On Jesus’s Brothers and Christian Sex Troubles

Genesis 3:9-15

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

Mark 3:20-25

Good morning. In my homily today I will discuss sexual violence, including a specific case that has emerged recently in our city. I will not go into explicit detail but I did want to alert you to this content beforehand.

I teach a book by Thelathia Nikki Young called Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination. The book is based on a series of interviews the author conducted with Black queer young people in Atlanta, GA. She asks them about their experience of family—in our culture, many LGBTQ+ people have difficult relationships with their family of origin, particularly queer people who come from conservative Christian backgrounds. And so Young talks to them about the families they started with and what family means to them now; and many of them describe coming into a new chosen family with other queer people. One of them, to whom Young assigns the pseudonym Bayard and describes as a Black gay man in his mid-twenties who is studying religion, explains his understanding of family with reference to the gospel passage we have just heard: “My canon says Jesus wasn’t necessarily really all that into biological relationships. In fact, I would argue that Jesus was very clear about wanting to kind of escape a biological determinism when it came to ethics and how we should treat each other. Like ‘behold your mother’ or ‘who are my brothers?’” Bayard’s point is that, for Jesus, familial relationships are not based in blood but are forged in loving action. As we begin to celebrate pride month, then, let us take stock of the fact that this apparently asexual man who surrounded himself with sex workers and disabled people and other outcasts had a decidedly non-normative understanding of family.

Let’s also point out that the text also says that Jesus had siblings. Now the perpetual virginity of Mary is one of the four Marian dogmas proclaimed by the Church since the Lateran Council. This dogma says that not only was Jesus conceived without the help of a man, but also that Mary remained a virgin until the day she died. Whence these brothers, then? The Catechism explains that these are “close relations,” not in fact brothers.

…Mark says “brothers.” Mark is the earliest gospel. Mark’s gospel contains no account of the Virgin Birth.

I take no position on the matter. Virgin birth, or parthenogenesis, is in fact a widespread phenomenon in nature, most commonly observed in snakes but also in birds, lizards, turtles, and sharks. As fellow lovers of Jurassic Park will know, “some West African species of frog have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single-sex environment.” Nature does some very queer things indeed. But I am not here today to challenge Catholic dogma and render myself a heretic (again). What I want to know is this: who cares?

Why does it matter so much that Mary did not have vaginal intercourse for her entire life and that Jesus’s brothers weren’t really his brothers? I think the answer is that we are still experiencing a nasty hangover from St. Augustine’s early days as a party animal.

Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 in a Roman province in contemporary Algeria, North Africa. His mother was a devout Christian but his father cared only about Augustine’s education and success. He moved to Carthage at 17 to continue his education. I tell my students, just imagine a small town kid from Magoffin Co., KY, making his way to the big city Louisville to go to college—Augustine gets swept away in the feeling of freedom and the sophistication of the city, lives it up on Fourth Street Live, acquires a mistress who bears him a son when Augustine is 18. Eventually after years of soul-searching Augustine converts to Christianity and becomes celibate. But celibacy is the most difficult challenge of Augustine’s life and he continues to struggle with it for the rest of his life. in his autobiography, The Confessions, Augustine confesses that he still sometimes gets unintentional erections at night and is ashamed of this. Why am I telling you this? Because Augustine wrote his own sexual neuroses and hangups into the bedrock of Christian moral theology. It is fitting that we encounter Adam and Eve naked in the garden today because Augustine reads this scene as the entry point of original sin into the human soul. The original sin is lust, and Augustine says that lust is present in every act of sexual intercourse. Lust—what he calls cupiditas—is a desire to consume the other, and after the Fall it became inextricably linked with sex. Augustine elsewhere points out that, were it not for the fall, men would be able to move their penises at will as they do their fingers; the fact that penises refuse to obey our commands in this way is evidence of Adam’s curse. Augustine wrote that, because lust is present in every act of sexual intercourse, it is inevitably involved in the act of human conception, and thus original sin is passed along from generation to generation through this sordid act, wherein the newly conceived life is immediately tainted because it was born of lust.

Today the Church no longer teaches this. Since the mid-twentieth century and especially since Paul VI released Humanae Vitae, sex is now understood as a gift from God and a manifestation and participation in God’s love which has both unitive and procreative functions. But sex, as John Paul II teaches in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, still has “dangers,” and sexuality, he writes, must be carefully watched, “as a watchman watches over a hidden spring” (whatever that might mean). So, as John Mahoney writes in his book on Catholic moral theology, Catholicism is perhaps only now beginning to shake off its long Augustinian mood.

My point in all this is: Catholic moral theology has long taught that sexuality is dangerous, laced with temptation and sin. This is perhaps so because most of the people who wrote Catholic moral theology over the centuries were celibate men, like Augustine, who viewed their own sexual desires as temptations to be resisted and characterized them as such for others, too. And the stain and the danger of this temptation has been of course foisted onto women, like Eve who is characterized as a seductive temptress who tricked an innocent boy into eating the apple and to who knows what else. The great theologian Tertullian, in a letter chastising women who dress provocatively, wrote this:

“And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert — that is, death — even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?”

I do not think it is too strong to say that sexual abuse and misogyny are grafted into the core of Christian theology and into the structures of the Catholic and other Christian churches.

We have taught that sexuality is something shameful, sinful, dirty, embarrassing, and that it should not be talked about, or done, or enjoyed, and especially by women. I think that a whole host of abuses including the priest sex abuse scandal stem from this moral theology and it is high time that it be removed, root and branch.

And yet, in doing so, we need to be mindful, because sexuality is a deeply powerful capacity which can create great joy and pleasure and also great harms. Some Christian pastors have made something like the argument I just made and used it as a way of manipulating women into sexual relationships they don’t want. This is what happened, we learned recently, at Covenant Community Church in Louisville, where Jud Hendrix used his position as “laid-back” pastor of a congregation that was supposedly “inclusive” and “boundary-breaking” in order to manipulate and coerce into sexual relationships at least ten women in his congregation. In fact, though Hendrix positioned his attitude toward sexuality as diametrically opposed to the stodgy, slut-shaming theology of conservative Christian churches, really it was the same. In each case we have powerful men controlling and coercing women’s bodies. It is time for this abuse to end.

And we cannot wait for it to end by itself on high—the release of the anti-trans document Dignitas Infinita as well as Pope Francis’s recent use of anti-gay slurs to refer to gay priests are ample evidence that if anything is going to change it has to begin with us. After all, we are family. And family is not about blood, or sex, or control. It is about being committed to each other. It is about listening to each other. It is about holding space for each other. Making each other feel free, and enough, and seen, and heard, and respected.

As for me, who are my kin, my siblings? Here you are, in this place. Amen.