We’re hearing hard things.  Paul is explaining the meaning of what we can see everyday but perhaps not quite understand.  It ought to be comprehensible.  Some find it very difficult to believe that there really is such a thing as godlessness and wickedness in the human heart.  Ignorance, yes.  Willfulness, sure, okay.  But wickedness, evil?  The desire to do wrong, to hurt and harm others?  There are no evil people.  I remember a dear saint in Illinois who came right up to me after worship one day and told me, “I believe people are good!”  And it’s not as if I didn’t understand why he wanted to believe that, why it was important to him to believe that.  He also cheated on his wife, for a time had been living with another woman.  The father of a friend in high school was an Episcopalian priest.  The Right Reverend cheated on his wife.  My aunt’s first husband made a habit of infidelity.  Well, all that is sad, of course, but is that wicked or godless?

There are many people for whom the old Calvinistic notion of total depravity feels quite wrong: revolting.  The very idea that grandma was totally depraved, or mom, or me . . . it just doesn’t square.  Grandma was a lovely woman, and mother was a longsuffering saint, and as for me . . . well, I know this much: I may be many things, but I’m not evil; I’m not wicked; godlessness has nothing to do with me.

All of this, however, to whatever degree it may be true, is true only because we have received and embraced saving grace from God.  Apart from that grace, which transforms those who treasure it, people aren’t really so pretty, and they aren’t saved.  We can call the opposite of saved unsaved, but the unsaved are unsaved because they remain godless and wicked.  And as for us?  We may not be murderers, but we know anger; we know how to insult and how to use language to wound.  And we’ve done it.  We may not be thieves as ordinarily defined, but we know how to hoard for ourselves and let others go get theirs where and as they may.  We know how to hold on to what’s ours and how to turn away others who ask for help.  We may not be compulsive liars, but we know how to use words to help maintain our carefully curated self-image; and we all know, of course, that truth is relative, subjective, and who are we to judge—that is, who are we to speak up for God’s Word, to speak out against error?  Someone might feel offended or have a panic attack!  Heaven forbid.

It’s a nice thought that we are all born good, naturally good.  We have a very difficult time allowing ourselves to think differently.  We ourselves may have remained good since birth (mostly), but we also remember our transgressions, our lapses and collapses, which we will not be listing or divulging at all here today.  We don’t quite know how to account for or explain our mess; we know it’s wrong and we know we’ve done it . . . we don’t want to investigate much further.  Just let it be an unsolved mystery.  We may even feel a bit ashamed, even a bit guilty about a few of the things we’ve done, said, thought, but we know (our society reassures us) that it really isn’t our fault.  Whatever we may have done that others call “wrong” is really somebody else’s fault.  It’s the system, systemic.  Really, we’re all just victims here.  And there is some truth in that, after all.

Yes, we are victims: victims of the sin in us.  We mostly let it ride roughshod over us.  It promises us such mind-blowing pleasures, and even after every disappointment and let down, we still find ourselves listening, like an addict, who doesn’t require much convincing or tempting.  Yes, when it comes to God’s way, we’ve all fallen short, very much including me.  Total depravity does not mean we are all secretly Charles Manson.  Total depravity is a more or less technical term that serves as a constant reminder for us that the only way to have salvation, to have a God-honoring, God-glorifying life, is for God to give it to us: grace.  No one can get to God without the initiative and constant help of God: not even mother or grandma.  The only one who can get any of us to God is God.  We are all of us broken and unable: emotionally, intellectually, morally, and yes, spiritually.

With many others among the biblical witness, Paul points to the same supreme manifestation of our shared, common moral failure, our shared, common brokenness: sexual impurity.  One of the old Greek terms for it—and they would know!—is porneia.  Though it shouldn’t surprise me, I am still amazed that there are those who will argue that the First Amendment protects pornography.  That’s using the law against itself!  There is some momentum at present in the direction of restricting access, age verification—which is good, but as for any effort to shut it down?  Ah, we are asked, but what is pornography?  Who gets to say?  Because there’s power in who gets to say, and, as we all know too well, the power of censorship is a dangerous power: today them, tomorrow you.  But that’s fear-mongering over what is vile, though quite profitable, to the tune of at least $13 billion annually, domestically.  Principled defenders exalt porn as if it were something heroic, on the cutting edge of freedom.  (To the tune of  $13 billion, annually.)

Of course sin defends itself and puts itself forward as something that, actually, is deeply good.  You narrow-minded bigots say its wicked and depraved, but in fact it’s the fullest expression of human freedom, autonomy, and self-fulfillment!  Ha.  Nonsense.  Any perversion of righteousness could be exalted, that way.  That way, theft is only taking what is yours by right, unjustly withheld from you by evil, greedy people who have more than enough as it is: just take it from them!  Shall we, then, also rationalize adultery or murder?

Paul is reviewing what necessarily follows when people turn from God, reject God’s ways, deny God’s Word.  The turn isn’t to a free, empty space.  Those who turn turn to themselves, to Self.  They judge, they decide, they are . . . free.

Those who worship Self go the same way, even if at different speeds.  “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another” (1:24).  Sinful desire, when allowed to pursue itself, ends in degradation.  The degrading of their bodies.  Paul tells us elsewhere that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.  Paul didn’t invent this.  Jesus tells us the Spirit will dwell in us (Jn 14:17).  We honor the Spirit dwelling with us as we strive to keep our bodies clean, not just externally.  God gave us these bodies—bodies He conceived, designed, and in which He delights—for a purpose: to glorify and enjoy God.  We mostly glorify and enjoy ourselves.  I mean, why not?

Paul points to the “sinful desires of their hearts” . . . well, who put those there?  Where did those come from?  We don’t like the answer Scripture provides: we put those sinful desires in our hearts.  We cannot say the devil did it, the enemy.  He spoke, we listened.  He showed us something, we didn’t look away.  He nudged us; we didn’t push back or turn another away.  We chose tasting over what God expected of us, over what we knew He expected.  We are made, Scripture tells us, in God’s image and likeness: God means for us to reflect Him.  We did not want to know or reflect Him.  We did not want His law, bossing us around.  We wanted to get as much as we could as often as we could wherever we could with whoever however.  Maybe guys feel it more than women, or differently.

We may want to think or tell ourselves that all the filth just a click away is a contemporary thing, it never existed in our youth, and certainly not in the youth of our parents.  The truth is quite otherwise.  The depravity may be more easily accessible, viewable, clickable, likable, and the algorithms are there to help in their amoral, obsessive way, but there is nothing new, here.  Sin is disobedience, and it is lodged deeply in the root appetites, the basic drives, like a computer virus, wreaking havoc, hijacking the system.

And God withdraws His intervening, shielding hand.  He gave people over to what they wanted to do, anyway.  When people act on that desire to indulge whatever God-dishonoring appetite, God will allow them to discover and experience the result.  We’re told that an alcoholic (maybe also drug addicts) cannot and will not turn until they have reached rock bottom: until they have thrown away and ruined everything that brought the least good to their lives, just to have one more taste, one more hit of degradation.  I don’t remember which rock star it was—it could be any of several—but I heard the story of how one overdosed, nearly died, and after getting out of the hospital, the first thing he did was the very thing that put him in the hospital.  He went right back to the needle.  So, what’s really in control, then?  The enlightened mind?  The tender, naturally good heart?  And if we’re so enlightened and tender, why do we run to such ruination at all?  It doesn’t take much thinking or even dramatic examples to begin to realize that we’re not as in control of ourselves as we like to tell ourselves—the thought ought to be deeply concerning, but more often, it begins to feel sort of exciting.  It’s symptomatic of the deep, chronic trouble of godlessness and wickedness.

Paul uses this word, degrading: brought down, brought into contempt, to fall, badly.  People, we, degrade ourselves because we lose the sense of shame.  Sin dulls shame; the deed begins to matter more than the shame.  The deed becomes the key—to happiness, fulfillment, escape.  If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.  If it makes you happy, why are you so sad?

“[D]egrading their bodies with one another.”  I won’t go into detail, I don’t need to; you understand what Paul means, and if you don’t, why, God bless you.  For Paul, this mutual, consenting, voluntary, habitual degradation is the clearest evidence of the depths of lostness, wandering lost in a fallen world.  How did it happen?  How could people arrive at this state?  Paul has thought about this: it deeply troubles him.  It’s positively painful to him.  And it’s not as if it was hidden and hard to find.  Paul didn’t have to go searching for it in out of the way places in the world of his time.

As to why they do such things, as to how matters could come to this, Paul writes, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen” (1:25).  Paul here returns to an earlier thought, an earlier image: the idol worship so characteristic of the ancient world.  The ancient Greek and Roman myths were full of tales of the gods and goddesses—like the soap operas of the day, raunchy telenovelas.  These deities were notoriously immoral: deception, cruelty, and infidelity were rampant.  Zeus, or Jupiter, was known for abducting and, uh, having, young women, with or without consent; he also abducted a boy named Ganymede, to serve as his cupbearer and to perform . . . uh . . . other services.  The story of the nymph Callisto also has some bizarre elements.  All this fallenness reflected nothing of true divinity; the Romans and even the Greeks knew it.  They had projected themselves into the heavens, preferring lies, falsehoods, fictions to the truth, about God, about themselves, about blessedness.

The most pernicious cult even today is not some well-armed wacko group camouflaged in the deep woods.  The most pernicious cult today is the sex cult, the cult of sex: the internet oozes it; much of film, television, and music make it the focal point of life.  We’re all supposed to be preoccupied with it, making it quite large in our lives, devoting time, attention, and precious resources to it so long as we live.  There are pills for women now, too.  The sex cult exists to worship and serve created things, serve fictions, fantasies and illusions, delusions; God is blocked, intentionally.  The sex cult wants nothing to do with the true God, because God, the true and only God, lays down rules regarding sex because we are created in His image and He expects us to use our bodies in that Spirit to glorify Him.  And that’s not at all what the sex cult wants.

“Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.  Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.  In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.  Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error” (1:26-27).  Well, we don’t like to hear that, today.  We don’t want to hear that.  People out there don’t want to hear that.  Why do we have to hear that, in church of all places?!  Those are verses that revisionists would be glad to omit.  That can’t be right, that can’t be God, that’s just Paul, bigoted, homophobe Paul, freaking out over what’s good and true and real!  Love is love.  As if that were a compelling argument, or any kind of argument.  Air is air.  Green is green.  Night is night.  The message there is, it’s here and you can’t do anything about it; get over it, get used to it.  Don’t judge, just love.  And we nod and say Yaaasss.

Before we think we, at least, are impervious to such thinking, recall: all of us, without exception, are in the same sea of sin, but some of us have grabbed hold of the life raft given for us.  No one is naturally holier than another; no one, naturally, is in any position of superiority or greater purity.  I loathe no one and have no interest in persecuting anyone, and I do not celebrate or approve what God says is not to be celebrated or approved.  And the Christian walks with the Lord in the light of His Word.

Lest we think Paul is blowing things out of proportion, saying things that just weren’t so, just your garden variety homophobe, many Roman writers, including giants such as Horace, Cicero, and Seneca, Martial, and Juvenal, were also commenting on the moral decay around them, prevalent and pervasive.  Even they pointed to homosexuality, male or female, as a prime expression of this deterioration.  That we now regard such an attitude, such thinking, or speaking like that as unenlightened and morally blameworthy is no credit to us.  As for homophobia, that is a modern convenience term invented to beat into submission those who receive the teaching of the Bible.  God’s Word is quite clear; Paul is not imposing any new teaching on the topic.  Paul is not proposing persecution.  He is reminding us that all sin strikes deep, deep into the very heart, the very sense of self, that precious sense of identity, who I am, that neither can nor ought to be changed.  Then, we meet the Great I Am, and things begin changing.

Our society and culture constantly show us that sex and sexuality are about self-gratification and utilizing others—with mutual consent, of course—for self-gratification.  We live in a shameless age, where the only thing to be ashamed of is shame.  Our God-illuminated hearts and our minds being renewed by God in Christ tell us, cause us discomfort, even pain, when we hear of the shamelessness, or see it.  That discomfort is good.  Don’t let the world’s words fool you.  Whose interests are served, that way?  Listen to God’s Word, do have compassion always, and be holy.  The root meaning of holiness, beloved, is different.  Unlike the ways and words of our temporary times.

God has given the gift of a body; it is a holy gift and the way to God’s holiness.  When we treat the gift as a gift, a holy gift given for a reason, with a purpose in view, we enter again into right relation with the giver.

A holy gift, given for a purpose; a body, provided for holy purpose: this table before us this morning is a reminder.  We have been given a gift.  A body has been prepared for us.  A life has been given for us so that we might have life, abundantly.  Abundant life is not in unashamed self-indulgence, austere self-denial, or self-hatred, but in God-honoring self-offering.  The one who offered himself for us invites us now to offer ourselves for Him; he who came to share our life also came to claim us and draw us into his life: holy, eternal, blessed, bright.  This life is about love.  We know what love is when we know holiness.  Receive God’s holiness.  Know God’s love.