Sunday, August 26, 2012

Sermon - Armed and Ready


Ephesians 6:10-20
Armed and Ready
James Sledge                                                                                       August 26, 2012

When I was a kid, a favorite hymn of many of the adults around me in church was “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”  And I don’t think the churches where I grew up were unusual in that regard.  As part of its Olympic coverage, NBC had a documentary on Great Britain during World War II, and in it they told of Winston Churchill’s attempts to woo President Roosevelt and get American support for Britain in that period when England was the last holdout against Hitler in Europe but American had not yet been drawn into the war.  During one of their meetings, Churchill had a military chorus sing several hymns, including “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and it apparently had a profound and moving impact on FDR.
And so in 1989, when the committee charged with producing a new Presbyterian Hymnal finished its work, culminating in the Blue hymnal that sits in the pews of this sanctuary, it was not long before a cry went up about the old favorites that had gone missing, notable among them, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
I was a pretty marginal member of the church in the late 1980s, and I had little knowledge of church politics or the work of hymnal committees.  But from what I’ve heard, the hymn had a couple of strikes against it.  There were music folks who didn’t think the tune anything all that great, and then there was the militaristic sound and theme.  If you’re not familiar with the hymn, it felt as though it could have been a military march. 
Any new hymnal has to drop some old hymns if it is to add any new ones, and it’s hardly surprising this one lost out.  In the post-Vietnam era, the last thing the Presbyterian Church wanted to do was sound militaristic.  In my imagination I can just see some hymnal committee member saying, “Let the Southern Baptists sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ if they want to, but not us.”
Now I can’t say that there have been many occasions when I wished the hymn was available to go with one of my sermons.  If I had been on that hymnal committee, I likely would have been happy to see it get kicked out.  But something Kathleen Norris wrote in her book, The Cloister Walk, made me wonder about how easily I disliked the hymn for its military imagery.  Norris was lamenting modern America’s literalism and difficulty with metaphor, and she writes, “Poets believe in metaphor, and that alone sets them apart from many Christians, particularly people educated to be pastors and church workers.  As one pastor of Spencer Memorial – by no means a conservative on theological or social issues – once said in a sermon, many Christians can no longer recognize that the most significant part of the first line of ‘Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,’ is the word ‘as.’  (The hymn has been censored out of our new hymnal by the literal-minded, but we sing it anyway.) ”[1]  

All of this boiled up in my mind as I began to read the passage from Ephesians that we just heard.  I readily admit that I tend to recoil from its martial imagery.  Armor, breastplate, shield, arrows, helmet, and sword.  What sort of craziness is this?  We Christians are supposed to work for peace.  Why would we speak the language of war?
As I considered and studied this, it struck me that the Christians who first received this letter that now resides in our Bible were quite different from us on at least two counts.  First, they were likely pacifists, fully embracing Jesus’ call to live a life that did not meet evil with evil, violence with violence. And second, they understood their new life in Christ to put them at fundamental odds with the normal order of things.  They understood themselves to live in a world at odds with their new life in Christ, and so they expected to be discriminated against, and even persecuted.  But they did not view their conflict to be with the government or society, with “blood and flesh” as the letter says, but rather a cosmic struggle.
Our modern context is very different.  Even though the church’s place in our society has diminished a great deal in recent decades, we still occupy a prominent place in our culture.  And Christian faith has made accommodations with power and force.  Just War Theology places some restraints on the use of military force, but it presumes that Christians will wage war, something those Christians at Ephesus could not have imagined.
When modern Christians, with our literalist tendencies, and our awareness of how the church at many times in history has endorsed the use of force against “enemies of the faith,” hear the military metaphors in our Scripture this morning, many of us feel uneasy.  But this morning, let’s try to hear these metaphors with the ancient Ephesians.  Imagine that you have recently become a follower of Jesus, a move that meant turning away from the practices you grew up with.  You have had to withdraw from going to the temples which were at the center of Roman society. You can no longer join in the big community festivals, and you can no longer join your neighbors in worshipping the emperor.  All this means that those Roman soldiers who were everywhere potentially posed a real threat to you.  If a local authority wanted to use the Christians as a convenient, political scapegoat, you might have to deal with those soldiers.
It is in this context that our letter writer appropriates and recasts the familiar image of a Roman soldier.  All the well know equipment is there, belt, breastplate, helmet, shield, and sword, but they have been stripped of all coercive power.  The armor we are called to don seems woefully inadequate to the task; truth, righteousness, faith, salvation.  And the only weapon allowed is God’s word.  And if I may stretch the metaphor a bit, the only supply for this oddly outfitted soldier is prayer. How could the Ephesians possibly hope to survive, much less prevail, so poorly equipped?
I don’t know about you, but I have to confess that my own faith is often a personal and internal thing largely divorced from my life and my work, even work in a church.  Righteousness, truth, and faith don’t often feel like they provide much protection, and my own powers of persuasion, however limited, seem a more potent force that God’s word.
It pains me to admit it, but the armor of God seems quite lacking, and so very often my ministry is constrained by fear.  I’m afraid of what might go wrong.  I’m afraid I don’t have what it takes, that I don’t have the right gifts or skills.  I’m afraid of what people may say about me or think about me, and the armor in our Scripture seems far too fragile. 
Perhaps that is why I so admire people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi.  They seem to know deep in their bones what our Scripture speaks of today.  They engaged in epic battles against injustice and for basic human rights, but they understood that their fight was not really against enemies of “blood and flesh.”  Rather it was against a great evil, a cosmic evil if you will, that led seemingly good, upstanding, moral people to embrace segregation, oppression, and apartheid, even to justify them as required by their faith.  And recognizing the cosmic nature of this battle, they refused to strike out at those who seemed to be in control.  Gandhi and Dr. King were never more anguished than when their followers turned to violence.  Their only protections were faith and truth and righteousness, their only weapons words spoken and enacted, their only sustenance prayer.
Take up the whole armor of God.  Dare we go out into the world protected by nothing more than faith and truth and words and prayer?   Dare we trust that faith and truth and rightness with God can steel us from the slings and arrows that we will face if we take seriously Jesus’ call to give everything for the coming reign of God?  Dare we trust that God’s word has a power all its own, a power greater than all our abilities?  Dare we trust that when our prayer draws us into God’s Spirit, real power is unleashed that sustains the body of Christ in its work and reveals the coming of God’s reign to the world?  Dare we take up the whole  armor of God?


[1] Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk, (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) p. 155

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