Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: Ephesians 5
Summary: In this chapter of Ephesians, after calling us to unity in the previous chapter, Paul emphasizes our need to discern God’s will in our lives, as we grow in maturity and service of the kingdom of God. We need to find ways to get along with one another, trusting one another and serving one another in love.
Good morning everyone! Very good to be with you two Sundays in a row. This is actually the first time I’ve ever preached back-to-back sermons anywhere, so hopefully I’ve come up with some new things to say this morning.
As I wrote this week, I found myself reflecting often on the ideas from last week’s sermon response time — we’ll circle back to some of your comments today. I think this idea of a collective response to sermons, and to scripture, is a practice that was clearly baked into the earliest communities of Jesus’s followers. We should ask ourselves — how did the Ephesians receive this letter? They gathered together, likely in a home, and heard the whole letter read out loud with no breaks — and while church buildings are well and good, it’s obvious that meetings in home lead to long conversations and reflections together, around food and fellowship, which I’m glad we’ll get some of this afternoon.
To back up again to think of the community hearing this letter — they would have heard the whole thing at once — sometimes chapter and verse breaks fall with breaks in ideas, but very often they don’t — and Paul is correctly a bit notorious for writing long, winding, dense sentences in complicated Greek, to the point that even the Bible itself encourages us not to be too discouraged if we find some of Paul’s writing hard to understand — 2 Peter 3:16 literally says, “Paul’s letters contain some things that are hard to understand.”
I just share all this to say that what we’re doing — going through the whole book week by week — is a good thing, in some ways more holistic than working with the lectionary — but it’s also challenging to hold in our minds, as we work with chapter five today, the first four chapters we’ve covered over the last month. We should look back a little, because Paul’s exhortations and instructions, which can get quite scathing, in the back half of his letters, tend to come after some really beautiful and giving and loving reflections on God.
Anyhow, today, we’re going to do three things: talk about the first half of the chapter with the theme of ‘discerning God’s will for our lives,’ talk about the second half of the chapter with some general comments on reading difficult scriptures and how I think there is good seed contained in this difficult household code — that we need to find ways to live in peace and community via yielding to God and each other. Finally, we’ll end with some comments on the Roman empire — the context for so many of Paul’s comments here, and really for the whole New Testament.
Before we dive in, let’s review a bit: Paul has already done so much in Ephesians to highlight the importance of how we live. How we live now that we are followers of Jesus is one of the big, pulsating questions at the heart of Christianity — and as Tig and I have said repeatedly in this sermon series, a big way we do that is by growing to be mature in the way of Jesus by practicing resurrection — centering God and Jesus in our lives, moving away from selfish ambition towards lives of wholeness and maturity, humility and trust, where we give to others, rather than take; where we serve others rather then seeking to be served; and where we trust in others and God’s presence. On top of these things though, we acknowledge that the world changes — the church, and we, always face new challenges — there will always need to be discernment about what the faithful thing to do is.
So, let’s talk a little bit about discernment — Discernment can maybe be a big and scary theological word. As I mentioned last week, two of the big questions Christians are always asking are: what are the essentials of Christian faith and life, and who gets to determine them?
Discernment is the process by which we decide both these things — and we discern in community with numerous voices: the Christian community we are a part of, our families, and our mentors, but also in prayer, in conversation with scripture and scholars, and in conversation with the best of the non-Christian culture around us.
Now, some Christians find it a little strange to think that discernment still needs to happen — they may say, isn’t the bible clear on every issue? If the bible is perfect, then why would we need to engage in discernment on anything?
I think it should be evident to you all by now that I just think the bible just rocks — as a work of history and theology and sociology and wisdom it is, as the Mennonite confession of faith says, “the indispensable book of the church.”
But part of being faithful to scripture is accepting that calls made throughout scripture, and here in Ephesians, to test its commands against the realities of our lives — we don’t just read the bible in a vacuum; we must apply the ideas of Jesus and the faithful into our lives, carefully. We are called to be wise as serpents, and as innocent as doves, and to put Jesus’s commands into practice.
Paul, when thinking about maturity, wants us to be wise in Christ — in the message version of verse 15, he says “So watch your step. Use your head. Make the most of every chance you get. These are desperate times! Don’t live carelessly, unthinkingly. Make sure you understand what the Master wants.”
A formula I’ve mentioned before about discernment is this: when the bible disagrees, Jesus is the referee. While we love and learn from all of scripture, we should often ask, not if something is scriptural, but if it is Christlike. This is part of what Paul is clearly stressing in this letter — in everything we do, we dwell first in Jesus and his example set for us. Another way I’ve heard this idea put is that we need to audit everything for the Lordship of Christ.
In submitting ourselves to Jesus’s example and teachings, we are tasked to be ambassadors for Christ in our contexts — we don’t just blindly follow every command in the bible, even if that we possible; rather, we let the bible to form us, because there are going to be challenges and questions we encounter that we have to handle on our own. This is part of what being mature in Christ, and practicing resurrection, means.
In Practice Resurrection, Eugene Peterson has this to say about the section of chapter 5 we heard read today: We are dealing with, “a pair of resurrection practices: love and worship. [These] consist of deliberately and unhurriedly immersing ourselves in God’s ways before we go off on our own. “Therefore, be imitators of God.” We are not cramming for an exam that will provide us a certificate for good resurrection behavior or admission to heaven; we are absorbing into our praying imaginations a way of being. Watch what God does, and then do it his way. Like children who learn proper behavior from hanging around their parents, be imitators of God, keep company with God.”
We need to dwell in God, and in worship, in order to form ourselves, to develop our moral imaginations, to be filled with God so that we can discern what his will is for us, and for the world around us. Part of what we do in worship is tap into God’s understanding of the world — as beloved, but broken; fallen, but in the process of being redeemed in Christ.
Paul wants us to abide in Jesus — this is part of coming to maturity so that we can be givers, not getters; discerners, not led around and astray by ambitious people; and so that we can live at peace with one another.
Ok — this brings us to the second thing I want to talk about: reading difficult scriptures and this household code.
The first thing to say is that all the principles of discernment we’ve talked about so far apply here too — when we arrive at a difficult scripture, we should approach it with Jesus, and the maturity that comes from the knowledge of God, in mind.
Now, we didn’t read on this morning just for the sake of time; for those of you who didn’t do the assigned homework and read on to Chapter 6:9, what I’m referring to here is the household code that includes, notably and uncomfortably, the command for wives to submit to their husbands and slaves to submit to their masters.
I want to say that, frankly, that there are times I wish this passage wasn’t in the bible. I think the history of the church and world might be better if it hadn’t been included — but it was, and, even though this text has and still often is misused, we need to lean in to discerning what it means for us, which can’t happen if we ignore it.
When we encounter a text that has been profoundly misused, it’s probably a good thing that our first instinct is to be disappointed — but it’s what comes after that that matters. We cannot simply gloss over difficult scriptures without knowing why we disagree. What we should do is apply as much context to the difficult passages as possible — leaning in to the passage to try to understand what they meant in the context they were written. As a pastor friend of mine in Harrisonburg likes to say: a text without context is just a pretext for stating personal opinion.
For scriptures we believe do not need to apply fully to our lives, we should perhaps spend more time with them — knowing why we believe the way of Jesus supersedes specific, time-bound, commands contained elsewhere in scripture. This, I would say is the application of the ultimate question we should ask as we interact with scripture and all of life — if Jesus is Lord, and God is love, then how should we live?
We’re going to do commentary on the societal context of this passage — the Roman empire — in a minute, but we also always need to keep texts within their textual context: where does this household code lead us to think when we read it within its context within Ephesians? Or when we just read the whole thing itself?
Paul provides an absolute boatload of important caveats around these two particularly difficult commands – for both of them, he immediately follows up with a command for mutual submission and respect, for power not to be used to dominate, but released, and the social playing field leveled. Husbands are told to love their wives as Jesus loves the church – and when we remember how Paul believes Christ loves the church, giving himself up for us, this is a hugely equalizing command. I honestly think it’s impossible to read this household code in its entirety and arrive at the decision that husbands should command wives, or that slavery, as we know of it in the modern era, is ever okay. This is self-evident, I believe, when we read the whole passage rather than just pull out isolated verses that suit our own interests.
In fact, the first command made in this household code is the following — “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ,” in the NIV, and “Out of respect for Christ, be courteously reverent to one another” in the message. This doesn’t just apply to women, or to men — it applies to the whole believing community. If we all truly submit to one another in our marriage relationships, in our friendships and communities, there is no need for hierarchical, dictatorial commands — which Paul goes on to clearly forbid husbands from anyways! This should be the command from this passage that we know best and live by — that we submit to one another in love.
This idea, of mutual submission, or yieldedness, to God and one another was and is a big concept of Anabaptist-Mennonite theology. In German, the word is gelassenheit — and it’s still seen as one of the most important spiritual characteristics in many plain Anabaptist communities today. In addition to being translated as submission or yieldedness, it can also be translated as serenity. If you want to know what gelassenheit is like, you can picture how a happy baby feels in the arms of its mother.
We need to have gelassenheit, first of all, in our relationship to God — to yield to God, knowing that the creator is beyond us, greater than us, but also knows us and loves us and that we can trust God. It’s when we are formed by this yieldedness and trust and serenity in God that we can begin living that way in our earthly relationships too — we can search for and help form church communities that know one another, trust one another, and work deeply together. All of our relationships — our family life, our economic relations — should rotate around this axis of serenity and the communal good that seeks the other’s good more than one’s own.
Now, let’s talk about the other deeply troubling command in the household code, usually translated as ‘slaves, obey their masters.’
Since Tig gave me today’s hard scripture, I’m going to mostly leave this to him next week, but there is one comment I want to make on this. First, the analogy to American slavery to ancient slavery is absolutely not 1-to-1; this is not to condone ancient slavery — far from it, and we should be glad that Christians eventually played a big role in eventually outlawing slavery within the Roman world — but we should be humbled and know that antebellum American slavery was, in many ways, worse and more dehumanizing than how the Roman’s practiced slavery. Slavery in Roman society was almost never generational, was not based on race, and slaves were not the lowest social caste of society — many slaves in the Roman era lived independently, even in different cities, and received education and wages, and many earned their freedom, while this was almost never a real option in the American slavery system. We get a more correct idea of the concept of ‘slave’ Paul is working with through many translations, including the Message, that use ‘servant’ rather than slave in this passage.
Plus, a literalist reading of this passage that ignores Paul’s incredible comment that servants and masters all serve the same master – God – again misses the point that Paul was trying to make, where he was pushing against the Roman domination system, even as he dwelt with the reality of its existence.
So, a final piece of context which is crucial for understanding this passage and so much of the New Testament: let’s zoom out and talk a bit about the Roman empire.
I don’t know if you all saw the recent social media trend a few months ago, but it became a trend for wives and girlfriends to ask their partners how often they thought about the Roman empire — and Stephanie and I absolutely fit the stereotype here, as I said at least once a day, which I assumed was totally normal — I, like many men, was shocked to find that many women don’t think about the Roman empire often at all!
Rome looms incredibly large in the history of Western civilization — but I think it is generally profoundly misunderstood. So much of what is going on in the New Testament is opposed to Rome — but much of the general culture we swim in today is still modeled and built on Rome’s model of subjugation, domination, and violence. It’s no accident that the forms of power and architecture we use here in the United States, from the physical architecture of our most important state buildings to the intellectual architecture, like the existence of a body known as the Senate — come directly from Roman precedent.
Because of the sheer power of the Roman empire, and because it eventually became a “Christian Empire,” we can forget to look at it for what it actually was — a horrifically destructive force that the New Testament writers clearly saw as something to be resisted and converted, not assimilated into.
One example of the brutality of Rome is the conquest of the country of Dacia — anyone know where Dacia is? Understandably, you may not — when Rome conquered it around 100 AD — just after the time Paul was writing — they killed or enslaved everyone in the country and resettled it with their own population to the extent that today, centuries later, we still call it “people from Rome” — Romania.
Now, at this point, it’s worth asking – why are we talking about Rome again? Because it’s the standard household practice of Rome that Paul is both borrowing and ripping to shreds here: In the traditional Roman household, the male breadwinner reigned completely supreme – there was no mutual submission involved at all; it would have been ridiculous for the average Roman to think he served the same master as his servant; Paul’s formula is a huge step towards mutual beneficial relationships of equality when placed in this Roman context.
Much of this critique of Roman culture, of course, was known to the Ephesians – and has already been addressed in this letter. Per Greta Ann’s comment last week, rather than gentiles, who Paul says Christians should have nothing to do with, we could translate ‘gentiles’ as ‘unbelieving gentiles,’ or, as it sometimes is translated, pagans. Paul spends plenty of time in Ephesians reminding Christians not to live as the pagan Romans and Greeks do – whose lives and livelihoods relied on conquest and genocide, who routinely worshiped idols with a variety of shocking practices including temple prostitution and ritual sacrifice, and who viewed monotheism as a despicable notion – Romans worshiped the military power of the emperor most of all; the polar opposite of our crucified and resurrected king, Jesus.
If we forget this context that Paul is writing in – of a world, particularly a religious world, far more brutal, strange, and immoral than our own – then we are at risk for missing what Paul is really asking us to do – to love one another and move away from systems of command and control towards relationships of trust and service. When we look at Roman society correctly – as an ancient domination system that needs to be changed, not emulated – we see how Paul is guiding us towards Jesus’s way of resurrection, even in this passage.
So: what does this mean for how we live today?
When our society, as individuals or collectives, is advocating or acting like the Roman empire – an empire of domination, genocide, and subjugation — we need to speak out clearly that this is antithetical to the way of the family of Christ. When our government resembles the Roman empire in sending weapons and armies to conquer and destroy, as is happening in Gaza now, we are called to speak and act against this violence which tears down, rather than builds up. We need to live love in big ways and small – in how we love our family members; in how we love our neighbors; and in how we love the immigrant.
To close – if we live lives of discernment about the evil of the times, we will see that more violence does not lead to peace; as Paul says, “We must make sure we understand what the Master wants” – and Jesus has taught us that God desires mercy, not sacrifice; mutual flourishing, not subjugation. We are to serve each other, not command each other; we are to trust each other, not fear each other. We, through the hope we have in Jesus, through the divine mystery of the incarnation and the hope of the resurrection, can trust that God is acting in the world and inviting us to act alongside him. We are invited to practice resurrection.
May it be so.
