When the Shed Catches Fire

Adapted from a sermon preached November 10, 2024, for Rêver Church.

There is something about returning to the house you grew up in that acts as a sort of time machine. In October 2024, I drove out to Colorado’s West Slope1 where I grew up. My mom had just received some difficult health news. I spent a few weeks with her, taking her to appointments, learning about blood pressure medications, and helping her plan for the future. It has been a long and difficult season for our family, with more doctors’ appointments than any of us could count and a worry that seems to take over. She is doing a lot better now, although it was genuinely scary for a while. We eventually helped her move to the Front Range so she could be closer to us and receive better care. But those few weeks in the house where I grew up turned out to be something I had not expected: I found myself wandering through old rooms, pulling things out of closets, and being ambushed by memories at every turn. A house has a way of holding on to things, especially memories. Birthday parties. Holidays. Childhood sleepovers. The backyard, where at the start of one summer, my brother, my neighborhood friend Nathan, and I once ceremonially burned an algebra textbook doused in cheap cologne to celebrate the end of school. Only to wake up at 1:00 a.m. to firefighters pounding on the front door, our celebration, having not adequately been extinguished, spread to the neighbor’s fence and the shed. I think about the repair work that followed. I remember, Eagle Scout Nathan, whose idea the whole celebration had been, did not show up to help with the repairs. My brother and I spent that week pulling scorched boards off the neighbor’s fence, covered in soot and ash, and I remember growing angrier the more we worked. It seemed profoundly unfair. As the oldest of four boys, the world being fair has always mattered to me in the very particular way it seems to matter to oldest children. But I also remember what my mom told my brother and me: we were responsible for our part, and our part was what we had to take care of, regardless of what Nathan did or did not do. I have learned a lot from my Mom over the years — a lot about love and responsibility.

Nostalgia has a way of doing what good theology also tries to do: it makes you think about what it means to live well with other people in the same space. During my time on the West Slope, I kept thinking about family, about obligation and care, about the structures we build to hold the people we love. During that season, I was preaching from Paul’s letter to the Colossians at our church on the Front Range. My time on the West Slope had caused me to miss a couple of weeks of preaching, so I decided to preach remotely on the next section: Colossians 3:18-4:1. I kept chewing on this passage between appointments and while planning low-sodium meals.

This passage and a similar one in Ephesians are among the most misread passages in the New Testament.

Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae was written into a world that the twenty-first-century reader barely recognizes. The Roman Empire was not really a democracy2; it was more an elaborate hierarchy, and the household was its basic social and economic unit. Roman law gave the paterfamilias, the male head of the household, sweeping authority over everyone under his roof: wife, children, and slaves. These relationships were not simply personal; they were also political. Stable households were good for the empire, and in the Roman social-imagination, it was expected that those relationships would reflect that stability.

Into this world, Paul writes what scholars call a Haustafeln, or household code. These lists of instructions governing household relationships had a long history in Greco-Roman moral philosophy, and the readers in Colossae would have immediately recognized the form. What they might not have recognized so quickly was what Paul was doing with it, however. Nijay Gupta describes Paul’s approach as a “contextual-ethic,” a strategy that works within existing social structures not to endorse them but to transfigure them from within.3 The question is not whether Paul maintained the form of the household code but rather what he did with its content. When you slow down and read carefully, the answer is surprising.

The first thing to notice is who is addressed first. In each of the three pairings that make up Colossians 3:18-4:1, Paul addresses the socially subordinate party before the one with power: wives before husbands, children before fathers, and slaves before masters. This inversion was not accidental. Emphasis in Greek prose was carried by word order, not punctuation, and Paul consistently places the person of lower social standing at the front of the sentence. Scot McKnight notes that this opening move reframes everything, insisting that “the oneness of Christ in the community of Christ revolutionizes what it means to be those in Christ.”4 These relationships have not been abolished but have been reimagined. Every person in the household is first and foremost a person in Christ, and that changes the grammar of the whole thing.

To wives, Paul says: “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” (Col. 3:18 NRSVue). This verse often makes people flinch, and, understandably, so. The history of its use has been problematic. However, the gut reaction can sometimes prevent us from reading what is actually there.

The Greek verb hypotassō means to order oneself under, to arrange oneself in relation to another. What is striking about Paul’s use of it here is that it is reflexive. Wives are not told to be submitted; they are told to submit, an active construction that gives them agency in the act. Paul is speaking to the wives as moral agents capable of deciding how to respond, rather than as objects to be arranged. To “give such agency to ancient wives,” Holly Beers writes, “(to self-submit or self-order, as it were, in ways that make sense in the Lord) would have been fairly radical.”5

Paul’s qualifier matters as well. The phrase “as is fitting in the Lord” is not a rubber stamp on cultural convention. This is a theological renegotiation of the assumed, social order. McKnight argues that the household code in Colossians operates on a “linear and nonreciprocal” social model that Paul proceeds to subvert.6 The subordination of wives was the cultural default; Paul embeds this default inside a phrase that introduces a different Lord than the one the Roman world had come to expect. The gospel does not arrive as a frontal assault on the Roman social order. It works from within existing structures, transfiguring them by the pressure of a different loyalty. McKnight calls the submission of verse 18 “an instance of cruciform living,”7 modeled on the one who, though equal with God, took the form of a servant. Submission is to the Lord and is not degradation; it is discipleship shaped entirely by the cross.

Paul then turns to husbands. “Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly” (Col. 3:19). The word Paul uses for love here is agapaō, the verb form of agapē, the kind of love that Paul’s letters consistently describe as God’s own self-giving orientation toward humanity. This word does not imply romantic affection. It is the word for the love that empties itself out. This kind of love was not a Roman cultural expectation of husbands. James Dunn, in his commentary on Colossians, frames the entire household code not as an assertion of authority but as a reconfiguration of obligation: Paul speaks “not of authority and rights but of obligations and responsibilities.”8 The point is not that husbands have divinely sanctioned power but that they must answer for how they exercise the power afforded to them by the social order they happen to occupy. This is true for all those who occupy seats and positions of power. I would argue that Roman social structure was situational rather than divinely prescribed. Paul, here and throughout the rest of the section, describes how to live within the existing system rather than prescribing a divine social order. If that is true, the same expectations would be there in a society ordered around a materfamilia social structure. This reading is not just a challenge to patriarchy, it’s a challenge to all coercive, self-indulgent, and anti-cruciform power structures.

Beers further presses this idea. “In the household code,” she writes, “Paul is not talking about rights; he is challenging the person who has more social honor and power in that ancient context, the man, to use it not for himself but for his wife. Using one’s honor on behalf of another, rather than oneself, is a kind of submission.”9 This is a remarkable observation because it means that love in Paul’s sense is itself a form of downward movement. The husband does not hold his position and dispense affection from a distance; he is called to pour himself out toward the one in his care. McKnight captures what this means in practice: the love Paul calls for is “a covenantal commitment to presence, advocacy, protection, and provision” for the wife’s flourishing.10 The point, ultimately, is not a renegotiation of power but something deeper: “The text … does not advocate sharing power; it advocates sharing life and love with one another as a new kind of power.”11 Paul reframes the social order rather than ratifying it. The Apostle to the Gentiles understood the social reality of his time and allowed a cruciform worldview to radically reshape it. I would argue that, although Paul’s argument does not go far enough toward gender equality, it paves the way for that work to be done.

The commands to the children and fathers each occupy a single verse, but they are worth a close reading. “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord” (Col. 3:20). Children in the ancient world were expected to obey; this was not news. However, Paul adds the Lord as the reference point, thereby shifting the child’s obedience from parental authority to divine relationship. Paul then turns to fathers: “Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart” (Col. 3:21). McKnight notes that this cuts against the cultural grain: the father’s relation to his children in Paul’s vision is “not one of imposing authority but of caring nurture.”12 The father is given the responsibility of protecting the child’s spirit, not of exercising power. A paterfamilias accountable for his children’s emotional well-being was a social expectation that differed significantly from that of Roman social philosophy.

The longest and most theologically dense section of the household code concerns slaves and masters, where Paul’s strategy of subversion reaches its most radical expression. Paul devotes five verses to slaves, an astonishing proportion given that Greco-Roman philosophical literature rarely addressed slaves as moral agents in any meaningful way. The very act of speaking to them and providing them with theological instruction on how to inhabit their condition with dignity and faith was countercultural. He tells them to work as for the Lord, not for their earthly masters, because the Lord will render justice and there is no partiality with him (Col. 3:22-25). While this certainly does not go far enough, in a world where slaves ranked at the very bottom of every social scale, this was a radical reassignment of worth.

However, it is the command to masters that is the most striking. Colossians 4:1 reads, as Beers translates it: “Masters, provide your slaves with justice and equality, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.”13 The Greek word translated as “equality” here is isotēs, and McKnight’s analysis of it is illuminating: In the Greek world, isotēs was a term used not for relationships between social unequals but for relationships among citizens of comparable standing, even among oligarchs.14 To apply it to the master-slave relationship was to import the language of civic equality into a context where it had no business appearing. McKnight concludes that in this command, “the power differential between masters and slaves is diminished dramatically.”15 Paul’s emphasis on the relinquishing of power by those in authority was a profound challenge to the social order of the day. Paul does not merely upgrade the social status of the wife, the child, and the slave. He calls on the one with higher social standing to relinquish his claim to power and control within the social hierarchy. Interestingly, Paul sent this letter, like many of his letters, to a local house church. The one receiving the letter, a follower of Jesus and leader in the church to be sure, was most likely the head of his household, making him the one Paul addresses in all three accounts: husband, father, and master. Paul understands that he has little political weight to change Roman social ordering, but he does have the power to influence the church. He does this by subverting readers’ expectations. Those in power often invoke religion to affirm their position, thereby conferring divine authority. Paul does not offer that. The common literary rhythm and structure of household code, here subverted, challenge the use of religion to justify authority.

I do want to acknowledge that Pauline household codes have not always been read this way. Beers is direct about this history: “The household codes have often been weaponized and used to legitimate abuses of other people, especially women and slaves.”16 This history is real and must be acknowledged. At the same time, Beers argues that reading Paul’s actual text carefully, in its ancient context, reveals something quite different from the weapon it has been made into: “Paul most certainly was charting a new path of resistance” to the dominant social order, a path defined not by revolution from outside but by transformation from within.17 We can claim to elevate the voices of the marginalized all we want, but if those in power do not make room for their voices to be heard and considered, very little will change.

I returned from those weeks on the West Slope thinking a lot about how we care for one another, which is perhaps what spending time with a sick parent does to you. There is something about the asymmetry of that kind of love, the giving that cannot be immediately reciprocated, that kept bringing me back to this passage. My mom certainly demonstrated this kind of love repeatedly throughout my childhood. She sacrificed a lot to ensure that my brothers and I had what we needed. Paul is not much interested in symmetrical exchange. He is interested in something more demanding: that those who hold more power use it for those in their care rather than for themselves. This is neither fairness nor obligation. It is more like love — an agapē kind of love. In the ancient world, when a Roman householder opened a letter from Paul and heard that the measure of his authority was not what he could demand but what he owed, in justice and equality, to everyone under his roof, including the slaves, that was not a modest claim. I think about that summer sometimes when I reflect on this passage. Paul never asks whether the Roman householder thought his obligations were fair. He does not negotiate with him about what the social order required or what he deserved by virtue of his position. He simply points to the work that was his to do. When the shed catches fire, the question is not who ought to have prevented it. The question is what you owe to the people standing in the smoke with you. It was a revolution, written in the language of household management, smuggled into the most ordinary relationships of everyday life.

This post was originally posted on Substack.