Ephesians 6:10-18
10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. 14 Stand therefore, and fasten 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. 18 Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.
Early one morning the
general manager of a very large department store got a phone call from his
security director. “There’s been a break in,” the director reported. The
manager drove right over. When he entered the store, the sight took his breath
away. Merchandise was scattered everywhere. Clothes were hanging in the
sporting goods section. Wristwatches and bracelets were stacked in the linens
department. Men’s shirts were arranged in a neat display in the middle of the
children’s shoe section. As the department managers sorted the merchandise out,
they made a startling discovery. Nothing was actually missing. As far as they
could tell, whoever had broken in had not stolen anything, but had just
rearranged the store’s goods. It was all still there, just in the wrong place.
Most puzzling, all the price tags were switched around. A diamond brooch had a
price tag for $12.95; a bath towel was priced at $599. It was completely
baffling, and no one could make any sense of it.
It seems odd that Paul
would write about military armament on behalf of the prince of peace. It’s
quite unlikely Paul was ever in military service, since Jews were excused from
serving in the Roman army. So Paul surely had no first-hand experience with the
outfit of armor he described in his letter to the Ephesian Christians.
It also seems
unbecoming that Paul would use warrior images in giving advice to Christian
people, whose savior rejected the use of armed force. When soldiers came to
arrest Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane Jesus stopped Peter from using his
sword to protect him. Yet, there it is, smack in the middle of the New
Testament, the armor of God and the sword of the Spirit, the basic kit of the
well-armed Christian.
Ephesus was on the
west coast of modern Turkey. It was the most important trading city of its
region, with a population of about three hundred thousand people. The temple of
the Diana at Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, housing
an image of Diana that was said to have dropped directly from the home of the
gods.
The temple was supported by 127 columns, each of them almost two hundred feet high. The Ephesians were very proud of the temple. During the Roman period, they promoted the worship of Diana by minting coins with the inscription, “Diana of Ephesus.”
The book of Acts relates Ephesus did not accept Christian preaching and evangelism easily. The silversmiths of the city had enormous financial interests in selling their goods to the temple and the temple’s gift shop. They stirred up the city’s various artisans against Paul and his companions. Soon the whole city was in an uproar and Paul’s companions were seized. Eventually, things calmed down and the men were released, but the Ephesians weren’t happy that substantial numbers of their residents were converting to Christianity and abandoning worship at the temple of Diana.
When Paul wrote to his
Christian brothers and sisters to put on the whole armor of God, it was his way
of reminding them that if they were going to follow Christ, they’d best be
ready for a real fight. They would have to be prepared to be attacked on account
of their faith. Note that all the equipment listed is purely defensive, except
the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
It’s tempting to
allegorize every element of the armor, focusing upon individual armaments and
expounding upon their individual significance. But Paul isn’t writing allegory.
It’s more of a metaphor and should be looked at as a whole.
We live in a world
that has changed dramatically since the Christian Ephesians began to follow
Jesus. In fact, we live in a culture that has changed dramatically since most
of us were children. Any of us older than thirty-five or forty know that the
culture our children are growing up in isn’t the same one we grew up in.
William Willimon of the Duke University Chapel related a conversation he had
with a small group of schoolteachers one evening.
“We wonder if you
preachers know what we're up against in the schools,” one asked.
“Like what?” Willimon
asked.
“Like a sixth grader
who has been abandoned by her parents, both of whom are physicians,” said one.
“Like an eight-year-old
who is addicted to cocaine,” said another. On and on they went, citing the
pathologies common in public schools today.
TV shows once didn’t
have ratings to warn parents that they were too racy or violent for children.
Supermarket check-out lines didn’t display mainstream magazines that gave
explicit advice for “mind-blowing sex” right on the cover. Police didn’t patrol
school halls even in inner cities.
There have been an
awful lot of good things that have come about in the last thirty or forty
years. We have better health care and live longer lives. Our environment is
cleaner. We don’t make black people sit in the back of the bus anymore. Yet,
despite the many positive achievements and accomplishments of the past
generation, many people, especially parents, often find that they are strangers
in their own homeland. They are ill at ease because the world doesn’t seem to
support the way they want to live and the way they want to raise their
children.
It’s as if one morning
we woke up early, went outside to the culture we live in, and discovered that
all the elements of the good life are there, but in the wrong place, with all
the price tags switched. We’re baffled and we can’t make sense of it. We’re
unsure that our cultural values are what they should be. The Walking Dead gets millions of viewers but it’s not clear how it
is helping us live better lives or that we should let our kids watch it. We
strive for a more just society, but watch befuddled as revelations about what
Planned Parenthood really does just keep getting more shocking, and that apparently
can’t be stopped by the law and the courts. It’s not very difficult to get the
impression that the world is marching to a different drummer, buying a
different set of goods.
So, yes, the world has
shifted. We live in a post-Christian era.
“Having once had a comfortable [monopoly] over American life,
[mainline Protestant churches] have now been disestablished from the [cultural]
center. Now there is no more free ride for us, no more crutches from the
culture. If we are going to remain Christian, if our young [people] are going
to grow up embracing this faith, we shall have to make them that way. The world
won’t do it for us” (Willimon).
Christianity, which
once found itself located firmly at the center of popular culture, now
discovers that it is viewed by that culture as subversive. This is not new this
year. In the 1990s, Promise Keepers filled football stadiums teaching men how
to live honorable lives of duty and loyalty. Pop culture and media derided the
movement and accused it of trying to turn back the clock to an earlier time
when adultery was still socially unacceptable and men believed in one life, one
wife. Pretty dangerous stuff, huh?
So we might ponder that much of the world generally regards us Christians like it regarded the hippies of the nineteen sixties—we are the counterculture
of the last gasps of the second millennium. We are regarded with deep suspicion
because we live and work in a world that lives by different slogans, has
different visions and speaks a different language than the church. We confront
a world which often isn’t supportive of Christian ideals and sometimes
downright hostile. So Paul tells us we’d better not be unarmed and unprepared.
We need to prepare for our struggle as carefully as a soldier prepares to go on
campaign.
Being a soldier for
Christ is not a solitary venture. The idea that there is such a thing as a
solitary Christian is a contradiction in terms. Even the best armed soldier of
Paul’s day or our own would perish quickly trying to fight alone. A soldier
completely depends on his buddies to see him through tough times, to help him
prepare for future rigors, to help him simply survive.
For that reason we
have the church. The church is where we find our buddies. Anyone who has seen
hard duty in military service never uses the word “buddy” like a civilian. A
soldier’s buddy isn’t just some casual acquaintance. Your buddy is your other
self. The prospect of your buddy perishing is more horrific than of your own
death. Military psychologists learned long ago that soldiers in battle don’t
fight for flag or glory, but because they love their buddies.
Soldiers wage war; the
church is to wage peace. As Paul wrote, our struggle is not against enemies of
flesh and blood, but against the ungodly compulsions and temptations of the
fallen world. So we need the moral equivalent of war, in William James’ terms.
And that means we need each other, organized in the church.
I am not saying that
we can’t be good Christians without actively participating in the life of a
church. We can’t be any kind of Christian unless we do so. Christianity
is not something that is, it is something that does. And
Christianity does only within the collective context of the community of faith.
To withdraw from the active life of the community of faith or decline to join
it is spiritually suicidal. The whole armor of God can’t be worn by solitary
persons. It takes the entire church to wear it together.
So we must gather for
worship. We gather to announce God in a world that lives as if there is no God.
We speak to one another as beloved brothers and sisters in a world which
encourages us to live as strangers. We must pray to God to give us what we cannot
have by our own efforts in a world which teaches us that we are
self-sufficient. In such a world, what we do on Sunday morning becomes a matter
of life and death. (Willimon)
Of all the armament
Paul lists, the only weapon for offense is the sword of the Spirit, the word of
God. Our helmets and breastplates and shield may get battered and dented, but
we can respond only with the word of God.
John’s Gospel relates
that the Word became flesh and walked and lived among us. In Jesus Christ there
is abundant life. The word of God we know through Christ is the promise of
grace and preservation. God is love. To wield the sword of the Spirit is not to
strike down with violence, but to embrace with love. When we are assailed, we
are to respond in love. We are to announce and do grace and mercy.
So the sword isn’t good for ungodly purposes. This is not a sword you can use to cheat your customers or business partners. It isn’t a sword you can use to chop down the poor. This sword can’t be used to slice people up with rumors or speech of hostility or condemnation. The word of God never does any of those things.
Jesus said we are to
do good to our enemies and love them. Perhaps that is the reason we need to
wear armor, for love makes us vulnerable. David Lowes Watson wrote,
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung
and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must
give your heart to no one. Wrap it carefully with hobbies and little luxuries;
avoid all entanglements; lock it safe in a casket or coffin of your
selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change.
It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers
of love is—hell.
Because Christian
people are a people of love we will always be armed and vulnerable. When that
ceases to be, then we’ve defected to the other side.
The Christians in
Ephesus had a great advantage over us. Their culture was groping in the
darkness of paganism, so it was clear that the culture should have no part
defining the role of God’s people in the world. It is not so easy for us, for
our culture is not wholly bad. But we have grown accustomed to thinking of
ourselves as living in a “Christian nation.” Maybe that was never really true,
but if it was, it isn’t true now. Christendom has vanished.
We must reject the
illusions, seductions and false alternatives of our time to reassert the
ageless truth that only Jesus Christ is Lord. In the very moment of our
clearest announcement of the Gospel to the world, we will find that as Christ’s
witnesses to truth and life we will have the privilege of helping to make God’s
reign real in the world. With Christ, we will “preach good news to the poor,
proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to
release the oppressed [and] proclaim the . . . Lord's favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
