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This week, guest speaker, Reverend Dr. Nathaniel Goh shares about what it means to be created male and female in his sermon entitled Our Human Sexuality.

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I bring you greetings, of course, from a number of places, from the Chinese Annual Conference of the Methodist Church in Singapore, from my from the principal and faculty of Trinity Theological College, and particularly from uh my dear colleague, uh the Reverend Dr. Jeremy Joe, who is of course the only Anglican uh ordained minister in TTC on the faculty at the moment. I bring greetings from all of them, and uh I wish to tell you that I'm very privileged to be here this morning to share the word. Let us pray. I would speak to you now in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. About a year and a half ago, I picked up a new sport called pickleball. Well-meaning friends started to give me plenty of advice about how to improve my game. Bend your knees, swing your hips, rotate your shoulders, contact the ball in front of you, follow through. Now, as I began to get more into the sport, my excitement increased. I began to play fast and loose with all these basics that I've been taught. Whenever someone tried to coach me in the basics again, I tended to politely pretend that I was interested. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, correct, correct. But I wasn't really captivated by the advice or the idea of going over the basics again. I must say I'm not sure if some of you feel the same way when you heard that today's uh or when you heard today's scripture being read. I must confess because many times as a Christian sitting in the congregation, I also felt the same way. Genesis 1, again, isn't this one of the most basic and well-worn passages of scripture? Anyone who wants to begin reading the Bible usually starts at Genesis anyway, right? So this is one of the passages that you are most familiar with, right? Until you reach uh Leviticus, maybe, and you give up uh the reading through the whole Bible. And as I read and reread the passage in preparation for the sermon, my mind once again was drawn to my attitude on the pickleball court. How is one more sermon about this going to contribute to our Christian life? I found myself showing polite interest, but not captivated by the text the way I should be or once was. We, however, live in a time of crisis. A radically new understanding of sexuality, marriage, and humanity is being propagated with profound implications for our society and church. Adherents to this new understanding of sexuality spread the message with evangelical zeal. Disciples of this reformation of sexuality are united in their devotion to this new religion of reality. The trigger point of this crisis is the question of what role our bodies and sexuality will play in our identity and in our destiny. The new religion of the body says that the body is only incidental to our identity. According to the priests of this new religion, the body is not a temple. The heart of the human destiny, they say, is the right to define our own concept of what it means to be, to have existence, meaning in life, the universe, and the mystery. Lest you think that the church can simply meet here, huddle away, and ignore what is happening, I quote to you the cautionary title of a book by Eric Erickson and Bill Blenkshin. The title is You Will Be Made to Care. You will be made to care. Please for tolerance will eventually give way to demands for conformity. When it comes to sex, marriage, and reality, respect for others will require social approval. A prominent Christian journalist confided that his biggest fear in life is that his own children will grow up to hate him because they will believe the terrible things said about Christianity. The greatest danger is perhaps not that many will be persecuted, though that may happen, but that many will abandon their faith and their families. Rocked by waves of accusations that we are haters, many will believe it. That's just one form of activism outside. But there are also those who struggle with questions of sexuality, for whom the answer the world gives is to change the definition to whatever you want it to be. That cannot be a council of hope in the end, for our hearts are inclined to failure. And so it is with all this in mind that I consider it my privilege this morning to return to Genesis 1 to consider the core convictions on which the Bible builds its understanding of humanity. What we have heard is the climax of the first account of creation. The passage comes right at the end of the creation narrative. Everything has been brought into existence: light, dry land, vegetation, sun, moon, and stars, waters, creatures, flying birds, wildlife. Everything has been created in preparation for and in anticipation of this climacom. Not only that, everything so far has been created in a binary pattern: nothing and something, creator and creature, heaven and earth, light, darkness, day, night, evening, morning, sun, moon, work, rest, good, evil. You see this binary pattern occurring in the order of creation. In Genesis 1, 26 to 30, having put creation in its proper order, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit now determined to create a being that is more like God than any of the other creatures. God plans to create human beings in the divine image according to his likeness to give them certain responsibilities and a purpose. Then he actualizes this plan. He creates human beings in his image with a crucial qualification. They will be either male or female. God creates men in his image and women in his image. And to these image bearers, he pronounces a blessing and a mandate. These divinely created male and female image bearers are to reproduce other image bearers and to produce an ordered society. That's a kind of summary of what we read in those verses. God's spoken word for human creation in our scripture passage, I think reveals to us five axiomatic truths about humanity. First, all people were created by God for bodily life on earth, with each other and with other living creatures. This is God's decree, his spoken word. It makes us what we are, it determines our status and purpose as human beings. We therefore derive our nature and our identity from God. Adam and Eve, you realize if you read on, do not name themselves as they have named all the other creatures. God names them so that he can address them personally and converse with them. Reality and human experience are not self-creating. The Baptist theologian Andrew Walker rightly reminds us that sexuality and gender are not quirks of evolution, nor are they purely cultural artifacts. They find their origin in the will of God. That's the first axiom. The second, in our humanity, we are to resemble the living God by reflecting him in what we are and what we do. We are to resemble the living God by reflecting him in what we are and what we do. We are to be holy as God Himself is holy. To be made in God's image is to manifest God visibly and personally in our bodies. Again, this shows that sexuality and gender are part of his design. It is not an endlessly bespoke aspect of humanity that we chop and change or pick and choose according to how we want. Our full flourishing as human beings comes not from trying to manipulate our bodies to fit our inner desires, but from living in accordance with our designer's design. I learned this lesson the hard way while I was doing my doctoral studies in Durham in England. My wife and I bought a stool from IKEA and brought it back to our apartment, where I immediately set out to assemble it. My faithful, ever-loving, forbearing wife unfolded the instructions and I told her, I waved her off, saying, Please, come on, it's just a stool. How hard can it be? One hour later, holding in my hands an unholy chimera of screws, metal joints, and wood that more closely resemble a modern art sculpture than a stool, I sheepishly turned to my wife and said, Can you help me bring the instructions here? As it turns out, the way for everything to work together in a good way was to follow the design and the instructions. I simply share this to show the truism. I hope you begin to see this basic insight that scripture says that we are not free to allow any practice or arrangement, even in our sexuality, even if we deeply desire it, so long as we consent to it. There is a design in which our following that design is the path to flourishing. Third, human beings were created in God's image as male and female. The terms male and female describe both their biological sex and their corresponding gender, their sexual identity into which they are socialized. Both are given by God in their creation. So both their sexual status and their gender reflect God's image. Men and women were designed to reflect God's character, his qualities, and his activity, both separately, individually, as males and females, and together when in marriage there is the conjugal sexual union. Again, I want to quote from a very helpful Baptist theologian Andrew Walker, who reminds us that male and female are bodily realities, not constructed from psychology alone. In fact, scientific research shows that we are gendered in our body all the way down. Every cell in our body consists of 23 pairs of chromosomes, of which 22 are identical in every person, male or female. Those 22 pairs produce ranges of traits, from the color of our eyes to the quality of our skin. There is one chromosome, however, the sex chromosome, that determines if a person is a man or a woman. Every cell in a woman's body has an XX sex chromosome and XY in the man. I point this out just to say that our sexual differentiation is literally inscribed into our bodies. Try as you might, your body cannot experience what it is like to be yourself, to relate to others, and even to relate to God as a member of the opposite sex from the one that you were born. You view and experience life in all of the cells through a kind of gendered experience. Our sexuality is an objective and fixed reality. Fourth, God did not create some part of us, just one part of us, and some capacities in us with the ability to reflect his image. What do I mean by that? It is not just our mind and our rationality that is the image of God, it is not just the soul with its capacity for loving and feeling and personal relationships that is the image of God. The whole person, one person, unified body and soul, is created in the image of God. The mention of Adam and Eve's sexuality shows that this includes their bodies. Their bodies are part of what it means to image God. The whole being as a soul, a living person with a human body and a human mind, was designed by God to reveal himself, however partially and imperfectly, in that person's life on earth. Your bodies were made for teophony. Every single one of us, our bodies are God's human manifestation of design and his intent and his glory on earth. It is the visible disclosure of God's glory in human terms. A failure to live rightly in our bodies is a failure to live up to that glorious purpose for which he created us. Fifth, even though the passages that speak about the creation of humankind in God's image do not explain how we were meant to resemble him, they do describe what we were meant to do as creatures made in his likeness. Have dominion, he says, over all the fish and birds and the animals. Just as God maintains the whole cosmic order and supervises its proper operation, so we human beings, rather than just a few powerful people, all of us are meant to maintain proper order in his kingdom on earth. And so that everyone and all creatures, each in their own niche and in their own way, will thrive together with all humankind. As managers of God's earthly estate, the first humans were commanded to subdue the earth. They subdued it by farming properly, by protecting it from protect from exploitation and abuse, but most of all, they would subdue the earth by exercising maleness and femaleness together. The act of being fruitful and multiplying is built on our sexual distinction. Families might be constructed in different ways through adoption, through covenanting, through fostering, and so on. But every single human person whoever existed and who exists is the result of a man and a woman. So your families might be constructed in different ways, and indeed they are, and in their own ways they can reflect the goodness of family relationships. But I hope you agree this truism that we get from Genesis that only the sexual union of men and women can produce children. Humankind was to be like God, serving as good stewards of the earth. And one fundamental way that happens is through the union of a man and a woman. These are basic building blocks of Christian teaching. And in fact, this basic building block intersects and interlocks with many other aspects of what we consider important in Christian theology. An understanding of God's creation of human beings and his design for human flourishing is a theology of creation. And then this connects to how we think about human nature, which we call theological anthropology, about human nature. From there, we consider the bodily effects of the fall into sin. We will call that Hama theology, right? I'm just telling you all the allogies. From that consideration of the bodily effects of the fall and sin, we think about how God redeems us through Christ and the nature of his incarnation, Christ's body. And that we call Christology. From there we might think about the Holy Spirit's indwelling of and the divine action through human beings, what we call pneumatology and salvation soteriology. From there we wonder what happens to us when we die? What happens to these bodies when we die? What intermediate state do we hold before the resurrection of the body? Issues like these are called, are organized under a rubric called eschatology. So you see, from thinking about the body, the the very fact of Genesis 1, the verses that we are reflecting on, connects us to the wider nexus of a whole suite of Christian teaching about life as a whole, from birth all the way to the final resurrection. And I haven't even begun to talk about my specialization, which is moral theology or ethics. Heterosexuality, homosexuality, transgenderism, gender dysphoria, body image, body mutilation, body modification. All of these issues that the church responds to requires thinking through these basic blocks of in Genesis. But most important of all, the Christian doctrine of creation wasn't meant for the church only. As Christians have understood it, it is our understanding of creation, all creation, Christian or otherwise. And that is why we confess that there are aspects of reality that are invested with moral significance. These aspects of reality that have moral significance include our sexuality, our bodies, and our human purpose. These basic truths we claim can be explored apart from the Bible because it is written into reality itself. Think about the chromosomes again. And because living in that way is conducive to human flourishing. I want to come back to my story about me playing pickleball. As a result of ignoring the basics, those of you who play sports, right, um, who participate in sports, you can imagine once you ignore the basics, your game deteriorates faster than ice melts on a sunny day. It got to a point where I was routinely getting even the return of surf wrong. Now, those of you who don't play record sports may not appreciate this. So let me explain to you. Someone starts the game by serving, right? They serve. That's the start. Literally, the start of the game is serving. A return of surf is literally the second shot after the surf. So an opponent serves and you return. That's the second shot. Not being able to return a surf means you might as well don't play the game. The whole basis for the sport is lost. If you cannot return a surf, you cannot play the game. The whole enjoyment of the game is lost. You might as well just stand at the side and pick the balls. Maybe that's why they call it pickleball. In any case, that's my experience. Once I lost the basics, the whole possibility to participate was lost. The first Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wesley, once said this: the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. This reflection on the climax of the Napoleonic Wars was not a statement of personal modesty. It was his recognition that success in battle depended on the basics that you had been built in. And it was a statement that Britain had institutions that formed people in the basics that could survive and even thrive in the demanding circumstances of war. I want to suggest to you that the Christian life is more about eaten than it is about Waterloo. Eton and Waterloo represent two distinct aspects. Eaton represents the long period of formation, and Waterloo represents that tiny episode or battle where you make a decision. Contemporary sexual ethics will never be able to respond to Waterloo, those battles or those crises that is out in the world, without Eaton, a period of formation. Morality has become the study of the battleground without much recognition of the training ground. And this is where the Duke of Wellington's remark is so significant. He says you cannot understand or even win at Waterloo if you don't understand Eton. What went on at Eton, the training, was more important than what went on at Waterloo in the battle. Because at Eton, people were trained to shoulder the kind of responsibility that they would encounter at Waterloo. The real decisions that took place there at Waterloo, decisions that shaped the future of European history, had been taken many years earlier. In other words, ethics in the Christian life is about the formation of a people and not first in the decisions that we make. Let me try and illustrate this insight with a story from Donald Nichol. Donald Nichol shares a story. Later that week, Donald and his friend Goof Badanock were talking about the tragedy. And Donald expressed sympathy for the surgeon involved, since he had encountered an unexpected complication. Goof, a colleague of the surgeon, strongly disagreed. And he said this. This is why he disagreed. He said, I think the man is to blame. If anyone had handed me ether instead of chloroform, I would have known from the weight that it was the wrong thing. You see, I know the man well. We were students together at Aberdeen, and he he could have become one of the finest surgeons in Europe if only he had given his mind to it. But he didn't. He was more interested in golf. And so he just used to do enough work to pass his examinations and no more. And that is how he has lived his life. Just enough to get through, but no more. He has never picked up those seemingly basic bits of knowledge that can one day be crucial. The other day in the operating theater, a bit of basic knowledge was crucial and he didn't have it. But it wasn't at the operating theater that he failed. It was 39 years ago when he only gave himself half-heartedly to medicine. End quote. Just as the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, so the battle for a sick child's life was lost on the golf course. An athlete trains for months for a race, and no amount of enthusiasm on the day can make up for deficiencies in preparation. A student studies for years for an exam, and again, no amount of thought on the day can make up for deficiencies in preparation. A doctor studies and trains to excel in surgery, and no amount of goodwill on the day can make up for deficiencies in preparation. To close, I want to say this. In the case of human sexuality, a return to the basics as outlined in Genesis reminds us about fundamental realities about human life design and flourishing. It reminds us that our embodied lives are from start to finish designed, defined, delivered, and destined by God. The image of God in humanity, although bent, is not destroyed. And the ideal expression of human sexuality in a god-like design has not been obscured. It can still be glimpsed and affirmed by all who share in a common humanity, despite the sin that surrounds it. The way things ought to be for all people is still visible and possible today. We must build on these basic biblical axioms and declare to the world the reality of what it means to be redeemed. We must invite others to experience a renewal of the image of God which has become distorted in humanity, in bodily life. In order to do so, we must be a community of character whose daily life is distinguished not only by a familiarity with the basics, but a faithfulness to it. The character we need for this task is not formed on the eve of the battle, but in the daily fields of living. You see, my friends, the challenge and crisis of the present day will not be seen off by words, treatises, or sermons. It will not be resolved by petitions and town hall meetings. The challenge can only finally be answered by our own lives before God. To the end, may God help us all live in his truth today and always. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

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