Sunday 01 • 27 • 19

This morning is from Genesis chapter two verse 25 through chapter three verse 21.

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of the tree in the garden'?" And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, "Where are you?" And he said, "I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself." And God said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" The man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate." Then the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." The Lord God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." To the woman he said, "I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you." And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you are taken. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return." The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them. — Genesis 2:25-3:21

The word of the Lord.

Two comments before I jump into our sermon today. First is that today's sermon is more PG-13 than PG. I'm not going to be a shock jock with language, but I am going to be clear in some of the terms I'm going to use. And so if you have kids ten years old or younger that you don't want to be in this, I'm just going to give you a warning on that now and explain because I need to be clear on this.

Second is that a lot of our material that I'm using for this sermon and for a couple others coming after this in the series come from a friend of mine, Sam Andrade, who was a pastor for years in Greenwich Village at the Village Church in New York City. He's written a very helpful book called Engendered. He spoke at a conference here in the Triangle with that material, and I'm using some of that today and we'll reference that. But if you want to read further on this, this is a really, really helpful book. And I just want to give credit where it's due.

So let me, before we turn our attention to God's Word together, let's pray. Father, I pray that the words of my mouth, that the meditations of all of our hearts would be acceptable and pleasing in your sight. Lord, you are our rock and our fortress and our redeemer. Amen.

Series Context

So today is sermon number four in our series on gender and the gospel. And if you have missed us or you're just now joining in, we've spent three weeks talking about Genesis one and two, about what it means to be created by God in his image, about what gender is, where gender comes from and what it actually means, how we think about that as a community together. And today we shift from creation in Genesis one and two to fall, which is Genesis three. And after that, we're going to go to redemption. What does it mean to be a redeemed community, thinking about how redemption applies to us and our bodies and gendered bodies now?

But I had us read this morning the last sentence of chapter two, and it was sort of the last statement in chapter two of what it meant to still be in God's good earth before the fall as people in bodies. And you remember what it said? God says this over His newly created equal asymmetrical image bearers, and they were naked and not ashamed. Naked and not ashamed.

Now there's a reality show that was produced for the Discovery Channel called Naked and Afraid. And the premise of the show was that people would go and try to survive for twenty-one days in hostile conditions in the wilderness buck naked. Now, I have to confess, I've never watched this show, which is a dangerous pastor thing to do in a sermon for something you haven't seen. But I understand for the show, for the Discovery show, of course, they do that thing with the camera where they pixelate the bodies, and these people are trying to survive in the elements.

Now, if there was a reality show based on Genesis chapter two, it could be called Naked and Not Ashamed, right? That's a statement of how God's created world was. People in perfect relationship with God, with one another, and even with themselves, with their own bodies. And that's a statement that has never been true of any person ever since. Ever since the fall, every person experiences in their bodies the fall and all the ramifications of that. Everything—I can't think of a single person who could say naked and unashamed. Even the people who are on the TV show Naked and Afraid, I don't think they can say that. They might be certifiably naked and crazy to try to survive in the jungle or the desert or the Arctic naked for twenty-one days, but not naked and unashamed.

And these words—this is the verdict that stands over the first two chapters of the Bible, and it stands in stark contrast to everything that comes after. Look at verse 10. This is what Adam's own statement was post-fall:

I was naked and so I hid. — Genesis 3:10

Naked and ashamed.

So today, as we pick up God's word again, we're going to look at what does it mean to experience the fall in our bodies with decay and corruption? What does it mean for us to experience this? And it's described for you immediately in chapter three. Look at these verses:

Verse 16: pain in childbearing. Verse 17: pain in growing food. Verse 18: sweat and toil. Verse 10: body shame.

There's a profound sense of alienation from our bodies.

And so here's our outline for today. I'm going to talk about how everybody's on the spectrum about the disfigured one, and then how grace has no spectrum. But before I do so, I want to start with some language. Because in the last five to six years, there are a lot of terms that have come to common use in our culture that weren't there just a few years ago that we need to make sure we understand how they're used and what they mean so that we can be people who can have intelligent discourse with people about gender.

Understanding Key Terms

I want to talk about terms. This may be tedious for some of you, but I just want to make sure we all have common language and we know what we're talking about.

Gender dysphoria is stress with your body, distress with the way you are. It's a condition that people often describe as being trapped in the wrong body, trapped in the wrong gender. A person feels like they aren't the gender that their birth certificate says. They despise, they hate their body.

Often, gender dysphoria is not a condition that exists solely in a person. It is also accompanied by comorbidity. Now, comorbidity is not a statement about being emo or liking to dress in black or talking about death all the time. Comorbidity is simply a statement of saying more than one condition—psychological condition—in a person.

So gender dysphoria often has a high rate of comorbidity. That means a person who comes in for therapy has more than one thing besides gender dysphoria that they need treatment for. A study was done, a Dutch study published in the American Journal of Psychology a couple of years ago. Sixty-one percent of cases in which there are other psychological disorders—a person who first identifies that gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria is the leading cause for them being there. And that number is actually kind of low because it doesn't take into account people who come in for other disorders and then disclose, "I'm also struggling with gender identity disorder."

So this is, number one, it's a real thing. And it's also something that people don't just get over. A person who's really struggling, clinically diagnosed as gender dysphoric, is not a person whose issues are going to be resolved by going out for a beer with the guys or going shopping with the girls. It's a real sense of distress. It is a real crisis condition in this person.

I don't want to be glib about this in any way. This is not a small thing. This is a big deal for people who are struggling.

Defining Transgenderism

Second term: transgender or transgenderism. This is potentially very confusing because the media would have you think that there is a whole spectrum of transgenderism when really there are only two categories. There are really only two categories.

The first group are those who are gender dysphoric—people who experience distress with their bodies as they are. If you go to a therapist, to a counselor, a secular counselor, most likely if you say, "Hey, I'm struggling with this," they are going to usher you into a beginning of what's called transitioning.

Transitioning can take one of three forms, and it usually is in one of three stages. First is dressing like the other gender—wearing the clothes appropriate culturally to the other gender. Second is hormone treatment. And hormone treatment, as you know, we have complex chemistry in our bodies. Taking hormones is a way of beginning a permanent process of altering your body. It causes you to either grow hair or not grow hair. It begins to change the chemical nature of what your body processes—everything from food to changes in your sexuality.

The third is surgical alteration. This is also called either gender reassignment surgery or gender confirmation surgery. There are a lot of things that can be done surgically. But I want to say they're expensive and they're dangerous. There are potential dangerous side effects to this.

The surgical procedures that change from male to female include these things: penectomy, which is removal of the penis; orchiectomy, which is removal of the testes, which are typically followed by vaginoplasty, which is creation of a form of a vagina. And then other transition surgeries, which can be everything from shaving of the Adam's apple to facial reconstruction surgery to soften the hard lines of the face. But these are complicated surgeries. This is not something that's easily done, nor is it cheap. Gender reassignment surgery runs at the cheapest end around $100,000.

The procedures that change female to male is masculinizing genitoplasty. The procedure creates a sort of a phallus and changes the genitalia. There are other procedures, including mastectomy, a hysterectomy, and perhaps cosmetic features which change the face. In other words, these are all surgeries and treatments that can change the outward appearance of a person. The outward appearance. But of course, you can't change your genes. You can't change your chromosomes. It may change the outward appearance of the way someone looks, but if you're doing any of these phases, this is called transitioning.

Now, a couple of other terms related to this. Cisgender—CIS—is a description of a person whose gender on their birth certificate is one they feel comfortable inhabiting in their life. So if you have no sense of "I'm in the wrong body," you are labeled as cisgender.

Another word is transphobic—a word applied to anyone who's not on board with the whole gender transitioning enterprise. So if you have any questions or concerns about giving hormone treatments to children, if you think maybe we're missing something in our discussions about surgery, you're called transphobic. And you may not like that term. You may be like, "I'm not a phobic. I'm not afraid of someone who's transgender." But in our culture, anyone who's not on board with all this is called transphobic, and whether you like it or not.

The Two Categories

Now, if the first group of the transgender are the gender dysphoric, who are the other group? To define that group, I need to talk about the prevalence of dysphoria in the transgender community.

Another study in the American Journal of Public Health in 2013 looked at how many people are clinically gender dysphoric. As they did the study, they found that one in about ten thousand to thirteen thousand men, and one in thirty thousand to forty four thousand females call or identify as clinically gender dysphoric. So that amounts to about 0.01% of men and 0.005% of women. It's mostly a male thing. But if you ask the question, "How many of those people identify as transgender?" it's a lot bigger number. The numbers are very different.

In 2012, about one in two hundred fifty people in our country identify as transgender. That's 0.3% to 0.47%. And by the way, if those numbers seem off to you, that's because there are lots of studies on this. Those numbers are only going to increase over the next years as our culture becomes more and more like, "This is mainstream. This is not a big deal." But here's what I want you to think about.

Those numbers are very different. If zero point zero one percent are gender transphoric and zero point three percent are transgender, what does that tell us? It means that one out of about thirty to forty seven people who identify as transgender are truly gender dysphoric. That is, they're struggling with distress about how they are. The others are not, and they identify as transgender for different reasons.

And this is a story that the secular media is not going to say because it's not very popular to talk about this. But what are those reasons? One is just because there can be entertainment value in changing your clothes to the clothes of the other gender. And that's called cross dressing. It used to be called transvestiteism. That word's kind of fallen out of favor. But cross dressing, many times it's for just recreational purposes. A lot of times it's for sexual arousal purposes. And those people may identify as transgender but don't fit the category of gender dysphoric. If a person does that in public, they're called a drag queen.

So that's the two big categories I want you to understand. Transgender is a big umbrella and it has a small group of truly gender dysphoric and a larger group of people who identify as such but don't meet that category.

Intersex

Now some of you have asked, and I've got a lot of emails and questions about a category called intersex, formerly hermaphrodism. And I want to cover that briefly. And to do so, I'm going to have to talk science, which is dangerous as an English major in a room full of a lot of NC State grads where you actually studied science. So just humor me, okay? Like broad sweeping brush categories. That's what English majors do, right?

So if you took high school biology, you may have learned that sexual typing is based on chromosomal either chromosomes. If you're a woman, it's XX. If you're a man, it's XY. But what's been discovered is it's even more elementary and simpler than that. It's not your chromosomes; it's actually in your genes.

In 1990, a researcher in London named Peter Goodfellow led a team in the discovery of the SRY gene, which exists on the Y chromosome. And it is literally an on-off switch for male versus female. So if you are XX, which is typically female, you have no Y chromosome, therefore you can't have an SRY gene. But for male XY, you have a Y chromosome and you have an SRY gene which can either be turned on or off.

And so that means that all women who are XX don't have this, and therefore are women. All who are XY, some who have the SRY gene flipped on, those will exhibit as men. But there are women who have XY chromosomes in whom the SRY gene is not flipped. And everything about them is woman, publicly. And they may not know that. They may go through their entire life and not know that. But this is simpler than even what you probably learned in high school biology. But it's also, at the same time, more complex. And it's more complex this way because there are a lot of things that can go wrong in human people.

I should say this one more thing about the SRY gene. Related to that, there's never been found a gene for homosexuality. This gene is an on-off switch for male versus female, but there's never been one that's a gay gene. And that's not for lack of research around that.

So we're very complex people. And we're made with lots of complex systems of enzymes and chromosomes and hormones. And so there is some room for error in this. There's room for deviation, for there to be ambiguity in either primary or secondary sex characteristics, and this is called intersex.

Intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't neatly fit in typical definitions of male or female. Formerly, the term for that was hermaphrodism. That's fallen out of favor. Intersex is the term now. And there are a number of conditions, and they kind of fall into three categories here.

The various conditions are chromosomal, hormonal, or enzymes. So a person can have chromosomal issues like Klinefelter syndrome. It's a chromosomal condition in boys and men where the individual has XXY chromosomes. That's about one in one thousand births. The condition I mentioned before—a woman with male XY chromosomes but with female genitals—constitutes about one in eighty thousand births, and it's called Swire Syndrome.

Other people can have a hormonal issue, like the condition androgen insensitivity syndrome, which is a person who's genetically male—one X, one Y—is resistant to male hormones or androgens in their system. As a result, the person has some of the physical traits of a male and a woman, but the genetic makeup of a man. That's about one in thirteen thousand births.

Or an individual can have an enzyme production problem like congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

That's about one in thirteen thousand births. And for most of those, there are interventions that can help. Those people move forward with kind of a normal life. But here for our purposes is what's interesting: intersex doesn't fit in the category of transgender. In fact, the Intersex Society of North America wants nothing to do with the whole transgender conversation. And if you think about this, it makes sense. Because a person who's born with ambiguous primary or secondary sex characteristics wants nothing more than to have that resolved and to move on with life. That person's not looking to be the poster person for a cause. They just want to identify inwardly and with their body in a primary gender identity and move on.

And this is interesting because the Intersex Society of North America is by no means conservative politically or any other way. It's not allied with Christian values or they wouldn't be like, "Oh yeah, we love your talk this morning, Pastor Bradford." And the transgender community would love to have that group join in the gender revolution. But what's fascinating to me is that this group says we want nothing to do with this. And I think that's very telling.

So enough on terms. I know that I've bored some of you to tears this morning. But now the sermon, okay?

All People and Body Shame

Here's my main point that I want you to understand: all people are naked and ashamed. All people since the curse are on a spectrum where we look at our bodies and they don't look like we think they should, and they don't act like we think they should, and we don't like them as they are. All people at some point in their life identify with that.

Let me give you case in point—celebrities. Selena Hayek says, "I don't actually have a good body, but if everybody thinks so, I guess it means I'm a good actress. I've acted the part of a girl who has a very good body. I know how to dress. There's some tricks you can pull off."

Megan Fox: "I don't think I'm a sexy, beautiful woman. I look like Ted Nugent in a black wig."

Penelope Cruz: "I don't think I'm beautiful. I can look good and I can look ugly."

Scarlett Johansson: "In normal life, I don't think I'm any more aware of femininity or sexuality than any other woman. I don't walk around feeling sensual. Of course, I'm a girl. Aren't we all like that when we wake up every morning and go, 'Oh, God, what happened when I slept last night?'"

And Ryan Gosling: "I'm not that good looking. I actually think I'm kind of a weird looking guy."

Now, what do all these people have in common? The American public thinks these are the beautiful people. These are sexy people. These are the people that we're like, that is what we want to look like. That's what we want to watch on screen. That's what I wish I looked like. Right?

If they are naked and ashamed, if they look in the mirror and are articulating some form of body shame, what hope do I have? If they feel this way, how do you feel about the body that you're in? This is what all of us feel in front of the mirror—some form of body shame. You may not feel that now, but you will if you don't.

Genesis two and three form for us a fascinating case study on the subject of body shame. Because in Genesis chapter two, verse 25, we just read about Adam and Eve who were naked and unashamed, in perfect relationship with God, with each other, and with their own bodies.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. — Genesis 2:25

One verse later, we're into chapter three and the fall, and suddenly they're naked and ashamed and they're looking at the same bodies. The same bodies as in chapter two. Which tells us there is a radical change in their perspective. That's what's changed.

And this is why I want you to hear this this morning: you are on the spectrum of body shame. Every last person in this room—whether you feel this acutely right now or this morning getting ready for church—you will feel this at some point in your life. Whether it's about your thighs or your ears that are too high or too low or one eye that's misshapen or your butt looks bad in jeans or you think your nose is ugly—we all have some form of this.

And if you don't now, you will. Because as you age, you begin to say things like, "My body is betraying me. I used to look good. What happened? Right? Someone hit me in the head overnight."

We all experience some level of body shame as we age. And if Ryan Gosling and Penelope Cruz can articulate this, what about us?

If you're here and you're completely cisgender and you're listening to me define all these categories of transgender and cisgender, and you're thinking you can't identify in any way with all those people—you are not paying attention. The fall affects every person in their body. There's alienation in every person's body. You've missed it because you are also on the spectrum, on the body shame spectrum. You are also not naked and unashamed. None of us.

The Core Problem

Here's the big problem: Adam and Eve did something that we've done ever since. Every one of us. They took on themselves the role of deciding good and evil. They decided what's right for them. That's the big step we should never have taken.

You may think that's not a big deal. We do that all the time—deciding what's right for me. But the answer of Genesis, the whole answer of all of the Bible, is a resounding no to that. That's the big problem.

When Adam and Eve began to view themselves with God out of the picture, they stepped off a cliff. The perspective of me without God in the picture is: I decide what's right for me, you decide what's right for you. And it's incredibly destructive.

This is what they should never have seen themselves without God in the picture. What has resulted from that is profound shame—profound shame about themselves and about their bodies. They saw themselves apart from God, and this is the problem: you do too, and I do too. That's what is so broken in us as fallen sinners. So broken.

And yet there's good news even in this saddest of chapters in the Bible.

The Gospel Hope in Genesis

Genesis three tells us that God has a plan for body shame. Look at verse 15. This is a curse that God is pronouncing over the serpent, over Satan:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. — Genesis 3:15

What's pictured there is that there would come a future generation, a future child of this human couple generations later, who would come and crush with his foot the head of the serpent. Even as he's doing so, he's being struck, he's being bitten. There's a bruising happening. This is called by theologians the protoevangelion—the first evangelism.

Even in the sadness right here, there's a proclamation of gospel hope for those with body shame. There would come God in human form, the person Jesus Christ, who at the very place of crushing our enemies of sin and death and Satan on the cross, would himself be disfigured in the process.

Isn't this what Isaiah says of him? Jesus on the cross is marred beyond human recognition. In his body, in his physical body, he suffers and is disfigured for those with shame.

His death was designed purposely to shame him. The Romans perfected what had been designed by the Persians. The Persians designed crucifixion to be an agonizing and shameful death, and the Romans made it even more grotesque. They did so that a person would hang naked to expose for everybody to see, for the birds to come and pick at, for all to see publicly shamed. It was a deterrent to other people: don't break this law.

And Jesus, in his body, takes on the suffering of and all the shame of humanity in his body.

God doesn't send Jesus with a little magic wand where he's like, "forgiven." He doesn't come and pronounce over us "loved and accepted." The only way that he undoes what's done by the curse, the only way that he is able to undo the effects of our body shame, is himself being crushed, himself being shamed, himself taking on in his own person this kind of suffering. And he does so that anyone on this spectrum, anyone on the spectrum of body shame, is welcomed in. It's promised you can be made whole.

Grace Has No Spectrum

To what end? Because grace has no spectrum. Grace has no spectrum.

Do you know that? Do you really know that God looks at us with no spectrum? All of us image bearers are the same to Him. Gender dysphoric, transgender, cisgender—all broken by the fall, all sinners, all of us who love to play God and decide what's right for me—we all stand before Him exactly the same.

There is no inherent righteousness in being cisgender, and there is no inherent curse in being transgender. Sorry, nobody's a snowflake.

All of us are people where we're told none of us is righteous. No, not one. All of us are on the spectrum of body shame, and yet because of the fall, there's no spectrum in grace. There's no spectrum in grace. God welcomes all sinners who come to Him. This is the great news. All of us come as sinners who need a God who comes to heal us in radical ways, and even though we measure differently, even though we measure each other differently, there's no spectrum in grace. There's just no spectrum. And do you believe that? Do we believe that? I don't think we do. I really don't think we do. I don't think Christians act that way.

If we believed in our hearts that we're all on the spectrum of body shame and yet that the gospel doesn't categorize us in relationship to those who are not so bad and those who are really bad, then we would be really different, and we would be different in two ways.

First, among the body of Christ, there would be no ick factor. You know what the ick factor is? The yuck factor? It's when we look at another person, another image bearer, and because we're Southerners, in our hearts we go yuck. But in our outward behavior, there's just a little pause, a little holding back, a little blink. And people know. They know that Christians all the time think of other image bearers in the category of other. And friends, that belies a deep ignorance of the gospel, of the grace of God for sinners. All of us come unworthy. All of us need grace. So there should never be an ick factor, a yuck among Christians. Anyone who comes to our church—this is my prayer—anyone who comes to our church and they don't fit your categories of what you're like and what your friends are like, they are embraced and they are welcomed in with no hesitancy, with a hug, with no pause. That's my prayer.

Second, we would have less and less of an ick factor for our own bodies. We'd be less vain. We'd be less concerned about your weird ears or your big butt or how you look in jeans. You'd just be more lighthearted. I'm not saying you'd quit the gym and eat Big Macs for the rest of your life. There's a good, right stewardship of caring for our bodies and exercising and eating right. But there would be less of an ick factor for our own bodies where we just would care a little bit less. We'd be a little bit less self-conscious, comparing all the time and measuring. We'd stop that. It just wouldn't be a big deal as it is right now. It's too big a deal. It occupies too much space.

Don't we do this? To really live in the gospel in this area is to begin to see your own body and other bodies in light with God in the picture, with Him in the picture, knowing that He has made us as image bearers. Part of what He does to redeem us is not just forgive us our sins, and not just one day when there will be a wiping of every tear and new heavens and new earth, but He will give new bodies. He will give perfect new bodies, and you will have a perfect relationship to that body. The ways that you experience brokenness and unwholeness, the ways that you hate the way you look and feel ugly and weird all the time—all that will be healed and made whole. If you are in Christ, then that is the hope. Isn't that good hope? Don't we want to cling to that? Don't we want to be reshaped and remade by that as a community? Don't we want to believe in our souls of souls that the gospel is that good news?

Amen? Amen. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.