Submit to one another

Ephesians as a whole - unity as an arc from theory into practice - and travels Theory into Practice. There is a danger in isolating these practical endnotes of Ephesians as private pieties detached from the superabundant cosmology of a God who is unity and detached from the thrust of Ephesians encouraging a holistic ecclesiology of radical unity.

Ephesians Recap

Unity is the theme, and I consider that this reaches its zenith in ‘Submit to one another’ - but to recap the trajectory:

1v1-14 (Sam) God’s plan, which was a mystery for long ages.. v10 - is to unite all things in creation - Sam considered that it is care for others, more than self-care which should define late pandemic repair. Unity considered in this move outwards and otherwards.

1v15-23 The passage is on God as Jehovah’s varied abundant gifts, including wisdom which (Cherie) weaved with parallel themes from Corinthians - of growth to maturity as a growth done together as different parts of Christ’s body coordinating those different gifts towards wisdom.

2v1-10 (The business-class upgraded Alastair) whose shirt was blue - spoke repetitively about how we are saved, saved, saved into Christ, into Christ.. There is thinly a sense that we-as-we are saved and so made alive together in this - but unity isn’t so much the question until the second half of chapter 2

2v11-22 (Caroline) had us meditate on [Household, Outsider, Peace] bringing these together in art - Donald Rodney’s piece In the House of My Father - illustrating the complex reconfigurations of what we have inherited, and what home is. The passage starts v11 "Remember.." You used to be a disunity, a dis-integrated, disparate fractious factional dispersity: alienated… v13 But now. V14 he has made the two one.. v19 considers unity as citizenship v20-21 a building metaphor - we are a deliberate coordination of diverse construction components, no longer planks and bricks in the yard, we are the structural integrity of a solid whole, reciprocally dependent, mortared in place, to stand for a long time as a monument to stark one-ness.

3v1-13 (Samuel) We’ve been made fellow heirs, members of the same body - with unity for the purpose, the purpose is the display of God.

3v14-20 (Sebastian) Considered with the poignancy of Arcade Fire that we used wait, we used to write letters, we used to sign our name. Paul’s letter here is particularly a prayer prayed together with all the saints, for all families, all generations

4v1-16 (Steve) If the kids are united they’ll never be defeated. Considered the idea of unity and indeed solidarity with Ukraine. Considered how we are bonded by a common experience of forgiveness, and how there is no I in TEAM. Pauls runs a unity cascade: There is ONE body, ONE spirit, ONE hope, ONE Lord, ONE faith, ONE baptism, ONE God and Father of all. Seven counts - a unity of unities. Ephesians then shifts into practice, considering the ready to hand body metaphor of those diverse persons who make up a one body.

4v17-32 (Sam) Spoke about atomic habits - and how our various temptations to anger/stealing etc can be contrasted with positive contributions to the whole

5v1-20 (Sarah) if unity, then living body, so be awake, and so use words because you have to, to coordinate activity amongst the active unity - so then consider language amongst yourselves - imitation as how we mirror one another and words as how create our shared worlds.

5v17-33 Today, this hinge, takes those atomic habit contrasts and makes it total: don’t get drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit with a cascade of participles.. Singing, thanking, submitting to one another.

6v1-17 (Gilly) will consider further cases of complex unity-via-submitting of parents+children and masters+slaves - and how the armour of God serves to defend that singular united body.

6v18-24 (Sam) will close us with praying at all times for all the saints.

So unity is throughout, and it is interesting to see this particular hinge through to the practical, via the ecstatic.

Eph5v18 - do not get drunk with wine

There is wine variously in the bible. And here it is, foreshadowing the promised spirit. Jesus’ first miracle at the Wedding at Cana, turned water into wine, as one of The Signs that he is the promised messiah. Signifying He is the wine-bringing one, who fulfils the promises of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Joel, Amos - who all use wine in their prophesied salvation. Not only wine, but better wine, the best wine, saved til last..

This rarified version of wine however still presumes a thoughtful appreciation of wine’s artisanal transfiguration of grapes into the bouquet of a fine merlot, somewhere between Paul encouraging Timothy to take a little wine, and Psalm 104’s wine to gladden the heart.. You should all carry on wine snobbing if that is within your conscience, but that is not precisely what is in view here.

At Pentecost, external observers thought the disciples were drunk. Now, you all may never have been drunk, so let me tell you about it. It’s a great feeling. A stimulant and a sedative in one drink. In vino veritas: beer goggles for dutch courage, disinhibited to espouse unconditional love for all mankind. I have a gregarious self-forgetfulness, I have the heroism to lift heavy things and I can access a broad emotional register. And, saliently to this, I believe I can sing tuneful and harmonic, to the chagrin of those around me, I can ascend the octaves of Michael Jackson or Bon Iver.

Don’t get drunk with wine - it’s not real and its not worth it. Instead, be filled with the spirit which is to say, get drunk on God.

The swop of wine for the spirit is not naughtiness generically for piety generically - it makes sense to me in this context rather that there is a transformative, satisfying and electrifying parallel of wine and spirit, intended in a if-the-lesser-then-the greater form of argument - seen in pentecost and available now.

Being filled by the spirit is not merely warm fuzzies, or spiritual hysteria, but at this hinge in Paul’s letter, he positions it as substantial experiential fuel that powers worship, and a material and tangible downpayment that enables Christians to then give themselves away in submission to one another.

Eph5v19 - singing

After saying be filled with the Spirit, Paul qualifies with five participle verbs, the last of which is submitting to one another, the preceding four are: addressingone another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always

Like Alastair and his blue shirt, Paul belabours a point here. Why? Partly from a place of his usual irrepressible enthusiasm, partly, I venture, because emphasis maybe needed, strength of emphasis to give license to those who think maybe this in an option reserved for extroverts, pentecostals, Disney princesses and seashanty tiktok. And maybe it is, and I’ll carry on being stiff upper British.

Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs ~ are you? Commentaries seem to suggest that the difference is slight and relatively intuitive in the translation. Psalms are psalms, hymns as we know them, and Spiritual songs are those more free form odes, choruses and so forth tiddly pom.

There are four surface emphases presenting:

Being a varied diet, also for varied contexts. Notable in a letter on unity, that it is diversity which is foregrounded and made imperative.

Then that we should do it with our heart. Singing is holistic, whole-self engaged mode that is emotional and embodied There is a physiology to rejoicing, you sing with your whole body poised and alive to a rhythm and tone. The trained diaphragm that instrumentalises the chest cavity as a tool tuned for the task of a life harmonic in vocal range and reach suited for broadcast. There is poetry to singing, the articulation of words and signs, universes of complexity, structures of argument and nuance layered through vocabularies of reference and emotion and meaning. Songs describe realities and declare realities, bringing worlds into being. You sing with your whole mind. There is an experiential springboard to singing related to memory. You sing with your whole past. The long run up into a song's burst, latent melodies released in the momentary event space that brought pen to page and now bow to string.

Another emphasis being that it should be addressed at one another - that is to say, sing at me bro. More could be made of antiphony. God is good - All the time. The spirit hovers in that space that is held in the air between us, whenever two or three are gathered. Music, like no other, carries the magic of synchronicity and harmony of diverse voices singing together ~ and all that was eroded by covid embargoes.

Lastly that this thanksgiving should be perpetual.

Then, in the same breath, the final participle verb: submitting to one another. It is assumed that submitting is part of this same effervescent euphoric ecstatic activity of singing etc. So, with submit, Paul’s intention is not strivers LARPing as tradwives amongst the egirls of twitter. I consider the hope for Ephesians is a people filled with the spirit then hedonistically exploring how they can be more than the sum of their parts.

Into Household Codes

So, to recap, under the broad rubric of “Be United”, Paul has primed the pump with “being filled with the spirit” and this segues into household codes, I’m arguing as an overflow and response to that abundance. The headline and theme is “submit to one another”

Why did it need to be said: submit? Presumably because it was not otherwise being done. Speculations on why not?

Ignorance - it’s not self-evident as a mode of community governance. As well as ignorance, there is forgetfulness and hubris and resting on the laurels of the common good and social welfare we have inherited.

Laziness - submitting to one another has the appearance it being a difficult thing, complicated, bureaucratic..

High risk of a high cost? It’s a prisoner’s dilemma with a considerable first-mover disadvantage which needs visionary leadership and accountable consensus to overcome a tragedy of the commons, freeloading and exploitation.

Peculiar spiritual/social opposition? Given that submission is suggested as climatic as a theophany of God’s self-giving being, it is likely to come under spiritual attack, and so is likely to need encouragement.

Doubting the potential for unlimited improvement and virtuoso excellence - that is, it’s always possible to go further up and further in establishing a governance structure of managed self-giving. Don’t stop at an MVP, keep on submitting. Turn it up to 11.

So somewhere in this shift, it seemed to Paul, the right and necessary emphasis was ‘submit’ and the domains to focus on were these three relationships [husbands:wives, masters:slaves, parents:children] as domains to think through how to submit to one another. Why?

At that time, those three relationships which were already commonly treated in common household codes as a typology of legal document in the Graeco-Roman world. So to some extent Paul is remixing that, maybe subverting, but minimally clarifying tactically and conceptually what modifications seem wise and orderly and sustainable in its liberation versus what would be chaotically libertarian and harmfully anarchic in the context of this novel spirit-empowered shift from the austerity might-is-right imperialist paterfamilia to somewhat undefined we’re-all-brothers-and-sisters-in-Christ.

These three pairings also exemplify three of the starkest asymmetries within universal typologies of relationship: Money, Sex and Power. There is some sense in solving for the hardest problem first. The call to the Ephesians is for peaceful unity across cosmetic and historic diversities of Jew and Gentile, slave and free - but the real challenge to unity is where these must be negotiated across shared and intimate domains, where two unalike parties needs must contribute and derive asymmetric costs/benefits from a partnership.

So Paul says, Submit to one another. Why and indeed how might it need to be said again? Is this a word for St Marks?

Submit to one another - is close to the bone, vulnerably touching my particular strain of theological idealism that has kindled a passion for Montgomery Hall, for crypto, for MW, for 41, for the PJs: Church maximalism, church-as-infrastructure, and a they-had-all-things-in-common mode of spirituality. The evening service preaching rota sorting hat clearly wanted my, ehem, sanctification. The question of submit to one another is more than an abstract theological speculation - and I enjoy abstract theological speculation. It is a question of what am I doing re church, what are we doing - what is churching ~ singing, making melodies, and submitting to one another? What then is good enough churching? And nested within that, forcefully on the question of submission, is husbanding, partly, the ongoing culturewar quandary of what is it to be a man generally, but particularly what is it to be a good man for Sarah. And how do you talk about that? And how do you talk about talking about that? And is it helpful, unfinished as I am, to speak from the pulpit about this?

Gilly, I believe is going to work through the second half of the household code section of Ephesians next week. So we have two weeks. I invite all within the sound of my voice to send me answers on a postcard. I implore you to rekindle small groups. I invite you for cheese after the service.

I’m winding my way toward husbands/wives - which I maintain is but a subset of the larger and more challenging appeal to submit to one another as a church. But in this, the gender etc question does present peculiar challenges to chat we might have.

Then I have too short a thread on the challenges to and opportunities of submission in households generally.

Then I’ll try to touch husbands and wives.

Householding: a conflict of submissions

It is salient that Paul positions his call to submission as a logical extension of being filled by the Spirit, and that he concludes “This mystery is profound”. The counter cultural household code he was commending to them was supernaturally predicated then, and cannot be other than supernaturally predicated now.

Today, there are various aspects of our social and familial life which rest heavily on the peace made plausible by our spiritual forefathers - we are still riding on fraying coat tails Tom Holland's Dominion’s Christendom. The humane quality of a human, interdependent households until recently has been one of those inheritances.

The contemporary shift is not so much away from God per se, but towards an infatuation with the giantism of consumerism’s empire and the security of totalitarian technology in a trajectory that wars against the particularism and personalism of the humane household.

Unregulated, technology optimises for abstraction and fungibility, rewarding conformity to its own imperial logic. Today the household is rendered subservient and precariously the imperialist logic of the therapeutic state aided by the market’s logic of hyper financialisaton - atomising the domestic as only dormitory pods - consolidating all other welfare as a specialised service provision. Modernity’s businesses, schools, asylums, factories have supplanted the household, as the place for nurture, formation, belonging, learning, labour etc.

By contrast, for Paul, households were dehumanised by Graeco-Roman imperialism’s abstraction and exploitation locating its control precisely within the household as an extension of empire.

In both cases gender is involved, however, as then, so now, I would argue gender is far secondary to the political egregore of empire and exploitation. In both cases what is needed, and what the spirit enables, is cultivating entities, cooperations, covenants at the intermediate scale - individuals freed from submission to empire, freed to submit to one another and commit to a locality.

Submit to one another ~ refs

The choices is not submit to one another or submit to nothing. The choice is submit to one another or submit to empire, to the powers, to the ideologies.

I found Rachel Held Evans essay on Interpretative Pitfalls around NT Household Codes, concisely frames the quite formal arrangement of householding enmeshed as an agent of the state - with the conflict Christian freedom would bring to the

Peter and Paul’s version of the household codes as a sort of radical Christian remix of familiar Greco-Roman philosophy regarding household structure. Central to the prevailing philosophy of the day was the idea that a free man ruled over his household as a sovereign, exercising unilateral authority over his subordinate wives, children, and slaves. Preserving this household structure was thought to be critical to preserving society as a whole. Many Roman officials believed the household codes to be such an important part of Pax Romana that they passed laws ensuring its protection. In fact, Christians were finding themselves at odds with some of these laws

Which Cynthia Long Westfall’s Paul & Gender makes more broad that the imperial influence was not monolithically one gender.

The hierarchical relationships of gender were embedded in a system far more complex than is generally recognized in biblical studies, which usually seems to assume a nuclear household and fails to recognize the mother’s authority in the Greco-Roman family.Authority in the household and society did not invariably follow lines of gender, since a woman could be a head of a household (materfamilias), a mother of sons, a patron of men, a master of male slaves, and a supervisor of male servants.

Christianity radical freedom, far more fundamental disrupts membership of monolithic governance. The Greeks have only a nascent sense of the person as valuable and agentic apart from centralised order. I think of this as a revolution similar to Napster disrupting the record industry, or Web3 doing the same.

I have gained much from Emmanuel Mounier’s writing on Personalism, which I love an excuse to squeeze in. He captures something of what being filled with the spirit does, to a shocking ability to exit ~ suggesting in some part why Paul would need to offer a restabilisation.

The man of antiquity is absorbed in the city and the family, subservient to a destiny that is blind, nameless and stronger than the gods themselves. … The philosophers value only impersonal thought and its static order, which is the order of nature as well as of ideas. To them the singular appears as a blemish, whether in nature or in consciousness. … It is Christianity that, first of all, imports into these gropings a decisive notion of the person. We can hardly comprehend today what a complete scandal this was to the thought and sensibility of the Greeks. Whilst for them, multiplicity was an evil inadmissible to the spirit, Christianity made it into an absolute, by affirming the creation ex nihilo, and the eternal destiny, of each and every person. The supreme Being which through love brings them into existence no longer mikes the world a unity through the abstraction of the idea, but by an infinite capacity for the indefinite multiplication of these separate acts of love. Far from being an imperfection, this multiplicity, proceeding from super-abundance, bears that superabundance in itself as an illimitable interchange of love. Long was this scandal of the multiplicity of souls to vex whatever survived of the sensibility of the ancient world

Westfall goes on highlight how, while suboptimal, there was some semblance of self-regulation, wherever men were in authority, by nature of the corporate structure, they were also under authority. It is a great addlement to our contemporary application, that we lack even this, so well intended complementarians wreak havoc for not having cultivated extended networks of wider co-submission.

Pauline corpus has historically been incorrectly interpreted as positively supporting the hierarchy and power of the imperial government and adopting, reinforcing, and pragmatically extending the hierarchical authority and power structure of men over women in the Christian community. Meanwhile, the influence of Christianity on Western political and social systems eventually diminished hierarchical authority between men and moved toward shared power and away from class systems, … since men were no longer under a comparable hierarchical authority either in government, society, or family, the hierarchical structure based on gender was changed and transferred to the nuclear family, which was more isolated from societal and political structures… male authority in the household came to be applied to every man and husband in a way that was far more absolute than it was either in the Roman Empire or particularly in Pauls household codes, and that authority has lacked checks and balances in the churches and religious traditions that continue to advocate it.

Lastly, on vignettes of households, I have much love for Poet and Essayist, Wendall Berry, whose account in is book What Are People For? paints this de facto contemporary household code, the norming of a form of detached and consumerist domestic arrangement which is disenfranchised and subordinate to the market, which he contrasts with a more holistic form that seems inaccessible to most of us.

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.

There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, “mine” is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as “ours.” This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction.

The Opportunity of Submission

Paul addresses the collective to conspire together to be a counter culture. He addresses, as explored just now, not so much the nuclear family, not so much the individual. Paul, is speaking to the church-as-church about it’s governance within and between households. If he is speaking to us, he is speaking to a presumed entity which isn’t there to apply.

I have a vision of church as submitted to one another, a church within a zeal to heal the land. Church as a household of households. Church as a mutual aid group. Church as an incubator, as stem and branch, as trellis. Church as fractal infrastructure - the small patterning the large. Church as collective risk mitigation and the creation of opportunities otherwise impossible to the atomic individual.

What would it look like for church as a body to consider it the responsibility of the more-than-sum that we constitute, to create the felicity conditions for total joined-up diverse unity. I am terrible at making sermons practical.

Submit as a random practice

I consider there are uncomfortable exercises of a shared life we could spring. Submit your bank statement to a small group member. Submit your web history to a housemate. Submit your calendar as bookable to others.

Submit as a coordinated practice

I know 41 isn’t a readily reproducible pattern book, for all sorts of reasons, but in the smallest ways there is a submission to one another. 10 millennials have found it within their benefit to submit their Monday nights to synchronise - to the exclusion of all other options. Barring a couple of Christmas Days, we done this every Monday for five years. There is a economic pragmatism and practical necessity for our doing so but could there not also be for church? So many small group suffer churn, entropy, mission creep, devolution -

Submit by persons according to role

Such as church is personalistic, it is not submissiveness in general or as a system, but the gift of deference by individuals discerning according the hat they wear, the roles they adopt, the choreography of our interdependent life.

So, husbands, love your wives. If we have time. ~ then Gilly will perhaps explore other personas within a rubric of co-submitted types.

Husbands, love your wives

So, to look at the specific opportunity of submission within marriage. I would be interested to discuss Love as a subset of submit - it is here in context the magnanimity of the party with greater strength and privilege.

Husbands love your wives - Theologically under-problematised and so under-emphasised as a part of our household code.

Do I love Sarah? Yes. Am I loving Sarah? Well, I’m not not loving Sarah. On a scale of 1 to 10. Love is ineffable. No, it’s effing not. But, what then are we talking about when we talk about love like this? I think we’re theologically fuzzy on ‘love’

Love has not been constructed as a well defined problem to solve. Apart from really egregious failure points Love’s minima isn’t defined and Love’s extremes or excellences aren’t signposted. Marital love, in church, is taken to be self-evident, or subjective, or secondary.

Evangelicalism has been midwife and handmaiden to unlimited and unaccountable blandness in advocating mild mannered middle class masculinity and mild mannered middle class marriages. I think, by privatising marriage for sensitivity and discretion, and elevating “judge not that you be not judged” and we eschew excellence and so lacklustre love is legitimised. I speak for myself.

Difficult as the one-size-fits-all forum of the weekly homily as sole vehicle for content distribution is ill suited for the nuanced and intimate appeal to love your wives. Making much of marriage to a diverse, under-married, suffering cosmopolitan audience feels either callous (you’re welcome) or needs be convolutedly over-caveated (you’re welcome).

From church I inherited a sort of Babette’s Feast awkwardness about romance - stilted and anachronistic and present at hand. Where as, loving your wives is a very embodied thing, it has an inherent carnality that makes it easy minimally to deprecate as a secondary issue if not actually castigate as unclean. And this is quite apart from our theology of sex which is incoherent and deracinated by purity culture ~ more generally as church we hugely neglect the broader notion that durable marital affection is difficult and worth prioritising as a missionally primary question. A swathe of the dechurched have drifted with legitimate complaint that they have tasted and seen mediocre marriages espoused and normatised from the pulpit - in a case of Jeremiah 31’s our fathers having eaten sour grapes but now our teeth are set on edge [Jer31v29]. Man hands misery on to man.

Rather. I want to believe that a church can invigorate its language for talking about love, we can celebrate embodiment and can signpost excellence in romantic relationships without naive romanticisation.

Paul says Husbands love your wives - why did it need to be said? Because it is not being done.

Why we don’t love

I’d say there are pull factors and push factors.

It’s notable that in Revelation’s letter to the church in Ephesus, John says this: “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.” (commentaries suggest this refers both-and to love-for-christ, and love-for-one-another) (Mk12v29–31; 1Jn4v20)

By contrast with submit, where the active commission of insubordinationseems visible. Husbands’ failure to love is more typically omission, a dialling down, a slinking away, an investing elsewhere.

The bible is full of don’t stop maxims - as don’t grow weary of doing good; don’t give up meeting together; don’t deprive one another for reasons other than prayer; don’t give the devil a foothold; don’t believe yourself to be forgiven little and so love little, love much; don’t become lukewarm or I will spit you out of my mouth

Don’t become lukewarm, but I do. This my unlove of gradual absenteeism, I sin against Sarah predominantly by negligence, I embezzle her value by silence and defame her glory by underpricing and so underpaying, I don't show up for her, I withhold the constancy she deserves, and so I dehumanise her, I unlove through passivity.

Why? My fallenness and the path of least resistance. But there are other threads worth unpicking

Notable in Mt24’s observation that in later days the love of many will grow cold, it says, “because lawlessness is increased” - The causal direction is that way round. When faced with antipathy to order and authority, the tendency of many is to grow cold in love. That resonated with me - more could be said.

If you are a young Christian man in a central London church just now, there be some favourable ratios. If you want to be an indecisive millennial prevaricating indefinitely, wasting her youth. It is a buyers market. A more grumpy version of myself would say, love your wives - marry them in a timely manner.

There are also push factors. The task of loving your wife is costly and risky, the costs and risks are volatile and unpredictable. It seems pretty hairy to venture this - there would be reciprocal caution to the difficulty of submitting to a husband - where have all the good men gone etc. The landscape of gender relations right now is starkly antagonistic, that is the water we swim in, that is the tide against which Paul is saying love.

Husbands love your wives: Paul offers: sanctify her, cleanse her, wash her, nourish her, cherish her. Partly this is remixing rituals at Ephesus’ Cult of Artemis. Partly I think it is to be taken at face value. Wash her. Nourish her. How? How do we cultivate husbands who are brave to, let alone competent? Husbands gracious to take it in the face as the local chapter of a patriarchy you didn’t vote for. Gracious to discover all available chivalry is patronising. Gracious and not glib to a feminism that has overplayed its hand. Proactive to pay the price, unflapped, gentle, resilient, competent to love.

Love has found difficult and left untried, and the ensuing husbanding that doesn’t wrestle with love’s difficulty is a parody of itself, kafkaesque managerialism phoning it in, simps for a waifus, capricious diffident dabbling, hedging, ghosting, boys who can shave, men without chests, still born adults without means or motive to come of age, immasculete yawning jailers of the tawdry prison of a love dimmed. I speak for myself.

Now, the line here is not, Man up and love your wives. It is, be filled by the spirit and on that basis alone, love your wives, excessively.

How Love should be

I’ll riff on a theme, at risk of stating the obvious, familiar and self-evident. What is this love? At what cost, to what benefit should we budget this love? Without vision the people perish. The vision is to turn it up to 11. The vision is to make love less vanilla. To love-as-Christ-loved is not sentimentality turned up to 11, it is severity turned up to 11.

Christ-as-husband is, in many senses, the zenith of our cosmology.

Marriage feast of the lamb, for the bride of Christ, we are absolutely betting the farm if this metaphor. There is also no neutral marriage. You do not choose to make your marriage a picture of your cosmology. It is. Your marriage is a picture of your cosmology, your cosmology is a picture of your marriage. And, specifically, your husbanding is your Christology. Accordingly we sing Jesus-is-my-girlfriend worship songs because we are in a casual dating relationship in a flat universe pursuing optionality as purveyors of moralistic therapeutic deism - maybe.

Husbands Love as missional

Your marriage is a picture of your total worldview, performed before a watching world. As the wedding day is calculated as a public display, so too your marriage on going, orchestrate it to be an answer for the hope that is in you. Do it for the joy. Be conspicuous. Use words because you have to. You are God’s work, created for work, living stones, living words, moving pictures, literal metaphors, the responsibility is to live with severity, to live acutely subjunctive lives, symbolise something legibly. Do your loving calibrated to the notion that it is not nothing, Not automatic not familiar. Love is not a private acts between two consenting adults, it is infrastructure. It is patterning a cosmology, proving a hypothesis, feeding the parts and the whole, resourcing the constitution of a household and all that it bears.

Husbands Love as selective of chosen people demonstrated with a chosen person

Love like Christ is not a general and vague benevolence to all things. It is something which particularises its objects. How does Christ love me? With infinite, selective love. Jesus loves you but I am his favourite. Should be offensive.As such polygamy by finite lovers is a heresy of presumption - we can only image infinite love by infinite selectivity. So be exclusive. So be a visible diagram of exclusivity. So burn your boats.

Husbands Love as positive hedonism a new being

Not enough is said of being one body. Loving your wife is loving yourself. Euphemise that. I’m not exactly sure what to say on this point that is not truistic or completely esoteric. What by the relative solipsism of yoga and somatic bodywork, you are now to do as a co-somatic singularity - in all of life. The notion of the pleasure body, should be antidotal to a any puritanical prurience and austerity regarding sensate and embodied existence.

Husbands Love as excessive abundance

The nature of Christ’s love for us is more-than-enough. And the implication of Paul’s cascade up to this point is that this excess is ours now, by his spirit. In whatever your peculiar gifts are, and whatever her peculiar love language is. Write a blank cheque. Make a plan to be exploitable. Design for unlimited freeloading.

Husbands Love as if it is the precondition for submission - not vice versa

The preconditions for inviting submission are that it is meaningful, and not exorbitantly risky. Make it so. Design the choreography of a marriage such that it is inherently accountable and inherently weight bearing. I am an unbeliever in the nuclear family. The notion that it takes a village to raise a child, is the abridge version that we are in fact contingent beings who should be imbedded supporting and supported - because we are trying to do a difficult thing.

Husbands Love as spiritual warfare

Love, being mindful of what stands against it - world/flesh/devil. So, on the one hand, be so extremely married that it would be opposed in the spiritual realm, and then, be so extremely married that it would be robust to resist. Takes seriously that you are not married in isolation for isolation, but rather your union participates in church as church.

End

All to say, I would love to chat, on a scale of 1-10 how householded are you? It is nobody's fault. Except everybody's, we all bear responsibility to work towards vibrant house churches, intergenerational family vitality, utility of activated domestic giving employment and hope

I have no qualms being marriage maximalist as if this were exclusionary. Everyone should be in households - at whatever capacity you are able, and those households, most effectively have a rooted covenant at the centre of it, and if that’s not a marriage, I an also be convinced by monastic forms of community, who are submitted to place and covenanted to each other.

Again, by accident of circumstance we’re doing this at 41 - trying to, imperfectly, be marriage maximalists, by incorporating singles and married with high dignity and purpose in a common cause submitted to one another.

This richness of submitted life, I would wish for what we build at Montgomery Hall, under some banner as - every home a vicarage. Or such. I’m riffing.

Be filled with the spirit, singing, giving thanks and submitting to one another.

The choice is submit to one another or submit to empire, to the powers, to the ideologies.

You are one in Christ now, so be united and stand firm in him.

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