Living under authority

Remember - we are called to submit to each other

Under one head, Jesus Christ

Then we follow him together

Lord, take my lips and speak through them; Take our minds and think through them; Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for Yourself, Lord Jesus. Amen

Intro:

The household

· Let’s just have a quick recap of where we’ve been

· But I wonder what your family looks like?

In my family we’ve got my Mum and Dad, and I have 3 siblings, Rachel, Tom and Tim who all have their own spouses now.

· In my family we’ve got my Mum and Dad, and I have 3 siblings, Rachel, Tom and Tim who all have their own spouses now.

Some extended members of my family are widowed or divorced. Some have kids while others don’t. The oldest member of our family is My Nana who is in her mid 80’s and the youngest grandson at the moment is our Peter at 3, until April and May when I get a nephew and a neice.

Every family is different, and every family is loved by God. So you’re going to need to do some leg work today. I want us to explore what living as family looks like. But that will apply to you in a different way to the person sat in front of you.

As we go through, it might be you’re thinking about how this relates to you and your husband or wife, to your kids or parents, to your nephews or nieces, to the families you know well and I particularly want us to think about how this applies to our Church family here at St Luke’s.

I also want to acknowledge straight off that some of you might not like the word family because of it’s connotations in your life. So you’re invited to join us today on a journey of exploration, and as always, we’re asking God to reveal his truth to us.

The household

· Ok, so as we turn to our scripture I wonder how many of you secretly thought, “O hear we go”. Or maybe you sat through the bible reading but it made you uncomfortable.

· If so, then that’s great – because I know it’s when the Bible makes me feel uncomfortable that I go deeper with God, and that’s what we’re after.

· But it does mean doing some wrestling with a passage, asking God how his word relates to our lives, and asking his Spirit to reveal this passage to us.

· Firstly we need some background to our passage

· Remember, Paul is writing in a time when men rule the world, where men make all the decisions, where slavery is a natural part of life and where the role of women and children is very different to our society, of course children worked from an early age as well.

· We mustn’t dismiss the passage because of the different context, but we do need to understand the different world Paul is addressing here.

· We don’t actually find the word family mentioned here at all.

· Instead we find the concept of the household.

· The male land owner who has a wife and children, who probably have their own children and wives, who are served by servants and slaves.

· The household was the unit which kept society going. It was the interaction of different households (we would call them families) that allowed for a stable society. The head of these households, the wealthy man, would take the lead on the families business, and be the one who would be consulted by the elders of the town.

· In the Roman world, even the emperor called himself the head of the household of his empire. That was how in built this structure was to their society.

· So there’s a bit of background to Paul’s letter.

· [And on the slavery front, Paul was in a society that relied on slaves to make the fabric of society work. Just like we can’t imagine a world without electricity (even though it hasn’t been around that long), Paul was in a world that couldn’t imagine a world without slaves. So he writes to both them and masters to make sure in Christian homes they respect each other and are fairly treated.

Let’s be clear that slavery is completely wrong, but the biblical writers address more h

· Read through

Ephesians 6:1–9 NIV

1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— 3 “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” 4 Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. 5 Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. 6 Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. 7 Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people, 8 because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave or free. 9 And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.

o Husband as head – domineering or abusive husband?, quiet shrinking violet wife? Or something different? In a male dominant society this will have been taking place. When we read deeper, Paul is certainly not colluding with that culture, he’s actually doing something counter-cultural.

o What is his call to husbands? V25

§ The role model given to the men is Christ himself. Jesus

· He gave himself fully to his bride, the Church

· A self abandoning love, laying aside the glory of being God, emptying himself and joining us as a fully human being (still fully God) but not using the fullness of his power.

· And God having stepped down from heaven in Jesus, died for us, died for his bride, died for his Church

· This is how much a husband and I believe a wife, is called to love their spouse

o V26 – why did he give himself for his bride?

§ There’s something going on here

§ In a number of places in Paul’s writing he instructs husbands to teach their wives. Something which was counter-cultural. Allowing women to access education, which equips and empowers.

§ Now in my reading this week I didn’t find it in relation to this verse, so I might be stretching the point here, but the way Paul speaks about Christ washing the Church through water and the word, strikes me as written in a similar vein.

§ We needed teaching God’s way to live which we heard from the lips of the groom of the Church, from the lips of Jesus.

§ I just wonder if Paul is also asking husbands to equip and enable their wives, who were disempowered in the ancient world.

· For me the three most important things here are

o Firstly, submission to each other is crucial

o Secondly, we must love each other

o Thirdly, We must have a strong head. As the Church family we come under the head of Jesus, and here in Whitfield under the leadership of the Clergy Wardens team who you might call the elders.

o In a family unit, children need a strong lead from a strong relationship between their parents.

o If you’re married here today, take on board what Paul is asking, that you submit to each other in love. We need the two together. It’s essential to keep speaking, and spending time allowing our husband or wife to be heard as well as having a space to share where we’re at. Sometimes the husband or wife might take a lead on a decision, but we all know how important it is for kids to have a stable home life. So if you’re struggling at all at the moment, just talk to each other, love each other and submit to each other

o Of, course not every family has both mum and dad around for a whole load of reasons. I think that’s one place the Church family can help or other close friends and family.

o Many of you are grandparents. I wonder how you care for your grandchildren. I wonder what influence you have on their lives? How much love they receive from you when they see you? What opportunities to share your faith with them you have?

o Some of you have nephews and nieces or have close friends with children.

o Others of you are parents with children under you care or you’ve launched into the world. They might not need the same parenting you gave them when they were younger, but you’re probably showing them a new level of support

o Let’s briefly have a look at

§ chi

Interview

· Who do you care for in your family?

· I know you juggle a lot of plates in being a Mum caring for your kids, a daughter in caring for you Mum and a wife. Where do you draw your strength from?

· Are there any challenges we can pray for you?

Instructing our children

· A regular conversation among parents all the time is around how we disciple our children.

· As a parish we want great kids and youth work which is our goal with Creche, Kingdom Kids and BIG, but that’s only a small amount of input compared to the hours in the week

· The best place for faith to be fostered and grow is at home.

· I know it’s tougher introducing new things with older kids or teens, but there are tons of resources out there to get the involved.

· Just a brief example:

o We have a kids devotional called “pens” which we use either after dinner or at bed time (which realistically happens for about a month tails off for a few weeks and then get’s back on the family agenda)

o As part of our Sabbath celebration, after a big breakfast we sit down in the living room and watch something called “Superbook” and then chat about it afterwards and pray

o We find it’s all about finding the family rhythms and then getting something to fit in with it. Making sure we model praying and reading the Bible as something natural and just part of being a disciple of Jesus

· I don’t have easy answers but Kay and I would love to hear from you either with suggestions for what you use, or if you want to explore how you can encourage your kids in their faith more.

· The most important thing is modelling it, showing them an example of what following Jesus looks like, and doing it all in love never forcing it

Response

·

Notes

Week 5 – Family -

· Good opportunity to explore the relationships between wives and husbands and children and parents at all ages and stages

· Please give some focus to the squeezed generation of 55-75 year olds in our church coping with children, grandchildren and ageing parents. Big issue for us here. Interviews here if you are not of this generation yet? How do we honour our parents in the twilight of their lives and not exasperate our children as they grow into adults and have children of their own?

· Why has God given us family and what does His new Kingdom family look like?

· How do we love, witness to and pray for non-believers in our families?

· How can we be more Christ-like in our families and create a family discipleship culture?

· If this guideline still seems outrageous in today’s culture, we should ask ourselves: do our modern societies, in which marriage is often a tragedy or a joke, really offer a better model of how to do it? Does the spectre of broken homes littering modern Western culture indicate that we’ve got it right and can tell the rest of human history how we finally resolved the battle of the sexes? Or does it indicate that we still need to do some rethinking somewhere?

·

· Wright, T., 2004. Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

On the contrary. The reason the family can become a place of fear and bondage is because it is designed as the place of love, security, affirmation and new energy. The worst is the corruption of the best. As with marriage, so with family life, and attitudes to work, both from employer and employee: are we so sure that we in the modern world have got it right that we are in a position to turn round and tell Paul he’s got it wrong?[1]

Yet domination by either sex is not the way our author views the relationship. His primary appeal, as we saw, is to the example set by the heavenly Lord and his spouse, the church. This fact controls his understanding of the ambiguous term “subject,” or perhaps better “be submissive” (vv. 21, 22, 24). As part of the domestic instructions found in other sections of the New Testament (; ; ) the call is sometimes taken to be one to blind obedience, docile servility, and unthinking subservience. It is then accepted that apostolic teaching was parallel with, say, Plutarch’s marriage rules: “Women are to be praised if they subordinate themselves to their husbands” (Praecepta Conjugalia 33) or Philo’s position in the same vein (Philo, Hypothetica 7:3). Yet it must be questioned whether this pattern of authority is what the New Testament codes are saying (with the possible exception of where some kind of feminine inferiority drawn from rabbinic arguments seems to be in mind).[2]

The effect of Paul’s use of household imagery is to depict the people of God as God’s household, a living and growing family whose life together requires mutuality of service and care, recognition of responsibilities, and a sense of identity, belonging and protection. As a household it would be understood that the community of God’s people would be comprised of varieties of people, roles and responsibilities, and that to function effectively order would need to be maintained. In this respect Paul’s use of the household concept and his choice to use what have been termed “household codes” to encourage appropriate behavior within the church are almost certainly related (see Ethics)[3]

(NIV)

21Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

22Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.

23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.

24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her

26to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word,

27and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

28In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

29After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—

30for we are members of his body.

31“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”

32This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.

33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

1Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

2“Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise—

3“so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”

4Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

[1] Wright, T., 2004. Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

[2] Martin, R.P., 1991. Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon, Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press.

[3] Hawthorne, G.F., Martin, R.P. & Reid, D.G. eds., 1993. Dictionary of Paul and his letters, p.418.