Gloria Dei Lutheran Church | Urbandale, Iowa

I'll Never See Life the Same Again: I'll Never See my Spouse the Same

Pastor Meyer’s Sermon

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our heavenly Father and from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus, our Christ.

February 17, 2009. Does anyone know the importance of that date. It’s the day where analog television broadcast will be rendered obsolete. They will stop here in the United States from being broadcast. If you have a TV at home that has rabbit ears on top of it and only receives analog transmission, well, they will be obsolete on February 17, 2009, in favor of high definition TV or HDTV for short. It’s the thing to have.

Everything looks so much better on HDTV or so I’ve heard but only seen just recently. And I have to tell you that I was impressed. The colors and the picture were so vivid. It was like looking through a window into the actual sporting event. You could see the sweat dripping off of the baseball players’ foreheads. You could see the grass being kicked up as the football player was running down the field. And now I know why those actresses and actors look so good on CSI. It’s because they’re wearing orange makeup. And you can also tell whether the actors have shaved or not. And so, needless to say, I was impressed. I went home. I told my wife, Lynn, we need to get high definition television. Well, that flew over about as well as when I said we need to get a motorcycle. But the point is that once I saw high definition television, I never look at TV viewing the same again.

This week, we continue our series of messages as we explore how the resurrection of Jesus changes the way we view our life. You see, once we’ve had our Easter moment, once we’ve seen the resurrected Jesus for who He really is and what He has really done for us in our lives, we will not see life again the same. Last week, we were invited to look at funerals from a different vantage point. And this week, we consider how, through our Easter moments, we will never see our spouses the same.

Now before I go on, I need to do a time out. Because if you’re single, it could be very easy for you to just shut your ears off and think this sermon doesn’t have anything to do with you, that this message doesn’t pertain to you at all and that’s not true. Because you never know who God is going to bring into your life and it is my prayer that this message will help to prepare you and also this message is for those of you who may be divorced or maybe you’ve lost your spouse because he or she has died. Because, again, you never know who God will bring to you in your life. Maybe it’s someone who is in a rocky patch in their relationship now looking to you for advice. You see, scripture says that we should use it for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness and it is my prayer, again, that this message would give some insight that you might be able to help someone who is in need of some advice.

So in our reading today, Paul is inviting us to look at our spouses not through the eyes of this world, not through the analog way of viewing things, if you will, but through the clear, crisp, vivid viewing of high definition. Did you catch it from what Paul says right at the beginning of our reading from Ephesians? He said, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Now through this whole area of scripture here, Paul is talking about husbands and wives. He goes on to talk about children and parents. He’s talking about a whole family affair. But the idea is submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. It is through our Easter moments that we start to see things differently. We start to see our spouse in a different way and we hear Paul encouraging us to go high definition on our spouse, to look at our spouse through the vivid picture of the word “submit.”

Now before we can go any further, we need to arrive at an answer to an important question and that is what does it mean to submit? Because many of us, when we hear that word, we think that submit means to obey. And often times, when we hear submit, we think it means to blindly follow and we can’t help but tack on some of the negative connotations that follow along with that word, like inferiority. But in order for us to understand what Paul is talking about when he says submit, we need to understand what Paul is saying in this chapter.

And he starts out right at the beginning of Chapter 5. He gives us a clue. He says, “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.” He starts us out by saying, “He dearly loves children.” Be imitators of God.

You know, just a couple of weeks ago, I was getting my son ready for bed and he was laying in bed and he looked at me and he said, “Daddy, how do you know that you’re my daddy?” And I said, “Well, some of the things you do are some of the things that I would do when I was that age.” And let’s think about that. How often have we seen in our children some of the same characteristics that we do, some of the same behaviors that we have? How many times have we caught ourselves saying, “Oh, my goodness, I just did exactly what my mommy would do,” or “I just did exactly what my Dad would do.” Paul is saying here that to be children of God, just like we see in our kids or we see in ourselves, we take on the characteristics of God the Father and that main characteristic is to submit to one another.

Now there’s a different connotation here, though, of what Paul is talking about when he says submit because, you see, the root word in the original language means simply “to serve each other under some specific pattern.” And I think this is so important that I want you to repeat it after me, okay? Are you ready? To serve each other under some specific pattern. It doesn’t imply inferiority. It doesn’t imply some kind of lesser value. It doesn’t imply that one is controlling the other. No, Paul is merely saying to serve each other under some specific pattern.

To get to the understanding of what he’s talking about, I think we can look at sports. This past week was opening week for baseball. And we can look at baseball and we can even get to an understanding of what Paul’s talking about. When a pitcher and a catcher run out onto the field, they’re both on the same team. They both have the same desire to want to win. They both want to be able to make contributions to winning the game but the thing is that the contributions they give are different. The normal order of things is that the catcher calls the pitches. The catcher basically tells the pitcher what pitch to throw and then the pitcher submits and throws the pitch. It doesn’t mean that sometimes the pitcher might shake off that particular sign and say, “No, I want to throw a different pitch.” It doesn’t mean that there may be a conference out on the mound where the pitcher and catcher are talking about what is the best pitch to throw to get Mighty Casey out. But in the natural order of things, it’s the catcher who calls the pitches. Now does that mean the pitcher is somehow an inferior player than the catcher? Does it mean the pitcher is not as good because he submits to the catcher’s selection of pitches? No. It’s the natural pattern. It’s the natural order of things.

And Paul is telling us here that marriage is a team project and Paul is describing the natural order of things. That’s what he’s talking about here in Ephesians where he says, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.” It’s the natural order of things.

The same for husbands. “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word.” It’s the natural order of things. Paul is saying that the idea of submitting is simply to recognize or acknowledge the God-given role that has been given. So look at the spouse as someone who you serve, not someone who serves you, rather someone who you serve.

I had one person say, and I think this picture is a great analogy for it, that a woman is not made out of man’s head to be dominated by him. A woman is not made out of man’s feet to be trampled upon. No, but rather a woman is made out of the man’s side to be equal with him, just under the arm to be protected by him, close to the heart to be loved by him. Submitting means that we serve the other person, the spouse is who we serve.

Now that’s hard for us to do and it’s hard for us to think about in this world. Our pride gets in the way. We think, “My needs are pretty important, too, and that’s important for me to focus on.” And we become interested in only our own interests and not the interests of the spouse and so we become so focused on ourselves that we shut out our spouse.

You see, that was the whole idea of our gospel reading that we just read, this idea that the disciples were arguing among themselves who was the greatest. Well, whoever may be the greatest means that there are others who are inferior, who are not so great. But what did Jesus say? Jesus says, “But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest and the one who rules like the one who serves, I am among you as one who serves.” You see, Jesus could have been prideful. After all, let’s face it, He had all the power. He could heal. He could make food abundantly. He could change water into wine. He could speak with unsurpassed wisdom. He could raise the dead. Jesus had it all and let’s face it, the people wanted to make Him king. He could have forced all of us to serve Him but what does He say? He said, “I have not come to be served but to serve.” Jesus humiliates Himself for us. He washes His disciples’ feet. He endures bitter lashings and insults. Jesus submitted Himself all the way to the cross for us, to serve us, for that was the specific pattern God had laid down, that someone had to die for our sins. Jesus submitted Himself for us. Why? So that we then can submit to one another out of reverence to Christ.

You see, Jesus becomes our power source. When you want to watch high definition television, you can’t use your old television set. You need new circuitry. Your antennae needs new circuitry. You need a new power source and so, through forgiveness of sins, to what Jesus has given us, He rewires us so we begin to learn how to see our spouses in high definition with Jesus as our power source.

So what happens? We begin to see our spouse as one who’s dearly loved by God. We begin to see our spouse as one who we serve just as Jesus has served us. We begin to look at our spouse with the love that God also loves us with. That’s what it means to submit to one another out of reverence to Christ.

But it also means that it means a higher cost. When you want to buy a higher definition television, they cost more than a regular television. So there’s a higher cost when you’re setting out to see your spouse in high definition. Because it means that your pride needs to be in check. It means that the interest of your spouse is above your own interests. It means that whatever you do in life or decisions you make, you do it with your spouse in mind. You keep asking how is this going to affect her or him. Yes, it is a higher cost. But, my friends, I guarantee you that once you see your spouse in high definition, once you submit to each other, to serve each other, once you use Jesus as your power source and you’re willing to pay that higher cost, that old analog way of before will just not be the same. Amen.