Sermon by Rev. Frank Rose

Lessons: 2 Samuel 11:1-15; Matthew 5:27-32; Conjugial Love 531

Sermon: The commandments says:” You shall not commit adultery.” When couples come to a minister to be married and they talk about the marriage relationship, often they are very clear about the importance of commitment. In some cases they might have been married before and their first marriage broke up because of adultery. Or else a parent or grandparent had a marriage that broke up so they grew up in a home in which there was this lack of trust. They want to have faithfulness in their coming marriage.

How many couples getting married would openly say it doesn’t matter to me whether you commit adultery or not to their future spouse? I think at the time of the commitment people are very clear. The wedding vow is a vow to be faithful to that other person. Adultery breaks the vow and does untold damage. A few days ago I was having a conversation with someone in connection with a business arrangement in Tucson and since I knew I was going to talk about this subject, I asked this woman what her thoughts were about this commandment: you shall not commit adultery. And she said adultery is wrong and devastating. It destroys marriages. It destroys families. It destroys personal integrity with the people involved. And she said: “I speak from experience, my first marriage broke up because of my husband’s adultery. When I asked him why he did it, he said oh I just wanted to see what it would be like to make love to another woman. It was only physical as if somehow that made it right. But the moment he did that, trust was lost in the relationship.” This woman shared with me and gave her permission for me to talk about this today, saying that even in her present marriage there is that lingering doubt that eats away at their relationship. It is horrible if you can’t trust the person you are married to you to be faithful to you.

When people are in love, the importance of commitment and loyalty is very clear. But it seems in our day as if there an increasing number of people who have lost the perception of this simple fact of life. I pointed out to the woman that for every man who goes out to cheat on his wife, there must be some woman willing to cooperate. And she said: “Yes, sometimes the women are worse than men. They have lost their perception that there’s something worth preserving here.” Adultery is wrong because it interferes with something very sacred and important which is the married love between a man and his wife. And when people lose sight of that, they at the same time lose an awareness of the horror of adultery. They begin to think nothing of it because they don’t believe in the love relationship itself. Perhaps they have become cynical. Perhaps their love has grown cold. Perhaps they do not realize that there is something vital here that is worth protecting.

Marriage love is the unique love between one man and one woman. Marriage is a relationship in which each one brings unique qualities. They give themselves totally to the relationship. They enrich each other. They grow personally. They grow as a couple. Marriage is a relationship that involves the total gamut of joy from the deepest sense of peace when souls are one to the most exquisite physical pleasure when bodies join in love. This relationship contains more potential for blessing and good than any other human relationship. It’s the only relationship in which it is appropriate to give yourself permanently and totally to another human being.

Of course marriage is very demanding. It demands the best of each individual. And the rewards are tremendous including a sense of deep and abiding friendship together with the peace that comes between two people who live together, work together, love and trust each other. All of this is at risk when people commit adultery.

Furthermore this unique love between man and woman transcends the natural world. Swedenborg found that after death marriage love continues. He met couples that had been married for thousands of years. He was profoundly moved by the beauty of their love and the depth of their relationship. He was talking with one couple in heaven, and noticed that when they looked at each other there was such a radiance that he couldn’t even make out their features. There was just this pure glow of love. It was only when they turned away from each other that he could see their separate features.

This love makes heaven to be heaven. It also promotes spiritual growth in each person in the relationship. In giving to the other person they grow, and in effect are also giving to themselves. The precious jewel, the priceless treasure of a love between a man and a woman is one of God’s greatest gifts to humans, especially when there is eternity in the love. Even people who do not know whether there is a life after death or not, still talk about love being eternal. It’s as if the love carries with it that perception. People don’t say I will love you for a week, or I’ll love you for a few years, or I’ll love till you get old. When they really feel love they say “I will love you forever.” That speaks the truth.

Adultery can be external or internal, natural or spiritual. What is spiritual adultery? To understand spiritual adultery we need to know about the spiritual marriage. Externally marriage is a bonding of two people—a man and a woman. Spiritually there is a marriage between two parts of each individual whether they be men or women. And the two parts are the emotional side of our life and the intellectual side. These two come into a kind of marriage in the spirit. If we believe something, we love it. The love and the belief are bound together in a kind of sacred marriage. What then would adultery be? Imagine if you had a belief, you had an ideal in your life and that for some reason you found yourself involved in an external craving or love that was in conflict with your belief and took that belief and distorted it to suit its own purposes. That would be like a woman being seduced by a man not her husband.

Whenever people do evil, they like to justify their evil. They like to rationalize it or explain it away. That process of justifying evil by means of the truth is a kind of spiritual adultery. Truth is supposed to be wed to what is good and loving. When the truth is distorted to justify something evil or selfish, that is an act of spiritual adultery. Shakespeare said: “the devil can quote scripture to his purposes.” When a person in the act of evil appeals to something sacred and uses that to explain or justify his actions, then he is committing spiritual adultery. There’s another form of spiritual adultery: imagine a person whose heart is good, whose intentions are right, and who somehow gets misled by false ideas. Take for example a person who in his or her own heart has a strong desire for a happy marriage and a belief in that, it is important. He has a love of marriage and a desire for integrity in his marriage. And then he reads a book that talks about the importance of variety in a person’s sex life and suggests that adultery can actually enhance marriage. A person might actually buy into that for a while. If he does so, those lies are married to good intentions forming a kind of adulterous relationship. This is very destructive. False ideas will adulterate good loves, and selfish loves will falsify true ideas. That is spiritual adultery.

The interesting thing is that when people commit natural adultery, they often commit spiritual adultery at the same time. This is illustrated in the tragic story of King David. Here was a man in the prime of his life, very successful and highly respected. Most of the men were off to war in a very distant location. He looked out his window and he saw Bathsheba bathing. Then he sent a messenger to get her. Bathsheba lay with him after which he sent her home as if that was the end of the relationship. But she sent a messenger back to David saying: “I am with child.” Now what was David going to do? He decided to send for her husband Uriah to come back to Jerusalem. He arrived dusty and battle weary, a little puzzled as to why the king brought him there. At the end of the interview the king suggested he go spend the night with his wife. It seems as if he wanted Uriah to make love with his wife so that when the child was born, Uriah would think it was his own child. In the morning he found that Uriah had spent the night on the doorstep of the palace. David asked him why he didn’t you go home to his wife. Uriah said that he could not sleep at home with his wife when his fellows were sleeping on the battlefield. Uriah was a man of great integrity. David made him stay two more nights, got him drunk, hoped that when he was drunk he would then go home to his wife. He never did. In the morning David wrote out his death warrant, gave instructions to the captain to put Uriah in the hottest part of the battle and then withdraw from him so that he would be killed. Uriah was killed, and then David took Bathsheba as his own wife.

What had David done? He coveted his neighbor’s wife. He stole his neighbor’s wife. He committed adultery with her. He lied and he murdered. Notice the spiritual adultery involved in the violation of the things that he believed in all to justify his crime. As it turns out in the Old Testament story, this was a very negative turning point in David’s life. He had one difficulty after another all arising out of that simple act of adultery.

Sometimes we get the impression that no one has morals any more. A few years ago I went to a lecture by a sociologist and he put the question: “What percentage of married people have been loyal to their spouse during the last 12 months?” They interviewed people and they asked them the question: “Have you been faithful to your spouse for the last 12 months, yes or no.” Over 90% said that they had been faithful. Maybe when people are young they think that it is fun to play around, but after a while they realize that it doesn’t work. There is a whole book written on this subject about a couple that experimented with all kinds of things: wife swapping and sexual orgies and who knows what. The wife had one breakdown after another and eventually they arrived at the position that nothing really worked except faithfulness in marriage. This was a devastating way to arrive at that truth which is already there in the sixth commandment. It seems many people discover as life goes on that the only thing that really works is faithfulness in marriage, and that adultery destroys marriages, it destroys families, it destroys personal integrity, and it destroys the spiritual marriage.

When the Lord talked about this to the disciples, they were frightened and thinking that it might be better not to marry. Maybe marriage is too hard to handle. We all have to deal with our sexual energy and it’s not an easy thing to cope with. One of our greatest challenges as human beings is to learn how to use our sexual energy constructively and not in a way that hurts other people, not in a way that destroys relationships. So we all have problems in this area—it’s not an easy area of our life.

The Lord on the other hand encourages people to be merciful to others and to themselves. The eighth chapter of the gospel of John begins with a story of a woman brought to the Lord who had been caught in the act of adultery. The people who had brought the woman were not interested in her at all. It was simply a trap. They wanted to destroy Jesus by giving him a question that He could not answer without getting into difficulties. The woman was caught in adultery in the very act, and should be stoned to death according to the law of Moses. When He heard this, Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust as if He hadn’t heard them. They spoke again and He wrote again. And finally He looked up and said that the one who was without sin among them should be the first one to cast a stone. Then one by one, beginning with the oldest they left until finally it was just Jesus with this woman. He asked the woman where the accusers were.” Has no man condemned you?” And she said: “No my Lord.” To this Jesus replied: “Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. “

The story combines mercy and a reminder that adultery is wrong. But people do make mistakes and they need to grow through their mistakes. If they sin they need to regain their spiritual integrity and get back on the course because the goal is so important and the goal is our eternal peace and joy in the loving relationship with another person. There is no simple route to a true and happy marriage. But we should never lose sight of the ideal. Don’t judge other people harshly on this subject. We never really know. Don’t be too hard on yourselves. Just keep clear that marriage love is a gift from God, one of the most precious of all the gifts that He has provided. Keep that as an ideal in your life, and if you don’t achieve true happiness in this world, you will certainly achieve it in the life to come.