Ephesians 5: Imitating God
I grew up with siblings, so we liked to find ways to get on each other’s nerves.
One of the best ways to do that was the copycat game. Raise your hand if you know the copycat game.
Basically, you repeat whatever your brother or sister says.
“I’m hungry.” / “I’m hungry!”
“Mom, he’s repeating me.” / “Mom, he’s repeating me.”
“You are so annoying.” / “You are so annoying.”
“Leave me alone.” / “Leave me alone.”
On first glance, our scripture this morning sounds like it is inviting us to play the copycat game with God - to imitate God, repeat God, sound like God, talk like God, and even walk like God. If that was the simple prescription to follow Jesus, this discipleship journey might be a whole lot easier for us. All we would need to do is a slap a bracelet on our wrist that says, “What Would Jesus Do”, and do it.
Following Jesus is a lot harder than that though, especially when we get frustrated, angry, wound up, disappointed, disenchanted, and wore out. Following Jesus is not a simple copycat game or else all we would have to do is go around in our lives looking for fishermen and tax collectors to inspire, healing the sick and poor we find along our city sidewalks, and spending whole days out in the desert praying alone.
Author Richard Rohr says that the real challenge in this spiritual game, is not that we aren’t sincere when we want to imitate God, but it’s that we put a lot of distance between us and God. We want to follow Jesus, but since we don’t live near any deserts and don’t encounter any tax collectors or fishermen (for the most part), we make our spirituality all about how we feel on the inside, an internal exercise, or we make our spiritual journey something that is unattainable because of who Jesus is.
Jesus was perfect - so we try to be perfect.
Jesus had all the answers - so we try to have all the answers.
Jesus sacrificed everything - so we should sacrifice everything.
Jesus may really be perfect and have all the answers and so on, but let’s not forget that Jesus was human just like us - a person who lived and breathed and walked and talked and got tired and worn out and loved and felt afraid and experienced frustration and knew what it was like to be rejected just like we do. And who lived out his ministry among the imperfect followers that he gathered to his side.
Jesus wasn’t interested in copycat followers - Jesus wanted followers who would write their own stories and share God’s love in their own voices and in their own ways.
Paul is thus asking these early Christian communities imitate the very nature of God that they discover in Jesus - the essence and fragrance of God’s love, forgiveness, and liberation. In this way, we can define growing spirituality, this idea of practicing resurrection, as not growing more perfect or having all the right words to say or memorizing the whole Bible or having perfect attendance at worship, as our constant effort to grow closer to God that God’s love might grow outward from us.
The rest of this Chapter in Ephesians lays out what this look likes in some very concrete ways. In the verses that immediately follow, Paul explicitly identifies some of the behavior and sins that can wreck our ability to imitate God - trading in lust for love, and trading in generosity for greed. Paul says when we do that, we begin to worship something else than God.
But I really just felt like I had to wrestle deeper with a sometimes complicated and controversial section from verse 21 and on, in my bible listed under the heading “the Christian household.”
This section is an example of what many theologians call clobber verses. These verses have been used many times by preacher, theologians, and Christians to clobber people over the head, scripture wielded like a weapon to hurt and wound people, taken out of context to justify all kinds of terrible things.
Verse 22, for instance, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.”
I have not heard many sermons in my life preached on this passage, but when I have, it has almost always been used to justify awful, abusive behavior in the name of God. Women who are in relationships where they are being abused and violated have been told to stay in the relationship because they should be “subject” to their husbands. Or when there is a serious disagreement, women are told by men, using the Bible as a bludgeon, to give up and lose their argument because God says so.
In recent weeks, we have seen many women step forward and speak publicly about sexual harassment and abuse they have been the victim of - I know some of our women here in our church have been victims of such evil too. This scripture passage in no way condones such behavior in the church or anywhere, no matter how someone might want to twist the text to their own purposes.
Scripture must never be used to justify the mistreatment and oppression of anyone - for when you do, you are not imitating God.
What then do we do with a passage like this?
Let’s take a look at the context. Paul in this letter to the Ephesians is not talking about a “so-called” nuclear family, like what American culture has taught us the building block of our communities - two parents, two kids, a dog, a house, and a Netflix account. The Roman household, which was the culture in which Paul was writing, was quite a bit different.
A Roman Household in the time of the Ephesians had a patriarch of the family, probably a husband, at the head, at the top. Just below him was usually a wife. Further below were kids, any other relatives living in the household, and servants, if the family was wealthy or powerful enough.
The patriarch of the family, in Roman culture, had the authority and final say over everyone in their household - wife, children, relatives, servants. Even the servant’s children. Final say meant final authority - over their well-being, their life, their death, their future prospects, their marriages, their debts, their roles, their freedom. There is evidence that some Roman patriarchs did use this power to kill anyone in their household who dared disobey them. There was no recourse.
Marriages, likewise, were not usually about love, romance, or care. Marriages were typically arranged to broker deals between families or powerful people. Women in the household could be married off at as young an age as 14, usually to much older men. And if the husbands did not have romantic interest in their wives, that meant that any other women, including slaves, could be the target of their interest.
Thus, the Roman household was rife with the potential for abusive power on a regular basis - there was no sense of equality as we understand it or marrying someone because you love them or letting someone have the freedom to dictate their own life’s direction.
So here comes Paul, knowing that the churches in the 1st to 2nd century were wrestling with how to live in such difficult times, living in households where power was being abused, where authority was being mishandled. Where life and death was at stake - Paul challenges early Christians not to ignore the social customs and run off into the desert but to “up end” them - subvert them - live and love in a different way.
All are to submit themselves to Christ. Yes, while wives are to submit themselves to husbands as is the Roman way, husbands should submit themselves - not to Ceasar and the way of Ceasar - but to Jesus. Husbands are to love their wives just as Jesus loved the church - to see their bodies as one. To inflict pain on a spouse was to inflict pain on oneself. The scripture speaks of a serious and deep mutuality, a growing closer to God in a culture that could be hostile to the way of God, a growing closer as a family in a culture that celebrated violence, abuse, and conquest as the way to get things done. Paul paints this incredible image of what it might meant to imitate Jesus in an unlikely and familiar place for early Christians.
So the question is not for us to take Paul’s description here as a prescription for our families - but to challenge ourselves to think about what it means to imitate God in our relationships in our homes - among roommates, partners, siblings, parents, grandparents, or whoever we share our lives with.
How we might live out the love of Jesus with those closest to us?
Ephesians’ image of the household challenges us to imitate God - to imitate Jesus - by being about each other’s liberation. To serve each other. To see ourselves as interconnected. To reject relationships that suffocate us and wound us. To reclaim a different way than Ceasar.
Ephesians’ image of the household, and the whole chapter, challenge us to connect our sense of spirituality, not just with Sunday morning worship or big lofty ideals, but with the most mundane routines of our lives. Not because God wants to micromanage us - but because it is through the ordinary stuff of sharing breakfast, cleaning our homes, talking with our loved ones, and meeting the demands placed upon us - that God is imitated and glorified.
In the Hill household, this means that I am not serving my wife if I make her pick up my dirty laundry everyday - or do the dishes - or do the laundry. Or vice verse or whatever. It means I need to model that to my children - that their mom is not a servant to bring them a plate of delicious food every evening - they have a role. They can love their mom by serving too. And God is interested in that - picking up dirty socks is as spiritual an act as fasting for 24 hours.
I hope that image challenges you - but this is the incredible image that all of Ephesians paints for us. We are caught up in this story of God, this drama of God, where God moves us into our world and makes us saints, despite our brokenness - where God makes us one and tears down the walls between us - where God is infused into our everyday lives in the most mundane and ordinary ways, because even our families are a staging ground for God’s love to be shared and lived out.
Spirituality is thus not something that takes us away from the world but moves us deeper into it.
Blogger Martika Diaz wrote back in June, every time she grudgingly picks up a pair of dirty socks off the floor for her family, she recognizes the good news that God does that for her (and for all of us) on a regular basis - picking up and sorting out our messes, showing up in our pain and isolation, and washing us anew that we may shine, once again, with the brightness and beauty of God’s incredible love.
Where does your life need to imitate God this week? What are the dirty socks that you need to pick up a neighbor, a co-worker, a spouse, a friend? Is there a situation in your life where someone has chosen power over you and you need God to transform that situation? Do you need to get out of an unhealthy relationship today? Do you need to turn something mundane that you do at home into a place of spiritual growth?
