In general, when preaching on a text, I tend to honor the counsel Lewis Carroll’s King of Hearts gave the White Rabbit during the trial of the Knave of Hearts: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” In general. This morning is an exception, because we have this giant hook on the imagination in the middle of our final passage from Ephesians, and we need to tend to that reality first and work outward from there.
We’re told twice to put on the whole armor of God. If you’re wondering why a sword is included when it isn’t armor, the Greek word is panoplia, which means the full set of a soldier’s equipment, not just the armor. We could translate it more exactly, but “whole armor of God” is what King James’s translators gave us, it’s what people are used to, and it’s close enough—especially since it highlights the most important point, which is our need to put on all these things. Every piece is necessary, and it’s only effective as a coherent whole.
I closed last Sunday’s sermon with these words: “In this world, relationships are about power dynamics, so we naturally read passages like Ephesians 5 in that light as if they were written to tell us who has power over whom, in what ways, to what degree, and why. That gets the Bible exactly backwards. Jesus calls us to set thoughts of power completely aside and let his Spirit teach us to see our relationships as opportunities to love others as he loves us and serve them in his name.” That’s profoundly important, because in power relationships the thing which truly matters is the power imbalance in that relationship—because almost every power relationship has one. It may be legal, as in the relationship between employer and employee, or creditor and debtor; it may be structural or positional, like the relationships between employees up and down the hierarchy—team member to team lead to assistant manager to manager and so on; it may be intrinsic, as with a dominating person and a “friend” who’s a wholly-owned subsidiary—think Gaston and LeFou in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, if you’re familiar with either version. Then there are relationships which combine categories, like the parent/child relationship, which is both legal and structural—and when a highly dominant person is a parent, you get all three.
With all these, with all worldly relationships, the power imbalance is the important thing. What matters to the world is who gets to tell whom what to do and why, because the world sees relationships from the demand end. Unfortunately, in the church we reflexively approach the “household code” passages from this worldly mindset. Consider the questions we ask. “What do I have to do or not do?” “What can I get away with doing or not doing?” “What do I have the right to demand that you do, or not do, or stop doing?” We take these passages as law and argue them like lawyers. We generate rules, draw lines, and look for loopholes. We get mad when other people don’t meet our expectations; when we don’t meet theirs, we retreat behind a cloud of ink—legal, not squid, but same difference.
Again, truly Christian relationships are relationships of mutual submission. Read more→
I love preaching on this passage. That might sound strange, given how much ill feeling it generates in some parts of the church, but that’s actually why I love preaching on it. There are passages of Scripture that have gotten jammed up over the years in interpretations that don’t actually make sense, and it’s a joy and delight to be able to come along and say, “You keep using that passage. I do not think it means what you think it means.” (All due apologies to The Princess Bride.) There are interpretations of Scripture which ought to be inconceivable that are widely assumed to be obviously true, and they need to be set right.
That’s what we’re dealing with here. It’s a widely-misused passage which illustrates two common pathologies of biblical interpretation. One is the mindset which reads the Bible as an instruction manual from which we are to extract “biblical principles” to follow in our lives. With that approach, the instant the brain sees the word “wives,” the mental guillotine drops and everything that follows is cut completely out of its context. It’s as if Paul said, “OK, I’m done talking about all this grace and unity stuff; now I’m going to sit down and write you a rulebook on ‘how marriage is supposed to work.’” That’s how it’s frequently read, as if it were a marriage manual that got mixed up with the letter and published by mistake.
If we’re going to take this passage seriously as Scripture, we can’t do that. Read more→
