The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is simply that the Bible has no sexual ethic.  Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which have changed over the thousand year span of biblical history.  Mores are unreflective customs accepted by a given community.  Many of the practices that the Bible prohibits, we allow, and many that it allows, we prohibit.  The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, or culture, or period. 

The image of Jesus to which we are called to conform to is not some sort of religious nut concerned with other-worldly religious matters as if the human issues don’t matter.  No, if the pattern is Jesus as we encounter him in the Gospels, then it means being drawn into the pattern of true humanity because Jesus models for us what it means to be a human being in the fullest sense.  In Jesus, God has given us the archetype of what it means to be truly human.  Now we must become more authentically human in the way that Jesus has set out for us, using Jesus’ life as a model.  It was never meant to be a matter of becoming a religious person but rather the forming of Christ in every person and in the life of the community of disciples.

In Buddhism, the most important precept of all is to live in awareness, to know what is going on.  To know what is going on, not only here, but there.  For instance, when you eat a piece of bread, you may choose to be aware that our farmers, in growing the wheat, use chemical poisons a little too much.  Eating the bread, we are somehow co-responsible for the destruction of our ecology.  When we eat a piece of meat or drink alcohol, we can produce awareness that 40,000 children die each day in the Third World from hunger and that in order to produce a piece of meat or a bottle of liquor, we have to use a lot of grain.  Eating a bowl of cereal may be more reconciling with the suffering of the world than eating a piece of meat.  An authority on economics who lives in France told me that if only the people in Western countries would reduce the eating of meat and the drinking of alcohol by 50 percent, that would be enough to change the situation of the world.  Only 50 percent less.

Every day we do things, we are things, that have to do with peace.  If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive, the present moment.  When we pick up the Sunday newspaper, for instance, we may be aware that it is a very heavy edition, maybe three or four pounds.  To print such a paper, a whole forest may be needed.  When we pick up the paper, we should be aware.  If we are very aware, we can do something to change the course of things.

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace, 65-66.

We must let go of the fantasy concerning the church as a stable, predictable, well-regulated organization.  If the church is truly the place in the world where the experience of God is brought to the level of narrative and discernment, then the church will always be in transition between partial closure and openness, between the idolatry of institutional self-preservation and the obedience of faith in the living God.  We must let go of the desire for theology to be a finished product of complete conceptual symmetry.  If theology is in fact the attempt to understand living faith, then it must always be an unfinished process, for the data continues to come in, as the Living God persists in working through the lives of people and being revealed in their stories.

You have to hate the body very much (as of course the Gnostics did) to think that a bodiless eternity on a cloud is what we were designed and destined for.  God loves his creation.  He loves matter.  Despite all the trouble it has given him, he has not thrown it away and started again, and he never will.  The incarnation of God in Jesus is God’s affirming “yes” to the flesh.  Jesus’ resurrection body – the first example of the sort of body which we will ultimately have, and which is necessary to allow us to experience the super-sensual, super-material world we will inhabit – was far more material than ours.  It related to matter on this earth much as our bodies relate to mist.  So keen is God on the material, that the plan for the cosmos is to make it even more material than it currently is.

- Charles Foster, The Selfless Gene, 199.

We must engage with our religious tradition, for it acts as a compass that enables us to navigate the world.  Yet we must combine this compass reading with a knowledge of the terrain in which we find ourselves and a deep love in order to work out which way we must travel.  Our interpretations of the Bible must then be understood more as temporary shelters than eternal structures.  We never finish reading the Bible but always find ourselves standing on its threshold, ready to read again.  Thus we can never rest easy, believing that we have discovered the foundations that act as a key for working out what we must do in different situations: for the only clear foundation laid down by Jesus was the law of love.  This love demands that we use the scriptures not as an ethical textbook but rather as a text that extrapolates the Christlike way of being in the world.

You are welcome at this table.  The altar is the big table.  This is the table that wants everyone there: poor and rich, women and men, children and older people, the mentally disabled and depressed, the homeless, the sane, the happy and the sad, the straight and the gay and the in-between.  Thieves are welcome here, and embezzlers; so are murderers and prostitutes and sex abusers and those who have been or are abused.  Those who have had abortions are welcome here as well as those who have not.  Drinking alcoholics, and those who've joined AA or have quit.  Everyone.  Just like the tax collectors and the blind man and the leper who followed Jesus.  The gospel story that makes the most sense to me about the Eucharist is the feeding of the five thousand.  Jesus didn't ask those thousands of people camped on that hillside whether they had confessed their sins or how clean they were.  He fed them. 

Reformation of behavior usually involves substituting one addiction for another, adapting to a new, possibly less destructive normality. … In addition to minimizing withdrawal symptoms, the substitution of one normality for another allows us to avoid the open, empty feeling that comes when an addictive behavior is curtailed.  Although this emptiness is really freedom, it is so unconditioned that it feels strange, sometimes even horrible.  If we were willing for a deeper transformation of desire, we would have to try to make friends with the spaciousness we would need to appreciate it as openness to God.  Because openness to God is threatening, and because our desire is more to overcome an addiction than to claim our deeper desire for God, we fill the space with something else.  In so doing, we assent to continued slavery under a new master who, we hope, will be kinder. 

And Trinity is a steady call and invitation to participate in the energetically active life of God – the image of the dance again.  It is the participation in the Trinity (God as he has revealed himself to us) that makes things and people particularly and distinctively who they are.  We are not spectators to God; there is always a hand reaching out to pull us into the Trinitarian actions of holy creation, holy salvation, and holy community.  God is never a nonparticipant in what he does, nor are any of us.  There are no nonparticipants in a Trinity-revealed life.  We need to know this.  It is a lot easier to guide, motivate, plan, and direct from a distance, whether in our homes or in our work.  So we keep a little distance, find ways to delegate so we don't have to get too involved.  But the reality of the Trinity does not permit it.  If we are going to know God we have to participate in the relationship that God is.  We discover ourselves as unique participants – each of us one-of-a-kind – in the life of God.  The Christian life is not programmed; it is a release into freedom.

- Euguene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 46-7.