So far, over the past few weeks I’ve tried to lay the groundwork for a proper Orthodox understanding of marriage and sexuality. I’ve spoken about marriage as an icon of the union between Christ and the Church. And I’ve spoken about marriage as a Sacrament, a Mystery of the Church; something which like all the Sacraments, is a gift from God that must be received in humility and love, and not something that can be tampered with. So far we’ve considered mostly the ideal situation.

So now we need to talk about the non-ideal situation. In other words, the fact that we live in a sinful, broken world and see the effects of sin and brokenness all around us.

The main point about this that I want to make is that in the Orthodox tradition we understand sin to be an illness. It is a disease that is passed on from generation to generation. While we don’t inherit guilt from our parents, we certainly do inherit the disease of sin, which ultimately leads to death.

Of course we know that Christ is the physician who can and does heal us. He provides the medicine, so we consider our disease not from a perspective of despair, but from a perspective of hope.

However, imagine person goes to see a doctor, and the doctor diagnoses him with cancer. Let’s say it’s already stage 3, but the doctor believes it’s still quite treatable. However, because the doctor doesn’t want to upset the person, he doesn’t tell him that he has cancer. Instead he just says, “don’t worry about it; everything is fine; you’re not sick.”

What kind of doctor would he be? He’d be responsible for the death of the patient, if the patient never discovered his cancer before it was too late. Instead of real hope, which comes with awareness of both the disease and its cure, he gives the patient false hope, which is deadly.

God created everything good, including sexuality. But the Bible is universal and very clear about forbidding all the things that fall outside the bounds of what is spiritually healthy and good. To summarize from the first talk I gave, the parameters within which a sexual union is blessed by God is a loving, permanent, monogamous relationship between a man and a woman, with the natural possibility of that relationship bringing children into the world. As Orthodox Christians we understand that relationship to be something that requires the blessing of God, which we call the Sacrament of Marriage.

What is wrong with deviating from those parameters? The point is not that people are bad if they go outside of those boundaries. The point is that going outside of those boundaries leads to spiritual cancer, or is a sign that spiritual cancer is already present. The cancer needs to be treated, which means the situation leading to the cancer needs to be changed. We don’t say that a man with cancer is a bad person. We just say he is sick and needs healing.

Now I want to say, before moving on to other forms of sin, that there is plenty of opportunity for the disease of sin to show up within a marriage that is blessed by the Church. Believe me; I know my own sinful example. We can fall short of what we are called to be in all kinds of ways. We are called to this beautiful ideal of presenting an icon of the union of Christ with the Church, and we can often look like anything but that.

The point, however, is that as Christians, we are aware of what we are called to and created by God for, and that we are in need of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ to get there, and there’s no other way. We know that we need healing. We are in the hospital because we’re seeking that healing.

The same disease, however, that causes Orthodox Christian husbands and wives to fall short and to fail to love each other, also manifests itself in other ways, with other symptoms. And some of these symptoms can reveal a very critical situation; but the situation is never without hope, as long as the patient is willing to face the reality of the disease. The instructions that we have received from God regarding sexual morality, along with all the teachings we find in Scripture, are for helping us to face that reality and find healing.

If we were all perfectly healthy, no instructions from God would be necessary. If we were all filled with love for God and each other, the 10 Commandments would be totally superfluous. God gives instructions because we have the disease of sin, and need to know the signs and symptoms of the disease, and the things that lead to our cure. He’s being a good physician; not like the doctor who hides the fact that the man has cancer.

Some people will argue that Scripture does not actually condemn certain behaviors. But both the Lord and St. Paul mention fornication, or “porneia” as something spiritually harmful and sinful. This could be defined as generally misusing the gift of sexuality, whether that be by unmarried people or by people of the same sex trying to imitate marriage as God intends it, or even within the marriage of a man and woman, but where they are engaging in selfish and self-indulgent sexual behavior rather than expressing genuine love.

Then again, people sometimes argue that since sexual immorality was forbidden by the Law in the Old Testament, it is no longer binding from the time of the New Testament, just like other parts of the Law are no longer binding: not eating pork, not making garments with more than one kind of thread, etc. However, in the book of Acts, chapter 15, we receive a clear word about which precepts of the Old Testament law are universal and eternal, as opposed to those that don’t apply to non-Jews. Those universal precepts are the ones having to do with idolatry and sexual immorality. This is very significant because the two are clearly connected. There are actually 4 things mentioned: idolatry, sexual immorality, blood, and strangled things. But the last two are just extensions of the first; blood and strangled things refer to animals sacrificed to idols. In other words, we are not to participate in worship of any other God, other than the true God. And we are not to involve our bodies in immoral activities, because our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and immoral activities are therefore another form of idol worship.

St. Paul says something that is worth considering here. He writes in 1 Corinthians, chapter 6: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”

“And such were some of you,” he says. In other words, the illness of sin leads to these symptoms; these are manifestations of the illness. And it’s not just the sexual sins; he includes being covetous. We could add any number of sins to the list. It’s not that people who have struggled with these things cannot be saved; far from it. Actually, in the Kingdom of Heaven, everyone will fall somewhere on the “such were some of you” spectrum. The point is that in heaven, no one will be still the slave of any of these things. No one will still be sick. These things are not our identities. We have to be healed of these things to become Saints and live the life of Heaven.

In our society, certain sins have come to be understood as the identity of a person. But from a Christian perspective, the illness can’t be the person’s identity. I may struggle terribly with impatience. I may be so conditioned by the long series of decisions and other factors and influences in my life that there is very little deliberate choice, or opportunity for self-control, left in the act of growing impatient or expressing that impatience. Nevertheless, “an impatient man” is not my essential identity. Rather, impatience is something that hampers and binds my true identity and personhood. It restricts my freedom. I am seeking to be freed, in Christ, from impatience. I hope that one day in the Kingdom, I will be one (of many) who was formerly impatient. The tumor will have been stripped away, but the man will remain. God’s grace can give us freedom from our sinful passions, if we seek that grace and that freedom.

In the same way, “gay” is not an identity in Christ. A person’s struggle with sexuality cannot be his or her identity. We simply don’t accept that. We say that is something that needs to be healed. The same for alcoholism, or any addiction or similar struggle. It’s not the person’s essential identity - who God made him or her to be. It’s something that requires healing. 

"And such were some of you” is how St. Paul makes that clear. It’s a proclamation of the restoration of the true person in Christ. Christ becomes our identity. We lose ourselves in Him, and then He finds our true selves, and presents them to us.

We can also speak of these struggles as crosses. Now, if we don’t take up the cross - if we just give in to our passions and indulge them, then they don’t constitute a cross. But if we struggle with them by constantly turning to Christ and constantly asking Him to heal us and to restore us and show us our true identity, then those things we struggle with can be crosses through which Christ saves us.

We do not condemn; even Christ does not condemn (John 3:17). Rather, He “desires all men to be saved.” (1 Tim. 2:4) However, we are certainly called to bear witness to the truth, for the sake of those who need to hear the truth. It is the loving thing to do.

By the way, the Church exercises great pastoral discretion in dealing with these things. She understands what a monumental struggle it is for people who have a same-sex attraction. The Church is merciful to them, as She is to all of us. She has been dealing with these issues for millennia - it's nothing new. We don’t see this as something uniquely sinful, but as simply another manifestation of the illness we all share. We simply hope for the healing of those with this struggle, as well as those with other struggles. However, this has certainly become a difficult issue, because society is constantly telling people that this is their identity and that they should just accept it.

It is actually profoundly unloving to know the truth about spiritual cancer, and to conceal it. It’s not that we can both love people and also be honest about their sickness and the cure. It’s that if we really love them we can’t possibly refuse to tell the truth to them. But the Orthodox Church will never stop telling the truth, out of love for all people. We want love to win. And in the end, it will.