It is tempting to approach human sexuality as if it were a private matter. However, as we have seen, nothing is private. Every life is entangled in the lives of others, especially those we interact with most intimately. This is due in part to the fact that we cannot separate our bodies from our souls. The soul is a facet of the body and the body is a facet of the soul. It might be better to say that the body has soul (the way a musician might be said to have soul), just as the soul has body (the way hair might be said to have body). And every soulful body is social, entangled in the soulful bodies of others. When we yearn for someone—a mother, a friend, a lover, or God—we are being soulful bodies. That yearning is sometimes clearly sexual, but it is at other times more significantly about the way we listen or speak to, work or play with, depend on or support, or trust and love others. Still, all of those ways of yearning are at least slightly sexual, since we cannot completely separate one kind of yearning from others.
Because sexual yearning is powerful and leads to sexual intercourse, impregnation, childbirth, and complications for the social group into which a child is born, societies all over the world have set up careful rules for sexual behavior. It is perhaps impossible to imagine a stable society that has no such rules. Certainly, those rules have saved women, children, men, and whole families and villages from great harm. However, even the most helpful rules not only open up lines of communication between people, they also set up walls that separate people. The Jesus of the Gospels does not disregard regulations, but rather respects them. However, he also crosses them. In fact his life is spent opening the walls that separate people from each other. This is seen in particular in regard to sexual rules. He especially embraces those who are marginalized by sexual rules, among them widows, prostitutes, menstruating and adulterous women, eunuchs, strangers (Gentiles), and others. It is challenging in each generation to determine how to acknowledge the importance of sexual regulations and at the same time embrace and love those whom regulations would push away. The good news is that God through Jesus and in the Holy Spirit has opened especially to those even God’s laws would condemn. We wish for good reason to protect the vulnerable among us, but we are also to remember that the good news tells us that no one is beyond hope, that all people are worth even the greatest trouble and hardship that it might take to welcome them into the body of Christ:
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).