The Household of God

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

A sermon preached by the Rev. Adrienne Koch at Trinity Cathedral on the Day of Pentecost, May 28, 2023.

Paul’s writings subvert the need for a self-made Lord by giving the people who want a patriarch a new Lord to submit to: “Jesus is Lord,” writes Paul, in today’s epistle. Jesus is called Lord in our New Testament more than 700 times. Because that’s how often we need him to be Lord. Anyone who has experienced the twisted the moral values of dominance and submission through patriarchy, and slavery, and domestic violence, knows that we need a new Lord of the house.

Jesus preferred humility to hierarchy…Paul, the Pharisee, who knew Jewish law so well, saw what Jesus was trying to do, but after his death, Paul’s followers lost the radical reversal of the household codes that Jesus inspired, and Christians fell back onto the old cultural maps of their rabbis and the philosophers. And as the gospel began to be preached to the ends of the earth, the household codes hitched a ride with the good news of Jesus.

“Of household management we have seen that there are three parts,” writes Aristotle: the rule of a master over slaves, a husband over wife and father over children. Household management built on dominance and submission was propagated from the Greco-Roman empire, from the cradle of civilization, and built our world on the distorted moral value that one person should always be on top. These household codes not only made it into our homes but into our scriptures.