Christ Church Washington D.C.

I’m pleased to be with you. I feel right at home. I’m from Portland, Oregon. It’s kind of par for the course for me. I also lived in Cambridge right between Harvard and MIT for about 10 years. I actually spent time at Harvard Divinity School. I think I went to school with some of those people out there. This is like the old days. I feel very comfortable. Anyway, think of it as like white noise.
I think that’s a strategy. You might fall asleep if you do, but hopefully you’ll stay awake. I want to take you to the passage that I’ve been assigned, and I’m actually very pleased to have it assigned to me. It’s from Ephesians chapter 6, beginning at verse 5. So I’ve preached my way through Ephesians before, but never focused exclusively on these verses. And I’ve given these verses a lot of thought over the years.
I’ve been preparing for this message. It’s kind of odd to say, considering the content of what I’ll be reading to you in a minute. But unfortunately, the first part of the message will sound a lot more like a lecture. And the reason for that is there’s a whole lot of disinformation that I need to clear up in order for you to be ready for the exhortation that comes at the end. But anyway, so here we are in Ephesians chapter 6, beginning at verse 5.
Verse 5.
Let’s pray. Father, I pray that the words of my mouth and meditations of my heart will be acceptable to you. For you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
It’s going to sound a lot more like a lecture. Hopefully it won’t feel like a fire hydrant. Just a torrent of information that just kind of goes past you. I need to clear away some dead wood as I noted before. The first verse that I read, verse 5, begins with the word servant. Let’s address the elephant in the room. It’s doulos, which is the Greek word that’s often translated as slave. Some versions use the translation bondservant.
To kind of soften the blow. But that is just the simple fact of the matter. It’s the word that would be used for slaves. So, as I noted, we have a lot of disinformation that we have to kind of work through when it comes to the subject of slavery and with regard to the past. Essentially, what we have been told over the last, say, 100 years or so,
is increasingly strident in terms of how this way of thinking is promoted. We’ve been told that the West, Western civilization, is somehow uniquely to blame or complicit with the institution of slavery. That, in fact, that this is something that if the Western civilization didn’t exist and promote, we wouldn’t have to deal with. But that’s actually a lie.
The truth of the matter is that Western civilization is not uniquely guilty for the institution of slavery. Western civilization is uniquely to praise in the sense that it’s the only civilization that has taken a stand against slavery and outlawed it. And that’s something that’s underappreciated and underdeveloped. One of the books, by the way, I brought a couple of books. I’m going to share with you the books. I have a friend named George Grant. And for years, I would,
I would just like quote in the course of my preaching from passages and books that I found to be useful. And George said, you need to really just take the books into the pulpit with you and read from them because people need to read again. And this might help promote reading if you actually read things from books that you like. So this is a really valuable book, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture by Orlando Patterson. It’s probably the best treatment on the subject of slavery that you can find. It was published back in
1992, and it won the Book of the Year Award. And Orlando Patterson actually is a sociologist that teaches at Harvard. I think he’s still there. I think he’s about 85 years old now. But he’s also Jamaican, so he’s descended from slaves. And what he sought to do when he initially began his research on the subject of slavery is understand why, as I noted before, the West was somehow conducive to the institution of slavery when the rest of the world was somehow immune.
What he discovered is exactly the reverse, what I noted for you a minute ago, and that what we actually see is in the West the triumph of freedom, something that has not occurred anywhere else in any other civilization, and he tries to understand in the book why that’s the case.
Native Americans, for example, didn’t have slaves. In fact, they did. In fact, slavery, we know today, is something that has been instituted or was practiced, the institution of slavery was practiced in every civilization of the world. And if you look at the top 10 slave-holding civilizations, the United States doesn’t even make the top 10.
It’s much further down the list. Anyway, but when it comes to this matter of sort of like the noble savage or the idea that these are people that wouldn’t have put slavery into use or wouldn’t have resorted to slavery in the past, the archaeological evidence actually refutes that. So here’s from page 11 in the book, and I’m afraid this is a little involved, but I think it’s worth hearing.
The historical evidence on slavery among hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists is quite rich, making it possible to understand how the dilemma was resolved in these societies and what this implies for our story. Slaveholding and trading existed among the earliest and most primitive peoples. Archaeological evidence reveals that slaves were among the first items of trade within and between primitive Germans and Celts, and the institution was an established part of life.
He was wondering about the Americas, he goes on to say a little later, by the way, one of the things that’s really worthwhile about this book is he treats the practice of slavery on different continents, in different parts of the world, and North American and South American slavery amongst Aboriginal peoples is the most horrific the world has ever known. So it’s not as though this was a place where just people lived in a sort of pristine and sort of bucolic, Edenic-like environment.
But here’s something about the Cherokees. The pre-European Cherokees were typical of slave-holding hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists. Most prisoners of war were killed, though some were occasionally adopted as full members of the victor’s clan. In a few cases, however, captives were reduced to genuine enslavement. They became people without clan membership and as such without any rights, even the right to live, and over whom the master had absolute power.
So this is the case around the world. Now, when it comes to the role of Christianity in the story of freedom, this is something that he, I think, does a very nice job of showing us the Christian faith that’s responsible for. So at the very end, in the coda, at the back of the book, he treats the subject of Christianity’s influence on the institution or the valorization of freedom. He notes, and by the way, as I read this, I’m not saying that he,
theologically, is putting things the way I would put them, but nevertheless, I think the overall tone and message of what I’m about to read is worth hearing. Spiritually, the Son of God made himself incarnate, then gave his life in order to redeem mankind from spiritual thralldom, or slavery, and to make people free and equal before God. All add up to a value complex that is not only unparalleled in any other culture,
but in its profundity and power is superior to any other single complex of values conceived by mankind. Individually liberating, socially energizing, and culturally generative, freedom is undeniably the source of Western intellectual mastery, the engine of its extraordinary creativity, and the open secret of the triumph of Western culture in one form or another over other cultures of mankind.
Today, almost all peoples embrace the ideal of personal freedom, whatever their actual practice, and that many have come to define the value as instinctively human in order to deny its quintessentially Western origins, are telling testimony of its overpowering appeal and inherent goodness. So, Christianity, the wellspring of not only spiritual freedom, but political freedom and personal freedom in the history of the world.
It’s not like a fringe view. A recent book by Tom Holland, Dominion, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, is an attempt to understand just why we should not let the Christian faith fade away because so much of the benefits of the world that we live in, so many of the benefits of the world that we live in are due to the influence of Christian faith in our culture.
Let’s dive into the subject of why it was universal in terms of slavery and why it emerges spontaneously around the world. It’s not something, in other words, that you have to be taught to do. It kind of emerges from the soil, as you could say. The first is the demand problem. So there’s a demand and then there’s a supply. So the demand problem is an easy problem to think about, and that is, well, inexpensive labor, obvious.
People had an interest in inexpensive labor. But there were also, of course, debased appetites that people wanted to satisfy, and the use of slaves to satisfy or gratify those appetites was part of the demand problem. But there’s a supply problem. This is the thing that’s not addressed, I think, well when we think about what we’re told concerning the history of slavery in the world. The supply problem deals with the fact that, first of all, there was a problem
with man stealing. Most famously, I think, in scripture is the fact that we have, you know, the sons of Jacob sell their brother Joseph into slavery. That’s a man stealing episode. And so they sell him into slavery and he goes down to Egypt and you know the rest of the story. Hopefully you do anyway. But within the Old Testament and New Testament, both testaments, this is a prohibited practice. It’s condemned. It’s condemned in the law in Exodus chapter 21 and then in the New Testament when the
Apostle Paul is listing the people who are engaged in abhorrent behaviors, he lists slavers as one of those, a certain kind of person who is going to be excluded from the kingdom of God and that’s in 1 Timothy chapter 1 verse 10. But the other dimension that I think might be new to you is a concept that Orlando Patterson refers to or is termed social death. And what happens in primitive societies and pre-industrial
societies often is there’s a kind of social displacement that occurs for different reasons. It can be war, famine, plague, different things cause people to lose their social connections. And because they’ve lost their social connections and they find themselves in a society that is pretty tightly bound together and already has a well-established status hierarchy, there’s really no place to put them. There’s just no place to put folks except bringing
them into households to serve as laborers, that’s about the only thing that you can do. Now, this assumes, of course, that we’re in a pre-industrial society that’s largely subsistence in character. In other words, there’s just not a lot of surplus when it comes to wealth, not a lot of institutions outside, say, the household or perhaps the priesthood or the governing authorities to deal with the problems of displacement when it comes to people. So consequently, this is what happens.
People get put to work, and they get put to work usually in households because there’s really just no other option. And this puts this in a completely different light than I think we’re normally encouraged to think about the institution of slavery. But it can occur through the economic destitution, not being able to keep your promises, to pay your debts, as I noted before, warfare, displacement.
The thing that made the West unique in its ability to be able to address slavery has to do with, first of all, the institution of the Christian faith and the prohibitions that were established legally. And then after that, another thing to think about is the fact that the Industrial Revolution helped to generate the kind of surplus wealth that made it possible for us to fund institutions to help people who were destitute,
help them, and they could help. So all of that comes into play. By the way, another interesting feature or another book worth referring to if you’re interested in the topic of slavery and antiquity is Aristotle’s politics. And one of the things that kind of slips past people when they read it is in book one, chapter four, Aristotle actually speculates on a future or thinks a little bit
about the possibilities of what could occur if we were able to create mechanical means by which to create things. In other words, robots, various labor-saving devices. Now, he’s working with the language that he was familiar with or the ideas he was familiar with, and he refers to the tripods of Hephaestus and the statues of Daedalus. And he says, in effect, we wouldn’t need slaves if we simply had the machines that would be able to produce
things that we need to live well. And so with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the surplus wealth that it created, we now have the means by which and the margins with which to develop the institutions that make it possible for us to live in a world without slavery. Something to think about. It’s not a coincidence that at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we saw the abolition of the slave trade throughout the Western world.
So with all of that said, let’s get to the subject of freedom. When we think about freedom, what are we talking about? I think one of the things that we can, a trap that we can fall in intellectually is to fall into kind of the libertarian way of thinking about freedom, basically having no constraints, doing whatever you want. The problem with that is that when people are permitted to do anything they want, they often do things that actually harm themselves and make them slaves to their own appetites.
I’m dealing with a problem like that right now in my church where a young man largely spent the early part of his life in a very structured and healthy environment, and then when he was finally allowed to go out on his own, fell into every possible bad habit you could possibly think of, and now is basically a slave to his appetites and is essentially unemployable.
I think it’s helpful when we think about the subject of slavery, particularly as we think about the New Testament and Paul’s teaching on slavery. If we look at 1 Corinthians 7, beginning at verse 21, there the Apostle Paul says, Art thou called being a servant? Care not for it. In other words, are you called while you are a slave? Care not for it. But if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.
In other words, if you have the ability to purchase your freedom or there’s a prospect of manumission, take advantage of it. For he that is called in the Lord being a servant is the Lord’s free man. Likewise, also he that is called being free is Christ’s servant. Ye are bought with a price. Be ye not the servants of men.
Let every man wherein he is called therein abide with God. In other words, to summarize it and to render it into a more contemporary idiom, if you were, you’ve been bought with a price because Christ through his redeeming work has purchased you. You’re not your own. You belong to him. Whether you’re bound or free, you’re still bound to him. So with those things in mind, I’d like to reflect a little bit
on the nature of freedom. And this is an important, again, background for us to think about with regard to the exhortation I’m going to give in a minute. Worldly people tend to think of freedom as an absolute and truth as relative. In other words, truth, if we acknowledge it as absolute, would impinge upon my freedom to do as I please. Christians, of course, think and turn things around or see things correctly.
Truth is absolute and freedom is relative. Now, there’s a thinker, a philosopher named Isaiah Berlin that’s given us a couple of helpful ways to think about freedom. One of those ways to think about freedom is freedom from. So when we’re free from certain things, this is what he’s referring to. When we’re free from, say, political oppression, free from the bonds of slavery and so forth. But then there’s freedom for.
And so what Berlin notes is that when we speak about freedom, we have to be clear what we’re talking about. We’re free from something, but what are we free for is also a consideration. Now, one way to think about this is to think about running in a marathon, something I’ve never done. I’ve never run in a marathon, but perhaps some of you have run in a marathon. Now, you could say, I live in America. I’m free to run in a marathon. But I want you to know that even though I’m free to run in a marathon, I’m really not free to run in a marathon.
I would die, right? In order to actually run a marathon, I would have to submit myself to a certain regime, you know, a discipline when it comes to practice and exercise and diet and so forth. And only after I have achieved the physical ability to run a marathon am I actually free to run a marathon. There’s nothing holding me back from running a marathon but the fact that I am unable to.
If you become capable of running a marathon I can run a marathon. I’m not going to try it but it’s basically just an illustration so don’t take me too seriously on that. Now what this is getting at is that when it comes to freedom there’s always a dimension of self-mastery that we have to consider. There’s a moral dimension to freedom particularly when we’re thinking about freedom for things.
There’s another frame of reference that’s helpful to think about this and it’s something that Bob Dylan sang. Any fans of Bob Dylan here? Two, three, older people, younger people who like listening to old LPs. Anyway, he sang a song, wrote a song during kind of his Christian period in the 1970s entitled You Gotta Serve Somebody. Anybody remember that song, You Gotta Serve Somebody? It goes something like this.
You may serve the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody. Just think about Bob Dylan singing it. And then at that point, the chorus comes in, serve somebody. But the idea is that the prospect of serving just yourself is not an option. There is a reality that we find ourselves and a reality that’s larger than ourselves that we have to recognize. And we see this in the deliverance of the Israelites from Bonnage in Egypt.
Again and again, when Moses goes to Pharaoh, his message to Pharaoh from the Lord is, let my people go. That’s where it stops in the movies, but that’s not where it stops in the scriptures. So that they may serve me. Let my people go so that they may serve me. And we see this, as I noted, in Exodus chapter 8 verse 1, chapter 9 verse 1, and it’s in other locations.
So in the first account of the law that we have in Exodus chapter 20, the rationalization or the rationale, the justification for the Sabbath is what? Creation. God made the heavens and the earth and six days on the seventh day he rested. Therefore, God’s people should rest on the Sabbath day. But when you go to Deuteronomy, the justification for the Sabbath day is different.
There is you were slaves in the land of Egypt, but now you are my servants. And the sort of the tacit message or the implied message is he didn’t give you a day off, but I do. In other words, you’re my servants and you observe the Sabbath day and rest on that day. So that’s what’s in mind. Now, when it comes to our service, we think about serving God and we can also think about serving other people.
Let’s address those two things quickly. So at the service of God, there’s just a reality that you and I owe everything to the Lord, right? There is nothing that you have that you can take credit for. You know, the Apostle Paul, I think it’s in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 7, says, what do you have that you were not given? He asks that rhetorically. Well, obviously, you know, it’s all been given. It’s all been given.
You’re dependent in a radical way upon the mercy and goodness of God, but just even for your very existence, there’s that remarkable address that Paul gives on Mars Hill in Athens in chapter 17 of Acts. It’s verse 28 when he’s quoting Epimenides, I think is the guy he’s quoting. It was a Stoic philosopher. He says, in him we live and move and have our being.
The existence that we enjoy is due to the fact that we are deriving our existence from the goodness of God as he, in his goodness, provides all the conditions that are necessary for us to live. So in a fundamental way, we depend upon God, and when we sue for divorce, what we’re actually doing is harming ourselves. Sin is a kind of suicide,
and we’re a life. We need to think about sin in those terms, and rather than just simply as, you know, that stuff that I want to do that God tells me not to do. What the Lord is essentially saying to us is if you do that stuff, you cut yourself off from the very source of eternal life. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to go there. That’s stuff that can’t be reconciled with my character. Therefore, don’t go there. Don’t do that. There’s a philosopher named Alistair MacIntyre, and he had a, I think that’s a pithy way of putting it,
he said human beings are rational, maybe not always, but most of the time, or could be, dependent, meaning that we don’t actually generate our own existence in a very fundamental way in every facet of our being. We are dependent upon our creator, and we’re creatures, which is actually getting at this very point.
Created. When I hear the word creature, I think of creature double feature because I grew up in the 70s, but creature just means that you are created. You are a created thing. But then there’s the fact that we also are made to serve others. So when we think about our freedom and the moral dimension of our freedom, it’s to be exercised in the interest of other people. Thomas Hobbes, you know, in Leviathan notes, there’s that famous line when he’s reflecting upon the state of nature.
His notion of the state of nature is erroneous, but the line is great. Basically, it goes, in the state of nature, human existence is poor, solitary, brutish, and short. In other words, if you were really to be thrust out into the wilderness like Tarzan, you would not be raised by apes. If you were to live in the wilderness with wolves, they’d probably consume you.
You wouldn’t be cared for and suckled by them. And consequently, we need other people to live well. We are not islands. We need to work together. And wherever people work together, wherever people have to work together to do something productive in nature or character, hierarchies will emerge. It’s necessary for hierarchies to emerge. Somebody has to take charge of getting the project done. And there are going to be standards.
Standards when it comes to what constitutes good work and what is not up to standard. Because those two things are the case, hierarchies naturally emerge in the order of things. And this is not something that is hard to reconcile with the kingdom of God or hard to reconcile with Christian theology. In fact, the word hierarchy, hieros, arche, means sacred order.
Are consequently, in some sense, a reflection of a larger order that we find ourselves in. If we think about the order of things in the kingdom of God, there is what? A king. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? I mean, why can’t I be king? Or why do we need a king at all? We have a king. And the fact that the creator of the world that we live in is a king,
and productively with each other, we need to have hierarchies. Now, hierarchies can go bad. We live in a fallen world, but we all know that. So let’s finally get to the exhortation. Okay, returning to the text. I had to say all of that stuff in order to get to the point I want to make, or points I want to make. So returning to the text, here we see in verse 5,
Verse 5,
So in verse 5, we’re told that servants should be obedient to their masters, and we have the phrase, with fear and trembling. I think that what that brings to mind is the idea, of course, experiencing perhaps maybe punishment for failure to obey, but I’m not sure that’s the way we ought to think about this.
It’s considering the context and considering the fact that Paul, when he addresses masters, tells the masters to forbear threatening. Threatening because what? People aren’t doing what they’ve been told to do. What I think Paul is telling us is to see through these masters who are masters according to the flesh. Notice that phrase in verse 5, according to the flesh.
And so, even though servants are told to obey their masters, they are told to do so with singleness of heart as to Christ. In other words, seeing through those masters to the very source of all things. And, well, keeping that in mind, the term fear and trembling implies that we’re dealing not just with
human beings, but we’re dealing with God himself in Christ. And with sincerity of heart, not with eye service. I love that phrase, eye service, you know, sort of like, well, it reminds me of a joke. There were a couple of priests in a cathedral, and one of the priests is out in the North Ex, and he sees something, and he comes to the other priest and says,
Father, the Lord has appeared to us, and what should we do? And the other priest says, look busy. This idea of just kind of looking like you’re doing something in order to please the people who have authority over you, but not with sincerity of heart is what that’s getting at. Now, this requires a measure of self-mastery. It’s normal for people to resent the impositions,
of other people upon them, and the requirements that are made with regard to the things that they’re supposed to do and accomplish. And in order to prevent the kind of normal sort of human response that’s due to our sinful state, there needs to be a measure of self-mastery. So this is the paradox I think that I’d like to leave you with, is that if you want to be a good servant, you need to be a good master of yourself.
So when we think about Cain and Abel in chapter 4 of Genesis, we’re told that Cain was downcast because the Lord had accepted Abel’s offering but not his. But when the Lord addresses him, he says to him, why are you downcast? If you do what’s right, your offering will be received. And then he warns him, watch out, sin is crouching at the door.
And you must master it. If you don’t master it, it will master you. With that in mind, whenever we feel those impulses of, say, well, envy or jealousy or resentment or even rage, those are moments where we should master ourselves so that we don’t fall into the same pattern of behavior that we see with Cain.
He addresses masters, and he addresses them as though they are servants, and they are. Recall from the passage that I quoted from 1 Corinthians 7, they’ve been bought with a price. So even though they are masters according to the flesh, when it comes to spiritual matters, they are on the same level as those that are subject to them. So consequently, they have an overseer, they have someone who is a master over them,
they should do the same in the sense that they should with goodwill do service as to the Lord and not to men. They should look past their own interests to the interests of the Lord and think about their own conduct and how they treat their servants with the truth in mind that they are accountable to the Lord even as those servants are accountable to them. And with that in mind, forbear your threatening, forbear your threatening,
that you have a master as well, and that master will hold you accountable for how you treat your servants. And this brings me back to this notion of self-mastery being necessary to be a good servant, but self-mastery is even more important when it comes to being a good master, being somebody who’s in boss or in charge of other people, because tyranny is actually evidence that a person has lost control of himself.
A person who tends to be tyrannical, say, like someone like Nero, doesn’t really have a mastery of his own appetites and consequently uses people to satisfy those appetites at the cost of those people, but at the cost of his own soul as well. And so to be a person who is not guilty of tyranny means you have to have a lot of self-control, particularly when you find yourself in a position of power where you can get what you want, especially at those times you should have enough mastery or self-possession.
So to wrap this all up, I’d like to just bring our minds to this very essential truth that the Lord is the one to whom we all have to give an account, and He’s the one who will reward us. Furthermore, as we think about this, there’s a sense in which our interests,
are actually served when Christ’s interests are served. I’m familiar with the term primogenitor. This is a word that I’m trying to introduce into everyday parlance. Primogenitor is the practice in antiquity of the oldest son receiving the entire state. So it was obviously not terribly popular with second sons or third sons or whatever. But when we think about the work of Christ
the only begotten son of God who through whom all things were made and for whom all things were made and all things were reconciled to the Father through him what’s implied it’s not even implied it’s pretty explicit we just miss it. The reason we miss it is because we’re individualists. We live in the United States we live in the Western world where kind of individualism has like messed with our minds. But if you have eyes to see it you’ll see that everything goes to Christ.
Which means that the only way you or I get anything is if we’re in him. We are joint heirs with Christ according to Romans chapter 8. It’s not as though there are many heirs. There’s one heir. But if you are in him you enjoy all the things that he deserves and will receive and has received. Including resurrection, eternal life, glorification, authority, all these things.
It’s all in there. It’s all part of the package. But the main thing is to be in Christ. And I say this a lot in my church back in the Portland area and people are probably tired of hearing me say it. But you’re new to me so I’m going to say it to you. In America we talk a lot about when it comes to the Christian faith you need to welcome Jesus into your heart. And there’s something in scripture that I think undergirds that and I don’t object to that way of putting things.
Far more frequently the case in the New Testament that things are put the other way around. You are to be in Christ. I think it’s like 75 to 1 in terms of how those words are, how things are put in the New Testament. The idea then is that if you’re in Christ then you have a future in him to look forward to and all the good things that belong to Christ.
So as you serve him, what’s that imply? You’re serving your own best interests. This is not like a win-lose scenario. This is win-win. So as you serve him in the course of your lives, regardless of where you find yourself, say, in the social order of things. We don’t have slavery anymore, but lots of folks still work for other people. Lots of folks are still employees, and there are still employers. We don’t call them masters necessarily.
But they still have a lot of authority, at least during 9 to 5. So there’s this reality, and we ought to think in these terms as we pursue the lives that we live, whether we’re in charge or not. We’re all working toward a common future in Christ and an enrichment that enriches not just ourselves, but each other as we labor for the Lord in Him. So with those things in mind, let’s pray. Heavenly Father, thank You for Your Word.
I pray, Lord, that You will work in us to will and to do according to Your good purposes. And I say these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.