God's Body Series

A little girl was talking to her grandmother. She asked, “Grandma, how old are you?”

The grandmother replied, “Now dear, you shouldn’t ask people that question. Most grown-ups don’t like to tell their age.”

The following day, the girl had another question. “Grandma, how much do you weigh?”

Once again the grandmother replied, “Oh, honey, you shouldn’t ask grown-ups how much they weigh. It isn’t polite.”

The next day the little girl was back with a big smile on her face. She said, “Grandma, I know how old you are. You’re 62 and you weigh 140 pounds.”

The grandmother was a bit surprised and said, “My goodness, how do you know?”

The little girl smiled and said, “You left your driver’s license on the table and I read it.”

Grandmother said, “Oh, so that’s how you found out.”

The girl replied, “That’s right, and I also saw on your driver’s license that you flunked sex” (James S. Hewett, Illustrations Unlimited, p.101).

Now obviously, that grandmother did not flunk sex, but our culture has. The vast majority of Americans—about 90 percent—have sex before marriage (Finer, 2007), many of whom have sex with multiple partners before they say “I do” (Galena K. Rohades and Scott M. Stanley, "Before I 'I Do,'" The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, 2014; www.PrechingToday.com).

In fact, in one recent survey, men reported having an average of 26 sexual partners in a lifetime while women an average of 19 (Sarah Fielding, “Here's how many people the average person under 30 says they've slept with — and why they could be lying,” Insider, April 17, 2018). Behind the numbers are a lot of hurting people, broken families, and children raised without the benefit of two parents.

Peggy Noonan describes the moment for her when this new America began:

She was at a graduation ceremony… It was 1971 or 1972 when one by one a stream of black-robed students walked across the stage and received their diplomas. A pretty girl with red hair, big under her graduation gown, also walked up to receive hers. The auditorium stood and applauded. Peggy looked at her sister, who sat beside her. “She's going to have a baby,” she explained.

The girl was eight months pregnant and had had the courage to go through with her pregnancy and take her finals and finish school despite society's disapproval.

But society wasn't disapproving. It was applauding. Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother, and not good for us.

The old America had a more delicate sense of the difference between the general (“We disapprove”) and the particular (“Let's go help her”). We had the moral self-confidence to sustain the paradox, to sustain the distance between “official” disapproval and “unofficial” succor. The old America would not have applauded the girl... but some of us individuals would have helped her not only materially but with some measure of emotional support. We don't so much anymore. For all our tolerance and talk, we don't show much love to what used to be called girls in trouble. As we've gotten more open-minded we've gotten more closed-hearted (Peggy Noonan, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Christianity Today, Vol. 40, no. 3, March 4, 1996; www.PreachingToday.com).

That’s the sad part. More sex has led to a lot less real love, but this is nothing new.

In his book, A Fellowship of Differents, Dr. Scot McKnight describes an eye-opening walk he once took down the Roman roads of ancient Pompeii. The volcano that erupted there in 79 A.D. preserved a vivid snapshot of Roman culture in the century when the church was born. “It is not an exaggeration to say the city was swamped with erotic images,” writes McKnight. Explicit pornography was everywhere. “The sexual reality across the Empire, of which Pompeii was a typical example, was a total lack of sexual inhibition.”

The normal order of things in the first century was for most men (and some women) to have procreational sex with their spouses and recreational sex with others. Those others often included young boys and slave girls. Pederasty (or the practice of sex with children) was widespread and accepted. Lesbianism was well known, but nowhere near as common as recreational same-sex liaisons between men, many of whom were still married to women. And relations with paid sex-workers formed such a major and enduring industry that Rome's most famous orator, Cicero, asked: “When was such a thing not done?” (Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents; www.PreachingToday.com).