Sunday, November 19,
2017
Imagine a trek through jungles, across
a river, in all weather. You walk for
days, thirsty, bug-bitten as you deal with snakes and wild animals. By the time you arrive, you’ve used up your
supplies. Still you make that final
climb up the mountain in order to sit at the feet of the shaman. He’s older than time. That’s why you seek his wisdom. Yet before you can open your mouth, he speaks
as if he knew you were coming. He asks,
“What is the theme of your life? Why do
you exist?”
Maybe that doesn’t work for
you. You couldn’t, in a million years,
imagine yourself on some kind of adventurer’s journey. You don’t hike and you don’t “rought it,” and
you have no plans to do so. But, you can
see yourself in a coffee shop with a friend you’ve known a long time. A good
friend. The trust between you runs deep.
On this occasion the conversation has exhausted the usual topics –
gossip about friends you have in common, complaint about how commercialized the
holidays are, and delight at the pumpkin spiced latte. Why
don’t they serve that all year? At
the lag in the conversation, your friend asks, “What’s it all about?”
She’s asking the same question put
by the aged wise man. What is theme of our lives? Why do we exist? What’s it all about? Hint.
The answer is not to save for a comfortable retirement. That’s something we do, but that is not the
purpose of life. The answer is not watch
football. That’s something some of us do.
It is not why we are here. So,
why are we here? What is it all
about? In Ephesians, we find one path to
the answer.
Issues abound Ephesians chapter
5. “Do not get drunk with wine.” This is not an anti-alcohol sermon
message. What we see here relates to
drinking only because the heart of the matter relates to every part of our
lives.
“Wives,
be subject to your husbands.” I see red-hot
anger on the faces of advocates of equality in marriage and smug satisfaction
on those who promote complimentary roles in marriage. This is not about marriage. This word from Ephesians informs our marriages
because the central idea sees Jesus at the center of all our
relationships.
The
central idea comes in verse 21. “Be
subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” “Be subject to one another
out of reverence for Christ.” The Greek
actually says, “[we are] submitting to each other in fear of Christ.” In my
previous study of this verse I saw emphasis on “submitting to one
another.” All of Ephesians is related to
mutual submission within the church, but that’s not the first and primary
lesson. Mutual submission comes after
“fear of Christ.” The answer to all the
hypothetical questions I posed at the outset is found in this idea.[i]
We
have to read the passage and listen to God’s word very carefully. I think that is what the NRSV editors had in mind when they rendered the Greek word ‘fobw’ as ‘reverence.’ Fear is a negative emotion. In the dark, we fear sounds that creak in the
house in the dead of night. We fear
financial ruin, we have fears when we have to have surgery, and we fear heights
and enclosed spaces. Phobias, from the
Greek word ‘fobw,' used in this passage’
are categories of fears.
Fear
has been used to oppress people in churches.
The fear of judgment and God’s displeasure has been used been by
heavy-handed church leaders to beat people down. It’s the attitude of superiority
Jesus condemned when he confronted priests and Pharisees. We approach Ephesians 5:21 cautiously. Speaking of “fear of Christ,” we don’t want
to awaken the fears that break people spiritually and drive them out of the
church.
In
the Greek-English Lexicon of the New
Testament, [ii]
the entry for fobw shows the term to be
part of a family of words. The
description of this family of words is over two pages long. The way the term is used in Ephesians 5:21,
it specifically means reverence or respect.
That’s a bit more inviting than fear, as in being scared of
someone. We’re happy to revere Jesus
Christ. We’re eager to show how much we
respect Christ. We love him. He doesn’t strikes terror into our hearts.
However,
we don’t want to neuter this term. The
deference and esteem we give to Jesus exceeds any respect we would extend to a
general in the army or the president or the pope. We might hold a special kind of respect for
human beings in elevated stations of life, but it is nothing like the reverence
we offer Jesus. The force that defines
who we are is the light in which we see Jesus Christ. He is Lord and everything in life is done
based on who we understand Jesus to be and how we see ourselves in light of who
He is.
To
say we fear the Lord, in the sense of Ephesians 5:21, is to say we can’t
imagine any life decision, situation, or relationship apart from full obedience
to the way of Jesus. We are fully
submitted to Him. The use of the Greek
word fobw in Acts 9:31 is helpful.
Paul
had just turned from persecuting Christians to joining them. Barnabas joined forces with him, convincing
the churches to trust him – congregations who feared his past evils against the
church. With Paul now in the fold and
Barnabas at his side, the church experienced tremendous growth. Many people began trusting in Jesus. And Acts 9:31 says, “Throughout Judea,
Galilee, and Samaria [the church] had peace and was built up. Living in
the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit it increased in
numbers.” ‘Fear of the Lord,’ that is,
life fully submitted to the way of Jesus, was coupled with peace, comfort, and
growth. Normally, we don’t associate
fear with peace and comfort. It is the
opposite of those things.
That’s
why the phrase ‘fear of the Lord’ is different.
At the center of the Christian reality we see “fear of the Lord” as the
only way to live. Have you suffered
soul-crushing abuse at the hands of judgmental Christians? Come and discover the merciful welcome of
Jesus in a community fully submitted to Him.
Together we discover and rediscover life lived fully in fear of
Christ. It’s a life of love and
grace.
The
fear of the Lord is why we live and act the way we do. Once we have established that life is fully
submitted to Jesus, then we move to what in most English translations is the
first stanza of Ephesians 5:21. “Be subject
to one another.” Why do we subject
ourselves before each other? Because we
fear Christ. We revere our Lord and want
to walk in His way and thus, we submit to each other.
The
Greek verb is upotassomenoi, and like fobw, we derive a variety of
English ideas from this word. In
Ephesians 5 it means the voluntary yielding to each other out of love. Why we do what we do? Out of reverence for Christ. What is it that we do? We submit to each other as an expression of
love. We are reminded, in chapter 2,
verse 19, that we are all together in the household of God. Once we have submitted to Christ, we do not
have the luxury of simply ignoring one another.
We belong to each other and are accountable to one another. Beyond technicalities of membership in a
local congregation, this is about membership in the body of Christ. We are connected to other believers.
In
Ephesians 4:2, Paul emphasizes humility, gentleness, and bearing with one
another. There is no option for
indifference. Too often in our cultural
context Christianity is treated as one religious option among many and
Christians approach church as their own individual preference. If you are following Christ, the church you
belong to should be the one he leads you to join. I have had times in the life of our church
where people in our church family simply refused to talk with me about a
difference between us. As Americans that’s our right. We can engage with people or ignore them at
our leisure. But we do not exist in this
space or anywhere as Americans. We are a people fully submitted to Christ. We submit to one another.
That
doesn’t mean when I call to talk with you that you are obligated to do whatever
I say or vice versa. I am not beholden
to you nor you to me. In love we
voluntarily submit to one another because Jesus is Lord and he tells us to live
this way.
In
Ephesians Paul extends this out telling wives to submit to their husbands,
husbands to love their wives, children to obey their parents, and slaves to
obey their masters. Paul’s effort is to
bring the call to voluntary submission in love to the places of real life in
first century Ephesus. He’s not writing
primarily about marriage or households so much as he is locating the call to
mutual submission in the context of home life because Jesus is Lord there.
This
passage cannot be used as grounds for affirming slavery or affirming a
husband’s dominance over his wife and children.
Slavery was an accepted first century institution. Paul subverted it by declaring that in the
church, everyone was to submit to everyone else. He commended deferential behavior, but he
also broke the law himself when the way of Christ demanded that he do so. This letter was written from prison. In his letter to the slaveholder Philemon, he
tells the man that now, the slave Onesimus was a brother in Christ. Philemon, out of fear of Christ, would need
to submit to Onesimus even as the other submitted to him. Wives and husbands, parents and children
submit to each other.
For
us to live out the words of scripture we ask, what does it look like when,
because of our reverence for Christ, we live in mutual submission in the places
of our lives? It looks many different
ways depending on the situation, but we know this. We have unity instead of strife because our
reverence for Christ takes priority over individual rights and preferences. We eagerly seek ways to meet the needs of all
who come. We love each other and this
love is seen in the way we extend grace to one another.
This
passage challenges our church to understand who we will be in a world swirling
with both change and tension. Public
mass shootings have us on edge. How can
we prepare for something unpredictable? Divisive
political rhetoric has us feeling combative.
We’re always ready to establish our position and then defend it in
verbal combat. The nature of gender and
sexuality has created generational divides.
We don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. In these and many other controversial topics,
the church and individual Christians are pushed to extremes, unable to unite
with one another in love. How do we move
forward as a faithful witness to the Salvation we have in Christ? How do show people outside of God what life
in the Kingdom is like? The answer is
not found in how we deal with any individual crisis or debate. As soon as we find our ground in one issue,
another, one we don’t understand, will arise.
The answer comes in who we are in Christ.
We
are a people fully submitted to Jesus as Lord.
We fear the thought of life apart from him, and we fear Him in a way
that exalts him all the while knowing he extends us love, grace, and life. Because we are fully submitted to Him, we
live in gracious submission to one another.
That defines as we face the questions of our day and try to help people
come to know Jesus. Whatever arises to confront the church, we face as a people
in Christ. That’s our top value. We are His, a people whose identity is found
in Him. Who we are in Him determines
what we do, how we do it, and what it means.
AMEN
[i] I
am indebted to Marcus Barth and his commentary in the Anchor Bible volume on Ephesians 4-6. He helped me understand the centrality of
‘fear of Christ,’ as the starting point in Christian life.
[ii]Bauer,
Walter and F. Wilbur Gingrich (1958), A
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature,
revised and augmented by F. Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker (1979),
University of Chicago Press (Chicago), p.862-864.
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