The beauty of the individual verse

Corrine and I are taking a pre-marital course at Christ the Rock church in Menasha after some prodding. It is precisely what I expected it to be.... Of course, there have been dozens of blanks to fill in--gotta keep 'em occupied. Anyway, I just wanted to share my favorite element of it so far. I will write this exactly as it occurs in the little booklet:

"Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral [fornicators]" (Hebrews 13:4, NW).

I looked at the actual context of the verse again. It is the "concluding exhortations" to the Hebrews. This verse is one in a list of many; it is undeniably not a section concerned exhaustively with sexuality. Truthfully, I'm not really all that concerned with what Christ the Rock is teaching. I am concerned, though, that not only can a verse like this be decontextualized to this extent, but that whoever was putting together the booklet felt it was their right--nay, their obligation--to add, in brackets, a definitive definition of what sexual immorality looks like. Could the writer of Hebrews have been speaking to child molesters or prostitutes? That question means nothing in the context of this class, and it's this that I find most frustrating about the whole situation.

I've been involved in courses in churches like this one enough times to know that opening my mouth in query isn't going to do anything but ruffle feathers and give the impression that I'm out to sabotage the rules and guidelines God made manifest in the Bible. But all the time I'm a part of something like this I cannot help but feel that, in more ways than just this one, this type of (mis)reading is not only a refusal to engage the text, but a willful (if hidden in multifarious layers) attempt to guard even those teaching the class from really engaging the text for themselves.

I hope I'm wrong. I really, really do. I hope all of these people feel that reading texts in ways that don't line up exactly with what their church espouses is not only acceptable, but essential.