Preaching on Paul’s problematic pericopes

LOUISVILLE — Preachers who hesitate to deliver sermons based on the difficult portions of Paul’s epistles can take heart from the encouragement and teachings of the Rev. Dr. Nancy Lammers Gross, the Arthur Sarell Rudd Professor of Speech Communication in Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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Last week, Gross led the monthly preaching workshop for the Synod of the Covenant. Her focus was on preaching from Ephesians. Watch the 90-minute webinar here.

“We love the great affirmations of faith” found early on in Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus, Gross said. “We love the opening material about praise and glory and thanksgiving to God, who created all things. … We love that through Christ, God has brought down the dividing walls between two hating people and drawn in those who are far off with those who are near. That is all wonderful.”

“Then, of course, we willingly use Ephesians 4 in our ordinations services, the gifts of the Spirit. The problem is, we turn the page and we get to the household codes: wives, submit to your husbands; children, obey your parents; and, of course, slaves, obey your masters. The question becomes, and this has been my question: Can we preach any of Ephesians if we can’t preach all of Ephesians? Can we just cherry pick the phrases we want?”

The title to Gross’ talk, “Only What is Useful,” comes from Ephesians 4:29: “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.”

“Imagine saying that to the Christian community today,” Gross said. For an upcoming book, “That’s the center from which I am exploring the rest of Ephesians.”

Gross asked webinar participants to share what they like about Paul, what’s their favorite Pauline passage, and how they use Paul in their ministry and in their preaching.

“I love Paul’s heart for the worldwide church,” one participant said. “He clearly cared about all sorts of church settings.”

Then there’s “the difficult Paul,” Gross said, displaying a slide that asserted, “Paul is like eating broccoli.”

She asked: What do you most dislike about Paul? What makes Paul difficult? What are your struggles in preaching on Paul?

“Paul can be offensive,” Gross said. “He’s been accused of being a racist, a misogynist, a nativist, a Jew-hater even though he was a Jew. He has been blamed for so many things.”

“A difficulty we have with Paul is we want to say what Paul said in those great affirmations of faith,” including “by grace you have been saved through faith” and “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” We want to say, “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

“But there are things we don’t want to say,” Gross noted, such as the household codes.

“Try instead to do what Paul did,” she suggested. “What was he doing and what was he trying to do” when he said the things he said, “including the great affirmations of faith that we love and the more difficult things that we don’t love.”

“What I see so often in Paul,” one participant said, “is, how do we live together in community when we’re different people?”

Again, what was Paul doing, Gross asked. “He mentored young disciples. He led an itinerant ministry of preaching and teaching. He raised funds” and he provided some pastoral care, such as to the churches in Philippi, she said.

“In early Paul, he was very concerned about how we live today in view of Christ returning immediately,” Gross said. “That was the apocalyptic Paul, the Paul who thought Jesus might return tonight,” whose message was, “Don’t worry about your social station in life because it’s not going to matter.”

For later Paul, “we think, maybe Christ might not return tonight, and we start getting into how we organize ourselves and how we administrate ourselves,” she said.

A key tool for preachers relying on oral interpretation is to have read the scripture passage out loud, preferably several times. “When we speak it, we pay attention to things like movement and progression, phrasing and emphasis,” she said. “We need to listen for the emotional content, the frustrated Paul when he said, ‘foolish Galatians, what are you doing?’”

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To demonstrate, Gross played a recording of her reading Ephesians 1:1-23 out loud, then asking, What’s Paul doing here?

“Paul is trying to paint a picture of God as big and huge,” one participant said. “Sometimes we can lose that awe. It’s important to be overwhelmed by God.”

“We do tend to domesticate God to what we think God should look like,” Gross said, noting that with the possible exception of Romans, Ephesians is the only one of Paul’s letters “that does not start with a problem or an issue in the local church.”

Gross asked: Can we hear the household codes “in the light of the praise and worship of God from a trusted mentor in the faith? We’re not going to hear that if our eyes are just reading it. That’s why I emphasize the oral interpretation, to hear that and be in worship with Paul” so that “that’s what’s ringing in our ears when we get to the difficult Paul.”

It's phrases like “speaking the truth in love” where speaking on Ephesians can tie a preacher in knots. “We forget the part about ‘let no evil come out of your mouths,’” Gross said. “Our tendency is to think about our truth. I can say this to you because I love you. I can tell you that you are wrong, you are living and believing and voting wrongly. I can say these things because I love you, and I can say it nicely: because of your lifestyle, honey, you’re going to hell. I’m just saying this to you in love, honey.”

“I think that’s the way this has been taken by a lot of people. I don’t think Paul is saying, ‘say your opinions nicely,’” Gross said. “The truth is Jesus. The truth is not my opinion. Jesus is that one true witness to the love of God. That’s who Jesus is.”

We often tend to “pit the social agenda in Jesus’ ministry in the gospels against the apparent evangelical agenda of Paul in his epistles,” Gross said. “That’s one of the reasons why preaching from Paul can lend itself to constantly evangelizing folks and maybe forget about the ministry for the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the downtrodden, the widow, etc.”

Speaking the truth in love “has to do with testifying who Jesus is, not just to our opinions,” she said. “What should come out of our mouths is what is useful for building up.”

What we forget when we read the household codes, Gross said, is Paul telling us to be “subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

“What if we read those [difficult] passages as if they were an extension of God’s turn-the-world-upside-down power reversal” where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, she said. “Wives, submit to your husbands” is nothing new. “It was the way of the world.” But as for Paul’s admonishment for husbands to love their wives “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” “no one ever asked husbands to love their wives like that,” she said.

In the same vein, fathers are not to provoke their children to anger, but rather to “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” As for masters, “stop threatening [enslaved people], for you know that both of you have the same Lord in heaven, and with [God] there is no partiality.”

“Should Paul have gone farther, like advocating for the abolition of slavery? We whish that he had,” Gross said. “For those of us who preach to people who have some power” who “when they speak they are listened to, I think this might serve as something of a corrective.”

Requiring women to keep silent in the church “really doesn’t align with the rest of Paul’s corpus,” Gross said. “It’s not consistent with the women who followed him, the women he respected” and “articulated their names at the end of many of his letters.”

To wrap up her engaging talk, Gross offered the preachers this advice:

• Reading aloud the passage is critical
• Note the interpretive choices required of you as you read
• Play with the emotional range
• If possible, read aloud the larger context
• What was Paul doing when he said these things?
• How does the passage make sense in terms of Paul’s apocalyptic and turn-the-world-upside-down power reversal?

Learn more about and register for upcoming edition of the Synod of the Covenant’s Equipping Preachers series here.