Sermon Cloud

Ahhh… here it is. We’ve been moving through the book of Colossians and this is the week, we get to the phrase- “Wives, submit to your husbands.” Lucky you if you are a visitor! So, we’re going to pray, we’re going read a verse from Colossians together and then we are going to fasten our seat belts and hang on, because I’m going to walk you through a reading of this passage that I think many of you have never heard before. Generally, we have a lot of discussion throughout the morning- today, we’re going to save most of that till the end- so if you have a question, write it down or remember it till the end of the morning, okay? 

prayer

Now, let’s read together a verse that sets the stage for everything we talk about today: VS 17

Here’s the controlling statement for the morning, and for the verses that follow- If you are a follower of Jesus, you represent Jesus to a watching world- so whatever you do, be careful to represent Him well. The Gospel is offensive enough without you adding to it- we’ll talk more about that in a bit, but first, let’s put this passage in context.

Paul is doing a couple of things in this letter…

1st, as we’ve been saying, he’s writing to ground and warn the Colossians. To ground them in knowledge about exactly who Jesus is, God in human flesh come to rescue and renew all of creation through His work on our behalf on the cross. And because that is true, if you want relationship with God, Jesus Christ is what you need and all you need. And there’s the warning- Paul knew that the wolves who were circulating in other churches would eventually get to Colossae and try to tell these people that they needed more than Jesus- that they needed to become obedient to the OT Laws if they wanted relationship with God- Paul says no-those things were shadows, pointing to the reality of Christ. So if you have Christ, the OT Laws are superfluous. Others would come peddling secret knowledge and aesetic practices and all kinds of things- and Paul warns them in chapter 2- Don’t let people capture you with this stuff. Christ is what you need and all you need for relationship with God.

But Paul has been doing something else, something we talked about our first week in Colossians. He’s writing a very political, very subversive letter. And he’s being careful in how he does it. In the midst of a Roman society where persecution of Christians who refused to worship Caesar was beginning, Paul, in prison for preaching Jesus still has the nerve to co-opt the language of empire and point people towards Jesus. The Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, said that fruitfulness, that bounty and prosperity was because of the ever-expanding spread of the Roman Empire. And Paul takes that common narrative of their culture and co-opts it- he says No, it’s the Gospel that is spreading all over the world, bearing fruit, changing lives.

Caesar was supposed to be the representative of the gods- a god walking among us, his image everywhere. And Paul says no- not Caesar- but Christ. The visible image of the invisible God. Not Caesar’s empire, but Christ’s Kingdom. Not the Pax Romana, but the peace of Christ- God made peace with everything in heaven and earth by the blood of Christ on the Cross vs 20 of chpt. 1 says. And we are to let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts he said in vs 15 last week.

There’s no doubt- The Gospel that Paul laid out was a challenge to the status quo- not because he advocated rebellion- far from it- he was clear in other letters- you obey, you pray for the political power of the day. But it was a challenge to the status quo because it threatened it from the inside out. What do you do with citizens who obey every law you make and yet say that they serve a greater King? A king you can’t conquer or overthrow because His kingdom is a moral, ethical, spiritual one without political boundaries. How do you fight that? What do you do to that kind of rebel???

So that’s the tension, the background of this book. And we keep that in mind as we read today. Let’s go back to verse 11 of chapter 3.

VS 11-

Here’s the basic problem when we come at passages like this in Scripture. In a different time, a different place, a different society, we have a hard time connecting with how radically freeing Paul’s words sounded to the original audience.

Paul drops an atom bomb on them. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, upper class, lower class- in terms of your relationship with God- none of that matters. You don’t have to be a certain class to be accepted by God. There is to be no Christian version of the caste system.

You don’t have to be a certain gender to be in relationship with God- God made men, men and women, women and I don’t believe His intention is to turn us all into sexless neuters, but neither does God say- because of your gender, you get THIS much of me, and because of your gender you get this much of Me.

All the distinctions that humans excel at making of race, and class, and gender- These do not matter when it comes to talking about relationship with God through the person of Jesus Christ.

Now- imagine. You sit in first century Colossae. Some of you are Jews, some are Gentiles. It’s an amazing thing you sit in the same space, worshipping the same God. Thrown into that mix is this: some of you are men and some are women. In the midst of a society that segregates worship according to sex, especially those with the Jewish background, you sit in a mixed crowd. Amazing that the Gospel has done this.

And some of you are rich, some poor, some slaves, some slave owners. And yet, in this place, you all have a voice. In this community, you are all valued. Nowhere else in the world is this true that slaves and slave owners both speak and are heard- but it’s true in the ecclesia- the gathering of people following Jesus.

And so Paul writes these words to these people in this time- people whose entire world has already been turned upside down by the Gospel and he writes these words. Slave, free, rich, poor- doesn’t matter. And I’m sure they are wondering some things. And knowing that these letters get read to a mixed group- some of the people hearing this were not Christians. These letters got copied and sent on to other cities, to a wide audience. Paul knows that people are watching and listening. Men and women, rich and poor, mixing races, mixing classes, slaves and free… How far does this go? Slaves eating at the same table as free??

Is this a danger to the Empire? Our whole economy is based on slave labor. Our whole society is based on patriarchy. Are these Christians who don’t seem to respect either the Jewish or the Greek ideas of the superiority of the male, are they going to try and destroy the whole fabric of our society? Are these people dangerous???

Yes…but not the way you think.  Is Jesus against slavery? Yes, yes, yes.

Is he for armed revolt and slaves throwing off their slavery and their masters?

No, no… no.

He’s for a completely different approach. A revolution infinitely more subtle and harder to put down, to crush.

Here’s what the Gospel says to both the powerful and the powerless- to those at the top of the pyramid socially and those at every other level-

VS 17

First- remember that whoever you are- if you are a Christ follower, you represent Jesus. People are watching and they are wondering about this new group of people who do so many things differently. And some are worried about the radicalness of your faith and what you might try to do to society… so-

VS 18-4:1

It’s interesting to me that in this paragraph, he gives the most space, the most attention to slaves. Slaves and masters. Is the Bible pro slavery”???

This letter to the Colossians was carried from Paul in prison to the city of Colossae by a man named Onesimus. Anyone know who Onesimus was?

Onesimus was a slave… A slave who had stolen money from his master named Philemon who lived in the city of Colossae, had run away and ended up in Rome, and somehow ended up knowing Paul. Maybe he got a job where Paul was being held?

But however he met Paul, the result was that Onesimus became a follower of Jesus. And so Paul sends him back to Colossae with two letters. This one to the Colossians and the short little letter we know as Philemon, named after Onesimus’ master. And what did Paul want Philemon to do in regards to his run-away slave? Let’s look at that quickly- turn over to Philemon…

PhilemonVS 8-21

What do you think Paul is saying here? Knowing that all his mail will be read by his captors, what do you think he just might be trying to communicate to Philemon by that interesting last phrase: “and even more.” I mean- past forgiving Onesimus, taking him back, treating him like a brother… what could possibly be left? Maybe freeing him? Can you think of any reason at all why Paul might want to say something without really saying it? Why he might want to choose his words carefully? And maybe say something between the lines?

So- why all this talk about slavery? It’s nice to know, it’s kind of an academic question, but the one we really want to hear you explain is the husband and wife thing. That’s the one we came to see you try to wiggle out of. Ok. J

I’ll answer that by asking: What does Jesus do? He changes things.

But He does it in His own way- He transforms structures from the inside out- slowly, surely, like yeast permeating a whole lump of dough.

What He doesn’t do, at least not yet, is tear down our societal structures completely and start over. His revolution is a slow one that depends on changing the hearts of people, not simply imposing His will. Someday the Kingdom will come, but for now- he tells us that in Christ there is neither slave nor free- that He came to free the oppressed and we should be like Him. And it only took us 1860 some odd years to work out what that meant in regards to slaves.

So- the one who came to set the slaves free says to slaves- don’t demand freedom. But do what? VS 23

Live in such a way that your master can never complain about your service and yet becomes completely aware that you have a higher allegiance- a different Master...That you serve Jesus first and foremost, that regardless of what your earthly master may think to be the case- you really are free.

And to wives who may have run their own businesses, like Lydia who was well-known for selling purple cloth, or a woman Paul mentions later in this letter who had the unfortunate name of “Nympha” but who had a church meeting in her house… to these women who in many ways were leaders in business and the church but were still considered by the society around them to be property, chattel, He says- don’t demand your rights, but live in such a way that everyone knows- it’s Jesus you really belong to. If you have a non-Christian husband who believes you are nothing more than his property, live in such a way that he can’t complain about anything, but he clearly knows- you belong to another.

This is subversive thinking at its best. This is nonviolent resistance to this broken world and its broken ways at its best.

See, we read this from a society where slaves are already freed and women are no longer property and we think: how awful, how regressive. And we completely miss the radical, freeing nature of what he is saying. And how absolutely seditious and dangerous it would have sounded to the society around them.

• Reading: Katie-

So. The big question- do wives have to submit to their husbands? In some senses that’s the wrong question. Paul says in Ephesians, just before writing out similar commands to husbands and wives and children and slaves- he says- submit to one another. Husbands submit to wives? Yeah. Wives to husbands? Yeah.

Here’s what the Gospel says to husbands and wives- you are equal. You are in relationship with God. You both have a duty to submit to each other and to love each other. Your lives, including your marriage should reflect well on Jesus and part of that means it should be attractive and compelling- you represent Jesus.

If you live in a patriarchal society where women are considered property, submit to your husband and show him to whom you really belong.

So, ironically, in our society… those who read these passages and because of them demand that wives take on some kind of subservient role, that women cannot be leaders in the church, that they are somehow equal in value and yet cannot have the same voice as men in the life of the community- those Christians in an effort to remain faithful to the Scriptures, end up doing exactly what Paul is arguing against here- their marriages and their communities fail to represent Jesus well and become a stumbling block for others.

Now-hear what I’m saying and don’t hear what I’m not saying. The Gospel has serious claims on our lives on the ways we treat others, on our relationship to sex, to money, to power- and sometimes those claims are going to be offensive.

But the point is, if anything about us is going to be offensive, it darn well better be the Gospel, and not our marriages, and so the church better give some serious thought as to how we treat our wives and even women in general.

It’s offensive enough to proclaim that Jesus is the Savior, because that means proclaiming that people are in need of a Savior, that there is a problem that needs to be fixed called sin, and no one wants to hear that. Let’s not add to the offense of the Gospel by missing what’s really going on here and saying that women are somehow second class citizens.

The prevailing Roman society of Paul’s day, drawing mostly from the Greek thought of the Stoics and others had very rigid family definitions. There was the pater familias, the Man, the Father at the top. And the woman was not equal, not in rights and not in value. In Greek thought she was second class. And the children under her and slaves last of all. Aristotle put it this way: “For the male is by nature better fitted to command than the female… The free rule the slave, the male the female, the man the child…”

So- into the mess of that society, into a whole world patterned on that Paul says, “Wives, submit to your husbands, but do it so they know who you really belong to. Husbands, love your wives and even if the law gives you the right to treat them harshly, Jesus doesn’t. Children, obey your parents- not because are inferior, but because it makes God happy when you do. Fathers, don’t aggravate your children- you may have a legal right to treat them however you want, but it makes them discouraged.

Slaves- live so that your master knows you have a higher authority in your life than him. And remember- though the law of the land considers you property that can be inherited, the Lord, Jesus Himself says He will give you an inheritance- a reward for serving Him.

Masters- be just and fair and remember- you have a Master to whom you will give account.  Paul says VS 24

There is so much more we could say about this passage. Notice what Paul does- he brings it back to Jesus, and that’s what I want us to do. For the next couple of minutes I want us to focus on Christ. The Christ who frees us, who forgives us, who calls us to live lives of servanthood and love. Who calls us to represent Him to a world that really needs Him- and needs us to represent Him well.

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