Then, and only then, does he launch into women. Right?

Wrong.

While Paul does tell women to be subject to their husbands as they are to Christ the head of the Church, he actually"aunches into" husbands and places a greater demand on them. (In fact, he spends over double the number of words talking to husbands than he does to wives.)

What he says to husbands is striking: Husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the Church, giving up his life for the Church. So too husbands should give up their lives for their wives. The only way to exercise their"lordship" 

But Paul, who has been radically reoriented by his run-in with Jesus, knows that no social order is safe from God's undoing, and no household is free to not be different. To be loyal to God is to be like Jesus, giving up our lives, to be in union with our spouses - for the two will become one flesh. If that's so then we are far from any kind of male lordship here.

Now this is a funny passage to read in a church like St. Thomas, partly because many of our couples struggle just to figure out who is the wife and who is the husband. We have various constellations of families and households, including some couples without wives at all, or husbands, or children. And those traditional households we do have don't seem vested in gender roles. It is also a funny passage to be preached on by me. I'm a single man without a wife, who probably won't wind up with one, unless he asks me to call him my wife. And in that case, he's probably not for me, and I'll have to pass him up.

But what I won't pass up is the call to loyalty - to cling and to cleave to him, to become one flesh, to give up my life for him because Jesus gave his life for me. And, Beloved, what we as a progressive church can't toss out with the bath water is the call of God across ages to follow the One who came down from heaven to be the bread of life for the world.

Now before we think we've got that covered, remember that Jesus not only said he was the bread of life but that we have to eat his flesh and drink his blood.