It's Not About Me

The Sexual Ethics Seminar was a required attendance event for the pastors of my denomination and area. From a large geographical area pastors came. The host church Fellowship Hall was packed. The Pastoral Counselor contracted to facilitate the event was well-prepared, articulate and entertaining.

Here we were meeting to learn of sexual ethics in relation to our conduct as clergy, who are in positions of power with parishioners and co-workers. Before the opening prayer was prayed it started ….

“Hey,” said one of the pastors sitting at my table, “this is something else. We’re attending a sexual ethics thing, and wouldn’t you know it, I’m sitting at the table with the man who has the sexiest secretary in the state.”

As I quietly digested his remark, weighing it against the day’s setting, the person to whom he spoke replied, “Yeah, she sure is. And I’m going to tell her you think she's hot.”

Now, I quietly digested this reply. My thought was two of my brothers danced up to the edge of the boundary, demonstrating their need to be there.

The seminar began. Just as the facilitator commenced to gather the participants into an attitude of expectation and learning, another person at my table rose to interrupt and make a comment. “Let me add one thing,” he instructed the facilitator. “We must always remember that whenever we sit among sinners we have to be careful we do not become one.”

Are these not “this doesn’t apply to me,” attitudes?

How do we preach against sin when we don’t recognize it?