My Relationship Is a Hot Mess

We're in the third week of my relationship is a hot mess. Today's message can stand on its own, but it's also an on-ramp to the final stretch of our series - and we've got a lot to cover. Let me start with another embarrassing story about me.

A while back, my wife Aaron, our three-year-old, and I were on a long road trip through endless California farm country on a stretch of highway with almost no exits. Our daughter suddenly, desperately needed a bathroom - and melted down when there wasn't one in sight. My wife said to just pull over and let her go on the shoulder; I kept pushing back, because the "shoulder" was a ditch with semis barreling past at highway speed, and I didn't think it was safe. By the time I finally spotted an off-ramp, I was so overstimulated by the crying and the back-and-forth that my brain couldn't form the careful sentence I needed. Instead, what came out was: "Let me tell you how this is going to go. I'm going to pull over where I want to pull over."

I have never seen the look my wife gave me in that moment. Once we'd both calmed down, she told me she didn't want to talk to me, and repeated my words back: let me tell you how it's going to go - as if she had no say, as if I was making the decisions for all of us. And here's the thing I realized: she wasn't just upset that I'd seemed to pull rank. She was upset because of the message she thought might be underneath it - that I viewed her opinions and wishes as lesser because of her gender. That fear doesn't come from nowhere.

Gender baggage makes relationships a hot mess

One of the quickest ways to turn a relationship into a hot mess is through the negative assumptions we carry about our partner based on their gender. It goes both ways - there can be chauvinism in either direction. Today I'm going to focus mostly on how men view and treat women, partly because I think it's more common and partly because there's some Scripture about it that needs clarifying. But feel free to flip the arrow around for the benefit of your own relationship. A quiet belief in inequality - even one rarely said out loud - is a ticking time bomb in a marriage. While the fuse burns, it produces disrespect, bullying, and a partner who feels unheard.

I have to confess that I once partially believed some of these things. As a young man, I listened to a nationally syndicated radio host who claimed to teach women how men think. A lot of what he said was flatly misogynistic - reducing women to second-class citizens to be used and discarded. He was entertaining and controversial, and I absorbed his words as the voice of an older, wiser authority, not realizing what they were eroding in me. I even started writing a book with a friend that contained a lot of those disrespectful ideas. I regret ever writing them. And here's the uncomfortable part: we didn't only get those ideas from media figures. We got some of them from religious leaders and Christian voices who told us Scripture supported them - that they were biblical.

Where did those "biblical" ideas come from?

The honest answer is that women were subjugated to male rule throughout much of the ancient world, including in ancient Israel. In times when brute strength meant survival, men held the power and made the rules. Women were often viewed as property - their father's first, then their husband's. Those cultural assumptions carried into the New Testament era because the basic systems hadn't changed. And many of these teachings got repeated across the centuries until they hardened, in many Bible-centered traditions, into doctrine - including one especially damaging idea: that women are equally saved yet intrinsically unequal to men.

Church figures defended that idea using verses like this one, about Adam and Eve:

And it was not Adam who was deceived by Satan. The woman was deceived, and sin was the result. - 1 Timothy 2:14

The claim is that women are more easily deceived and more prone to rash decisions. But notice the strange logic: if Eve was deceived but Adam wasn't, then Adam knew better and sinned anyway - which hardly makes him superior. And look at the actual account in Genesis:

She took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too. - Genesis 3:6

Adam was right there. He heard the same sales pitch from the serpent. He was either deceived too, or he simply chose to sin. Either way, it cuts against the idea that men are inherently superior. (As a side note worth keeping in mind: you can take the apostle out of the Pharisees, but it takes a long time to take the Pharisee out of the apostle. Even after his conversion, Paul still identified as a Pharisee - "I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee" (Acts 23:6) - and some of those traditions he was raised in occasionally surface in his writing. But that's a discussion for another day.)

Other leaders leaned on poor renderings of verses like 1 Corinthians 11:7, which some translations phrase as women being created to bring honor to men. Women, did you know that's supposedly why you exist - not to honor God, but to honor a gender that considers you inferior? If anyone truly believes that in their heart, I'd just ask you to stay open to some new ideas over the next couple of weeks.

Patriarchy described is not patriarchy prescribed

This whole system - the belief that women are permanently subordinate to men - is known as gender hierarchy. (For much of what follows, I'm indebted to the work of Tarryn Williams and his in-depth piece Subordinating Jesus and Women.) It wasn't until the 1960s that the church examined these ideas on a large institutional scale, asking why women should be considered inferior or automatically subordinate. After studying Scripture thoroughly, theologians in both mainline Protestant and Catholic traditions largely concluded that while the Bible reflects a patriarchal culture, it does not teach patriarchy as God's standard for human relationships.

Tim Mackie - who holds a PhD in Hebrew Bible and Jewish studies and co-founded BibleProject - puts it this way:

[These systems are] evidence of evil systems, or broken and sinful systems, in positions of power - even in Israel. This can and will happen anywhere and any time, until the Messiah has all things under his control. It is not a statement of what should be. - Tim Mackie

Jesus himself shows us this. When the Pharisees tried to trap him over divorce law - a law that let a man dismiss his wife for almost any reason - he said:

Moses permitted divorce only as a concession to your hard hearts, but it was not what God had originally intended. - Matthew 19:8

Jesus calls a law of Moses a concession to hardness of heart, not a full expression of God's design. So when we see a system that dominates a gender or a people - even inside Mosaic law - we shouldn't read it as God signing off on that behavior. If the beliefs in a passage don't line up with what Jesus would do or teach, they aren't an argument for keeping a broken system broken. Patriarchy doesn't line up with the radical equality Jesus preached and lived - and it doesn't even line up with Paul's own instruction that husbands should love their wives as their own bodies (Ephesians 5:28), or Peter's that husbands should treat their wives with understanding and honor (1 Peter 3:7).

The rebranding of a broken system

Not everyone who claimed to follow Christ wanted to give up the old system. As gender hierarchy began to fall in the 1960s and 70s, certain groups - mostly organizations of men, many of them the same groups that resisted the civil rights movement - pushed back. They preached what was essentially the same hierarchy with a new defense, and in 1977 it was repackaged with a friendlier name: complementarianism.

It sounds gentle - men and women are equal, just with different, complementary roles. And that statement is often true in a general sense. But that's not all the doctrine holds. It teaches that the man is in charge of the relationship at all times, and the woman submits to his wishes unless doing so would cause her to sin. It also reaches outside the home, excluding women from certain roles simply because of their gender, while excluding men from nothing.

Here's the problem with calling it a matter of "roles." Roles normally carry the possibility of reversal - you take a turn, then I take a turn. But this system never reverses for women. A man can run the church kitchen or do the cooking and cleaning at home any time he likes; a woman cannot make the final decision unless her husband permits it. The examples its defenders use - pastor and congregant, president and citizen, general and private - all describe positions a person can grow into. A private can become a general; a citizen can be elected president. Under this doctrine, a woman can never advance - not for lack of skill or training, but because of gender.

That isn't an allocation of complementary roles; it's a permanent, irreversible chain of command assigned at birth. And a permanent power structure assigned at birth is, by definition, a statement of inequality. The closest real-world parallels are systems like the caste system or the Jim Crow laws - with gender simply substituted for race. If that kind of inequality is wrong in one setting, it's wrong in all of them. You can't honestly call it "equal but different." Can you imagine asking a friend to pray for your hierarchy, or celebrating your fifteenth hierarchy anniversary? A marriage was never meant to be a chain of command.

So here's the important distinction: complementarianism is a hierarchy built on a particular interpretation of Scripture - one shaped by culture, by a specific time, and by a pre-existing broken system - and, I'd argue, one you can only reach by selectively choosing verses and using them out of context. That's our topic next week.

Bring the right thing into your relationship

Next week we begin my faith is a hot mess, and it will overlap with all of this - because, for better or worse, what we bring from our faith into our relationships shapes them. If we want our marriages to be healthier and less of a hot mess, we need to submit them to Jesus first, and make sure the way we see our partner's worth and role lines up with what Jesus would do.

Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets. - Matthew 7:12

"Others" surely includes your spouse. You wouldn't want to be under your partner's thumb - so don't put them under yours. If you want to feel more loved, look for ways to be more loving. And if you want a healthier relationship, stop worrying about power and control, and start treating one another as truly equal members of the same team, working together with each person's unique strengths.

When we get it right

Not all my stories are cautionary tales - sometimes we get it right. One Fourth of July, driving home from fireworks, my wife and I both spotted a sheepdog that had bolted from its yard and was darting through traffic. Without a word of coordination, we both decided at the same instant to save it. For the next while we were a team - calling out directions to each other, not in a domineering way but in a let's-save-this-dog way. She, being a pet photographer and something of a dog whisperer, got it to settle and come to her; I grabbed the leash and the water bowl. We ended up bloody, stinky, sweaty messes who'd helped reunite two lost dogs with their owners. On the drive home, she looked at me and said nights like that make her love me more - because she got to see my heart and work alongside me for a good cause. Teamwork, using our different gifts together, didn't just get the dogs home; it drew us closer.

My relationship isn't always what I expected - but it's also far more than I ever expected. Author Rachel Marie Martin said something I'm trying to hold onto:

Sometimes you have to let go of the picture of what you thought it would be like and learn to find joy in the story you were actually living. - Rachel Marie Martin

And the story I'm actually living is of a man fortunate enough to have a wife who loves me, loves her daughter, and loves Jesus too. The moments when we get love right are really just a pale reflection of the overwhelming, unconditional love Jesus shows us.

Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us. - Ephesians 5:2

Jesus paid the price for our sins on the cross so we wouldn't have to be separated from a holy God. Three days later he rose from the grave, showing his power over death, and now he offers eternal life in the place he's preparing for us, and abundant life full of meaning and purpose when we follow his example.

If you've never accepted those gifts and you'd like to make Jesus the Lord of your life today, you can pray a prayer like this one:

Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I'm a sinner. I know I've done wrong things. Please forgive me of my sins. Right now I ask you to be the Lord of my life. Help me to turn from my sins and follow you. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins, for rising again on the third day and taking those sins away, for saving me, and for preparing a place for me. In Jesus' name, amen.

If you prayed that prayer, or if you have questions about the love of Jesus, I'd love to talk and pray with you - come see me after a service, or email me at josh@seacoastredondo.com.

Come back next week as we begin my faith is a hot mess. I believe this next stretch will be a powerful chance for God to change hearts and lives. Until then, may we become imitators of the real love embodied by Christ in all of our relationships.