our sexuality and our spirituality are intimately connected," Haffner told a crowd at the First Unitarian Society in Madison earlier this month. At their best, after all, they share what Haffner called "a common moral vision" -- how to love each other and how to treat each other with respect.
Haffner is a Unitarian Universalist minister who in her previous career was head of SIECUS -- the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. Now she is the director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing.
As she reminded people at the annual Wartmann Lecture on sexuality, many people in American society carry with them a lot of negative messages from the religions of their childhood -- messages about gender roles, their bodies and the role of sexual pleasure in life. These messages have been amplified by the prominent place of the religious right in the political realm.
Her message is a very different one: "Sexuality is a blessing from God to be celebrated with joy." She strives to encourage religious congregations to help their members celebrate their sexuality while including all: male and female, gay, straight, bisexual, transgendered.
Haffner's personal story helps illuminate her approach to these issues. She grew up in a secular Jewish family with little exposure to the Bible. When she decided to pursue ministry as a career in the mid 1990s and took Scripture classes, she really was reading the Bible for the first time and she was reading it with the eyes of someone whose professional work was all about sex education.
What she found, she said, was a wealth of stories about man and woman being created at the same time and told to go have sex -- "be fruitful and multiply," was the phrase in Genesis. Even in the second creation story in Genesis, where man and woman are created separately, there is a sense that they were there for companionship to one another, for pleasure.
She talked about the erotic poetry in the biblical book of the Song of Songs, the wide variety of loving relationships in the Bible, and her realization that in the New Testament, Jesus was all about welcoming the people who had been marginalized for their sexual activity -- a woman at a dinner who washed his feet with her hair, a woman at a well who had had many lovers, a woman caught in the act of adultery.
"Both the Hebrew and the Christian Bibles have great messages," Haffner noted. "Sexuality is creative, good, our bodies are wonderful things, there are many forms of blessed relationships."
Which is not to say everything goes.
"Our sexuality must be exercised wisely so it is not in service of pain and exploitation," she cautioned. But that has to do with the nature of relationships, not with particular sexual acts. "The sin is never sex," she said, "but sexual exploitation."
So even as Haffner celebrates the joy of sexuality that she believes is a core message of the Bible, she also works against those who would use sex as a weapon. The Religious Institute has a new program called the Congo Sabbath Initiative aimed at the use of rape as a weapon in the wars that are occurring in Congo.
She wants religious settings to do a better job teaching about sexuality and to make sure that they are places where children are safe from sexual exploitation. She wants congregations that have prided themselves on their openness to all people, whatever their sexual orientation, to renew their efforts to make all feel welcome. And she continues to advocate for marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.
After all, as Haffner put it, "our sexuality in all its stunning diversity is part of God's creation."
Hey, Debbie, let me ask you about a couple of those women.
Why did the woman wash his feet with her hair? Because she was overjoyed that he had forgiven her sin. In other words, if the sin was sexual (the text doesn't say, does it Deb?) it needed to be forgiven and was a very drastic thing. That wouldn't fit very well with your theory about all sex being good with God, would it?
And what did he say to the woman caught in adultery? He said, "Go and sin no more." BTW, if you're counting Jesus' reaction to this woman as some sort of "sex positive" exercise, wouldn't that be implying that Jesus doesn't mind adultery all that much? And do you really think that the message the church was getting out of this passage for the last 2,000 years (before you came along to enlighten us) was "sex is bad?"
Debbie, did you know that almost every time you see the phrase "sexual immorality" in the New Testament the word in the original Greek text is "porneia?" Porneia is a Greek word meaning "sex outside of marriage." That would be heterosexual marriage, BTW. It doesn't mean "sex that involves pain and exploitation." So, if you are promoting sex outside of marriage as something God approves of heartily, are you on Jesus' side of this issue? Should you tell people that you are teaching what He taught?
I’ll say guilty...but definitely better looking than most UU ministers, who generally look like Janeane Garofalo trying to go to a Halloween party as Ben Stein in drag.
Did you hear about the Unitarian who married the Jehovah’s Witness?
Their kids spent all their time knocking on doors all over town, but they had no idea why...
Dang, you beat me to it.
Another one over here. In fact, it keeps getting better...practice makes perfect, after all. ;-)
LOL!
I had an art teacher who lived on her own street she named Sappho Drive in Jacksonville FL who was also aUnitarian Universalist. She was a little wacky.
Obviously they don't understand that the only real sex negativity in Christianity is when your wife has a headache.
Good thing she didn't bring up the Israelite Zimri and the Moabite Cozbi. He got speared for his dalliance with an idolator.
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