Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's February 15, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.  If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE.

The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented.

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Well, speaking of the halftime super bowl show . . . I can honestly say that I have never seen what all the fuss is all about. Two weeks ago I had retired to an adjoining room to catch 20 minutes of dissertation writing. But I did half overhear the conversation coming from our living room when the MTV sponsored halftime show first cranked up. Our resident family music critic kept saying something like, “how can they consider that music? That’s not real music, you know.” Meanwhile, his sisters were defending the right to free expression and that every kind of music couldn’t be either classical or jazz.

But what really got my attention in the adjoining room was when the show was almost over, and I heard him say, “Did you see that! Wait a minute! Did that really happen on live TV?” Of course, it happened so fast, that there was no chance for me to take a look. But meanwhile, the females around the TV seemed rather ho-hum about the whole thing, including the adult who was purportedly in charge, who, although she was watching the TV screen, somehow missed the whole thing. Meanwhile, all I keep hearing is an incredulous, “Did you see that?”

Well, since that night two weeks ago, Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, MTV, and CBS have become virtually household words. Quite a public discussion about what is indecent or obscene has ensued, including at least one Knoxville woman who filed a class action lawsuit against CBS, claiming that the halftime show caused the plaintiff and millions of others . . . “to suffer outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious injury.”

Ironically, as David Hunter pointed out in an editorial in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, everyone has been talking about the halftime show, but hardly anyone seems to be concerned that over super bowl weekend, 67 Iraqis and three American soldiers died, 267 Iraqis were injured and scores more since then, or that since the invasion began, over 500 Americans have lost their lives. (Feb 9, 2004). The now notorious halftime show seemed to divert the nation’s attention away from the whole question of WMD and the accuracy of prewar information from the intelligence community and the Administration that helped to justify the invasion in the first place.

Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, argues that we Americans are no longer interested in information, truth, or transformation. All we want is to be entertained. We have less interest in actually playing a sport than watching sports. We have become passive recipients of stimuli, sitting back and waiting to be entertained. (cited in Pulpit Resource)

Well, Postman’s thesis may be a bit overstated, and it might not apply to many of us, but if the entire halftime show was as lewd and as indecent as many have said that it was, and I am sure they are right that it was very offensive, why did the offended millions who were watching the show continue to watch it till the bitter (and controversial) end? Why not change channels or turn it off? The truth of the matter is, of course, that the sirens of pleasure and entertainment beckon us, and like a powerful magnet, we do get sucked into the vortex of the glitzy world of TV and Hollywood.

On thing that I think this whole controversy illustrates is the manner in which the entertainment industry depends so heavily on the images and subliminal message of male sexual dominance and subjugation of females. And such dominance and subjugation, I believe is a far cry from the kind of community and mutuality in relationships that are fundamental to the Judeo-Christian story about the place of man and woman in God’s new world.

The book of Genesis tells us that God intentionally created male and female; moreover, God made them (God made us) into sexual beings – not asexual, that is, not sexually neutral beings. As you heard me read earlier, there are actually two creation stories in Genesis. Why two accounts? Well, that’s a hard question to answer, but we do know that multiple people or “schools” were involved in writing Genesis and the other books of the Pentatuch, that is, the first five books of the Bible. And scholars pretty much agree that the creation account in chapter 1 is associated with the work of an author called the Priestly writer; and that in chapter two, we can see the hand of someone called the Yahwist writer. Two very different styles; even two different theologies at work.

In this first account, in chapter 1, we read about male and female being created in the divine image, the imago dei, created as the grand climax of the evolution of an ordered creation that is being formed out of the disorder of the primordial chaos. Humanity is to be not of only one kind, but of two. The idea of a human being finds its full expression, not in the male alone but in male and female both created in the divine likeness.

And then, in chapter two, the story of creation the Yahwist writer narrates a much more earthy version of creation, with garden and animals and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the center of the garden. In this version, God has taken dirt and like a cosmic potter, has fashioned the clay into Adam. After giving him the responsibility to name all the creatures God saw that there was no creature fit for Adam. Then, God put Adam to sleep, removed one of Adam’s ribs, and gave Adam a companion whom he named woman.

This second creation story has given rise to the joke, that God created man, and realized he could do better, so God created woman.

But jokes aside, this second story about God’s creation of humanity is the one that I think has become layered over with many, many different meanings and interpretations.

God has endowed male and female with capacities to make the world serve their needs and to enjoy the world’s good things. But this original vision has been corrupted so that humans exploit each other, personally as well as one group over another. When human sexuality is exploited, that is, when one uses his or her body or another’s body for selfish uses, then that person has abused the intent of his or her sexuality and has corrupted God’s intentions for human sexual relationships.

The Church, historically considered, has to share much of the blame for the current

My analysis would be role of women has been degraded and that, at least partially, the Church bears some of the blame.

God’s Daughters

The body as object of desire and pleasure