c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ Children starve, bombs explode, single-parent families plummet into poverty, the rich get richer, and what do religious leaders talk about?

Sex.

Sex _ every marketer’s gold. Sex _ the adolescent fascination that never ends. Sex _ living proof that a capacity for guilt doesn’t corral rebellious spirits.

So ripe is our worry about sex that Christians cannot meet without degenerating into name-calling and other-fixing, all over sex. Bishops of the Anglican Communion, for example, recently met in England. While bombs were exploding back home, an African bishop stood in front of a gay man and shouted an exorcism into his face. When the recipient protested that he didn’t desire such prayer, the bishop shouted all the louder and commanded Jesus to set the other man free.

What insanity!

Anti-gay Christians toss Bible citations at the offending minority, as if Jesus had anything to say about the matter _ which he didn’t. They proof-text the writings of Paul to paint him as an anti-homosexual warrior _ which he wasn’t. (Paul was much more concerned about bickering among believers and the tendency of some to mistake their opinions for divine authority.)

Anti-gay zealots wave Bibles as if God had definitively addressed sex and nothing more needed to be said, when, in fact, homosexuality is a minor and ambiguous issue even in the Old Testament, hardly on a par with menstruation as a source of concern.

Conservatives seem to smell victory. They clearly had a majority at the Anglican bishops’ Lambeth Conference as they have at several recent mainline conventions. Conservative Episcopalians in North Carolina are aiming big guns against their bishop for inviting Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, N.J., a gay rights supporter, to address the Fall Clergy Conference _ as if clergy ears were too tender for Spong’s liberal perspective. Will the theological enterprise in North Carolina be endangered by the expression of a divergent viewpoint?

We have moved beyond bizarre. If times were good and no problems tarnished the human enterprise, if all children had food and all people were treated with dignity, if God’s clear commandments about sharing wealth and seeking justice were being obeyed, then a debate over sex might seem worth the airtime. But with terrorists hard at work, world economies teetering, water in short supply, inequities in wealth reaching grotesque levels, civil war leading to slaughter, and even the prosperous weighed down by misery, feuding over sex seems obscene.

Ignoring the sufferings of humanity while chasing after a minority’s bedroom behavior violates not only the trust that a community places in its religious institutions, but the trust that God placed in those whom he called to ministry.

In their hatreds, the baptized are poisoning their own well. Why would anyone of good sense look at these squabbling, sex-obsessed Christians and conclude their God was worth knowing? How can Christians evangelize when the most visible cause they proclaim isn’t Christ crucified, but sexual conformity?

Moral crusaders might well win. Politicians seem loathe to cross them. Citizens in distress can be lured into scapegoating. If religious leaders talk about nothing but sex, then in time many will come to believe that sex is God’s primary concern. As in marketing T-shirts and cosmetics, sex is a guaranteed seller. Entire careers can be made by bashing gays.

We just need to remember that it’s all bogus. The gospel isn’t about sex. It’s about conversion of life, suffering servanthood, love, freedom from fear, self-denial, giving up the illusion of control, embracing God’s in-breaking kingdom.

As always, this word challenges and judges. As always, people will seek to escape the gospel’s profound core by engaging in trivial side-pursuits, like counting angels on pinheads and arguing over plaques. But shouting about sex doesn’t make sex the channel of God’s peace.

MJP END EHRICH