Sermons

Rev Alex, 2-13-2005

Please turn to the person to your left or to your right and reassuring squeeze hands, get comfortable in this tight space with your close proximity to one another, and prepare yourselves for my tenth annual sermon on sex. Despite having been raised by a sweet Southern woman who told me that I was not ever to talk of sex, politics, or religion when presenting before an audience; I have done it year after year after year starting when I was still in seminary, and this morning I continue in that tradition.

I want to begin by recounting an exchange that I had with a couple here in this community within the last year and a half, an exchange that was witnessed by one of you. It was over a lunch table that I heard the story of how it was that this couple that lives here in the Triad worshiped in a UU setting in the 1970’s somewhere in the Midwest, and they decided to be married in that church. They met with the UU minister and worked out a service and it was a beautiful service and they were thrilled with their wedding. They left the wedding and went to their hotel suite and prepared for the night of fun and frolic that follows getting married and about that time the doorbell rang. At the door were the minister and his wife and another couple with champagne. They were invited in and they all sat down and shared the champagne. It became apparent before the bottle was empty that the four UU’s were there not only to congratulate the couple, but also to ask the couple if they could join in the wedding night fun and frolic. Lest any of you doubt the veracity of this story, I have a witness that can go with me before the COM to attest to the truthfulness of this story. The couple said that they went quickly to their own ground of belief, and they knew that they wanted nothing to do with the four UU’s, so they politely thanked them for the bottle of champagne and asked them to leave. On the other side of the experience they decided to look for another church. I happen to like this couple very much, and I apologized to them upon hearing this story. I apologized on behalf of my colleague in ministry who passed a line—which my professional group now has in writing—of impropriety. We understand that you do not do sexual relationship with members or friends of the flock.

Despite this having happened almost thirty years ago, I still apologized to this couple and said that I hoped that my colleague had not caused them too much pain by crossing that line with them. I had further conversation with this couple and I talked with them of how it is that I understand in the UU setting we are always caught in this paradox of what it is to explore liberty to its fullest extreme while at the same time being responsible to one another. Then I said in 2004, when this conversation happened, I am extremely proud to the point of bursting on where we Unitarian Universalists are on this business of sexual freedom. On the exploration of freedom, be it sexual or political or financial, the human experience again and again is one of testing the limits, often times overstepping an appropriate boundary and in the process learning from it, pulling back a little, but not stopping in the quest to know more.

I bumped in to the couple over the Christmas holiday and it reminded me of last year’s conversation. Shortly afterward I went to see the film “Kinsey” about Alfred Kinsey. How many saw the film? Wonderful. For those who didn’t, I want to remind you who Alfred Kinsey was. Most of you know him from the Kinsey Report, a piece of language batted around left and right in our culture. Alfred Kinsey was born over a hundred years ago in 1894. He was the son of a very conservative minister who he loved dearly and whose advice he tried to follow, but at the age of twenty in 1914, over a matter of freedom about what he would study, he completely severed ties with that father. And he left the school that his father had him in, and he headed to Maine and went to a small private college there, and in 1916 he graduated with a BA in Biology. He went straight to Harvard where he got a PhD in Biology, and in 1919 he spent a year traveling across the US studying a fly. He was somewhat obsessed with knowing all there was to know about this fly. In 1920 at the end of that cross-country trip, he took a teaching position at Indiana University, and he met the woman who would become his wife: Clara McMillan. He marries her in 1921. In 1926 he publishes a Biology textbook, and it is unusual for the time because it is pro Darwin. His high school classmates had labeled him a ‘Darwin-to-be’ and he published this textbook in 1925, only one year after the Scopes Monkey trial.

In 1938 only 12 years after the publication of that textbook on Biology, out of student demand because he has been doing private counseling with students, he offers Indiana University’s first ever sex education course. It is widely subscribed. Many, many more students wanting to get into it than there are slots for them. As a result of teaching that course he decides to begin to take anonymous sexual histories of every student he teaches. He develops this device by which he can interview every student he teaches to get their full sexual history. By 1939 he has over 1000 sexual histories and he decides to expand his work in to Chicago. He decides that the group that he is most interested in studying is the homosexual population of Chicago so he goes and does that and he finds success there and some controversy. He goes to the Rockefeller foundation in New York City and he asks them for grant money, which they give him with enthusiasm. The money is intended to help him to further expand his interviewing of persons to obtain their sexual histories. By 1947 (seven years after receiving his first grant money), he has several hundred thousand individual histories recorded, and he has a staff of people going around doing the interviewing and gathering of sexual histories and he decides that he needs to compile all this data and sort it out statistically. From that decision came the 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The book was widely praised. The literature on it with the exception of one primary source praises what Kinsey has done. The one major national publication which speaks out against it was Cosmopolitan magazine. Every major newspaper and magazine applauds what Kinsey has done.

In 1948, with the great praise he is receiving with the release of the book and with more grant money, he decides he is going to film every possible sexual practice that can be filmed. He goes out seeking volunteers who will allow themselves to be filmed while having sex. This kicked up a major storm for Kinsey. The religious community did not know what to do with this. It was disconcerting and there was a large amount of criticism, but he persisted. He was fortunate that Indiana University had a president and a board of directors who were willing to stick with him and his work. In 1950 the US Custom Agency began to grab packages that were shipped to him and impound them because they contained erotic material. He filed a suit around their practice and went on to win that suit. In 1952 our US Congress charged a group to review the scientific validity of his research thinking that they would undermine it, and the group came back and said he had done a very good job.

In 1953, Kinsey published a book on the sexual behavior of females. Interestingly enough, this time the largest response is negative. The publications that had praised his work five years earlier, now say Kinsey has gone too far and needs to be stopped. There was intense pressure from the national political infrastructure and from the Rockefeller Foundation—now headed by Dean Rusk. In 1955 to further fan the fires, the American Law Institute which is responsible for drafting idealistic penal codes, publishes its ideal penal code for 1955. And that penal code, on all matters of sexual law, is grounded in Kinsey’s research. And for the first time in American history, anal sex—according to that penal code--is deemed appropriate and normal in the human population, as is homosexual behavior. With the release of that penal code, everything went wild. Everyone wanted him fired, they wanted him stopped, and in 1956 he died. With his death, much of the controversy around his work simmered down. But he left the Kinsey Institute on Sex Research at Indiana University.

Kinsey for me is a saint. I think he was as fine a person as any one of us could hope to be and I want to tell you why I understand him to have been saintly. Since he is another preacher’s kid, he automatically gets a lot of affection from me. And he had a call. First he was obsessed about those little flies, and after he had studied those flies for a long time, and realized he was interested in their sexual behavior, he realized he could study human beings and their sexual behavior. It came from within him and it informed all of his work. He stuck with that call—that interest in human sexual behavior despite the fact that it challenged the behavioral norm within the larger community. He knew that. A piece of his willingness to respond to that call and study human sexual behavior was—and this was beautifully depicted in the film—grounded in his compassion for minorities. He was particularly concerned about homosexuality concerns and rights and feelings and he felt he needed to study what was going on with people to honor that compassion that he had for the minority. The film and various biographical pieces point out the possibility that he was bisexual. You will know if you study his work that he created a scale (0 to 6) upon which people can identify where they are upon a sexual spectrum. He had great courage to withstand the confusion, chaos, and hot criticism that came his way as he spoke publicly about what he learned as a result of his research. And perhaps most importantly from my perspective as I consider the qualities that make for a saint, there was a constancy about Kinsey in what he did in response to all of that which enabled him, empowered him, allowed him to create this Kinsey Institute for Sex Research so that his important work would outlive him. He created institution that insured the furthering of knowledge about this place where he had this strong call.

Like all saints, Alfred Kinsey was human. He had failures; he had his faults. Like the good saints of the UU setting of the upper Midwest of the 1970’s that I told you about at the start of this sermon, Kinsey crossed a couple of lines. In his endeavor to know more, lines were crossed. But learning came out of crossing those lines, and as with any good saint, from the learning the furtherance of the work continued. I know I am not the only one who remembers the sixties and the seventies. Stick your hand up if you remember the age of free love. Nearly this whole room has their hands up. Our culture, for a brief time in my early teen years, flirted with the possibility of free love and with sexual freedom that our world had not known for a long, long time. Kinsey’s work laid the foundation for that exploration in part. Since that time for a variety of reasons, our culture has banked hard right on this business of sexual freedom at least as it is talked about openly in public places. I am not speaking of personal and private practices. But in the general conversation within the culture, we have banked hard right on this business of sexual freedom. However our Unitarian Universalist movement has not. And I am very, very proud of us in this regard. In this UU setting the whole question of what constitutes responsible sexual behavior on the part of a person of faith is still open for discussion; the boundaries are still being explored; the possibilities are still being imagined. The work that Susan Hill, Alison Dunmore, Jay Cheek, and Jim Ingram are doing in teaching our teenagers the Our Whole Lives curriculum is evidence of our commitment in this faith setting to talk what it is to be a whole human, to be a person of faith and at the same time to be sexual and to be willing to explore the possibilities of what being sexual might involve.

We have had in this place a saint in our midst for the last two and half years. Audrey Ilrig went out to Colorado two weeks ago for full sexual reassignment surgery. She comes back to us fully female. She has lived with us in all of our uncertainly and our indecision about how to be in relationship with her for the last two and a half years. She has with her physical presence done an incredible amount to grow us and stretch us on our understandings and our feelings around what it is to be people of faith who at the same time are sexual in our being. For that we owe her a great statement of thanks. As was Kinsey, she has been consistent in response to her call, full of certainty about her sense of needing to do what she needed to do. And she has stayed with us in all of the questions and uncertainties we had about being in faith community relationship with her. In that regard she is a saint in our midst. We Unitarian Universalist are the recipients of a proud historical heritage in regard to the work of sexual understanding on the part of a faith community. My hope on this Sunday before Valentine’s Day is that we will deepen in our ability to be open and frank and disclosing one with another around what it is to be person of faith possessed of sexual being. To the extent that we do that and do it well, we deepen the spirituality of this community. May we be good in all that work. Amen.