Preached on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. The lections this sermon is based on can be found here.
Well, as many of you know, I’m back here with you after a few weeks of vacation. And you know how it is when you get back to the office after vacation. You purge the email in-box, and then you go through the voice mail and the snail mail. Then you take care of the weekly duties, things you know you have to do. For me, that means sending out rota reminders to those who are scheduled to be lectors and acolytes; and preparing the prayers of the people and the readings for Sunday.
When I’m also the preacher for that Sunday, I go to the readings first, to get them ready for the lectors, and to get them in my head so to speak early in the week, so I can be thinking about them for Sunday’s sermon. So, being a 21st century priest, I looked up what the lectionary readings for today were on the lectionary page website. August 23rd, click, BCP lectionary, click... Oh yes, the covenant at Schechem between Joshua and the people of Israel. I’ve got something in my seminary notes about that, I think…
And then, imagine my chagrin, when I got to the second reading… “Wives, obey your husbands!” I knew I should have taken the last two weeks in August off, instead of the first two weeks. I could have avoided this altogether. My silent prayer went up, ‘Please God, don’t let there be a male lector scheduled to read the Epistle this Sunday!!’ A quick check of the rota let me know that June Muller was scheduled to do the second reading.
Being the shepherd to the lectors, I felt that June deserved fair warning about this Sunday’s reading. I called her up and warned her of just exactly what she would have to declaim from the lectern this Sunday.
June, being a good and faithful lector, didn’t balk, she agreed to take on Ephesians this Sunday, but she did warn me that she might laugh out loud during her reading. I thought to myself, of all the reactions that good Christian women have had to this text down through the centuries, a hearty laugh is perhaps the most innocuous -- and probably the most appropriate.
But once June was on board, that left me with a sermon to do. Back to the Internet. Feminist Biblical Criticism, click… Turns out that many of our sisters in the faith have come to terms with this passage, and in their scholarship, perhaps we can find a small bit of peace with this passage from Ephesians.
Our selection from Ephesians fits a format common in the ancient world. It is a household code, and household codes were a standard of ancient life and literature. Beginning with Aristotle, there are many handbooks, and lists and recommendations for how a proper house should be run. The Greek word for house, oikos, is the root of our word economy. And that is the point of a household code, the proper functioning of the system with everything and everyone in place, and possessing a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities.
The New Testament household codes are a bit different from other Hellenistic household codes. Almost all of those documents are addressed to the man of the house alone. The New Testament household codes in Ephesians, Colossians, Titus, and 1st Peter, address wives, children and slaves as well. It may not sound like it to our ear, but the passage from Ephesians appointed for today is actually more inclusive than many of its contemporary documents in that women, children and slaves are seen as important to good functioning of the household, and as worthy of instruction as the patriarch of the house.
Another interesting difference about the New Testament codes is the fact that money is not discussed. Most Hellenistic codes were about home management that preserved or expanded
the household wealth. The household codes in Ephesians and elsewhere in the New Testament are not concerned with money at all, but rather with relationships that foster mutuality, caring, nourishment and love between members of the family. Etymology aside, this is not an economic approach, but an approach that seeks to foster the happiness, not the wealth, of the household.
As feminist biblical scholar Carolyn Osiek in an article in the Biblical Theological Bulletin puts it, “The dominance-submission pattern is still there, but it has been radically changed, from treatise on male dominance to exhortation to mutual relationships in Christ.”
Osiek points out that the central theme of Ephesians is reconciliation of the alienated within the unity of the church. As we find in our collect for today, and in the quote from Genesis within our selection from Ephesians: “the two shall be come one flesh.”
It seems that the epistle writers see submission to authority as the most appropriate form of imitation of Christ for women, children and slaves. They are to submit to authority as Christ submitted to God’s authority in accepting the cross. In our specific passage this morning, the
church’s submission under Christ’s authority is mentioned as well.
Men on the other hand are asked to imitate Christ in another way. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” Husbands, it would seem, are not merely to submit to authority, but are to offer themselves as a sacrifice for their loved ones, those given into their care.
So, submission for wives, sacrificial death for husbands. Suddenly it doesn’t seem as if the wives are doing too badly in this passage after all!
But in the end, the meaning of this passage is stated quite clearly in the beginning: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Carolyn Osiek says that the intention of the passage is to iterate how we are to submit to one another, to serve one another, to respect and love and care for one another, out of reverence for Christ who submitted to God in accepting death on the
cross. And husbands, fair warning, until you’ve done what Ephesians says is your duty – literally sacrificing yourself – I’d refrain from commenting on how well your wives are doing submitting to you or anybody else, for that matter.
Ok, I feel like I’ve done my duty both as a priest and a feminist myself now… Can we please leave Ephesians behind for the rest of this sermon????
Because something interesting is happening in the gospel this morning. We left Mark a few weeks ago and have joined the gospel narrative in John. And in the passages we’ve been reading, Jesus has been teaching the disciples more about the meaning of his coming. He has been sent to us as bread from heaven, a new form sustenance, something beyond the manna in the wilderness. And eating of this new bread, which is Jesus’ own flesh, is the pathway to eternal life.
Many of those who hear this teaching have a problem with it, as John reports. And it’s no wonder. It may be hard for us to hear it quite as they did. We’re used to hearing that this bread is Jesus’ body, and this wine is Jesus’ blood. We hear it every Sunday in the Eucharistic prayer. But in Jesus’ time, to the first people to hear a teaching on Eucharistic Christology, it would have sounded odd -- to say the least. It sounds, in fact, like cannibalism. Eat flesh? Drink blood? This is cannibalism mixed with vampirism!
And indeed, early Christians were accused of these crimes or at least of mimicking them, by their pagan neighbors. But for Jews, who had well-know strictures about purging blood when butchering animals, and many other strictures against coming into contact with corpses –- much less treating them as if they were bread -- this teaching of Jesus that he is the bread from heaven and we must eat of him to attain eternal life… This is taboo upon taboo, and would have been very hard for many if not most 1st century Palestinian Jews to hear and accept. And indeed, John tells us that many of his disciples turned back from following Jesus because of this teaching.
But of course, the problem is with the listeners, not with Jesus. And their mistake, their sin, is literalism. They believe that what Jesus is saying is meant to be taken literally. It is not. Jesus’ meaning, his message is mystical, abstract. As Jesus himself puts it in our gospel reading, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” it has a spiritual truth that supersedes and transcends the literal.
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Jesus is born of a woman, then he lives a life like anyone else’s. His journey is our journey in every particular, an ordinary life. Then, at the end, he gives us a rather strange task, eat this bread and drink this cup, it is my body and blood, whenever you do this, remember me. Soon thereafter, he dies, just as all of us will do. Then his ordinary journey takes an extraordinary turn. He rises again, and is seen in the flesh by a doubting Thomas and all the Twelve. And in a while, he rises into heaven to rejoin his father, our father.
But yet still he is with us, and we met him again in the meal we will share in just a few minutes. When we eat of his body and drink of his blood, we become one with him. And then our ordinary journeys take an extraordinary turn, for as Jesus says into today’s gospel, ‘those who eat this bread will live forever.’ His ordinary journey took an extraordinary turn, and our ordinary lives become extraordinary, our lives become eternal.
But you’ll miss all that, if you take what Jesus says too literally.
Just as with our epistle today. Take that one literally at your peril, for it is written in a context that is not our own, but its true meaning is about a mutuality of love and service that we should bear for each other. But you might miss all that if you take it literally.
It’s so funny, this impulse toward the literalism. I find the folks that most tenaciously cling to literalistic interpretations of Christianity are not conservative believers, but rather, they are usually secular liberals. So many times, people have derided my faith saying things like, “Come on, there’s no such thing as virgin birth. People can’t walk on water. Christianity is ridiculous!” And then they head off to find their spirituality elsewhere -- quoting Zen aphorisms and Vedic tenets, and refusing to accept anything but the most literal interpretation of the Christian gospel.
But truth be told, we all have a little of an impulse toward literalism, I think. We want everything to be simple, and completely apparent and understandable, at the first glance. In spite of our lived experience that life isn’t straightforward or easily understandable. And that the truth can be complicated. Life can be ambiguous.
What appears to be a blessing can often become a curse. And likewise, what appears to be a disappointment can often lead to great happiness. We can love someone deeply and yet be deeply angry with them as well. We can feel great pain and yet laugh at the same time. Happy marriages are not always perfect ones. Sorrows are often indications of great joy that has passed. Life is full of contradictions, and truths that are not at all simple or straightforward, or uncomplicated.
And all this is true of God as well. Our God is a divine creator, and yet came to us as a human being of the most humble origins. And still, our God is the Spirit of wisdom, appearing as an ethereal wind, and a flickering flame. Our God is an all-seeing, all-knowing parent, but also a little child born in a stable. A Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit, all in one. As with the Eucharist, this more complex understanding of God caused problems for the earliest Christians when they were accused of gentile polytheism. But that was a misunderstanding born out of, again, literalism.
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It’s no cake-walk, this Christianity thing, is it? It calls for some serious thought. It calls for tenacity. You have to stick with it to really come to comprehend it, I think. You’ve got to look deeply into our Scripture, our rituals, to find their meaning. You’ve got to look deeply and honestly at yourself, to acknowledge that which is sinful and also to find that which is holy, within you.
There’s always more to the story with God. Much more. More than any of us can know. More than can be contained in a book, or even a collection of 66 books like our Bible. Certainly more than I can put into this sermon… I haven’t even gotten to my seminary notes on the Covenant at Schechem! And I won’t, not this time.
So keep coming, stay with it, stay with us. There’s more to the story than meets the eye at first glance, and more than meets the ear upon first hearing… It may not ever be easy or simple, but I can assure you, it will be interesting, and ever fascinating and full of wonder at God’s complexity and God’s amazing grace.
Amen+
(c) The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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