Sex.
Well that got your attention.
Welcome to the Bedroom, the room in the house where we talk about relationships.
The problem with bedrooms of course is that by the time you are in the bedroom a whole set of relationship assumptions have already been made. And sometimes that’s a good thing, and can lead to good things. And sometimes that is a bad thing, and can lead to bad things.
Why the bedroom then? Because while relationships are more than sex, and take place in rooms other than the bedroom, our culture puts huge store in finding the right sexual relationship with the partner who will most affirm us, be the most intimate with us, and allow us to be the most authentic person we can be. And that all culminates in the bedroom. At least that’s what we are told.
Yet that’s makes the bedroom a challenging room to be in. What if we get it wrong? What if we are not affirmed, but rejected? What if we share our biggest intimacies and our trust is broken? What if we are being authentic and our partner is being fake? There are reasons that when things go wrong in the bedroom, the most frequently visited room after that is a therapy room.
Whatever else the Sexual Revolution has done, it has filled our health clinics with thousands, millions, of unhappy, anxious people. Something about the Bedroom isn’t working the way our world says it should work.
The first bedroom wasn’t in a house at all. It was in a Garden. The Bible tells us of the first intimate sexual relationship between a man and a woman. And it says, curiously, that they were naked and not ashamed. Now we can imagine that being the case in the bedroom, but wandering around the rest of the day doing your chores and going to work in the nude? Unless you’re a middle-aged German naturist that doesn’t sound very appealing.
See, here’s the point. The biblical story says that the man and woman were not ashamed because they had nothing to hide. They were living in complete openness with each other. And with God. It was when things went wrong; it was when they decided to set the parameters for relationships with each other, and with God, that they hid themselves. First by hiding behind fig leaves from each other, and then by hiding behind trees in the Garden, from God.
The Bedroom exists to explore why we are not open with each other and with God, and how being open with God can lead us to being more open - the right way - with each other. Sex is part of that, but not all of that.
In fact, the point of the Bible story is that the openness of sex points to a deeper, more intimate openness that we were designed for, the openness of a relationship with the God who created sex.
Sex is not a destination. Sex is a signpost to a greater destination. The Bedroom is a halfway house to a level of intimacy and relationship the likes of which we can only begin to imagine. So welcome to the Bedroom.
