Sunday, February 10, 2008

Submit to One Another - Rose and David co-sermon
Ephesians 5.21-33

Greet someone you don’t know very well and talk to them for at least 30 seconds.

If you look in your bulletin, you’ll see that the sermon is called “3 Secrets to a Happy Marriage.” Rose and I have been talking and have decided to change the title to “How Disney Got It Wrong.” If you watch Disney movies, whether it’s Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, or whatever, they make you think all the hard work comes before the couple gets together. What we’re here to talk about today, though, is that when you get married, that is where a lot of the hard work begins. So how do you do it? What is the key to a biblical healthy marriage?

Note to single folks – you are not invisible. There are two possibilities in your future: One is that you’ll get married, in which case keep these things in mind when you’re looking at what kind of person you want to marry. Marry someone that you can give yourself to; someone who is worthy of that trust, the gift of yourself. The other possibility is that you’ll choose to stay single for the rest of your life. That’s okay, because what we’re going to say about submission applies in some degree to all relationships. Also, keep these things in mind when you’re counseling your friends and family.

Brewer parents marriage model of non-submission
I wanted both Rose and I to share about our parents’ marriages and our family backgrounds not to point them out as wonderful or horrible, but so you can understand that Rose and I didn’t have perfect models for submission when we were growing up. We’ve had to learn many things the hard way, just like many of you have learned, are learning, or ? will learn. Dad 39 (3rd marriage), Mom 23 (2nd marriage). When they got married, they were similar ages to most of the couples that Paul was writing to in his letter to the Ephesians.
    
     1. Early on, dominant, old-fashioned breadwinner father, give-in old-fashioned stay-at-home,
     care-for-the-house-and-kids mother. When mom resisted, Dad yelled, swore, or withdrew. If your model for marriage      is based on authority, and your spouse questions you, where do you go?

     2. Later, when the kids were older and Mom had more time to herself, she realized she wanted to do more. Started     working, becoming more independent … and the marriage was essentially over. Mom realized she didn’t have to just do     what Dad wanted. Dad had no control over her workplace.

Langmesser parents’ marriage model of non-submission
    - My dad was pretty passive and avoided conflict with my mother; mother who has things her way or “Ain’t nobody     happy if mama’s not happy.” Unfortunately, I don’t know that either one of my parents led the household. I think each
    of them pretty much did what they wanted, and mom complained when dad didn’t do what she wanted.

Submission: the Early Years
I’m now a Christian, I’ve thought about relationships a lot and studied submission and biblical passages on how a man should treat his wife. Mutual submission is my key word. As a bachelor, I know exactly what that means and am
committed to it. I’ll achieve it perfectly and that will free my wife to do the same.

Along comes Rose. While courting, submission almost always happens. Of course – it’s dating or courtship! In my
wedding vow (wrote it myself) I even reference Ephesians 5.25: “Because of my love for Jesus, I will submit to you.”
There are parts of this passage I get, I do well, early on. Verses 28, 29, and 33.

David did understand Ephesians 5 well. Much better than most men I knew. I remember two things about submission before we got married.

The first thing I remember is from the first time we were in church together. David had a newer Bible, and the pastor
must have been preaching from Ephesians. His Bible had Ephesians 5:21 separated from verses 22-33. So David took a pen and bracketed 5:21 together with the rest of the passage. That made me think, “Hm . . . he might not understand all
this perfectly, but he’s on the right track if he sees it in light of his reverence for Christ.”

The second thing I remember is one of our many phone conversations. (I was living in Michigan, and David was living in Vancouver.) I asked him, “So what do you think about the man being the leader?”

He answered, “I think that I am supposed to lead by submitting to you, and you follow my example.” Now at the time,
that fit everything we had learned about Christian marriage roles. And David’s behavior matched it. He was devoted to God, and he worked to consider me in all sorts of ways. David understood that when Paul wrote this “household code”
in his letter to the Ephesians that he was adding something radical that didn’t exist anywhere else in Greek or Roman culture. Paul undermined the traditional Roman family value that the male “head of the household” had absolute authority. Paul called every member of the family to submit to one another.

Now I wasn’t totally comfortable with David’s answer. However, David’s answer – and his behavior – was convincing enough that I agreed to marry him. ?

In my vows, I said, “I will trust you, that you love me and are following God; and I will trust God, that He will take
care of me.”

I figured, if this is what it means to be a godly wife, then God’s got my back, so I’ll trust God even when it’s hard
for me to trust David.

Now some of you might be sitting there thinking, “But David Brewer is practically perfect. What about the rest of us
who are stuck with our husbands?” Keep in mind that many of the wives that Paul was writing to had begun following Christ before their husbands. Paul doesn’t say, “You only have to submit yourself to your husband if he’s a perfectly
godly man.” Now if a husband (or a wife) is abusive to their spouse, we think they should separate and seek help so
that the abuse doesn’t continue. However, most of us are not married to abusive spouses. We’re just married to
imperfect spouses. Now imperfect spouses are hard to submit to, but God knows that, and he still calls us to submit ourselves to them.

Ultimately, I don’t base my choice to submit on what David does. I base it on the fact that God has called me to submit myself – to give myself – to David.

I think early in our marriage I really struggled with a scarcity mentality: there isn’t enough love, respect, etc., to go
around. We need to each do our part (50-50 on housework, finances, church responsibilities, you name it) and I gotta protect myself, gotta get what’s mine before it’s gone. If you don’t look out for Number 1, who will? You know what
that attitude reveals? A lack of trust in God, and a lack of trust in your spouse. You know, Paul doesn’t just start his letter in Ephesians 5. This isn’t coming out of nowhere. If you go back to the start of his thought process, he begins at the start
of chapter 4: “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called …” and continuing in verse 17 (Paul was certainly an extrovert, as he interrupted himself for 15 verses there)
“Now this I affirm and insist on it in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds.” He continues on with a whole list of ways the Gentiles, the non-Jesus followers, live their lives, and then begins to explain how Christians, how little Jesuses, should be living. Ephesians 5 is in that context: don’t act like those around you, don’t act
like you used to. 1 Peter 3 has the same thrust: when he talks about how husbands and wives are supposed to relate to each other. Peter’s focus is on Christians living godly lives in the midst of a godless society.

So let’s take a step back and think about this: who has marriages without trust? Who is unable to lay his life down for his wife? Someone who doesn’t know Jesus, that’s who! If you don’t know Jesus, why in the world would you open yourself up, why would you be vulnerable with someone who could hurt you, repeatedly and badly? But! We do know Jesus! And because I know Him, I can trust both Him and Rose. I can live with the idea that God has blessings in store for me, and I don’t have to worry about how often I mowed the lawn, how much cheesecake I got (as opposed to how much Johnny Diaz ate), or how much time she spent with me as opposed to other people. I am free to submit!

Now fast forward to the middle years of our marriage . . . and some of the expectations we had.

Submission: the Middle Years
There’s an old saying “You don’t marry the person, you marry the family.” Even though, at 26, Rose and I were old
wise people, who had independently decided who we were apart from our families, and we weren’t going to be like
that, doggone it … we still were molded and formed by those families. Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People says in talking about interpersonal relationships: “Many expectations are implicit. They haven’t been explicitly stated or announced, but people nevertheless bring them to a particular situation. In marriage, for example, a
man and a woman have implicit expectations of each other in their marriage roles.” The part he leaves out is that,
especially early in a marriage, you are much more likely to automatically not match up to your spouse’s expectations if
they haven’t been voiced. Part of our early adjustment was starting to articulate the unspoken assumptions of how a husband or a wife was supposed to act, look, talk, and think. And once that’s out on the table, well, you’re not done. Because then you have to work together to talk through those expectations and to work together to validate or reject those expectations. Mutual submission.

Story: While in Philadelphia, I fought this battle like crazy. Rose was going to school – and it was a hard program, with
a LOT of work. Most people don’t finish in three years, but she did – and she was doing internships at churches, serving on the seminary student council, working as the writing tutor and as a teaching assistant … and she was pregnant for all
of her third year, delivering five weeks before graduation! I can cite all that now and acknowledge how impressive it
was. However, while we lived there, I was more focused on myself: I was working away from home. And from my perspective, being gone so much should have entitled me to take it easy when I got home. I took it personally when I
had to cook, clean, do laundry and grocery shopping all that.

Now, hear me: I do not view those specifically as a woman’s tasks, nor a wife’s tasks. But it’s also true that because of
the family I grew up in – traditional breadwinner Dad and traditional stay-at-home Mom, and because while we were in Philly I was working away from home and Rose was not (my thinking here), Rose should have been doing those houseworky things. If I had been able to voice, face up to, and move on from those implicit expectations, I probably
could have submitted better, and our three years in Philly, which were fantastic years from every other perspective, could have been some of the best years in our marriage instead of the hardest.

I had my own expectations of David. He normally fulfilled them all, but not always. He didn’t always take out the
garbage or fill the car up with gas . . . you know, the things that men are “supposed” to do all the time. I’m pretty much over those expectations, even though he still does those things most of the time.

There were more subtle expectations that I had of him – much “holier” expectations – that I finally came to recognize
were not Scriptural. We had been taught that the husband was supposed to lead family prayer, and initiate devotions,
and all sorts of other scripted roles . . . to be “the spiritual leader”. We believed that the wife was supposed to
submit – meaning to follow the husband’s initiative in all those things.

Then David hit a long depression. He wasn’t praying with me in the mornings like he always had. He wasn’t always
making good spiritual decisions. He wasn’t the “spiritual leader” I had relied on him to be.

The problem is that I looked at this passage and thought it was about David leading, and me following, where it’s much more about unity. It’s about being spiritual partners.

The problem is that some of us women think that Prince Charming comes and sweeps us off our feet, we get married,
and that Prince Charming still carries us spiritually. We forget that after the wedding, that we’re called to stand on our
own two feet spiritually.

So instead of helping David by initiating prayer when he was depressed, I withdrew. I was afraid that if I initiated more spiritually, that he would take offense, that he would think that I was usurping his authority. David rightly thinks it’s crazy that I thought this.

I was talking with Pastor Kelly about this sermon, and he said that Sara is often the one who initiates prayer. They both initiate prayer.

So why was I so hesitant? David didn’t need a wife who didn’t rock the boat – he needed a spiritual partner to hold his hand and give him a hand up.

I forgot that my first call is to reverence to Christ. Our call is to stand before God and follow Christ – then to submit ourselves to our husbands out of that reverence for God. The only Prince Charming who carries us spiritually is the King
of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

Submission: This Year
Rose and I have now been married 11.5 years. We still have a way to go to catch up to Don and Irene Cole at 69
years, but we’re working on it. And I can tell you that today we do better at mutual submission than we ever have. We
are partners in parenting, in ministry here at Grace, in the way we relate to the Brewer and Langmesser families, and in our relations with each other. What’s made the difference? I think three things, which are all really about submission. I’ve already talked about two: trusting God and trusting our spouse, being vulnerable even when you might get hurt; speaking and validating (or changing) expectations. And now we’ll talk about the idea of the Emotional Bank Account (Covey)
or Love Tank (Chapman).

Pastor Kelly has mentioned any number of times a Eugene Peterson book he liked called A Long Obedience in the
Same Direction. I think that’s how mutual submission works. Or as Gary Chapman (author of the Five Love Languages) writes, “to feel love, first do love.” There are many things that don’t mean anything to me by themselves, but I’ve learned that they mean something to Rose, so usually I do them. ? Just being honest. Whenever I take a trip somewhere, I try to find some kind of gift for her. If I can’t find anything really cool and funky, I’ll get her dark chocolate because I know she loves that. I work hard to provide space for her to do things she enjoys, whether that is helping with English classes, teaching Discovering Grace, doing scrapbooking, going to a coffeehouse. Often these things mean I do things I’d rather
not do. I’ve practiced doing those things and now they’re part of my routine.

These examples play right into the idea of the Emotional Bank Account or Love Tank. The idea both Covey and
Chapman have is that every relationship has an account/tank. Every time you interact with that person, you make a
deposit or a withdrawal. Buying dark chocolate for Rose, encouraging her to spend time scrapbooking, finding fun things we can do together like go to a movie, is a deposit. (One big deposit Rose makes in my account is blessing me with an annual trip to the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Yeah baby!) Um, where was I? Oh yeah … criticizing her, emotionally withdrawing from her, allowing my schoolwork to interfere with our time as a family, is a withdrawal. The basic idea here
is that you need to make sure you’re putting in a lot more deposits than you’re making withdrawals. Let me emphasize: the goal is not to know your balance! You’re not supposed to say “I did four nice things for you last week, so I’m going to ignore you this week.” Remember, there are emotions, relationships, in play here. This is New Math. Only the other
person can tell you if you’ve deposited enough to make a withdrawal of any amount.

I know there are some of you listening to this and thinking about people – maybe your spouse – who have overdrawn
their accounts with you, or from whom you’ve made too many withdrawals. Can you get the balance back to zero, then
on the positive side? Sure you can. As Kelly shared last week from John 5, the question is “Do you want to be made well?” Do you want the relationship to be healthy again? Then submit. Submit in little things, and keep submitting even if
you don’t seem to be getting a response from the other person. If you’re overdrawn at the bank $200 and you deposit $10, I wouldn’t expect a big thank you or congratulatory note, would you? Keep making those deposits and avoid withdrawals for a time.

It wasn’t until many years into our marriage that we realized that “submitting to one another” means giving ourselves to
each other. It’s not about control or power or authority. It’s about giving ourselves.

That’s hard in marriage because it’s day in and day out. It’s not just the big things. Just last Monday God played a joke
on us just to show us that we still have a long way to go to fully submit ourselves. David was upstairs, and I went into our downstairs bathroom. I flipped the light on, and nothing happened. None of the other lights worked, either. I went to the fuse box, and all the switches looked fine. But I figured it had to be one of those switches, so I was just going to flip them all. I called upstairs and asked David to unplug our laptops. Instead, David came downstairs and explained that he had clearly marked all the circuit breakers, and so I didn’t need to flip them all. I looked at all those switches, and just wanted to do something, to have power over that problem. And there was one unlabeled circuit breaker just crying out to me to
flip it. So I flipped that circuit breaker back and forth, even though I knew David was probably right, and I knew he wouldn’t be very excited about it. Because, after all, he hadn’t done what I had asked.

So there we were, standing there, and David went back upstairs and I went back to the bathroom and remembered to try the reset button on the outlet. Voila; it worked.

After a little while, I went back upstairs to talk to David. (You see, we were getting ready to work on this sermon. ?)
I went upstairs, and David wheeled his chair over to my table. After a moment, I softly told him, “All I wanted you to do was to unplug the laptops.” He said, “All I wanted you to do was to listen to me.”

It was very apparent to us both that neither one of us had submitted ourselves to our imperfect spouses. David hugged
me and we prayed for our sermon.

Submission is hard work – but it’s also our highest calling and the way to truly loving relationships. We’re going to
leave each of you – married men, married women, and singles – with a charge / a commission. And then we’ll pray and submit ourselves to Christ.

Charge to Married Men
I’m going to be hard on you here. Some of you have a background, or the current attitude that the man is the boss.
Who is your boss? Is it Christ? And how did He treat you? And how have you responded to it? Then why do you try to lord it over your wife? Unless you’ve been beaten, spit on, laughed at, and killed, you have not laid your life down the
way your boss did for you. You want to prove what a man you are? Submit to your wife.

Charge to Married Women
Paul calls married women to submit themselves to their own husbands. Later on he says to respect your husband.
Do you nag or manipulate or complain about your imperfect husband? Or do you follow along with your husband’s
less-than-godly decisions, instead of giving yourself to your husband as his spiritual partner? Do you give yourself?
Do you submit yourself? Trust God. Respect your husband. Submit – give – yourself to your husband.

Charge to Singles
Don’t think you’re getting off easy here. Keep in mind the key verse in this whole passage is verse 21. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. It doesn’t really matter if you’re married or not. The emphasis is on submitting to one another … though there are special ways to do that in marriage. All of us know that it’s easier to submit to those we only see once a month or once a week. It’s easy to be nice to someone we’re not living with. But do you submit to your parents? Your kids? Your siblings? Your co-workers? Fellow church attenders? Friends? Your charge is not easier, just somewhat different, from those of the married couples we’ve been talking to. And if you’re single and longing to get married, and you think submission and sacrifice comes easy once you’re married … well, stop watching those Disney movies. You ever notice those fairy tales always end at the wedding? Marriage is not a fantasy land, it’s hard work. Practice submitting now to those around you, and if or when God blesses you with a spouse, you may have an easier transition than I did.

Go deeper
Other places in Scripture that include “household codes”
- Colossians 3
- 1 Peter 3

Books to help in practical ways
(You can get all of these from Amazon.com, other places on-line, or many local bookstores)

Finding the Love of Your Life
by Neil Clark Warren

Fit to be Tied
by Bill and Lynne Hybels

As for Me and My House: Crafting Your Marriage to Last
by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Before the Ring: Questions Worth Asking
by William L. Coleman

Faith Tango: A Liberating Approach to Spiritual Growth in Marriage
by Carolyn and Craig Williard

Families Where Grace Is in Place: Getting Free from the Burden of Pressuring, Controlling, and Manipulating Your Spouse and Children
by Jeff VanVonderen

Prayerbook for Husbands and Wives: Partners in Prayer
by Ruthanne and Walter Wangerin, Jr.

The Five Love Languages
by Gary Chapman