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Reading Other People’s Mail: Part VI
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
August 16, 2009
Be very
careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every
opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but
understand what the Lord's will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to
debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with
psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the
Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
—Ephesians 5:15-20, NIV
Today we come to sermon number six in this series called “Reading Other People’s
Mail.” I don’t know how much you have learned, but I have learned plenty. The
more I study the letter to the Ephesians the more I think it may have been
written as a sermon, intended for a group of newly baptized Gentile converts. I
can almost see them there, sitting on the front pew in their new white robes as
the preacher steps up to the pulpit and began to speak. His sermon is neatly
divided into a section of theological explanation followed by a section of
ethical exhortation: in chapters 1-3 the preacher tells those new Christians
what the church is and how it came to be, and in chapters 4-6 he tells them who
they are and how they ought to behave.
And
he doesn’t pull any punches.
It’s as if reminding them that God has blessed them with every blessing of
heaven, and that Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between
them and the Jews, and that God has adopted them as his own dear children gives
this preacher the right to meddle in their most personal affairs. Listen to
some of the things he says in these last three chapters. “Put away your former
way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts.” “Fornication and
impurity of any kind, or greed, must not even be mentioned among you.”
“Entirely out of place is obscene, silly, and vulgar talk.” Do you see what I
mean? Nothing is off limits to this preacher. Nothing!
But
not everyone is so bold.
Since I came to First Baptist we have been using the Revised Common Lectionary
as a plan for reading through most of the Bible in worship over a three year
period. Most of the Bible, I say; not all of it. While the committee that put
the lectionary together tried to include the most important passages of
Scripture they couldn’t include every passage; it would just be too much. But
it’s interesting to notice what they put in and what they left out and
interesting to wonder why.
Today’s reading from Ephesians, for example.
I
spent a good part of last week wondering how I might preach that passage. It
starts off with this advice about being very careful how you live, “Not as
unwise people but as wise.” But then listen to the advice that follows: “Do
not be foolish. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead
be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs.” Got it? Don’t be unwise. Don’t be foolish. No, on the
contrary, stand around on street corners singing spiritual songs!” I thought I
could preach on that. I could talk about all the seemingly silly things we do
in church—praying, singing, hugging—and then talk about how the foolishness of
God is wiser than the wisdom of the world, that in the end it might turn out
that praying, singing, and hugging were more important than almost anything else
we could do.
I
thought I might get a sermon out of that, or at least half a sermon. But then
I looked at what came before this passage and what came after it. The passage
before is a meddlesome section on renouncing pagan ways and the passage that
follows is this eye-popping section on marital relations that is one of the most
controversial in the Bible: “Wives,
submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife
as Christ is the head of the church.”
Hmm… Can you understand why the lectionary committee stopped at verse 20? And
can you see why it would make good sense for me to do the same? But I am not
often accused of having good sense. And so, with apologies to the lectionary
committee, I’m going to leave today’s reading on the riverbank and wade out into
the murky waters of Ephesians 5:21 and following to take up the topic of
submission.
When I was in Wingate, North Carolina, I used to teach the fifth and sixth grade
Sunday school class where we tried to learn everything we could in a two-year
period about what it means to be Christian and belong to the church. Part of
our curriculum was the church constitution (believe it or not), and Article IV
of that constitution said that since our church didn’t endorse a creed we would
accept “as an informational statement the Articles of Faith endorsed by the
Southern Baptist Convention in May, 1963, and recorded in the Baptist Faith
and Message.” And so we worked through that statement in our Sunday School
class, taking one Sunday each to discuss the doctrines of God, Man, Salvation,
et cetera—seventeen sections in all. We had just finished our study when
the Southern Baptist Convention met in Salt Lake City in 1998 and added
an article to the Baptist Faith and Message! When I mentioned it
to my class the following Sunday they groaned. They thought we were through
with all that. But they listened attentively as I read the article: “A wife is
to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as
the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”
There was a long silence after that, and then one of the girls asked, “What does
submit mean?” One of the boys answered, “It means you have to do what
somebody tells you to.” And then he thought about it and began to smile as he
imagined the possibilities. “Like if you’re sitting in your recliner watching
TV,” he said, “and you tell your wife to bring you a snack, she has to do it.”
The boys all grinned at that. The girls didn’t. They were quiet, considering
the implications of the article. We had talked about all the other articles of
faith as if they were the gospel itself. Was this? Did they have to submit
just because the Baptist Faith and Message said so? One of the girls
finally folded her arms across her chest and said, flatly, “Well, I’m not
going to submit!” “Good for you!” I thought. “Good for you if that’s what
submission means: if it means letting some La-Z-Boy boss you around just
because he’s a man.” But what if that little surge of rebellion she was feeling
was not gender-specific but something that is common to all humanity? What if
there is something in each of us that doesn’t want to submit to any of us? In
fact, what if just the opposite is true: that we would like what that boy liked,
the idea of other people submitting to us? If that’s true then maybe we’d
better take a closer look at submission.
Richard Foster says that submission is one of the great spiritual disciplines,
and that, like all disciplines its goal is freedom. What kind of freedom comes
from submission? Foster says it is “the ability to lay down the terrible burden
of always needing to get our own way. The obsession that things go the way we
want them to go is one of the greatest bondages in human society today,” he
says. “People will spend weeks, months, even years in a perpetual stew because
some little thing did not go as they wished. They will fuss and fume. They
will get mad about it. They will act as if their very life hangs on the issue.
They may even get an ulcer over it. In the discipline of submission,” Foster
concludes, “we are released to drop the matter, to forget it. Frankly, most
things in life are not nearly so important as we think they are. Our lives will
not come to an end if this or that does not happen” (Celebration of
Discipline).
Knowing that about submission you can understand why the writer of Ephesians
would want to include the topic in his discussion of marriage. If husbands and
wives didn’t always have to get their own way, if they were free to drop some
things, to forget about them, most marriages would go a lot more smoothly. I
still remember an article on marriage in which a newspaper columnist named Ken
Garfield talked about the “Yes, dear” principle. He didn’t say it had to be the
wife. He didn’t say it had to be the husband. But he said that if the marriage
was going to be healthy somebody would have to say, “Yes, dear.” And so the
author of Ephesians really does say, and so the Baptist Faith and Message
quotes: “wives should submit to their husbands.” But the author of Ephesians
says something else which the Baptist Faith and Message does not quote.
In 5:21, the verse that comes right before the one about wives submitting to
their husbands, he says that they should “submit to one another out of reverence
for Christ.”
He
unfurls that statement like a banner over everything that follows. Husbands and
wives should submit to one another he says, and then goes on to illustrate what
he means: a paragraph about how wives should submit, and two paragraphs
about how husbands should submit, as if husbands might need twice as much
instruction. In fact the word submit is not even found in verse 22 in
the Greek New Testament, the one that is so often quoted as a proof-text for
submission. It’s in verse 21: “submit to one another,” the preacher says, and
then, in verse 22, “wives like this,” and in verse 25, “husbands like this.” In
these liberated times we may be shocked by what this writer says about the
submission of wives, but what he says about husbands is even more shocking.
Listen: Husbands should love their wives, he says, “as Christ loved the Church
and gave himself for it.” According to the author of Ephesians the supreme
model of gracious submission is not a woman, but a man.
Do
you remember that scene from Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus comes to be baptized
by John in the Jordan and John resists? “I should be coming to you,” he says,
“and do you come to me?” He’s shocked. Surprised. The baptism he offers is a
baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. But Jesus is no sinner.
He’s the beloved Son of God! He has no need to repent. So, why is he here?
“In order to fulfill all righteousness,” Jesus says, and I’m not sure John, or
I, or anyone else knows exactly what he meant by it. But the word
righteousness, by itself, is a dangling modifier. It only makes sense if it
is the righteousness of something, as in “the righteousness of God.” And
that may only make sense if we think of it as “doing or being what God considers
right.” Now, that’s a stretch, but if it’s a fair stretch it would mean that
when Jesus says he needs to be baptized “to fulfill all righteousness,” he means
that it’s what he thinks God would have him do. And without asking too many
questions he does it.
Which is probably why God picked him instead of one of us.
If
I were Jesus I might have wanted everyone to submit to me. I might have wanted
them to line up along both sides of the road and bow down to me as I made my way
to the river. I might have wanted to take John up on his offer and baptize him
instead of the other way around. But that was not, apparently, what God wanted
and Jesus yielded to God’s authority. So, his baptism can be understood as an
act of submission to the will of the Father, and those of you who know the story
know that it would not be the last time he did such a thing. In the Garden of
Gethsemane, approaching the hour of his death (which he also referred to as a
“baptism”), Jesus said, “Father, if it be possible, take this cup from me.
Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.” At the end of his ministry, as at
the beginning, he lays down the terrible burden of having to get his own way and
takes up the terrible freedom of doing it the Father’s way.
It
is really no less than he expects from us.
When I used to talk to those fifth and sixth graders about baptism I told them
that
If they decided to be
baptized there would come a moment when I asked them to profess their faith, and
that in that moment they were to say, “Jesus is Lord.” That may not sound like
much to you,” I said, “but it is an act of submission; it is a way of saying to
the world that from now on you will be surrendering your will to his, you will
be laying down the burden of doing things exactly as you please and taking up
the freedom of doing things exactly as he pleases.”
That seems like a
lot to ask a fifth or sixth grader, but the author of Ephesians would not think
it was too much. This meddlesome preacher elbows his way into our most private,
our most personal, business on the assumption that we are not our own, that we
were bought with a price, and that when Jesus who laid down his life for his
bride, the church, asks us to do something the very least we can say is,
“Yes, dear.”
—Jim Somerville © 2009
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