Our Sermon for July 19, 2015: No Longer Strangers, Ephesians 2:11-22 (2024)

No Longer Strangers: Ephesians 2:11-22

Something unexpected happened while I was working on the sermon for this week.Each week, as a prepare for worship, I spend time reading through the suggested scriptures in the yearly church calendar.AsIread,Icame to therich set of verses in theEphesians text,and I knew that this was the text that I preach about this week. Honestly, we've known each other for about a year now. I bet that you'd guess I'd be interested in a scripture that talks about breaking down cultural walls and creating a community in Christ. That's not the unexpected part. The unexpected part isthat I'd be preaching out of Ephesians at all.

Why would I hesitate to preach a sermon from Ephesians? Well, the primary reasonhas nothing to do with today's scripture but everything to do with a set of scriptures that I can't standthat come towards the end of this book,Ephesians 5:22-6:9. This set of scriptures isonepartof what is known as the Household Codes that are found in some of the booksof the New Testament. These codesare in found inEphesians,Colossians,Titus, 1 Timothy, and 1 Peter. Theyaddress the proper relationship,in a Christian home,between spouses, between children and parents, and between enslaved people and the people who enslaved them. While I think you can reasonably argue that the version of the code as outlined in Ephesians is probably the most generous version of this set of ideas about how to be a Christian family, when taken as a whole, there are few parts of the Bible that I thinkhave been used to more often to do more harm than the household codes.

When people are go looking for scripture to justify societal norms that define women as second class people, they often go straight for the household codes. They hold up scripture like Ephesians 5:22-23 as a primary example of how the Bible says only men can be in leadership positions, be it in the home or in the public sphere. These verses say, "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." Ephesians goes on to say that wives should be subject in to their husbands just like the church is subject to Christ. And, while the author of Ephesiansdoestell husbandsthat they need to be as gracious to their wives as Christ is to the church, in the end,when you compare one person in the relationship to Jesus and the other to the church,the relationship describedcan neverrelationship between equals. In the best of possible scenarios, the relationship isbetween a submissive, less powerfulwife and a hopefully gracious,considerably more powerful,husband. When people in Christian systems want to argue that gender inequality is ordained by God and that the Bible forbids women from being inleadership positions, the household codes are nearly always cited in the biblical rationale for such patriarchal behavior. When anyone has the temerity to tell a woman that she should stay in an abusive relationship because she is called by God to submit to her husband, the household codes are nearly always cited in the biblical rationale for such patriarchal behavior. As a woman called to Christian ministry who believes strongly that ahealthy marriage is built on equality, not subservience, I have very little use for these parts of scripture.

As if the patriarchy weren't enough, the household codes are also often implicated in Christian justifications of white supremacy. WhenAmericanpreachers looked for biblical justification for the horrors of slavery, the household codes were consistently used to demonstrate that Christians could ethically own other human beings. For example, in 1861, when the Bishop of Florida wanted to outline what he saw as the strong biblical case for slavery,the householdcodesare some of the scriptures he used to make his case. The Bishop, namedVerot, wrote, "St. Paul, in several of his epistles, speaks of the mutual duties of slaves and masters, he never dreams of the new duty invented by the Abolitionists- the pretended duty for the master to liberate and manumit his slave, and the duty of the slave to runaway from his master, even by using violence and causing bloodshed." He goes on to citethe household codesfromColossians, Titus, and 1 Timothy. These does mirror this admonition, found in the book ofEphesians:"Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ."The author of Ephesiansgoes on to tell slaves to render service with enthusiasm, as though, when serving the people who enslaved them, they are serving Christ himself.

Racist biblical interpretations like Verot and like countless other preachers before him set the groundwork not only for the atrocious practice of chattel slavery, but also for the centuries of systemic racism that followed and continues to infect our country to this day. You can draw a direct line from sermons like Verot's to southern White Citizens Councils that claimed their dedication to segregation was rooted in their Christian faith to northern banks who refused to give black families home loans because it would not be appropriate for black folks and white folks to liveas equalsin the same neighborhood asto themodern day drug laws that are color-blind on paper, but that are applied more consistently and more harshly to people of color. When study after study shows that black folks and white folks use drugs at roughly same rate, but black folks are arrested far more often and given much harsher sentences, there has to be something in the system that is that is teaching people to be suspicious of black people... there has to be something in the system that teaches usto treat people who are the descendants of the enslavedas though they are still not equal citizens. When we dig through our history, down to the foundation of thisinequality, we find this scripture, "Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ."

I hope that it is clear now why I hesitate to spend any time with Ephesians. There is aburden of history and context here that I cannot ignore. This letter, credited to Paul, though not likely actually written by him, seems to be at the center of so many painful, broken parts of our culture. How can I even think of this book as Holy when it describes relationship that seem inherently unequal and asks oppressed people to act super happy about the service they are being forced to do?These are the questions that I wrestled with as I worked on my sermon this week.And, then I read this line: "For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us." And, then I read this line: "So, then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens inthe saints and also members of the household of God... In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God." How could the beauty of these verses the describea God who breaks down walls between religious and ethnic groups, and then rebuilds the people into one dwelling place for God exist right next to those frustrating verses describingunequal relationships in marriage and supportingslavery?

A scholarnamed Elan Mouton has offered one way of reading Ephesians that is helping me reconcile the division-destroying Christ of chapter 2 with the division affirming household code of chapters 5 and 6. Mouton argues that Ephesians can be readnot as a witness to one who has finished being changed through Christ butas a testimony of an author who is right in the midst of being transformed through his relationship with Christ.We can see that thisauthor understands that belief in Christ islife-changing and earth-shattering.This authors is convinced that theblessings that God bestows through Christ are so profound that they can literally reorient your life. In chapter 2, theradical reorientationthat is most needed at that time is adismantling of the cultural prejudices thatwere preventing JewishandGentile followers of Jesus from truly living as siblings in Christ.This author is writing, in part, to provide theological grounding to address that particular issue.

What is frustrating for me as a modern reader is that I wish the author hadn't stopped knocking down theological walls with the Jews and the Gentiles. I thinkthat the peaceof Christ thatbrought together Jews and Gentile can also foster gender equalityandoffer a relational system that is does not rely on coerced labor and long-held beliefs about ethnic supremacy. I wish this author would have just kept working. I wish he would haveended up at what would appear to be me to be the natural conclusionof this kind of theology:a body of Christ where old divisions based on racism, sexism, and ethnic prejudice have been dissolved. What I got was a system whereethnic prejudices are questions but where presumptions about gender and class aren't. Husbands and masters are asked to be betterthan they currently were, but not actually be vulnerable and give uppower as fully as Christ did on the cross. Iget frustrated when I read Ephesians becauseIwant an author fully transformed. What I got is an author who is still on the way. He's still in the midst of Christ working on him.

Perhaps the reason that I need to keep reading Ephesians is to be reminded that this process of being transformed through Christ is not quick.I need to keep reading Ephesians to remember thatjust because someonehasworked through some areas of theirlife to break down walls of prejudice, that doesn't mean that that person isdone doing all the work that is asked of us as we work with God to bring about God's reign of love and justice.Maybe I need to keep reading Ephesians to be reminded that I'm still on the way, too, and that I can't stop continuing to examine all ofmy own beliefs and behaviors just because I've been trying to tear down walls in one part of my life. There still may be inequality lurking in other parts that I haven't even started to work through yet. If I can still manage to read the first part of Ephesians, maybe it willhelp me work through the parts of my life that still look like the end of Ephesians. Maybe it willmake me work harder to find the ways that Christ is growing all of us every closer, making sure that we're no longer strangers. Maybe it willinspiremeto alwayskeepworking to create a more just household with God

If you'd like to know more about the unequal affect that current drug laws have had on people of color, I highly recommend the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander (New York: The New Press, 2012).