The Marcella Project

God is not a divine rapist, he won’t’ force himself upon you.

He woos. He provides a space and place for us to flourish. This relationship Jesus is offering is unlike any other. His love is without limits, his is a love that informs and transforms us.

Does anyone need that? Ya, me too.

In 2005 I had the privilege of studying in Israel. While there, we hiked out to the place archeologists believe is ground zero for the Biblical Cana. Pretty cool, right?

But I have to tell you, the story of the wedding at Cana has always bugged me. It’s place in John’s Gospel, just didn’t make sense. If Jesus used events around meals to teach something, then what exactly was he doing here, water in wine? What in the world does that show you and me?

Are you feeling it?

You know the "I" m not sure how I'm going to fix it, feed it, pay for it, heal from it, - at the end of my rope and resources and my ICare button is broken feeling?"

Great, let's pull up to the table. It's a big table. In the story of the feeding of the 5000, Jesus has something to say to those of us who are weary!

We're in a series called the table. You know, the place we sit at and eat with others. Where we eat, when, what we eat, who we eat with, it all says something about us, doesn't it?

Our table reveals a lot about us.

That is true now, and it was true way back when in Jesus's day. And that's why Jesus did it—used meal times to challenge the social and religious exclusion of women.

It’s summer when we think about picnics, picnic tables, corn on the cobb, potato salad, and Texas BBQ. The Table. It’s is a place people gather and eat, or noticeably didn’t. The table or the lack thereof communicates something about our family and upbringing; it was around the table that values and social norms imparted and social etiquette requested.

That social upheaval around the table was even more so during Jesus’ day. In antiquity eating around the table established boundaries around who was in and who was out. The seating arrangement enforced those boundaries.

The first-century church- battled the Gnostic teachings that invaded the culture. Gnostics believed that the material world was “not good,” including the body. One of the byproducts of this belief was the thinking that “what I do with my body doesn’t matter” therefore, sexual immorality isn’t relevant; it’s what my spirit does that counts. Paul countered the Gnostic teachings in 1 Corinthians and other places by arguing the created goodness of the body and its functions (including sexuality). We could say Paul had a holistic theology: mind, body, and soul. 

Today we discuss good Christian sex with Rev. Dieula Previlon. 

My kids, raised in the '90s, experienced the purity movement that swept our evangelical churches. Remember the rose? Every time you have sex, you pluck a petal off until you only have a thorny stick to give your husband.

Today we are talking with Kristin Kobes Du Mez about the origins of the Sexual Purity Movement. Kristen holds a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and is a history and gender study professor at Calvin College. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics.

I didn’t grow up in a Christian home, or in the church, or around Christians, so you could say I had a secular worldview when it came to sex and sexuality. In some ways, what I learned from the secular world was more on spot, truth, than what I learned from the Christian community.

We’re starting a three-part series on sex. And today’s conversation is about what we learned about sex from our faith communities. And let’s be honest for many of us it’s wasn’t helpful, we might even say it was harmful. Ya, today we’re talking about that.