The church doesn’t talk about sex enough. And by talk about sex, I mean really talk about sex—not just warn young people against premarital sex,…
Walking with Jesus in Asian American-ness
Tag: church
2020 may be over, but the pandemic is not over yet. With stay at home guidelines, isolation, and low-grade anxiety surrounding almost every decision of daily life… I’m reminded that many people are still far from feeling “okay.”
A church community can oftentimes be a place of support, mutual encouragement, and hope. One thing I’ve been struggling a lot with this past season is figuring out both my place and my “role” within the community. Especially as someone who is working part-time for the church, it can be doubly confusing. Where do my work responsibilities start and end? How do I take care of myself as I take care of others? Is it my job to take care of others first, before myself?
I think as the church, we should talk about sex more.
Perhaps one of the greatest schemes of the devil is to distort something that God intended to be so good, into something that society views as taboo, secretive, or dirty. Many churches issue the blanket statement, “no sex before marriage,” and then leave it at that. A smaller selection of churches are willing to talk about Genesis or the creation story and sex in the abstract sense—sex as union, sex as procreation, sex as blessing. But not too many churches are willing to talk about the nitty-gritty (are you shuddering at the thought?) of sex from all angles—embracing the physicality of it as well as the sacred symbolism.
I’ve been trying to read various different Christian books lately that are authored by people who are not white men. One of them is At Home In Exile, by Russell Jeung—Asian American Studies professor at SF State and incidentally, someone connected through the sister church that started my church, who has come to preach for us a couple of times. His book memoir details his narrative living in East Oakland’s “Murder Dubs” neighborhood, and finding solidarity and community with the Latino and Cambodian refugee families there. I found one particular passage particularly scintillating for me: