Armed and Vulnerable

 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)