Susan Warrener Smith

August 27, 2006 Ephesians 6:10-20

While our culture has no men in shining armor - at least not in the literal sense - the image drawn in the letter to the Ephesians is one I think we all can quickly see in our mind's eye. Not just history books and museums but movies and toy stores expose all of us - even at an early age - to the knight in armor. And certainly the Ephesians could resonate with such martial imagery, living under the dominance of the Roman Empire and the pervasiveness of its military strength.

While this imagery is easy to picture, however, it nonetheless makes me uncomfortable. When I was a child, we all happily sang "Onward Christian Soldiers," but as the years have passed and the brutality of war has become ever more real to me, such militaristic imagery to honor the Prince of Peace no longer seems appropriate. When Rod Parsley launched Reformation Ohio by saying, "A Holy Ghost invasion is taking place. Man your battle stations, ready your weapons, lock and load!," I was most uncomfortable with that language. What then do we do with such passages as this famous one from the letter to the Ephesians? I wore a uniform to school for many years, but putting on a navy blue skirt, white shirt, and saddle shoes never created the dilemma that this description of the Christian's uniform causes.

The image is drawn clearly - armor and breastplate, helmet and shield, shoes for the feet, a sword in hand. Suddenly I see Russell Crowe on the poster for the movie "Gladiator." Yet the irony is that this all-too-familiar imagery which conjures up thoughts of the battlefield or the gladiatorial ring is not a reflection of a battle cry at all. If we read it carefully, we discover that the uniform described is, after all, not one of aggression but one that is defensive. Our task is not to lash out in a preemptive strike. Rather as Christians we are to don a uniform that reflects our trust in God for strength and defends whatever would thwart the gospel of peace.

The trouble is WE would very much like to be the source of our own strength.
Remember the words written by William Ernest Henley over a hundred years ago?
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Or more recently, Frank Sinatra sang proudly,
For what is man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels
and not the words of one who kneels.
The record shows
I took the blows
and did it my way!

This morning, however, we have heard that the Bible calls us instead to "grow strong in the Lord and to find our strength in the power of God." Following Christ is not about being a self-made individual. It is not about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. It is not about doing it "MY way or no way." In fact, growing strong in the Lord is not about something WE do at all. We can see this right there in the language, for the tense of the Greek verbs used in this passage implies ongoing passive action. We are being made strong. This is something that is being done FOR us, not by us, and something that is being done for us everyday, every hour, every minute of our lives.

Our requirement is to put on the armor of God, not so that we can lock and load and begin some invasion . . . but so that we may be able to withstand the wiles of the devil. No, I don't think that Paul, or whoever wrote these words, imagined life as a kind of Punch and Judy puppet show where Punch goes to battle with the Devil and in spite of his murderous deeds is clever enough to outwit the Devil and the hangman, to boot. I don't think standing against the tactics of the devil is some kind of cat and mouse game. Nor is it a human struggle for acceptance or happiness, for glory or even personal salvation. This is not even about battles of flesh against flesh, one country against another, or one gang against another. Our struggle is "against Sovereignties and Powers who originate the darkness in this world" (Jerusalem Bible) . . . - "the COSMIC powers of this present darkness." (NRSV) We must put on the armor of God against the metahuman forces of evil which are, in fact, all too well-known in the world. The abomination of slavery, the horrors of Auschwitz, the devastation of Hiroshima, the death toll of Viet Nam, the disaster of Chernobyl, the bloodbath of Rwanda, the incessant presence of war and violence in our world. These horrors remind us that there is evil in this universe which does indeed transcend the squabbles of one person pitted against another.

Or what about the cosmic implications of the ravages to the environment? I hope everyone here will see the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" to see one disastrous consequence of humanity's ignorance, procrastination, and naïveté. In his book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ Matthew Fox makes a passionate plea for putting on the whole armor of God and disarming the principalities and powers which threaten the created order. For as he points out, ". . . pain, suffering, and sin are cosmic - bigger than we can control and far more complex in space and time than we can imagine . . . Our struggle is against ‘powers and principalities' . . . In a living cosmology there is no such thing as being ‘merely human.'" (Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, p. 152) The victory Christ has won transcends just my personal salvation. It is a cosmic salvation, a cosmic victory. When astronaut Rusty Schweikert left the capsule of the 1969 Apollo mission and floated in space on an umbilical cord, he was profoundly struck by the interdependence of the earth. Rivers do not recognize political boundaries. Clouds float over nations regardless of whether or not it is democratic, communist, or a dictatorship. Ocean currents care not for differing ideologies. "In a living cosmology there is no such thing as being ‘merely human.'" We are to put on the armor of God, not so that we can lock and load and launch an invasion or so that we can ensure our personal salvation but so that we may launch a defense against the metahuman, the cosmic powers of darkness. And how does this happen?

By placing around our waist "the belt of truth" - not scientific truth which seeks to describe the universe based upon experiment and calculated in quantitative terms . . . not historical truth which seeks to isolate historical facts rather than the poetic truth of epics or legend . . . not philosophical truth which seeks truth about the structure of being. Rather this is the truth of Jesus Christ who when asked by Pilate, "What is truth?," answered by saying, "For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth." (John 18:37) Sister Elaine Prevallet, who is a frequent contributor to the journal Weavings which I read on a consistent basis, says that "testifying to the truth, for Jesus, has not been only a matter of teaching, speaking to individuals and crowds, public confrontations with the official scholars and teachers. Jesus' whole life - his healing, his attitudes toward the outcast and sinners, his acceptance of any comer whose mind and heart were open: these were his testimony to the truth of what he knows. His experience of God at the deepest level of his being convinced him, beyond any doubt, that God's love and forgiveness are not a matter of keeping rules but are available to anyone . . . rich and poor, sinners and saints, whose hearts and minds seek God . . . Biblical truth," she says, "seems . . . to be a question of what we might call integrity." ("Doing the Truth in Love" by Elaine M. Prevallet, SL, Weavings, May/June, 2006, pp. 26-27.)

And it is integrity that is to be the breastplate we are to wear. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible uses the word "righteousness," but I think "integrity" is a word more familiar to us. Either way, however, it points to the heart. Elaine Prevallet goes on to say "that truth . . . needs to be found . . . not just within our heads, our intellectual capacities, but even more within the human heart, for it involves the whole human person." And she finds the word "integrity' helps expand our understanding of truth, for when our lives are informed by integrity in the truest sense of the word, then we are aligned with the very Source of our being which is the God of Love. I have an old record of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with Philippe Entremont playing the piano and Leonard Bernstein conducting. It was a favorite recording but began to wear out. It has not been remastered on compact disc, so I had to compromise with another recording. I was so disappointed with this new recording because while the pianist had all the notes right, she played with no heart. To stand with truth buckled round our waist and integrity for a breastplate is not so much about getting the notes right or obeying the letter of the law or playing by all the rules and regulations as it is about playing with heart.

No one has demonstrated such integrity, such righteousness, such playing by heart more publicly in my lifetime than Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity. When the city of Bhopal in India was enveloped by a cloud of poisoned air caused by a leak from a pesticide plant, it was Mother Teresa and the sisters of her order who rushed into this scene of devastation, danger, and death to bring the healing love of Christ.

Playing by the heart, though, does not appear only in such public, heroic acts. We don't have to look to those who are internationally known to find such righteousness. Someone sent me an e-mail which was a collection of responses from children to the question, "What is love?" What is love? "When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore, so my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis, too." What is love? "Love is what is in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen." What is love? "When you go and sit with the man next door whose wife just died."

One of the books I read on vacation was the recent bestseller, Marley and Me. And as a hopeless dog lover, I resonated, as so many have, with the author's conclusion that dogs - yes, EVEN dogs - have much to teach us human beings about playing by heart - ". . . about seizing the moment and following your heart . . . [about] appreciating the simple things . . . about optimism in the face of adversity . . . about friendship and selflessness and . . . unwavering loyalty . . . A dog has no use for fancy cars and big homes or designer clothes. Status symbols mean nothing to him . . . A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn't care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his . . ." (John Grogan, Marley and Me, pp. 279-280) To stand with truth buckled round our waist and integrity for a breastplate is not so much about getting the notes right or obeying the letter of the law or playing by all the rules and regulations as it is about playing with heart.

Before us let us carry the shield of faith. A word of caution, though, for faith is not about knowing facts or articulating definitions of God. Even atheists understand the concept of God. Faith is not about intellectual understanding but once again is about matters of the heart, or as our friend Frederick Buechner puts it, "about standing in the darkness, and a hand is there, and we take it." (Frederick Buechner) A seminary professor tells how when teaching his students about the resurrection, he would take his class to the city morgue. There confronted with the grim reality of death, students learned once again what it means to be a "struggling and searching pilgrim." "Pure faith," this professor says, "occurs, as with Israel in the desert, when we go on serving the God whom do not see, loving the God whom we do not feel, adoring the God whom we do not understand, and thanking the God who has taken from us everything but God's own self." (W. Paul Jones, Weavings, May/June, 1997.) Let carry the shield of faith and stand in the darkness, taking again the hand that is there.

And finally, our uniform is not complete without the shoes of peace, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit. In the face of all the "the cosmic powers of this present darkness," let us armor ourselves that we might be equipped to proclaim boldly the good news - that God is a God of love; that God is a God of peace; and that God's peace is that peace which passes all understanding. St. Francis describes the gospel of peace as sowing love where there is hatred; forgiving when one is transgressed; seeking unity where there is division; bringing hope where there is despair; bringing light where there is darkness; bearing joy where there is sadness. When such peace is found, then, too, is salvation.

Let us trust that we are growing strong in the Lord, and may our dress code be: truth, integrity, love, faith, and peace.


* Thanks to William Willimon for the title of this sermon!