Dcn Susan Erickson

Dear Siblings in Christ,

Let’s face it, today’s Daily Office reading from Colossians is highly unedifying. “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” —3:18 “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord.” —3:22

We believe, and repeat each Sunday, that the Bible is “the word of the Lord.”  Yet it’s easy to see how verses like these can be—and are—used to justify patriarchal family structures that do not treat women with the same dignity as men, cutting off opportunities for full human flourishing. The same structures, purportedly buttressed by such verses, continue to block women from becoming leaders in their communities, in business, the arts—and in the church.

It’s also easy to see how people in the not-so-distant past—some of them, we should note, Episcopalians—justified the enslavement of fellow human beings by pointing to such biblical passages.

So what are we to do with these verses? Pass over them in embarrassed silence? Condemn the whole Bible as hopelessly patriarchal and in need of a major re-write?

One answer is that we need to contextualize verses like the ones from Colosssians. The Bible is the word of God, but it is mediated through and written by fallible humans; and these fallible humans lived in a time and culture very distant from our own. As with any text, we’re called to the work of prayerful listening, study and interpretation. The horizon of the writer of Colossians was a hierarchical world that countenanced slavery and severely limited the role of women.

If we fail to do this piece of textual work, we’re like the Israelites in today’s other Daily Office reading from Exodus (32:1-20): we make of the Bible itself a golden calf, a lifeless idol rather than a living Word.

And we should also hear the words of Colossians that still speak directly to us: “Fathers [and mothers!], do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart.” (3:21) “Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving … pray for us … that God will open to us a door for the word, that we may declare the mystery of Christ … .”  (4:2-3)

I pray that each of us finds a door in Scripture through which Christ can enter our heart.

Faithfully,

—Dcn Susan