Shane Hughes 6-22-25

And it's a delight to be with you, whether you're here in the room or with us online. It's good to have you. This is, we are almost to the end of our series on Ephesians, and Lee and I were just talking that this is one of those moments where if, if, if the world would cooperate with me better and not blow everything up on a Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night. That'd be great. We are going to talk that next week.

We're going to talk about the fact that Paul says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood. But you're going to have to hold on to with me until we get there. Our struggle is not against flesh and blood. People are never our enemy. But today we have an even easier topic to talk about.

We're going to talk about submission. Husbands, wives, parents, children, slaves, masters. So, hey, it's going to be easy and it's going to be fun. All. All right.

We're in this together. And so what's going to happen today is there's going to be a little bit of controversy. There's going to be, it's going to be a little bit complicated. And for some of you, I think there's three different hearings of the text that you're about to receive. I think this first hearing is that it's a struggle.

You've wondered your whole life, why is it that God said this? And why is it that my family is shaped this way? For others, it's a club. Not the kind of club that you get to join. The kind of club that hits you over the head.

Right? It's a club. It's a, it's a bludgeon. For others that have, like, new to Christianity, you're going to hear this text perhaps for the first time. And you may say, this is not a struggle.

This is not a club. This is ridiculous. This is even in the Bible. I need you all to give me a hearing. I need you to all to hear the word of God.

Fresh this morning. And it's probably. We're not all going to agree. You're not going to agree with everything that I say today. We don't have to agree on everything.

It will probably sound to some of you like I went too far. It'll probably sound like to others I didn't go far enough. But this is what I do know, that God's word is never used as a cudgel or a threat or a license for dominating, manipulating behavior. That's never how God's word is heard or received and this text is authoritative and this text is normative, that means it has a say about how we live together in our common shared life. This text matters.

But if you take what Paul says out of its social, historical, cultural context, then you lose the ability for this text to carry any meaning. You have to understand what Paul is saying in the context that Paul is trying to say it. It's the first century, it's the Roman Empire. It's a great Greco Roman culture. He's in prison by that same Roman Empire.

And this doesn't surprise us because Jesus functions the exact same way. If you take Jesus out of being a Jewish rabbi living in Palestine under the heel of the Roman Empire, who by the way was not rich, who was not well connected to the religious elite, who was not born into the palace of a king, if you take all of Jesus teachings out of Jesus life, then you don't really understand what Jesus is trying to say in the first place. So today I'm just going to ask you for a fresh hearing. As you are able, please stand or take a posture of reverence and listen for the word of God.

This morning I'll be reading from Ephesians 5, 6. Be careful then how you live. Not as unwise people, but as wise, making the most of the time because the days are evil. So don't be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk on wine, for that is debauchery.

But be filled with the spirit as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to one another, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times, for everything in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Being subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord. For husband is the head of the house of the wife, just as Christ is the head of of the Church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so wives ought to be in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives. Just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of the water by the Word, so as to present the church to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything thing of the kind, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife, loves himself. For no one ever hates his own flesh, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the Church, because we are members of his body.

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and and the two will become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I am speaking of Christ and the Church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself. And a wife should respect her husband. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise, so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth. And fathers, don't provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord. Slaves.

Slaves. Obey your earthly masters with respect and trembling in a singleness of heart as you obey Christ, not with the slavery performed merely for looks to please people, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the soul. Render service with enthusiasm for as for the Lord, not as for humans, knowing that whatever good we do, we receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are enslaved or free and masters do the same. Stop threatening them. For you know that both you and I have the same Lord in heaven and with God.

There is no partiality. The word of the Lord. Please be seated. Heavenly Father, we invite you into our hearts, into our minds, into every aspect of our being today. Father, give us the courage and the wisdom to understand what it means to be subject, submissive to you and to one another as we grow into the body that is Christ, of which Christ is the head, as we are shaped and molded into the form that you've called us to be.

And Lord, we ask your blessing on this time. Pour through me the gift of preaching that I might speak your truth and love to these, your people. It's together that the Church says. Amen, man. Up until this point in Ephesians, everything's just been going great.

I mean, I loved this sermon series. It wasn't hard, wasn't complicated. Lots of good texts, lots of fun. I want to remind you of all those things before we jump into today. In Ephesians 4, we talked about unity.

One body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all. In Ephesians 5, we talked about how we live out our lives with boundaries. Because these boundaries, these margins, are how we experience the freedom that God offers us. This freedom is the expression of new creation, the that God is doing through us in the power of the Holy spirit. In Ephesians, 2.

We reminded ourselves that our unity is not our uniformity. It's not our doctrinal clarity, although that matters. And it's not in our orientation to serve and care for others. None of those things bring us unity. What brings us unity is Jesus.

And I think today that's where we have to start and that's where we have to end. Richard Beck, a few years ago, one of our elders, he said this phrase, and it's been stuck in my head ever since. I've never been able to get it out of my head. He said, if we get Jesus right, we will get women in leadership, right? Right.

The key is not to discern carefully exactly what Paul is saying in First Corinthians or first Timothy about the nature of who gets to be in charge. In fact, when we focus on that, we might more likely than not turn this into a discussion about who gets to have the power. But instead, when we look at Jesus and we see how he serves people and he loves people and he cares for people, if we get Jesus right, we're going to get women in leadership right. If we get Jesus right, we're going to get our marriages right. We're going to get our parenting right.

We're going to get our human relationships, all of the human relationships right. And so what Paul is doing here is he's riffing on this. This known classic. He's sampling a beat that the people in Ephesus have heard before. But what he does is kind of shocking.

And it's. It's called the household code, and it's instructions for how to run a house. It's just, how should things be organized? And these things have shown up all over the place. If you look in the 1940s and 50s, they're in good Housekeeping.

Right? They're there. Aristotle writes a household code, Plato writes a household code. And they're pretty common for everybody that was giving you advice, I'm certain that if you surfed like TikTok or Reels long enough, you're going to find somebody that's telling you this is how your family should work. Plato had one, Aristotle had one.

The Stoics had them. They're very common. And when Paul begins a Christian household code, it sounds like he is immediately getting it wrong. Let me show you why, because this is what Aristotle wrote of household management. We have seen that there are three parts.

One is the rule of a master over slaves, another of a father and the third of a husband. A husband and father rules over rules, dominates over wife and children bond. 3. But the rule differs. The rule over his children, being a royal over his wife.

A constitutional rule, though there are many exceptions to the order of nature. The male is by nature fitter for command than the female, just as the older and the full grown is superior to the younger and more immature. And then he goes on later, this is in his book politics or his writing Politics. And he goes on further to say the free man, the person, the slave owner, rules over the slave after another manner from that in which he ruled. The male rules over the female, or the man over the child.

Although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees, for the slave has no deliberative faculty at all. The woman has, but it is without authority. The child has, but it's immature, so it must necessarily be with the moral virtues also. All may be supported to partake of them, but only in such a manner and degree as is required for each for the fulfillment of his duty. So let me translate that for you, if that feels dense in logic.

Aristotle's basically arguing there that although women, children and slaves have parts of a soul, it's not the same as the way a man has a soul.

The word he uses there, rule, is the same word that the Romans used to dominate cultures. You must exercise absolute authority. And it's noted that women and children, slaves, they should have no rights, although they've been given some. They are barely capable of rational thought. This is just the world that Paul lives in.

Aristotle, by the way, only addresses the master or the husband or the father. And that's really just one person in the house. That's the paterfamilias, it's the head of household. And when he's addressing children, what you have to realize, when we think of children, we might think of somebody that's this tall or this tall or going through puberty. In the ancient near east, in the first century, a child is anybody.

That's not the paterfamilia. You could be 56 year old with a grandchild and you still fit that category of child, because your great uncle is the paterfamilia and you're not now you have your own family, and so you have this sphere of domination, but you are still beholden to that power. And if it makes sense for the family for you to divorce your spouse and abandon your children so that you can marry someone else, because that's a better political deal or economic deal, they can do it and they don't think twice about it. And the fear at the time, the fear that's existing in the Greco Roman culture, is that if houses were run by any other way, the household would fall apart. The fear is if this happens, then there's just going to be chaos.

Of course, women and slaves and children couldn't be trusted. And if the household fell, then society would fall, and then the empire would fall as well.

And I step back from the world that Paul is living in and the world that Paul is riding in, and I just have to note to myself what a failure of imagination.

Didn't they know. Didn't they know that love is a magnitude more powerful than fear? Didn't they know that granting respect and human dignity would create more loyalty and devotion than cruelty and power? Didn't they know that this is a better way? And so this is not the way that Paul addresses the Church.

He speaks directly to women. He speaks directly to slaves. By the way, he mentions the slaves first over the masters. Did you notice that? And he speaks to children.

In Corinthians, Paul says that in marriage, our bodies don't just belong to ourselves, but to one another. And in the first century, at the time, of course, a wife's body belonged to her husband. Of course a slave's effort belonged to their master. Of course a child's will belonged to their parent. But Paul says no, Paul says a husband's body belongs to his wife as well.

It's mutual.

The other thing that's tricky about this text is that most of our modern Bibles have been edited and added, you know, chapters and verses. All of that stuff was added in much, much later to help us be clear on what we're talking about. And then even later, editors came through and said, well, this. They gave you kind of topic sentences. And in a lot of your Bibles, the topic sentence starts at.

At chapter 5, verse 22. That begins with wives, submit to your husbands. But that's not actually where this text begins. And the reason that we know that is because in 5:22, there is no verb. And in Greek, when there's no verb, you look above earlier in the text to figure out, okay, where is that verb?

It literally says in 5:22, not wives, submit to your husband, but actually likewise wives as to their husbands. It's not its own new category. And so you have to look up to figure out where does the category start. And that category starts with mutual submission. There's a lot of vows that a person makes at a wedding.

A vow always to make his. And as I've done a Few weddings, I've seen them. And when I was in campus ministry, you know, the vows of a college student is different than the vows of a grownup, which is fine. One time there was a vow that said, I vow that you will always get to play Xbox with your friends from 9:30 to 10:30 at night. I'm just curious, like, how's that one still going?

There was a vow that one person made. I vow always to make your grandma's guacamole recipe, not my grandmother's. There was a vow that every time I drive your car, I'll fill the gas tank for you. And some of these vows are kind of silly and they're fun and they're trying to express, like, the love, the uniqueness of the love that they have for one another. But what we have to remember in the 1st century and in the 21st century is that marriage is a covenant.

It's not so much the declaration of a present love or emotion or passion, it's the binding promise of future love, is that you're going to be there for through thick or thin. And it cuts across the grain. In our culture, the first century saw marriage through the lens of coercion. Our world sees love through the lens or marriage through the lens of chemistry. But we as believers see love marriage through the lens of Christ.

In 5:23, Paul writes, the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself. That's Christ its savior. And we talked about this a couple weeks ago because this word showed up earlier in Ephesians where Christ is the head and that word is kefle. It's not arcos, it's not the archangel. It's not the literal authority of an organizational structure.

It's the source. It's the head, like a river. And each time that Paul uses this in Ephesians, it's not about power. If you want to believe me, then dig a little bit deeper. Look at the verbs Paul uses when he talks about Christ in the context of husbands.

And this is from Cynthia Westfall. Jesus washes, Jesus cares and feeds. Jesus is doing spot removal and even ironing. All of these verbs that are attributed, to the head are designated for domestic service. Do you notice that?

But Paul ties them to Christ and husbands. Is that what it means to be a head, to serve? Yeah, it does. That's exactly what it means. But I want you to look at what happens in Ephesians when Christ is the head of something.

In Ephesians, chapter 1, God exercised this power in Christ by raising him from the dead and seating him at the right hand of the heavens, far above every ruler and authority, power and dominion, and given every title, not only in this age, but in the one that is to come. And he subjected same word everything under his feet and appointed him as head, same word over everything, for the sake of the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way. Later, in Ephesians, chapter four, then we will no longer be little children, but speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into him who is the head Christ. From him the whole body fitted, knitted together by every supporting ligament, supports the growth of the body, for building itself up in love by the proper working of each individual part. This is what I want you to see.

When Christ is the head of something, it elevates it.

And there's a sense in which kefle head means, means high esteem, a prestige, it's a place of honor. This is what Paul notes in Philippians, chapter three. For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we are also eagerly wait for a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform the body of our lowly condition into conformity with his glorious body by the exertion of the power that he, that he has even to subject all things to himself. Do you notice all the words that are still there? When Christ is the head of the body, Christ elevates it.

He makes the body like him. And so being subject to Christ means that you are to become a servant, you're to become a slave. But it also means that you are elevated, sharing in his status and in the mystery and the complexity of marriage. This is what the mystery of mutual submission in a Christian marriage should do.

Mutual submission in a marriage should help each other, witness one another, encourage one another as each are elevated by Christ to become something more, maybe to become something that you originally were. The unmarred imago dei, the part of you that is most like God.

And I think there is nothing harder than to wake up every morning and willingly submit yourself to the people around you. Whether you're in a marriage, whether you're a parent, whether you're a child, whether you're. You have a job and you have a boss. There's nothing harder than to wake up every morning and willingly submit yourself to those around you. But this is exactly what Jesus is asking us to do.

Because there are very few things that'll make you look more like Jesus than daily mutual submission.

And then he moves to slavery. Why doesn't Paul just end slavery right here. I mean, why doesn't he say there shouldn't be slaves? I mean, the first argument is that just Paul's not in charge. He can't make this declaration.

He wasn't the emperor. In fact, he was in prison by the emperor. But there's a hint. There's a hint that Paul says, you know, this isn't the way it's supposed to be. And in Philemon, where Paul is writing a very direct situation of a runaway slave who's coming back to their master and both of them have become Christians, there's this very direct, almost flat out statement where he says, this guy is your brother and you cannot behave in the way that you used to.

It's not so with us. And in Corinthians he tells people, if you have a chance to become free, you should do it. But what Paul does, again, which is striking to the household codes that are existing around him, the way that he is flipping the script on everything that the Ephesians know, you serve as a slave because God sees you and God will reward you. No matter who you are serving in this world, you have a master who treats you fairly. And he also tells that master who is also in the church.

You serve the same master and God does not favor you.

See, I think the household codes are just an extension of everything that Paul has been saying in chapter five. If we want to become new creation, if we want to become the kind of people that Christ is forming us to be, if we want to be shaped and changed and molded by the Spirit, then there needs to be some radical transformation. When Jesus is Lord, it means that every relationship you have is reimagined. In Ephesus, it was the relationship between Jew and Gentile. How unlikely and crazy and impossible it would have been to cast down that dividing wall that was between them.

But Christ broke it down. And Paul believes, and we believe that God is still performing that miracle over and over and over. We lean into the work of God and we put our shoulders against the walls and we chip away at the mortar to bring them down. My friend Jeff Brown had this great point. He shared this with us, with me last week.

He said that the word Christian makes a great noun, but perhaps we should rethink regulating it, whatever. Lowering it to an adjective. What's the word? Relegating. That's what I have in my notes.

I just couldn't say it. We shouldn't relegate Christian to an adjective, right? Like Christian rock band, Christian counselor. Christian is not a Modifying thing. Christian is the main thing.

And it's really easy to lose sight of that. And it's so easy to confuse the two. The main thing and the modifying thing which what does it look like for every relationship in your world to be reimagined by the power of Christ. When we make Christ the main thing, it changes everything. And look what Christ did.

Christ took the verbs that would never belong to him. He protects a sinful woman from religious leaders. He gives a Gentile woman the same respect in a theological dialogue that he gives to Nicodemus, a Jewish leader. Jesus bears shame. Jesus humbles himself.

Jesus takes on the form of a servant, puts a towel around his waist and he washes his feet. Jesus submits himself not only to the will of God, but to death on a cross and brothers and sisters, this is how we find our way.

This is the only way.

When we say Jesus is Lord, what it means is that his way is going to be our way. When we meet Christ in the waters of baptism and we pledge a covenant in our hearts through thick and thin, through good and bad, it's really not about our passion. It's not about our emotions. It's about our will that we are going to be willingly allow Christ to transform us over and over and over. That's the only way.

This text is not trying to preserve some sort of Greco Roman social structure that would mean we're trying to bring back slavery. That's not happening. Rather, it is to demonstrate when Christ contacts any social system. Christ's sacrificial love is so fundamentally powerful, it fundamentally transforms every person in the system. And so husbands are changed and wives are changed and parents are changed and children.

It.

We are reminded that we don't answer to the man anyway. We answer to Christ, who has been both powerful and powerless. It's not about reinforcing power, it's about relinquishing it. May we have the courage in the church to do what Christ has done. Let's stand and sing.