Sermons

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One Another
August 24, 2003
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
8th in a series on Ephesians
Ephesians 5:21-6:9

It’s nice to be back worshipping with you this morning after two weeks away. Our family had a great two weeks away on Whidbey Island. Very nice, very relaxing…the only real problem was that I spent so much time thinking about this one burning question that I wrestled with and wrestled with: Should I run for governor of California or not?! I finally decided I didn’t want to be Candidate #248.

This morning is our next-to-last sermon from the book of Ephesians. Let me just remind you of the little memory device I gave you the first week we read Ephesians, the title of a book by the Chinese pastor Watchman Nee: Sit Walk Stand. Ephesians encourages us first to SIT, and consider the relationship we have been graced with in Jesus Christ, “by grace you have been saved.” Next it talks about WALKING, the living out of the Christian life. And finally next week we’ll look at STANDING in the face of evil.

This morning…we are still “walking,” thinking about how to live out our lives in Christ. Our passage begins in chapter 5:21, and is part of what ancient times called a “household code” for living. Because it’s long, I want to encourage you to follow along with Brian and me as we read:

Ephesians 5:21-6:9

The passage for this morning raises lots of question, and moves us into sensitive, controversial territory. Many smart pastors…have an associate pastor preach this sermon! Others just skip this part of the book. I’m very committed to reading ALL of scripture, because I believe we have been given scripture just the way the Lord wanted us to have it, with all its tensions and difficulties.

• A man in Seattle reads the first section of what we just read, fixates on the phrase, “Wives, be subject to your husbands,” and quotes it to his wife as he slaps her in the heat of an argument. “If you were submissive,” he said, “you wouldn’t disagree with me and I wouldn’t hit you.” It’s not the first time.
• A woman, an elder of a church in New York, reads a part of the second section, “Children, obey your parents” and feels justified in shouting at her daughter until the girl is so overwhelmed she begins to cry.
• A Christian man in Georgia in the 1850s reads part of the third section, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling,” and triumphantly notes that “the Bible supports our owning slaves.”

These kinds of things go on every day. They grieve the heart of God. As long as there has been a Bible, there have been horrible abuses like these, ungodly actions justified by the poor reading of scripture. Friends, the Bible did not just float down from heaven. Paul’s letters, for instance, were written by a MAN…under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, yes, but also a man in a particular time and place…and then passed on to us. The Bible is a book that contains situational advice for the year 90 AD. AND it communicates divine revelation applicable for 2003. It is incredibly human, AND it is undeniably divine. Karl Barth long ago called the Bible “the Word of God…in the words of men.” And it will require careful study and prayerful reading to hear how God speaks into our time and culture through these words…particularly this passage.

We’re almost to the end of Ephesians. When the Apostle Paul wants to really get down to it, to bring the full transforming power of the cross and resurrection of Christ to application in the lives of his readers, what does he talk about? A new political order? Transforming a regional economic system? No, when Paul REALLY wants us to examine our lives for the presence or absence of God’s Spirit…he challenges us to look…at home. What are you like at home? I am more frequently embarrassed by my behavior in our household than any other single place. I’ve yelled at my children. I’ve argued and been defensive with Anne over the silliest things. Couldn’t Paul start somewhere else? How about the church? I feel pretty good about how I treat most of you. I think I behave pretty well with our staff (at this point, any staff should be nodding their heads). But no…Paul has to start…in our living rooms.

If we looked at ALL of Paul’s letters, and particularly Ephesians…we might conclude that his overriding message is this: An entirely new and different thing has happened in Jesus Christ. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, everything has changed. Paul’s favorite phrase for this is “new creation.” A Christian…is new creation. Everything is different. And Paul’s favorite question, then, to the church, is: “How are you different?” How are YOU different than the culture, than the world around you? Paul says we HAVE to be different.

But it seems we’re not doing that so well. You pick the category.

• Marriages? In a culture where divorce rates exploded about 20 years ago, the difference in divorce rates inside and outside of the church today? 1% or less.
• Legalities? Courts are filled with Christians suing one another.
• Charitable giving? Churchgoers in our country average something less than 3%...not a huge difference from the rest of the population.
• Care for the environment? Church parking lots are filled with gas-guzzling, high polluting cars (well, Bethany’s isn’t…but if we had one it would be!).

The issues of our day, homelessness, AIDS, hunger…are the Christians any different than others? Sometimes. Many times not. The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche once said, “Christians would need to look more redeemed before I would believe in their redeemer.” We often don’t look too redeemed. HOW are we different?

The guiding verse, the umbrella for this whole passage is the first one, verse 21:

“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

All the rest that Paul talks about will link back to this one: Be subject to ONE ANOTHER…out of reverence for Christ. Once Paul has said that, he looks at this mutual submissiveness…in the three key relationships of an ancient household:

1) Marriage. The Greco-Roman household of the first century consisted of relationships between unequals. This particularly applied to a husband and wife. The household was a totalitarian patriarchy. The husband’s dominance was physical, social, absolute and legal. A husband often had mistresses, concubines…and then also a wife, whose major function was to bear a male child. The husband had legal and absolute right to do virtually anything…the wife had no say. At meals, the husband reclined at table with his friends while the wife sat at the far end, and left as soon as the conversation began. She was an inferior.

Into this cultural context, Paul says to a Christian wife (and it is so interesting that he speaks first to the wives, who normally would not be addressed specifically at all…instruction would come through the male) “Choose to submit” to your husband. Before God, be the best wife you can. Honor, respect, serve…all of those things are rolled into “be subject to,” or “submit.” Honor God by how you honor your husband. Now remember, the umbrella verse everything comes under: “Be subject to ONE ANOTHER out of reverence for Christ.” Then: That means you, Christian Wives…be subject to your husbands. 43 words it takes Paul to tell this to wives, and to draw the parallel with serving Christ.

Then 147 words (3-4 times as many) to the Christian husband. Now we might think the word to the patriarch would be “Here’s how you RULE, or use your authority.” No chance. The word to the husband? LOVE your OWN WIFE. Not wives. Three times, the word goes to the husband: LOVE her. LOVE her. LOVE her. How? The way that Christ loved the church. That would be: self-sacrificing, self-limiting, earnestly, tenderly, even at the cost of your own life. The power Jesus Christ exhibited was the power of humility, love, self-sacrifice. This is the way that the husband is told to treat his wife. How could we possibly think that authoritarian, abusive, selfish patterns of language or behavior could have ANYTHING to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ?!

Paul elevates a Christian marriage beyond anything that culture could have imagined. IMAGINE how a marriage on THESE terms…would have looked in THAT day. He essentially renders discussion of rights and power as meaningless or insignificant. Marriage is radically transformed into part of a community built on mutual submission and love. How different that must have looked to that world! How different it would look in our world…if we practiced it. So: How do things look at your house? Spouse? Roommates? Neighbors?

2) Parent and Child. Again, what was the climate in what is now Turkey in the first century household around children? Children were totally under parents authority, legally and socially, but especially under the father. And “children” here could mean all the way into adulthood. A father literally had the power of life and death over his children even if they didn’t live in his house. Roman law literally gave a father more rights over his son than a master had over a slave! Small wonder that Paul has a word to limit a father’s harshness.

I’ll show my age here, but I used to listen to Cat Stevens’ music years ago…on RECORDS! He had a very haunting song called “Father and Son” that was a dialogue back and forth between a father and son. When he sang the father’s words, his voice took on a wise, slightly patronizing voice that repeated itself from one verse to the next. He kept saying the same thing. When he sang the son’s words, his voice was strident and upset, saying things like this: “From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen…” and “All the times I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside” and finally “I have to go away.” The father couldn’t hear the son…or wouldn’t. [It has been great, humbling discipline that Anne has modeled for me since our kids were young…to be willing to admit wrong and ask forgiveness of our kids when I have messed up as a parent.]

Paul, again very unusually, addresses the children directly here first and says, “Obey your parents,” repeating the fifth commandment. THEN he addresses the fathers. Again, in a household code such as this we might expect him to detail how to assert his authority. And again, instead, the focus is not on the parental authority, but the responsibility. “Do not provoke your children to anger…bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Paul does not turn the household into a democracy, nor does he ignore the fact that children are to be disciplined and instructed. The structure of the ancient household is not overturned. But again, in Christ, it is to operate on considerate relationship rather than power…Imagine how different THAT would have looked in that time and place. Imagine how different it would look in our world, where abandonment and child abuse are such huge issues.

3) Slaves and masters. In the first century, one-third of the population of Italy and Greece were slaves. Slavery was a universally accepted institution. Paul was not entering a debate over abolition. Slaves could own property and other slaves and hold other jobs. They had the potential of becoming freed people, they could work in many responsible professions. But…they were still slaves.
Many slaves became Christians, and the early church was full of slaves. Again, Paul breaks all tradition by here addressing these slaves directly, encouraging them to work from the heart, “as to the Lord.” AND then…he addresses masters…and again does NOT say “here’s how you assert your authority.” Shockingly he says to the masters, “You too! Do the same to them! Don’t threaten them, for you have the same master and HE sees no difference between you.”

We might wish that Paul had written, “You should not have slaves!” Why didn’t he? I don’t know. Perhaps the time was not right to begin the abolition of such a cruel tradition. Perhaps he was practical, thinking it would be suicidal in that day and age. There are other places, passages to discuss transformation of culture by changing structures…but I don’t see it here. Paul does not suggest overthrowing the institution. But his appeal again is for Christians to live radically differently than those around them. To treat household servants as brothers and sisters in the Lord.

Paul is even clearer on this in the little New Testament letter of Philemon. He writes to a man named Philemon about a runaway slave named Onesimus. It seems that Onesimus had stolen something from Philemon and run away. Paul then writes back to Philemon. He doesn’t say, “Philemon, stop having slaves.” But he says, “Now you have Onesimus back…no longer as a slave but as a brother.” This was a shocking word in that day.

In every instance in the household, Paul focuses on mutual relationship. He doesn’t destroy the existing social structures…but in many ways he renders them insignificant, even meaningless…in light of new creation. What God has done in Christ is so amazing, new, creative, freeing. If God has freed from sin, then everything is new and can be different. The relationships fundamental to the day, within households…are to operate on mutual love and submission, not power or rights or authority. As Paul envisions it, society will indeed be radically transformed…but from within. And it will be transformed because the new creation in Christ allows the relinquishment of self-interest for the sake of ONE ANOTHER.

Let me close with a story from Watchman Nee’s little book. It’s actually not about relationships in the household, but all week it has caused me to think beyond just rights and cultural norms in relationships:

“A brother in South China had a rice field in the middle of the hill. In time of drought he used a waterwheel, worked by a treadmill, to lift water from the irrigation stream into his field. His neighbor had two fields below his, and, one night, made a breach in the dividing bank and drained off all his water. When the brother repaired the breach and pumped in more water his neighbor did the same thing again, and this was repeated three or four times. So he consulted his brethren. “I have tried to be patient and not to retaliate,” he said, “but is it right?” After they had prayed together about it, one of them replied, “If we only try to do the right thing, surely we are very poor Christians. We have to do something more than what is right.” The brother was much impressed. Next morning he pumped water for the two fields below, and in the afternoon pumped water for his own field. After that the water stayed in his field. His neighbor was so amazed at his action that he began to inquire the reason, and in course of time he, too, became a Christian.

How are things in your living room, your family, your neighborhood, your friendships, your marriage? Do you stick out in this culture? Jesus says in the gospel of John: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for…ONE ANOTHER.”