Episodes
Sunday Oct 21, 2012
Community that Propels
Sunday Oct 21, 2012
Sunday Oct 21, 2012
Rev. Dean Snyder Ephesians 5:21-33
We have leaders who organize our scripture readers … different ones for different services. When one of our leaders who organizes readers for one of our services saw the Scripture lesson for today … the passage including the words “Wives be subject to your husbands,” she sent me an email saying “Really? Really?”
As part of our Propel series, we’ve been studying the Book of Ephesians. The passage you heard read is from what has become a very uncomfortable part of the Book of Ephesians called The Household Codes.
Usually we in the more liberal churches just pass right over this uncomfortable material and try to pretend it isn’t there. I am not sure that is a good strategy.
A couple of years ago we did a sermon series on the topic “What we can learn from scriptures we wish weren’t in the Bible.”
We took some passages that make us very uncomfortable for good reason and tried to sit with them long enough to get past our negative feelings to ask if there was something in them to learn from. If we understood these passages in the context of the norms of the society they were written in, was there something there that we could translate into our time and place?
We took the passage in the gospels where Jesus is quoted as saying that divorced people are not permitted to remarry. I remember when Methodists taught that. How mean was that? One strike and you are out. One marriage doesn’t work out and you are denied the joys and comforts of an intimate marital relationship the rest of your life.
But if we can acknowledge that this is not fair and start to ask where such a teaching came from and to understand it in the context of males having all of the power and women being powerless, you can begin to see that the point is to protect women from being discarded for a newer version, which was something men were tempted to do back in those days. And we can begin to acknowledge that divorce has a cost and that we need to pay attention to who pays the price.
Should divorced people be allowed to remarry? Of course. No question. We also need to pay attention to the personal and social cost of divorce.
Because we must reject the apparent superficial meaning of a particular scripture does not mean we can’t learn from it.
In that same series we looked at the first chapter of Romans where the Apostle Paul calls same gender attraction and affection unnatural. That scripture has certainly been used to oppress and shame LGBTQ people. But really now, how much can we blame Paul for not understanding that some of us by our birth and nature are gay? How many of us realized this 30 or 40 years ago?
Yes, Paul had faulty assumptions about same gender sexual attraction. He though same gender sex was a result of people being so obsessed with sex that they could never be satisfied and kept looking for bigger and bigger sexual thrills. So if you are gay, Paul wasn’t talking about you in Romans 1. What Paul is describing in that passage is not who you are.
If we can get past a simplistic superficial reading of Romans 1, we can begin to ask whether it is possible that some of us, straight or gay, are looking to sex for what we can find only in God. There may be something beneath the surface there worth thinking about.
I decided we should sit for a few minutes today with this portion of the household codes in Ephesians that tells wives to be subject to their husbands.
No one can deny that this passage has caused great suffering for women throughout the centuries.
There is no way to get past that without facing it. This passage of scripture has been used in oppressive, nasty ways and still is being used in oppressive, nasty ways today.
This is part of the reason we can’t spend six weeks studying the book of Ephesians and just pretend it isn’t there. We need to look it in the face long enough to conquer it and then ask whether there is any truth for us here beneath the superficial reading that has been so convenient for men over the centuries.
Some wives who have been harmed by husbands may not be able to get there, so let me say to you, no matter what Ephesians seems to say, we do not believe that wives should be subject to abusive husbands.
The thrust of the biblical story is toward justice, equality and inclusion for all people, women and men. The Bible was written in a patriarchal culture and that culture infects portions of the Scripture, but the thrust of the biblical story is toward justice, equality and inclusion for all people, women and men.
Jesus was a feminist. I have no idea if he was married or not, but the Jesus of the New Testament was amazingly empowering toward women. This would be true in our day, and was even more amazingly true in the patriarchal culture of the society in which he lived.
Scholars tell us that the household codes in Ephesians are actually in a strange way a testimony to the impulse toward equality that was part of the early Christian movement.
Some of you may remember that I told you that Ephesians is a late New Testament epistle. It was not really written by the Apostle Paul himself. It was written by one of Paul’s students in Paul’s voice after Paul had died, which was not an unusual practice in the first century.
Scholars believe the house hold codes were written because the Christian impulse toward equality was upsetting the communities around the churches and the leaders of the churches were trying to slow things down and conform more to the norms of the society to avoid persecution.
I get that. How many times have we here at Foundry said “Maybe we are moving too fast? Maybe we should slow down? Maybe we should take a step backwards or we are going to lose people? We’ve got this vision of inclusion here at Foundry but are we going too fast and too far for our denomination?”
I understand why the spirit movement toward equality got scary for this second generation of Jesus followers in Ephesus and why they decided they needed to act more traditional, to teach more traditional family structures. So more than other parts of other epistles and surely more than the Gospels, the teaching of the household codes in Ephesians accommodates the patriarchal family structures of the society around them.
We do that ourselves too more than we like to admit.
I do not want to whitewash Ephesians 5. This passage has been used in ways that have been horribly abusive to women. No question. I don’t want to move past that too quickly. This passage has been used in oppressive and nasty ways.
But if we can sit with it long enough to understand it in context, maybe we can see that the passage is really not about marriage but about the church. It is about living together as a congregation. It is about being a community of Jesus followers who are trying to figure out how to authentically live with one another.
And the deeper point of the passage is that followers of Jesus need to live together in a spirit of being mutually subject to Christ.
“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,” Ephesians 5:21 says. That what got Deutero-Paul into this messy conversation about marriage in the first place.
“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” It is a great mystery, Ephesians says. Our relationship in the community of the church with Christ and with each other shares something of the same spirit as a marriage in which two people become one flesh. It includes both love and respect. It is a relationship of vulnerability. Being subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.
I think being the church in our time is hard.
We need to be aware of the injustices in the world that we inherit and participate in. We need to be aware of male privilege, white privilege, straight privilege, first-world privilege, able-bodied privilege, socio-economic privilege. We need to be aware of our internalized oppression that causes us to diminish ourselves and not claim our rights and equality. We have to be aware of all the things that divide us and make our relationships unjust.
And at the same time we need to be subject to one another. We need to be vulnerable to one another.
My friend Gil Rendle reminds me from time to time that diversity is harder. It is easier being a church that is all one socio-economic group, all one ethnicity, all one orientation … at least publicly.
But we don’t live in that world anymore.
So it becomes the task of the church to be aware of all the things that give us unequal power and to correct for them and at the same time be subject and vulnerable to one another. We need to be honest about our differences and at the same time love one another.
We have a ministry fair today, and we are encouraging everyone to take a step deeper into your call. Everyone of us is called to ministry. We are all called to be ministers and we are all called to be ministered to.
The purpose of our ministry fair is not to become busier, not to act more obligations and activities to our lives. It is to step more deeply into our calling so we can let go of what we don’t need to carry on our shoulders because it is not our calling.
What I want to say this morning is that in the ministry we do, our relationships with one another are maybe the most important thing.
We have affinity groups in this church, which is great. We need to spend time with others who share some aspect of our identity. We have a LBGT potluck, and young adult fellowship, and women’s retreat and young women’s prayer groups, a couples Bible study, and a group of men who play pool together.
But we also need to come to know each other in ways that help us learn that we are more than our affinities. We are all broken. We all are gifted. We all need a savior. We all saved by grace alone.
Years ago I was part of a group that did mission together and it included two people who rubbed each other the wrong way. One was a feminist women and the other was a man who wasn’t. They worked together a long time in the same mission group. Until one day they let down their guards and he told her what it was like growing up with a mentally ill mother and being married in his first marriage to a mentally ill wife. And she told him about having an abusive father. They both told me separately that they were never able to see each other the same way again.
We need to pay attention to our privilege. But we are more than our privilege or our oppression. We are all broken. We all are gifted. We all need a savior. We all saved by grace alone.
My hope for us is that we will learn to practice justice but most of all that we will learn to be ever more vulnerable and open with one another.
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