Lust: Loveless Desire
October 4, 2026
19th Sunday after Pentecost
MINISTER
Rev. David J. Wood
SCRIPTURE
Song of Solomon 4: 1-7' I Corinthians 6: 12-20
“Lust: Loveless Desire”
by Rev. David J. Wood
19th Sunday After Pentecost, October 4, 2026
First Congregational Church of Camden
Scripture Readings:
Song of Solomon 4: 1-7 & I Corinthians 6: 12-20
We have come to the final sermon in our series on the Seven Deadly Sins. We have navigated our way through Pride, Envy, Sloth, Anger, Greed, & Gluttony. Today we take up Lust. Often, in the early formation of the list of “The Seven Deadly Sins” list, Lust was first. For many it is the most easily recalled.
The esssayist, Dorothy Sayers, in her reflections on “The Seven Deadly Sins,” wrote:
I am reminded of a young man who once said to me with perfect simplicity: “I did not know there were seven deadly sins: please tell me the names of the other six.”
Perhaps of all the sins, Lust is the one still considered to be newsworthy. I’m sure most of you still remember the time when Jimmy Carter confessed his lust and it was front page news. It was 50 years ago, almost to the day, that Presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, made a confession in an interview with Playboy Magazine. In that interview, he admitted to having “looked on a lot of women with lust” and committing adultery “in his heart.” (A reference to Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5 that related lust to adultery.)
In the wake of the interview, polls revealed that readers were repelled by the personal nature of the remarks and the media unleashed an onslaught of criticism and ridicule just weeks before election day essentially demolishing Carter’s substantial lead over Gerald R. Ford in the opinion polls but, in the end, it did not keep him from winning the election.
In a culture that plays to and on our proclivity for sexual desire, it remains deeply personal and private matter and not fit for public exposure. A paradox of sorts.
However, Lust can have a positive spin. We speak admirably of someone having “a Lust for life”: meaning someone who is living large, living out loud! Living with gusto! A person who throws themselves into life with abandon, possessing a kind of exuberance for life.
Picking up on this appreciative side of Lust, one pastor wrote: “As a pastor give me a lustful, seeking, reaching, desirous person in my congregation rather than a detached, cool, controlled, repressed, apathetic person. It’s easier to contain a fire than it is to raise the dead.”
The Latin word for lust is LUXURIA—which means riotous or excessive behavior. It is where our word, “LUXURY”comes from: indicating goods of lavish excess, beyond what is necessary or merely sufficient. Originally, lust stood for excessive, inordinate desire of any kind: food, drink, pleasure, money, and sex…
Lust as a sin became a way of naming all the all too human experience of becoming enslaved by desire. Or as someone put it, “of being eaten alive by our appetites.”
Given that sex is one of the most powerful desires we have, it makes sense that in time it would become the focal point for any discussion of lust.
We live in a sexualized culture…a culture that plays to and on our impulses…”we live in an age in which voyeurism is no longer that sideline of the solitary deviant….but rather a national past time, fully institutionalized and naturalized in the mass media.” Internet life has made peeping Toms of us all.
There was a time (so I am told) that if we would have to undertake a very deliberate and complicated search find sexually provocative, explicit literature and material. Now virtually, such material comes searching for us. Solid numbers on the annual revenue from pornography on the internet are hard to come by. But there is consensus that the annual revenue exceeds that of the NBA, NFL, MLB combined.
At the same time…our culture retains a capacity for condemnation of sexual transgression when it takes the form of rape, abuse of children, sex trafficking…and the like. Perhaps more than any other sin we have named, lust is the one that retains some notion of sin and transgression. The recent horrific allegations of rape coming out of Cornell this past week…or the implosion of the Graham Plattner campaign are cases in point.
Sexual desire is complicated.
Over the years, the Church often characterised sex as a necessary evil…rather than a joy to be experienced…
In my own church based upbringing, I remember as a young adolescent being taught that sexual desire was like a fire: it can either provide warmth and comfort to a home or it can burn the house down. That imagery was enough to instill the fear of God into a blossoming adolescent. It was absolutely clear which outcome was more likely!
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This morning, we began with a reading from Song of Solomon.
My main reason for doing so was to remind us that the Bible is against lust…it is not Anti-sex, anti-pleasure, anti-desire.
Those verses from chapter 4 are just a small selection from an extended collection of love poems. The Song of Solomon is composed of love songs sung by a man or a woman to each other—from one lover to the other. As one interpreter put it, is is “a celebration in which the two lovers savour all the physical characteristics of their beloved….” Another remarked, “Though God is never named in the Song of Solomon, God’s delight and creativity saturates every verse and is embedded in each fleshy word.”
It is almost enough to get the Bible banned from the public library! As one of my preaching colleagues put it, “If young adolescents ever happened upon this little often overlooked book, they might begin reading it with flashlights under the covers of night.”
It’s place in the Bible was questioned. To justify its inclusion, some have interpreted the book as an allegory…God’s love for Israel or of Christ’s love for the Church. In the end, it’s hard to get away from it as a "celebration of human love with poetry, revelling in romance and sexuality.”
The realm of sexual desire needs to become part of our life in the church…not to tamp it down, button it up, seal it off as something to be feared…Neither is it be be the most important dimension of who we are as human beings…
but to place it in an alternative context of a much larger understanding of the human person, of the meaning of love—a much larger context of goodness, wholeness, and holiness.
Here we hold the most important dimensions of our lives together: body and soul together; heart and hands; will and emotion; desire and discipline; love and desire.
The power of the sexual bond between human beings is worthy of a being regard as a life-long bond. It’s involving, its complicated. Love-making is deeply connected to life- making.
It can be made into something much less…less involving, less connective, less demanding. But then, that’s just it, it is made into something much less…which, inevitably makes US into SOMONE less that we were meant to be.
The Theologian, Paul Ricoeur, put it this way: Every thing that makes sexual encounter easy, simultaneously speeds it collapse into insignificance.
To sum up: Sexual desire has the unique power to bind us, unite us, to forget ourselves, to know ourselves, to be known by another, to feel ourselves, to free us, to break us open, and to reveal us…it is what makes it such a precious and precarious thing.
When sexual desire turns into lust—an impulse becomes a compulsion.…that inevitably isolates, alienates, and demeans.
In that turning, the other ceases to be a subject, a multi faceted, complex human being. The other, quite simply, becomes an object…and when we make another into an object…the interchange is onesided, of matter of using, has no mutuality, no reciprocation, no accountability. Beyond satisfaction of desire, it demands little to nothing of me, no vulnerability, no self revelation…the other is quickly discarded.
We cannot trivialize sexual experience…without trivializing oursleves…and one another. The life we live in and through our bodies matters….it is not a trivial.
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Brings us to our reading from I Corinthians…
It’s a complex text…that requires much more time to unpack than we have this morning. But let me say this…
Paul’s essential argument was against those who were claiming that as long as you spirit was in the right place, what consenting adults do with their bodies is of neither here nor there. Eating or drinking of having sex….it’s irrelevant to one’s life before God..
Paul makes a case for a profound unity of body and soul; flesh and spirit. He proposes nothing less than a sacramental view of our bodies. He rests his case on the Resurrection: the Resurrection of Jesus was not simply a spiritual affair, it was a bodily; embodied event. Which, he claims, proof that what God thinks of our bodies. They matter, supremely. That are part and parcel of God’s redemption of humanity.
The body is meant not for sexual immorality but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
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WHAT IS THE ANTIDOTE TO LUST?
Trusting in the goodness of God enough to direct one’s desires according to love. To give in to lust is to give up on love. We are not meant for lust…we are made for love.
Pay attention to your hungers and desires…they reveal our deeper needs and yearning…that if unnamed and unattended have a way of wreaking havoc.
Seek community…isolation, boredom, loneliness…draws us away from genuine, loving contact. The absence of trusting contact with others degrades our capacity to love and be loved…to know and to be known.
One thing we all bring with us is a sexual history…and often that is a complicated history. No doubt there is ecstasy, joy, celebration, and communion…but also, all too often, woundedness and lingering pain. There is no shame, no need to hide…there is mercy, healing and wholeness to be found here…
In the beginning and in the end, we belong to God…and everywhere in between, body and soul, we belong to God. And that is unambiguously GOOD NEWS. Amen.