The House Around the Faucet--February 19, 2021

The House Around the Faucet--February 19, 2021

"Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.  Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly.  Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord.  Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart." [Colossians 3:18-21]

Did you ever see that commercial where the couple finds their ideal kitchen faucet in the store, and then tells their architect to design a house around that?  That's not just marketing genius (I mean, now I want one of those faucets, too!), but it's not a bad way to think of these verses from Colossians.

Because, for all the ways we can get ourselves lost in the weeds over the ways verses like these have been abused and mishandled in the past to justify all kinds of mistreatment of wives and children in the name of "obeying" and "being subject," this passage isn't about giving anybody permission to dominate anybody else.  Just the opposite, in fact.  This passage, following as it does from the previous verses about doing everything we do "in the name of the Lord Jesus," are sort of like putting Jesus at the center of our lives, and then building everything in our households around Jesus.  

Let me say that again.  Like the faucet in the commercial, these verses from Colossians call us to reimagine everything--every relationship in our lives, in fact--around who Jesus is, and who we are because of him.  And it's just that--because of who Jesus is, the sort of person he embodies and the kind of love that is his, nobody has permission to dominate anybody else.  In fact, serving and self-giving love that honors the other is the hallmark of all of our relationships.  We're building a household around Jesus, and Jesus doesn't use his authority or position to dominate, but rather to serve.

For an embarrassingly long time in the last two thousand years, Christians (honestly, it's been mostly Christian men here) have misappropriated passages like this with a bit of interpretive sleight-of-hand to make them sound like the New Testament requires women to be demure and unthinking automatons or children to be nothing more than free labor for their parents.  We have had too long of the misreading of passages like this to make them sound like this is a ranking of power and importance in a family, and that adult men are supposed to dominate and dictate, and everybody else just falls in line.  

On top of that, we live in a culture and in a time that often teaches boys that being "a man" is primarily about being toxically aggressive jerks who threaten and intimidate their way into getting what they want, rather than recognizing Jesus' kind of maturity doesn't have to bully anybody, but rather chooses to serve, to love, to be vulnerable, and to uplift and honor others rather than needing to be "top dog" himself.  And then add the further assumption our culture makes that a nuclear family of mom, dad, and then 2.5 kids, and a dog (white picket fence recommended) is the only way a family can look, when in actuality, the biblical writers often assumed families included extended connections of grandparents, in-laws, grown siblings, and cousins, all living in the same immediate area, if not in the same house.  We end up with a pretty distorted picture that imagines the "one right way" to do family life is for an obnoxiously dominating male to boss everybody else in the family around while he smokes his pipe and puts his feet up, rather than a vision that is centered on Christ-like love.

So, let's be clear here.  The Bible doesn't have a single "one right way" for your family to look, and this isn't giving a prescription for who is allowed to work outside of the home, or how you arrange the responsibilities in your household.  Instead, I want to suggest that this passage from Colossians suggests a center--Jesus himself--around which all of our other relationships are shaped, and through which all of our relationships are seen in a new way.  So instead of parents seeing themselves as bosses or rulers of a household (the way in the ancient Greco-Roman mindset, children were basically seen as expendable non-persons until they came of age), we will see the role of parent through the self-giving love of Jesus. That doesn't mean parents are supposed to spoil their children to become entitled brats, but rather that parents see their role as servant-leaders who use their position in the family to empower and shape their children with Christ-like love, too.  And instead of imagining that this passage dictates that women are supposed to be silent and subservient like shrinking violets while men are supposed to be domineering and overcompensatingly macho, I want to suggest that the letter to the Colossians envisions everybody starting with the question, "How does Jesus love?" and letting that guide their actions.

For at least the bulk of my lifetime, it seems that Christians have been known for loudly insisting that every family fit one preconceived cookie cutter design that never really came out of the mouth of Jesus (who, by the way, was neither married nor a parent, and still was able to live a wholly meaningful and good life, as it appears was also the case with the apostle Paul), rather than asking the one question the Scriptures do actually dare us to ask: "How do my relationships look different in light of the way Jesus loves?"  There can be a lot of variety in what our closest relationships in life look like in answer to that question, so it's not a cookie-cutter sort of question.  Instead, we are called day by day, even as the shape and arrangement of our families may change over time, to ask that question--What will my relationships look like if they are built around the character of Jesus?--and to let our lives reflect the answers, moment by moment, day by day, decade by decade, all our lives long.  Jesus is the faucet you build the house around.

This is really what the New Testament says about family life:  start with Jesus, wherever you find yourself in a family, and let Jesus' kind of love shape the way you live out your relationships.  That's what is worth investing our time and attention on today.

Lord Jesus, you whose lordship looks like footwashing, and whose reign takes the form of a cross, shape our love in light of who you are.