First Presbyterian Church
August 25, 2024, Pentecost 14B
Defensive Measures
Back in August 2021, about three years ago, a Santa Barbara, CA man was charged with “foreign murder of US nationals.” The man, upon admitting to the murders, claimed to have been “enlightened by the extremist group QAnon and the Illuminati.” According to the man, he had received “visions and signs” telling him that his wife “possessed serpent DNA,” and that the same DNA had been passed to their children. He had therefore taken the two children, a 2-year-old boy and a 10-month-old daughter, driven them across the border into Mexico, and shot them in the chest with a spearfishing gun. In doing so, he claimed, he was “saving the world from monsters.”
In a time like this, when such a story with such seemingly fantastical and unbelievable details ends up in the very mainstream Washington Post[i], perhaps we enlightened modern intellectual types should be a little less dismissive when a scripture like today’s reading from Ephesians speaks of standing against “the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” I have no interest in speaking pro or con on the literal horns-and-hooves existence of devils, demons, or whatever you might call such a thing. This scripture’s primary interest is not in reveling or indulging in thoughts about such rulers or cosmic powers or spiritual forces of evil; this scripture’s primary interest is in what follows – being prepared in mind and soul and spirit to withstand the attacks and lies and fears that seek to engage us in deeds of evil, however one defines their sources, and to stand fast in Christ. The metaphor which our author chooses for this purpose is to put on “the whole armor of God.”
In and of itself the passage is one of those that really ought to be basic to our understanding of the Christian life. Take another look at the attributes that are celebrated here: truth, righteousness, proclaiming the gospel, faith, salvation, and the word of God. How are these bad things? How are these anything but essentials of the Christian life?
In this combination as presented here, these become a kind of discipline or rubric for life. Being grounded in the truth God gives, we live with righteousness among one another, proclaim the good news as God gives opportunity, live in faith and trust in our salvation, all supported and rooted in the word of God. That’s one way to put it; you might express it differently, but the key is to grasp that these are not individual achievements to be checked off some list of virtues; these are woven together like a fabric, or to use this author’s metaphor, assembled as armor, for our defense in a world that is not welcoming to the gospel.
That last statement, about a world not welcoming the gospel, shouldn’t shock us by now. This is something Jesus told his disciples, more than once. In Matthew 10, Jesus probably shocks those followers with his statement “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” As Jesus explains, those who live into Jesus’s call and become his followers will be estranged from even one’s own family; one’s foes will be members of his own household, as Matthew 10:36 describes. The world will not be sweetness and light for those who truly follow Jesus. Jesus said it himself, and the author of Ephesians knows it, and would encourage the readers of this letter to be prepared for the hostility they would face or maybe were already facing – perhaps knowing that the “powers of this dark world" sometimes got help from our friends and family.
With this in mind, our author exhorts his hearers to take up truth, righteousness, proclaiming the gospel, faith, salvation, and the word of God as defenses against that in the world which would oppose our discipleship. (Yes, even the "sword of the Spirit" is here more for one's defense; the principal offensive weapons of the Roman military against which this is patterned would have been spears and arrows.) It’s a list that should be right up there with the “fruits of the Spirit” in Galatians 5, or the “think on these things” attributes listed in Philippians 4. Instead, this has become one of the more abused passages in all the New Testament.
One part of this abuse of scripture hinges on that early language about the “wiles of the devil” and rulers and authorities and cosmic powers and spiritual forces of evil. Some corners of the church have a bad habit of obsessing over those things. Whether it is in drawing out elaborate cosmologies of darkness or concocting "fear fiction" such as the Left Behind books – or for that matter the series that was initiated by a novel with the title “This Present Darkness” in a clear nod to this scripture reading – such self-claimed Christians engage little at all in proclaiming good news; rather they become peddlers of fear. And fear is the very stuff of those rulers and authorities and cosmic powers, however you define them. Fear is the opposite of gospel. Fear is the stuff that drives a man to kill his children because some conspiracy theorist has convinced him they’re going to destroy the world.
The other common abuse of this passage is to get obsessed with the armor imagery and forget those attributes to which the armor metaphor points. Such readers get led into reading such a passage as a call to holy war.
It is one of the more curse-worthy tendencies of the church across its history to look for excuses to go on the attack. How many crusades marred the Middle Ages? How much violence marked the Reformation era? And now this “warrior mentality” and the invention of a “warrior Christ” to justify it is far more pervasive in many corners of the modern church than it’s comfortable to admit.
Friends, let's be clear; this armor talk in Ephesians is not about forming “warriors for Christ.” It has one point, spelled out in verse 13: “…so that you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand." When “the sword” comes as Jesus describes back in Matthew 10, our job is … to stand. There’s no retreat, but there's also no plan of attack, no glorious charge, no smiting our foes, none of that. We stand together, in truth and righteousness and gospel and faith and salvation and the word of God; we withstand all the evil that the world (and sometimes our fellow “Christians”) throw at us; and in the end, we're still standing. Conflict will come, indeed, if we’re truly following Jesus and truly proclaiming the gospel as Jesus did. We don’t need to go looking for it, much less starting it.
The final verses of this reading perhaps make the point above more wrenchingly than any amount of exposition can hope. The author, again most likely a follower or assistant of Paul’s seeking to preserve and transmit his mentor’s teaching, appears to have emulated his mentor in at least one way: being imprisoned. That reference has come up a few times in this letter, and here it appears clearly again near the letter’s close as the writer describes himself as “an ambassador in chains.” The indirect call to prayer found in last week’s reading becomes direct here, as the writer urges his readers to pray “on all occasions” for the Spirit, and “for the Lord's people,” and especially for himself so that when he speaks, he may be given a message to speak boldly and declare “the mystery of the gospel.” Our author is called to speak, to proclaim. That’s all the “offensive action” that is invoked here.
We’re not here to go to some kind of spiritual war, though we're not necessarily meant to run from it either. We are here to proclaim, and not incidentally to live out what we proclaim. We are given this “whole armor of God” for our defense as we proclaim. We bear this armor to withstand and to stand. In a world of conflict that will inevitably oppose what devoted Christ-followers are bound to say and to do, we are given defensive measures to preserve us so that we may speak boldly, so that we may withstand, and so that, having done all these things, we may still be standing.
And it is with this, not quite a call to arms but perhaps a "call to armor," that the author concludes this letter. There are some extremely difficult and even deeply unpleasant sections that, no surprise, the compilers of the Revised Common Lectionary chose not to include in this cycle for preaching and worship. Nonetheless there is also some sound instruction to be found in these pages, and (as was noted in one of the earlier sermons in this series, it becomes our task to determine what to keep from this epistle's instruction, what to "put on," so to speak, or what to keep. And indeed, truth, righteousness, proclaiming the gospel, faith, salvation, and the word of God are good things to keep.
For defensive measures, Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #361, O Christ, the Great Foundation; #840, When Peace Like a River; #838, Standing on the Promises
...not this.
[i] Jonathan Edwards, “A QAnon-obsessed father thought his kids would destroy the world, so he killed them with a spear gun, FBI says.” Washington Post, 12 August 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/12/california-father-killed-children-qanon-illuminati/ (accessed 15 August 2024).
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