So those of you who are coming here expecting a sermon are going to be half-satisfied because we're going to have a short sermon today because we have so many festivities going on. This is our covenant entrance today when we're marking people entering into the covenant of Jesus Christ and moving in different ways in that covenant. We'll kind of see how that unfolds today. Those of you who are coming thinking that you are going to have to sit through a sermon will also be half-satisfied because you only have to sit through half a sermon today. This is a profound mystery, but I'm talking about Christ and the Church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself and the wife must respect her husband the Word of the Lord. Well, here we are. Sometimes folks visit in the summer and they say, why are you having a church service in this heat? Why do we do this? Why do we come here and try to worship in this heat, as if it's getting hotter and hotter? The answer is because we're the village church and we like to be tough, like to do things that are tough. That's what we are in the village church. That's why we bring up the passage like this and discuss it in the middle of the heat of summer when everyone's hot and easily annoyed because we're the village church and there's no other answers that don't ask. Well, we are coming to the next passage in our tour through Ephesians and so we need to look at it because Paul considers this foundational for these churches he's writing to in the region of Izmir in Western Turkey. Now in the early 1990s, in the midst of some very hot summers, in many ways, Cornell West published a book called Race Matters and in part he did it to defend affirmative action, but that act set him off on a brilliant movie career. Now, you know the title of my sermon, I'm not as smart as Cornell West and I doubt this sermon is going to get me apart in a movie, certainly not the best series of movies of all time, but I dare to draw a parallel here, I dare to draw it because West was intent on specifying a distinction that people were ignoring, speaking and acting like it didn't matter, when in fact West argued, it most certainly did matter. And my title is a little shocking in this day and age because gender is a distinction that many people have already dismissed and some are working hard to ignore it. And the question that this passage raises for us today, I hope you see, is are there realms in which gender does matter? Now the Bible in some ways bends genders and sees no distinction between men and women and some ways, but not in all places because at the same time of says the Bible, gender is a gift and an important aspect of personality and there are certain places where gender does matter and we've come upon one today here in our journey. Now I know I'm being subversive, somewhat subversive and even raising this question, are there ways in which gender matters? As you know, as I assume you notice, our culture is on a path toward androgyny and what can I say, we're the village church, that's what we do, we're subversive, we're here to question societal norms, but it's something I ask you to invite me to consider. For a number of reasons, the federal marriage amendment debate is about to break on the American scene, the federal marriage amendment has been in the House and the Senate going through the House of Congress for a while now, but certain events are bringing it to the forefront, to the debate, the recent Lawrence versus Texas decision, right, what's happening in Canada, what's about to happen in Massachusetts, are all bringing this issue of whether same-sex unions should be recognized as equal status of marriage, it's bringing it to the forefront, bringing it to the national discourse, and that's good, I'm glad to see this happening. I think it's going to be an interesting debate, to see what American people think, there will certainly be a lot of blather, but if you can kind of swim up to the top of the paciferous rhetoric and in some ways empty rhetoric, to get it what, as people who are debating the real issues, you'll see that the debate actually involves this question, it's going to be very interesting because opponents of the federal marriage amendment will certainly be trying to frame this issue, we'll see it as an issue of civil rights and simply an issue of civil rights. That's this question of preference in sexual unions and in marriage, sexual preference is simply another issue of civil rights, but what's going to make it interesting is that you're going to have civil rights leaders, some of whom are black, and are confronted daily with the devastation of the family in the inner city, who are going to be saying, there's civil rights, there's people from the 60s still around saying, no, this is not an issue of civil rights, so what's it going to be, we'll see, but the real issue that must be debated, I hope you'll see in the discussions that take place, is this issue, whether there's something deep about genders, that's got to be what's debated, so it's worth some thought, is it not? Does gender matter, because if the constructionists are correct and gender is a spectrum or an illusion, and sexuality is plastic, then nothing is lost to humanity, to deny gender, and though these constructionist theories are popular, I would say if you look at them, still that the anthropological arguments are weak, are still weak, in that they fail to explain many of the features of human experience, such as the power that's generated in the interaction between the sexes. There's a number of ways you can look at this, certainly there are a myriad of physiological differences, there are differences from biology that have an effect on behavior and identity of a person, and it's not just, there are a lot of them, so it's not just things like men have a 10% higher red blood cell count than women do, to allow their wounds to heal faster, or it's not just that, things like women have a thicker layer of subcutaneous tissue, so they are more equipped to deal with extreme circumstances that take great endurance, not just things like that, but sexual dimorphism actually extends, if you look at the literature, to other systems, even the nervous system, yes, even the brain, folks, it is the case that women have a larger brain than men in proportion to their body weight, generally speaking, and they are going to need it to attack this passage, and it is also true that men, the male human brain is more lateralized than in the female, more of the functions of the brain take place on one hemisphere or the other, now these are differences, certainly there is something I would think you would say biology does suggest that gender matters, but perhaps you can see it in an even simpler way, when you go into the bedroom, now when you go into the bedroom no matter who you go in with, and what you do when you get there, let me suggest that you still take roles, do you not, do you not, in those moments and dronginate drops to the floor, along with your clothes I would say, and your roles still contain genders, now if that's so, and if you cannot escape this, does it mean, might it mean that gender is a deeply meaningful distinction, for if those theories, if these constructionist theories are wrong, then there is something deeply human about your gender, and to lose it is to lose your humanity, now constructionist theories promise freedom from moral limitations, but at what price, and it's certainly the case is that Daniel Heimbach points out that if it is true that there, if fixed differences in human sexual identity are ultimately unreal, then certainly the God of the Bible is a deceiver, and a Bible perpetrates enormous evil, if that's the case, so do think about it, but what's happening here actually with the Apostle Paul is he is just expanding his discussion about unity which is about, what this letter is about, it's about unity in a church, and if you recall back when we are doing Ephesians 4, we learned that in a Christian view unity requires diversity, you cannot have unity in the maturity that comes from unity without diversity, that's what we learned, and Paul is bringing this out just in another context, saying by losing diversity, we lose the ability to grow up into the truth, so it's important for me to talk to you about this today, because that's my concern, okay, ready, here we go, why, submit to your husband, all right, I want to circumscribe what this passage says somewhat right off, okay, it's a large subject, normally we have a Q&A time afterwards for you to phrase objections, ask questions, we don't have time for that today, so this is introduction here, but let me draw some broad strokes, okay, this passage does not teach, that why there's some part to submit to being beaten by their husbands, this passage does not teach, that you are your husband's slave, this passage does not teach that why it should be taking no initiative, but that why are to submit to their husbands when they're asked to do wrong to sin, it's not saying that, if your husband puts a gun in your hand and tells you to shoot someone, you should say no, unless it's, the someone happens to be that guy who inspected my house down in Maryland, that would be a morally ambiguous situation, but if your husband tells you to go to a spouse's slapping party, you should decline, et cetera, et cetera, okay, and unfortunately many people, both non-Christians and Christians, have read this passage and because the statements are so strong, have misread it here, misread it to mean that you wife are meant to do, whatever your husband says regarding the list of whether he overstepped the human authority that was given to him, not so. See, when Paul says at the end of this first sentence, as to the Lord, host the Kareos, what he says, as to the Lord, it's modifying the verb, not the object, that expression is modifying submit, not modifying husband, okay, so Paul is not saying obey your husband as if he was God, but rather obey your husband like you obey God, now you say, well, maybe that doesn't sound much different, oh, it's a big difference, folks, because the likeness is an verb, not in the object, he's saying that you imitate your attitude to God who only asks you to do right in your attitude to your husband, you should be as willing to do right for your husband as for your God. So the real issue of verse 22, the primary issue, is do you submit to the Lord? Do you submit to the Lord? Is that an element in your spirituality, submission to God? Is that the way you look at it? Because if it isn't, then, you know, is it teaching stops there? Because that's the issue. Now, why? Because a wife cannot do what she is called to do here, if she does not have a someone with a capital S there to rescue her, she can't do it, nor can the husband actually answer the call of this passage unless God is in his picture and can be depended upon to answer the husband's needs and desires. It's all depended upon a faith in a redeemer, and that means submitting. So then the writings of the Apostle Paul, faith and obedience belong together, as Armand Riddhabbat says, they can be employed as interchangeable ideas, faith and obedience, faith and obedience, as can unbelief and disobedience. When you're saying one, the other ones contained in it, so to speak. So in speaking about obeying or submitting to the Lord, Paul's talking about trusting, being able to trust, and submitting wise, no, that you cannot properly submit to your husband unless you trust God, nay, that you cannot, unless you are doing it because you are trusting God, trusting God to take care of you. Otherwise, you cannot do it in a way it's being preached here. Wouldn't you agree, darling? Her mind is wondering. Wouldn't you agree? I have to point out that the reason I can teach this, the reason I can preach this, because I have such a stunning example of someone who can navigate these waters in my own marriage to help me understand it. But I should say that I don't think I could recommend this advice on Christian marriage if you're not a believer in Jesus Christ, because Paul says that this all has to do with the revelation of God unavailable before or without Jesus Christ. So it says the end of the passage. So even though there's something that some might call a creation ordinance, this description of what a Christian marriage is depends upon the revelation that Christ brought into the world. I recently had a marriage counseling experience where a couple was asking me to give them help for some serious problems in their marriage. And I said to them, yeah, we came to a point where I found they weren't really near than were believers. And I said, we can't really deal with that until we deal with your own relationships with God, your individual relationships with God. And they wanted me to give some kind of generic marriage advice. And I don't have it, folks. I can do it.
Because to try to do a Christian marriage without trusting God in Christ, it won't work because it will turn your marriage, it'll turn your spouse either into an idol or into an adversary. Now all that being said, all that being said about what this doesn't mean, you know, this is still a very strong statement that's being made to Christian wise, very strong. You know, and I've heard this passage presented in such a way of saying, oh, well, you know, it's not such a big deal. You're not being asked to do that much. In practice, you really don't just submit to that much and things like that. I cannot stand here and soft pedal submission because it is not a little thing. It's a huge thing, folks. It's an enormous thing to ask a person to submit her will to another on a regular basis. It's an enormous thing to ask. And you see, it's enormous precisely because men and women are equal. As according to the scriptures, both sexes, both women and men are centers of transcendent worth. That both men and women have the unique privilege of bearing the image of God. And it's because of the insistence of the scriptures that men and women are equal, that actually puts the meaning of submission. And it's what makes it such a big deal. And Paul knows this. Oh, he knows it. And I'll show you how I know he knows it in a minute. But the interesting thing is that despite the enormity of this requirement, it doesn't cause him to soft pedal it. You see in verse 24, in everything he says, he doesn't soft pedal it because of what's at stake. Now, I'm going to try to talk to the about these together. Principally, I want to talk to the husbands because that's what this passage does. You know, you notice that this passage is a lot more about men than about women, about husbands than about wives. Because I'm sure why he spends more time on it, except maybe that what Christian marriage asks of men may be even more enormous. So what we're seeing emerged from this passage is that gender doesn't matter and that both husbands and wife are called to fantastic trust. But gender does matter in how they're called to express it. You see, the call of husbands is to love their wives and verse 25 explains what that is. It defines it as giving up yourself, laying down your life. Well, what's to be said. The Christian marriage goes beyond any human organization you can think of in what it requires. I mean, forget the Marines, folks. This is a call only for those who have the right stuff. You realize what's being asked here. You know, Jesus at one point he's talking about love. And Jesus says, this is the greatest kind of love that a person can have. He says, this kind of love is the greatest kind of love possible. The kind of love that Paul's talking about here, of laying down your life. But then, in a New Testament, only one group of people, there is only one group of people who are commanded, unequivocably, as a matter of habit, to lay down their lives for someone else. One group, who is that? Osbandals. Only people in a New Testament committed to doing this, commanded to doing this. So it's almost a cliche now. The pre-marital counselor is sitting across from the young couple. They're sitting across the desk. Engaged couple is sitting there. The pre-marital counselor is dispensing with them. Right? He's telling them, you know, she says, marriage is not 50-50. And the couple's eyes get big. It's not 50-50. And the marriage counselor says, no, it's not 50-50. She says, it's what? A hundred, a hundred percent. You're each giving a hundred percent, says the wise marriage counselor. And, oh, wow, interesting, inside, they say. But folks, in looking at this passage, Christian marriage is not like that. Christian marriage is not 100-100. It's off the charts. You give up your will to direct. You give your life up physically, if needed, and daily every day, daily in the other ways. This is off the charts. In fact, Paul knows how utterly extravagant this call is sounding. So he goes on, verses 27 to 29, to try to convince the husband that living this way is really for his benefit, as well. That's why he gives a dual purpose there in why Christ did what he did for the church. 26 and, verse 27, to parallel reasons. Christ did this rescue that he did for her sanctification and for his enjoyment of her. Look at that second one first. He says, lay down your life for your wife, actually leads to great enjoyment of her for you. Why don't you go into that? What Christ did here? There are a number of aspects of Christ and the church that the Apostle Paul could go into. But what he talks about is Christ presenting the church to himself as a beautiful bride, Christ's enjoyment of the church. Why did he do that? He does that in order to say honest, guys, the sacrifice of yourself for your wife is for your benefit. You and your wife are so connected, it's like exercising or taking care of yourself or feeding your own body. You get great benefits from doing that. And so, when he says in verse 29, no one ever hated his own flesh. And you say, oh, that's not true, what about massacres? Listen, what he's talking about is basic stuff like eating, giving nourishment to your body. He's not talking about the relationship between pleasure and pain. Even if you are into SNM, you don't starve yourself. If you go into one of these fantasy stories of Greenwich Village, they don't have little racks of pamphlets there saying, you know, how to fast to increase your pleasure. Right? Well, I'm guessing. Well, no, I've not an expert. I've had a few stories I've got as well as the... The point is that whatever good you do to your own body, it's like doing it to yourself. Because it's almost you. Your own body is your possession, yet it's yourself. And likewise, you and your wife are one flesh. And you know, by implication, he's saying the same is true for the submitting wife as for the sacrificing husband. Here, you're one flesh that submitting to him leads to great enjoyment and benefit for you as well. Wouldn't you say, sorry. I said that because she's... My wife often talks about this. And as I said, she is the reason I can preach this term because she's an excellent model to me of navigating these waters between idol and adversary. So I learned a lot from her, from doing this. She almost enjoys telling the benefits that she gets from this. Although it might be just as hard for the wife to see this ahead of time as for the husband. So that's the first reason. I do need to touch on the second reason here that he gives. Because it's important to shape the husband's sacrifice. You know, Christ's sacrifice is for the privilege of washing the church. Now, let's note here that the husband gives up his life. He puts his wife first for her sanctification. So the Christian husband should be continually sacrificing not to make his wife a Persian kitten on a pillow, but for her sanctification. That's what the rescue is about. And if this is the goal of your sacrifice husband, it will make the marriage look quite different from the American dream. You think about it. So I guarantee you, if you allow this passage to shape your sacrificing for your wife, you'll probably be doing different things than you're doing now. Now, why there's a verse 23, there's a real parallel going on here. And for a wife to understand her submitting in verse 23, it hinges on the meaning of this word head. But Paul says literally as the husband has a wife, as Christ is ahead of the church, he is the savior of the body. So the three parallel things, he expresses what he means by Christ being the head of the church. Now, I just have to tell you, if you get out of your thinking, when you hear this head and body, head of the body, it doesn't mean skull of the trunk. The body as you can see that in the way that Paul talks. He talks about in Ephesians 4, the body grows up as nourished by the head and grows up into the head. That's physiologically impossible with this metaphor, right? That's not what he's thinking about. Now, there are places you can see when Paul calls the church the body, he talks about members from all over, the ear, talking to the hand, the ear and the eye. So he's thinking about the whole body. And you can see also that Paul uses the word head metaphorically in places. God is the head, God the Father is the head of Christ, Christ is the head of every man. So there shouldn't be taken to mean that Christ is the head and men are trunks or something like that. Rather, Paul uses head to mean chief member of a group, representative, or in this case, rescuer. Because he explains what he means in this direct comparison, saying savior of the body. So what we learned from this is that Christ's authority over the church proceeds from his saving work for her on her behalf. Okay? You can see this in the story. So go way back to the beginning of Jesus' ministry. Some of you know this story. What happens? The tempter comes and the tempter says, I have authority over all the people of the earth. And I will give them to you. You just bow down and worship me. Remember, he says that. Now, for that to be a temptation at all, the tempter must, in some sense, have had the people to give and Jesus did not. And Jesus also must have wanted the authority over all the people of the earth and not have it. Right? I mean, to offer Jesus something he already had or didn't want, it wouldn't be much of a devil, would he? Jesus would have just laughed at him. So there was some way in which that was not true. What a devil was tempting him with. That Jesus didn't have that authority. And so as the story goes in the New Testament, something happened during the crucifixion and the resurrection that won Jesus people. It gave him authority over those who became the church, that he didn't have before. He rescued them. He won them. So you see, the authority, the headship of Christ over the church, in some way comes from the rescue. And this is what Paul is highlighting in verse 23. This is what he wants us to think about. This is the meaning of the husband's headship. And it makes this submission and sacrifice more of a story than a static responsibility. It makes the submission of the church and the wife a response. It's a response. So it's something that has worked out. And folks, you do need a number of years to work this out. You need a few years just to realize that you're not actually doing it. The only way you thought you were doing, you're not actually doing it. So submission and sacrifice are extremely, are precious gifts. And there are meant to be gears that turn together. Both gears need to be present to turn well. How much says the wife? How far should I submit? And the answer generally is more than you think should be necessary. How much says the husband? How much shall I give up for her? And the answer is more than you think should be necessary. That's what in verse 24 in everything. And verse 25, give himself up. I mean, how much more than you think is necessary. The submission is then allowing the husband to direct for your benefit. And he needs authority to do that. Okay, finally, Paul says that this is a mystery. Meaning it's something great that God has taken a long time to tell us. But now it's revealed because Jesus came. And that's why Paul gives such a big build up here. He says, this is pretty big. Now, this is entirely profound. It's going to blow your mind. But what's the shocker? The shocker for Paul is that encoding Genesis about God's creation of human gender and marriage. Paul is talking about Christ and the church. Why is that a shocker? Because Paul is saying that marriage was invented to serve a purpose. And that purpose is to illuminate the love between Jesus Christ and his church. In other words, Christ and the church is not like marriage. Marriage is like Christ and the church. Paul is not thinking of marriage and saying, hmm, now what is marriage like? So what do I like marriage? Oh, I know. I'll talk about Christ and the church. That's a good metaphor for what you go on in marriage. Marriage is the metaphor. Marriage is the metaphor that God invented to explain this love between God and his people. And it was designed, says Paul, after and around the love of God for his own. And it was done before the fall. So the reason a husband and wife can think of themselves as becoming one flesh is because the church has become Christ's body. There's a union. The relationship this one was made to show how closely Christ holds you as it's very flesh. And that's what we're going to celebrate in a moment when we go to communion. But that means also that what's going on in marriage is a shadow play. It's a shadow play. You see, all human authority is a shadow. Not in Plato's sense. But in terms of headship, kings and presidents, if they're honest, should come to the conclusion that they have no business being where they are, to be an authority over people. Because even the best really don't fit the shoes, really don't fit the crown. They should realize this even if their CIA doesn't make misstatements. They're mere shadows of a true king who will return to replace their shadow nations with the real thing. And this is true also the authority of marriage. This is why I started out pointing out that it's about submitting to the Lord. There's a white nose that the husband is not really worthy of such submission. And the husband knows, or at least he should, that the wife is not worthy of his extended self-sacrifice. So what they are doing is acting out a drama, calling up the memory, proclaiming the hope of the real thing, the real husband, the real marriage. And that's why Paul begins this last verse with a however play in Kai. He says, like the number of puzzling conjunctions in this passage. They're puzzling unless you feel the thrust of verse 32. I am talking about Christ and the church. Because he knows that if you think about this long enough and marvel long enough about how it's about Jesus and what he's doing in his body, you will start to wonder, well then why should I put myself through all this? If my marriage is just a shadow, I'm not doing a real thing. It's kind of demeaning. Now it says Paul, that's exactly it. It's the only way to do it. And it's not only the only way to do it, it's the reason for doing it. It's not only the motivation for making these seemingly impossible relational moves, it's the reason that you must do it. It's because you're acting out in a Christian marriage, the work of Christ in his church, that you must do it. And play these parts to your currently unworthy co-stars because in the process of doing it over time, you each become more worthy in these roles in your marriage. You find something more about what it is to be truly human, to be truly human man, to truly human woman, both human because they're both living lives of giving through trusting. But you have to say, with Christianity, Viva la Diforos gender matters.