Unearthing Paul

A sermon on Ephesians 5:21-33

This week, I’ve heard from daughter Melanie about a variety of wedding details, not the least of which was her decision not to have father “give her away”. For those of you who know Melanie, this probably comes as no surprise, but it happens to be very relevant to the lessons presented to us today bringing us the words “wives” and “subject to” in the same sentence. —the last time this one came around, I dodged this one – probably substituted Winnie the Pooh.

Today, though, I felt more prepared to tackle it because Marcus Borg has a new book that he wrote with Dominic Crossan called The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon. You just know I have to love this.
There are a number of important contextual points that apply to this one of Paul’s letters. First is that, of the thirteen letters that bear his name, only seven are thought to have actually been authored by Saul/Paul of Tarsus. Three letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are commonly knows as the “pastoral letters” and appear to have been written some time after the turn of the 2nd century. Their historical setting is quite different from that of Paul, the church planter. Somewhere in between Paul’s seven letters and the Pastorals the remaining three letters, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians were written, and probably not by Paul. This has been recognized for quite a long time, primarily due to the very different voice and vocabulary used in the letters. Borg and Crossan arrive at what they call the three “Pauls.” The original voice of the seven letters they call the radical Paul. They call the voice of the pastoral letters the reactionary Paul and the other three disputed letters, including today’s challenging one from Ephesians, make up the conservative Paul. Our two scholars have done an incredible job of drawing out the differences and identifying the reasons that letters like Ephesians do not reflect the Christian vision of the real Paul. Clearly the later letters suggest that the communities Paul had been addressing were having difficulty absorbing his message, so the writers started to alter that message. It reminds us of the similar difficulty many people in Jesus’ immediate culture had with his message of non-violent, self-sacrifice for God’s kingdom of peace and justice.

The original voice of Paul was one of transformed lives and relationships. He tackles the relationship between slaves and their owners in the charming little letter to Philemon. It is an amazing example of persuasive genius. Paul leaves his friend, Philemon, with little choice but to free his slave Onesimus, because Paul demonstrates how they are equals in Christ. Fast forward several decades to the writing of the letter to the Ephesians in which we find this – “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ…masters, stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same master in heaven and with him there is no partiality.” It does not sound like the original Paul, though there is at least a nod to making life better for slaves. However, in another couple of decades, in the letter to Titus we hear this, “Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they do may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior.” This is clearly antithetical to Paul’s vision. As Borg and Crossan point out, “there is nothing there about any mutuality of obligations for slaves and masters. And there is nothing addressed directly to slaves. There is a single verse, and it begins, ‘Tell slaves.’”

This is why it is so critical to take on the contextual meaning of all scripture. Here we not only find that Paul’s message was co-opted but that it potentially arms anyone wishing to provide Biblical support for slavery with some rather shocking ammunition. Don’t you suppose that letter was used once or twice in the plantation churches to keep slaves in line? It’s pretty good ammunition to be able to say, “see, it’s right here in the Bible!”

All of this makes our reading from Ephesians a lot less problematic than it might seem. Sure, the letter is in there, but we shouldn’t go blaming Paul for it. The voice of the radical Paul has quite a different understanding of the proper Christian relationship between men and women. In the 1st letter to the Corinthians, Paul presents a vision of equality in the family—what right for one is right for the other, and what is wrong for one is wrong for the other in matters of divorce, abstinence, and equality in the assembly and equal entry into the community of apostles.

As with Paul’s view of slavery, this prescription for equality was a shocking development for a patriarchal world and sure enough, within a couple of decades we are treated to the revisionism of today’s reading—and while the expectations established for the behavior of men is more challenging than the local culture was used to, it still falls far short of the radical equality Paul believed in and articulated in his original seven letters.

These two examples of equality incorporated into Paul’s radical vision are the means by which he taught his congregations to participate in the work of atonement. Patriarchy and slavery are endemic to cultural systems in which some segments of the population were dominated by others. For Paul, Jesus’ death on the Roman cross and his subsequent resurrection was an indictment of that system of domination. The question we have to ask ourselves is “how much has really changed?” Do we not still allow the radical vision of both Paul and Jesus to be co-opted by more recent interpretations that are designed to perpetuate some group’s domination of another? How many women have had scripture used against them in abusive relationships? How long did slavery continue, justified by Biblical references that have been improperly attributed to Paul and made authoritative?

Paul was able to grow Christianity because people were hungry for freedom from an imperial system. But we live in a democracy that survived ended slavery and drastically altered our cultural view of gender relations. Today we have a non-white president, and we have Bishop Katherine, Speaker of the House Nancy and Secretary of State Hilary. Many inequalities have been breached even though not every heart has been won.

There are things in the letter to the Ephesians that I love, some truly radical things like “universal salvation” but it’s really important that we understand what has happened here and ask, if the earliest Christians were not ready for such a radical message are we? It takes great courage to stand against the things that seek to dominate and oppress us. It means to swim against the flow of your culture, sometimes your immediate community or family. But once armed with an understanding of the transformation Jesus and then Paul offer us we stand ready to be made into more than we ever thought possible. Once we know that, the only questions that remains is, “do we really want it?”