2018-08-27
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Ephesians 6:10-20
When I was a child, my mother’s parents had a lovely summer home near Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. An old farmhouse, one of its most enticing features was its barn. In that barn were abundant treasures for a little boy. And one of those treasures was an army helmet. It was a real helmet. It was the helmet my grandfather wore during the First World War, a helmet popularly known as a doughboy. I was awed by that helmet, and by the dent it bore from a bullet.
I loved the helmet mostly because it was my grandfather’s. But I loved it, too, because, as a little boy, I also was entranced by battles and fighting. I had little if any concept of the grim atrocities of battle. I romanticized army warfare, and I adored the TV shows of the old west—“Roy Rogers,” “Daniel Boone,” “The Wild, Wild West,” “Bonanza,” “Zorro.”
As I got older, and as the Vietnam War took such center stage in American life, my romance with war waned. Those battles lost their charm and came to seem only violence and destruction. And when I became an adult, and my sense of Jesus deepened, that violence often came to seem misguided. I could and did admire the valor and heroism of its soldiers. But battles and war had largely lost their magic.
So when it comes to biblical images like those in today’s passage from the letter to the Ephesians, I wince a little, as you perhaps do, too. It’s hard to understand why a writer writing in the name of Jesus and in the tradition of the apostle Paul would lionize a culture of war. Telling us to don our armor so we can fight the battle of faith seems more than a little archaic and counter-productive. In what ways does it serve the Jesus of peace, the Jesus who refused to lift a finger to stop his own execution—in what ways does it serve Jesus or Jesus’ vision to summon us to the ramparts and to get ready to fight? Shouldn’t we just ditch this imagery and find something more to our liking—something more to do with love and peace and justice, perhaps?
Well, maybe. And we will at many other times in our life together. Never fear! But I suspect there’s something about these images that’s worth lingering over, something about this call to arms that, precisely because it may sound so unappealing, has a word to speak to us.
And it has sounded unappealing to many. Over the last thirty or forty years, many denominational hymnals have intentionally not included hymns with martial imagery. The most famous of these is “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Church leaders understandably wanted to avoid the impression that, as Christians, we are here to march off to war. “Soldiers of Christ, Arise” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” were also dropped from a number of hymnals.
Another casualty was “Lead On, O King Eternal.” And I have a sense the controversy about that hymn can shed some light on the imagery of the passage from Ephesians. That hymn, “Lead On, O King Eternal,” was one of my favorite hymns when I was younger—maybe precisely because of its war imagery. And when a number of voices in the church suggested that we leave that hymn aside, I took another look at its words. Maybe you remember them: “Lead on, O King Eternal, the day of march has come; henceforth in fields of conquest your tents shall be our home. Through days of preparation your grace has made us strong; and now, O King Eternal, we lift our battle song.”
That hymn, with its clear call to battle, made many hymnal editors blanch. What those who objected seemed to miss, though, was the second verse: “Lead on, O King Eternal, till sin’s fierce war shall cease, and holiness shall whisper the sweet amen of peace. For not with swords’ loud clashing, nor roll of stirring drums, but deeds of love and mercy the heavenly kingdom comes.” The second verse turns the war imagery of the first verse right on its head: “For not with swords’ loud clashing, nor roll of stirring drums, but deeds of love and mercy the heavenly kingdom comes.”
And this is precisely what the writer of the letter to the Ephesians is doing: turning the war imagery on its head. “13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God . . . [F]asten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. 15 As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. 16 With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”
This is beautiful language. It’s evocative. It’s suggestive. It trades in metaphor rather than literalism. It appeals to the imagination, that wildly under-used dimension of faith. These images convey something. They awaken something. They’re a ringing call to a certain kind of arms—not violent and destructive arms, but arms that remake the world, arms that fight the only battle really worth fighting—the battle for faith and peace and justice. That’s the armor we’re called to don.
Look at the battle gear the writer commends to fellow Christians. Part of what’s so striking about these images is that they are almost entirely defensive in nature: a belt, a breastplate, shoes, a shield, and a helmet. These are hardly instruments of mass destruction. They guard and protect. They deflect weapons of war. They cause no damage of their own. They simply shelter and safeguard the wearer. Hardly agents of devastation and ruin, they are designed precisely to achieve the opposite: to minimize damage and pain.
If we dismiss this passage because of its war imagery, we really miss the underlying point of these words and images. And it’s the deeper sense of these words that can be life-changing for the church. What this letter-writer is getting at is that there are forces of evil and destruction all around us, and he or she wants us to take on that defensive armor so that we and the world might be undamaged and remain whole. Devastating powers assault life. And this letter writer is urging us to mobilize our God-given resources to withstand the barbs and bullets, and to find in God gear that yields blessing and peace and a new kind of world.
“The wiles of the devil” the letter calls them—forces of evil, demonic powers that eat away at the beauty and grace of life. For many of us enlightened post-moderns, such language may seem dated and off-putting. Few of us conceive of a personal devil creating mayhem in our lives. What this early Christian was acutely aware of, though, was that there are clearly forces and powers that crush our hopes and dreams, that wreak havoc, that undo and destroy. And as followers of Christ, our truest vocation is to counter the barrage of false and deceptive and destructive forces that insinuate themselves into our lives. Because of these powers that dismember and destroy, we are called to stand firm in resistance, to witness to a better way.
A number of years ago, American lawyer and lay theologian William Stringfellow taught these images of the devil and spiritual warfare in a seminary, and the budding ministers in his class found the language archaic and passé. When he taught the same images in the business school, though, they totally got it. Business leaders knew there were unpredictable, subversive forces working their way in the world. And they appreciated having those forces acknowledged and named (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 3, pp. 375-377).
You and I know these forces. Greed is one. When Mary and I were in Maine this summer, we got to know some long-time acquaintances better. And I was struck that one of them, a highly successful corporate attorney, regretted what he now recognized as his excessive greed when he was younger. “I was focused on making money for my clients, and for myself,” he said. That greed resulted in some choices that he wouldn’t make again. As he nears retirement, he sees how insidious was that craving for money, and how it derailed him from his best self. An evil force throwing its darts. How might our spiritual armor deflect it?
Workaholism can assault us, as well. Some of you may have taken note, as I did, of an interview Elon Musk recently did with the New York Times, an interview in which this brilliant entrepreneur, head of Tesla and SpaceX, broke down in tears. The reason for the tears? “He said he had been working up to 120 hours a week recently . . . [H]e said he had not taken more than a week off since 2001, when he was bedridden with malaria. ‘There were times when I didn’t leave the factory for three or four days—days when I didn’t go outside,’ he said. ‘This has really come at the expense of seeing my kids. And seeing friends.’ [And then he] stopped talking [in the interview], seemingly overcome by emotion” (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/business/elon-musk-interview-tesla.html).
And of course Musk’s tears betray the problem, a destructive bullet rampant in this culture. We so often revere those who work ridiculous hours, the people who live a one-track life. We set this up as the ideal—“look how dedicated he is to his work”—and all the while Musk’s life falls apart, he loses touch with his children, his marriages disintegrate.
Should we value expertise and commitment? Undoubtedly. But should hard work happen at the expense of people’s health and wholeness? That’s when something is missing. That’s when the devil has sunk its talons into its prey and distorted a crucial dimension of human life. What armor will guard against such misplaced priorities?
In another vein, we this week encounter a familiar bullet as we are confronted yet again with stories of sexual abuse. Ohio State’s football coach, Urban Meyer, and its athletic director, Gene Smith, have been punished for not holding their coaching staff, and Zach Smith in particular, to the highest standards. And a staggering grand jury report in Pennsylvania details abuse by more than 300 priests, as well as a systematic cover-up of this abuse by church authorities. Whether or not you want to speak of a personal devil, we can all agree that that is pervasive evil. And it calls for a certain kind of holy armor if we’re going to deflect those loathsome powers.
The truth is we are assaulted by all sorts of destructive forces, from hurricanes and wildfires and volcanos to illnesses and betrayals and deaths to lies and sexual abuses and holocausts. All of them eat away at the fabric of our lives. So a long-ago writer penned some words that give us tools of resistance and hope.
And here’s the bottom line: when we feel assaulted, when we feel under siege, God gives us armor to withstand and to stand firm. They’re not weapons with which to beat someone else silly. They are a sort of armor that deflects life’s stinging arrows, a force field that turns sucker punches into glancing blows. God’s armor is a belt and a breastplate, shoes, a shield, and a helmet—armor to turn aside even life’s most vicious and traumatic assaults, armor with which to stand up to such evil and to live into a better way—to live into God’s way. This holy armor includes a belt of truth in the face of lies and deception; a breastplate of righteousness in the face of cut corners and self-centered egotism; shoes of peace in a world that so often devolves into violence and division; a shield of faith that anchors us somewhere richer and truer than the transient loyalties that so often claim our hearts; and maybe above all a helmet of salvation that reminds us of a love so deep and high and broad that all damning forces are put in their pathetic place.
To forestall the greed and workaholism that are so commonplace, for example, maybe part of the armor we need is to practice Sabbath and a kind of mindfulness. Years ago, I went on a twenty-four hour silent retreat. As I started, I met with a spiritual director. As I described the swirl of frenetic activity that characterized my life, the spiritual director said to me, “I want you to go outside on the retreat house lawn. And I want you, as you walk, to take a step no more frequently than once every ten seconds. And I want you just to notice what’s around you.” And I have vivid memories of walking those beautiful grounds, and seeing the many shades of green in the leaves, and the graceful sweep of the branches, and the insects crawling lazily through the grass. It’s all stuff that I usually miss. And as I walked, I could feel my breathing slow and my muscles relax and my soul be buoyed. That slow deliberate walking was part of the grace-filled armor of God. And it was saving me.
To counter the rampant sexual exploitation that’s come to light in recent months, a different sort of armor is necessary. We see it in women and men who are willing to be vulnerable about such usually secret matters and to tell the truth about what they’ve experienced and to refuse to go along with it any more. We see it in a culture unwilling any longer to turn a blind eye to what is clearly evil. It’s an armor that refuses to take on blame or shame for violence and cruelty inflicted by someone else.
Words like these from Ephesians may cause us to slow down. They may remind us, too, that the armor of the spirit empowers us to resist sexual violence. It may call us to work for immigration reform and racial justice and health care for all. God’s armor is light and precious. It resists evil and enhances life. It’s a special armor. And it matters. And it’s holy. Thanks be to God.