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?
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