There was once a missionary who went to a very remote isolated tribe, way up near the arctic circle. He was the first Christian missionary to ever come to their area. In fact they had had almost no contact with the rest of the world at all. He moved in with them, worked very hard to learn their language and their customs. And he worked very hard to teach them about Christ, through his words and his actions both.
As they learned about Jesus the whole village decided that they wanted to be baptized as Christians. And, since none of them had had Christian weddings, they wanted to do that, too. They set apart a special day, with a mass baptism service in the morning, a mass Christian wedding ceremony in the afternoon, followed by a great feast and celebration. The missionary baptized the whole community in the morning, then led a mass wedding in the afternoon. Then they ate and they danced and they celebrated. And when their stomachs were bursting at the end of the day, the missionary leaned over and asked the chief what he thought about baptisms and Christian weddings now that they had experienced them both. The chief said that the baptism was great, but the people especially like the weddings. The missionary asked him, "And why is that?" And the chief said, "Well, today we all got new wives."
And the missionary suddenly badly wished he had spent more time teaching them about what a Christian marriage meant.
We live in a world that needs to hear again what a Christian marriage looks like. We need to teach about marriage. With all the divorces and painful marriages, with all the pressures and stresses that our world places on marriages, we need to be really clear on just what it is we are trying to do. Our culture has all sorts of techniques for fulfilling ourselves, asserting ourselves, feeling good about ourselves. But we're not very good at husbands and wives learning to get along with each other.
This morning, as we continue to work our way through Paul's letter to the Ephesians, we come to his longest instructions to husbands and wives. Its a passage that is difficult for us to understand today. It is a passage that can be easily misinterpreted in a very destructive way. But I believe that it also contains some important wisdom for us. It's printed out in the bulletin for you to see. I invite you to hold it open in front of you as I read it and as I talk about it.
Now hear the words of the Apostle Paul from Ephesians, chapter 5.
"Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also 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 water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, 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 the two will become one flesh." This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband."
There are three basic ways that this passage can be interpreted.
One way, a traditional way, is to emphasize Paul's instructions to the wives, to insist that the woman's role is to submit to her husband, do what her husband tells her to do, think what her husband tells her to think, to be something like a servant for her husband. A first reading of the first verses really sounds like Paul has a very hierarchical relation ship in mind, with the husband always the boss.
I don't remember ever meeting anyone who was a serious student of the Bible who believed that was what Paul was saying, but it has been all too common that some men insist on making all the decisions in the house and molding their wives into subservient doormats. And they might try to use this scripture as part of their manipulation, telling their wives that God commands them to submit to whatever injustices their husband inflicts on them. But that comes more out of their own need for control and inability to love than it does from the Apostle Paul. And this is not a Christian position.
I was in a Bible study with a group of Freeport pastors a few weeks ago and we came to a passage where the Bible clearly says that God led someone to go back into an unjust situation and submit to the injustice. And I'm sure there is a time for that. How many long-suffering wives have successfully reformed their immature and selfish husbands by hanging in there and loving them?
But some of the black pastors said right away, that's the kind of thing that they told our ancestors who were in slavery, God wants you to just submit to injustice. And there have been times when pastors have sent abused wives back into marriages, telling them to just keep submitting to abuse and injustice and everything would be all right. But it isn't always all right and sometimes horrible things happen. You can't just submit all the time. In our Bible study we decided that God has given the church two tools. One tool is submission. Sometimes a quiet, serving, loving heart will turn an unreasonable man around. Sometimes its just the tool to use. But some people will not learn from that, and then there is the prophetic resistance to evil and oppression. And the trick for the church is to know the right time to use each of those tools. We cannot just tell people to submit to evil forever.
There are two other positions on how to interpret this passage. Both of them have some very committed and conscientious Christians who hold them. Both of them have solid, healthy, Christian marriages who use them as models. Those are positions two and three.
The first position focused on Paul's words to the wives. I'll call it the controlling husband. The second position focuses on Paul's words to the husbands, and that changes the equation dramatically. I'll call it the servant leader husband. As soon as you consider what Paul said to the husbands, the first position, the controlling husband just falls apart.
This second position still sees the husband as the head of the household, but with a very specific understanding of what that position means. How are husbands supposed to treat their wives? Paul says in verse 25, "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." Does Christ arbitrarily boss us around? Does Christ demean us? No way! And so Paul's teaching leaves no ground for a husband to do those things to his wife. Paul clearly had in mind that husbands would be servant leaders. How did Christ love the church? Jesus described his ministry to the church by saying that he did not come "to be served but to serve and to give his life." (Mark 10:45). Husbands, that's the model for how God wants you to treat your wives. Jesus doesn't just force us to love him. That's impossible. What he did was he came to us, he served us, and he even died on a cross for us. We love him because he first loved us so much, not because he forces us.
Husbands, God calls you to serve your wives. The Bible is very clear here. And that is a word that our culture needs to hear right now. Too often husbands put all their energy into bringing home the paycheck, and Monday Night Football and they leave the rest to the wives, the emotional care of the family, spiritual nurture, discipline of the children, helping the children with homework. Are there any husbands here who have to admit that you sometimes don't put enough energy into your family, that you have just left it to your wife? I have to admit I've done that. In many ways that is the role our culture trains us for.
If you don't think that has been a problem in America, look at the impact of the Promise Keepers movement. The movement only started 7 years ago and already over a million men have attended their mass rallies and there are something like 20 thousand Promise Keepers small groups in America. Men are realizing that they have been negligent, that they haven't carried their share of the work, that they have cut themselves off spiritually and emotionally from some of the richest parts of life.
Time Magazine told the story of a man who had once beaten his wife and she had had to call the police on him. Their pastor took him to a Promise Keepers rally and his heart was changed. The day came when he walked in the door and apologized to his wife for the way he had treated her and asked his wife if he could literally wash her feet. And she said yes, and he got down on the floor with a basin, just as Jesus had done for the disciples. He had a new model to go by in the way he treated his wife. He recognized God called him to be a servant, not a slave driver. What a difference that change made.
Paul says it over and over again in our passage, "husbands love our wives," "husbands love your wives," "husbands love your wives." He says it 4 times in 8 verses. Maybe he recognized that we need to hear that again and again. And if there is a difference in the rolls of husbands and wives in the family, it is not that we husbands sit back and make our wives do all the work of building a Christian family. Any difference in roll that Paul gives us is that we are supposed to work harder to bless our families, to make sure that our children are raised right, to make very, very sure that our wives know they are loved. I'll call that the position with the husband as the servant leader.
Now that's a very viable position, and it works for some wonderfully, but it requires a fine balance that is something difficult to maintain. I think that the overall impact of Promise Keepers can be very good. But I would really like to have some fine tuning. Sometimes they talk as if men coming together is going to be the solution of all the spiritual problems of our country. Can men solve all the problems without women? I don't think so. And our women have so many skills, I don't know why we would want to try. Certainly a husband who is the loving head of a family will do all he can to bring out and support his wife's gifts, not just replace them with his own.
Well, let me give you a third position, I'll call this one mutual submission. If the first position focused on the duties of the wives and the second position focused on the duties of the husbands, then mutual submission focuses on both duties. Paul tells the women to submit to their husbands. That means to lay down their own desires in favor of their husbands, to serve their husbands, to watch out for the best interests of their husbands. And he tells the husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church. That means to lay down their own desires in favor of their wives, to serve their wives, to watch out for the best interests of their wives. And it seems to me that as both husband and wife are looking to serve the other any differences in roles become smaller and smaller.
There was once a traveller driving down a country road. He came to one of those old one-lane bridges. It had a "YIELD" sign on his side of the bridge. That meant that if anyone was coming from the other way, he had to give way and let that other car go first. So he slowed down, looked carefully across the bridge, and then drove across when he was sure he wasn't getting in anyone's way. Later that day, when he had completed his errand, he came back down that same road the other way. And when he came to that bridge, from the other side, he was surprised to see another "YIELD" sign there. He thought, that was strange, shouldn't there be one side that always has the right of way and the other side that yields? But there was the sign, so he slowed way down. He looked up the road to be sure that he wouldn't be in anyone else's way. Then he went across. As he went across, he looked back, and, sure enough, there were yield signs at both sides of the bridge. It was strange. But he recognized the wisdom right away. If both sides are ready to yield, there will never be a crash on that bridge.
Husbands and wives, we have to learn to yield, to love, to serve, to humble ourselves to each other. If you make a competition to see who can bless the other more, everybody will win and nobody will lose. Christ calls us to be subject to one another. AMEN
