Potentially Problematic: Armor (Ephesians 6:10-20)
21st Sunday of Ordinary Time
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the
strength of his might. 11 Put on the whole
armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. 12 For we
do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the
rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this
present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the
heavenly places. 13 Therefore take up the
whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and
having done all, to stand firm. 14 Stand
therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on
the breastplate of righteousness, 15 and, as
shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of
peace. 16 In all circumstances take up the
shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts
of the evil one; 17 and take the helmet
of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, 18 praying at
all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that
end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all
the saints, 19 and also for me, that words may
be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of
the gospel, 20 for which I am an
ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. (ESV)
It is a time-honored tradition for
parents to take photos of their children on the first day of school with their
tidied shirttails and their new shoes and their no-strand-out-of-place
hair. It is an encapsulation of both the
parents’ survival rate after the summer break and of the child’s willingness to
begin something new, heading off to the adventure of a school year where
friends and teachers and activities await.
The new clothes and the combed hair and the perfect smile are armor
against everything that could happen, every moment that might make school
something to dread rather than welcome. Even
if the first day is something nobody wants, that photo makes it look like
everything is potential.
A delightful
new trend that’s been going around social media is for parents to also take a
photo of their children after school on that first day and post the two
side-by-side. Shirttails are pulled out
and sometimes ripped completely, shoes are scuffed and occasionally on the
wrong feet, hair is in every direction as though the child were caught in a
small tornado. The “after” photos make
that first day of school seem like a chaotic battle against the forces of evil
rather than learning arithmetic, the armor singed by the fires of war.
We continue today
in our series on texts that seem to offer more problems than solutions at first
blush, remaining in the letter to the church at Ephesus. This passage of the “armor of God” is one of
the better-known pieces of Scripture, if not in complete memorization then at
least in general idea. The armor gets
invoked in a lot of curious ways when people need to feel like combat is the
best metaphor at hand.
Christians
have a very complicated relationship with the idea of warfare; we have spent
much of our faith’s history battling against whoever we deem dangerous to our
persons or, more often, our understanding of the faith, even though Jesus
warned us that “those who live by the sword will die by the sword” and that the
best of moments will be when swords are beaten into ploughshares and there
shall be no more war.[1] Even the current debacle of the United States
leaving Afghanistan is tinged with the ugly beginnings of being called a
“crusade” back in 2001, a reference to the bloody and horrifying series of wars
in and around Jerusalem over some three hundred years that have permanently
disfigured Christianity’s presentation to the world.[2] These days, we Christians are more at war
with ourselves than anyone else, battling factions for who has the right heart
of Christ and who sets the blueprints for the kingdom of God we’re supposed to
be building. We take up our swords of
self-righteousness, if not Spirit, and swing wildly at our foes.
The language
of warfare saturates our hymns, our prayers, our petitions to God in this
embattled world. Paul, who was writing
while imprisoned for proclaiming a faith that spoke against the seemingly
unshakeable power of Rome, understood far better than we modern Western
Christians can what it was like to need armor in living out one’s beliefs. But Paul was not encouraging factions to
slice at each other’s hearts. He warned
against patterns that were much, much bigger.
“Put on the
whole armor of God, that you might be able to stand against the schemes of the
devil.” Professor Robert Williamson,
Jr., notes that “The claim that ‘our struggle is not against enemies of blood
and flesh’ (6:12) but rather ‘against the wiles of the devil’ (6:11) leads many
interpreters to conclude that the passage is about a spiritual struggle on the
part of individual believers and has no connection to the political realities
of the world.
“Yet a closer reading of the text
shows that, in fact, it is concerned with spiritual realities precisely in
their relationship to political realities. Ephesians 6:12 contrasts the ‘enemies
of blood and flesh’ with the true enemies, using a five-fold repetition of the
word ‘against’ (Gk. pros)”[3]—against “the rulers,
against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present
darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Against not the person standing next
to us, not the Baptist down the street or the Episcopalian disagreeing with you
online, but against the ways in which individual people wield temporal and
spiritual authority to crush the very souls of others, twisting the wonder of
creation into something that bends to human will.
This is not a license to pick a fight
with the person who thinks that guitars shouldn’t be in worship or that
communion can only be with wine; this is a distillation of Christ’s expectation
that we dig into the world we live in and root out the harmful patterns. Christians have a difficult history with the
language of war; and Christians have been in positions of power for centuries. Our tongues have become swords; our words
arrows against others as speak in the name of God but without the love of
Christ.
Church, we have so much to apologize
for. We have put on the whole armor of
God and gone off to war in defense of a God Who proclaimed that we should not
kill; we have put on the whole armor of God to fight against anyone who does
not bend to our picture of who should be in church and what they need to look
like when they get there. We have put on
the whole armor of God as though it is an actual battle and we have forgotten
that the entirety of God’s Self is built on the improbable absurdity of grace,
grace abundant and unearned, grace that flowed through a preacher in jail
saying to the churches he helped shape that they were protect
themselves, not to charge ahead as though they were God’s avenging angels.
“[Paul] resorts to a common
militaristic image of body armor that his audience would see on Roman soldiers
daily,” writes Pastor David Cameron, “but in a nose-tweaking twist, he
reinvents the image in a most non-militaristic way. He appropriates the common
parts of armor – belt, breastplate, shield – but he assigns them uncommon
values: truth, righteousness, faith. Consequently, the armor, usually a symbol
of self-reliance, is transformed into a symbol of utter dependence on God.”
Putting on the whole armor of God is
not an offensive move; it is defensive.
We are to put on the whole armor of God so we can stand firm, not so we
can attack; to withstand, not overpower.
We are not to be doormats, to be sure—we’re wearing armor, after all—but
putting on the armor of God does not change the fundamental role of Christians
to protect, to nurture, to heal, to live and allow life. The armor of God is completely covered, after
all, by the shield of faith.
“The shield is defense against
flaming arrows,” reminds Professor Melinda Quivik. “Roman shields were leather, wetted against
incoming fire, and large enough to cover the one who carried it and one-third
of the person beside him. The
shields were linked, so that again, we can see the church, armed with faith,
facing assaults from those who do not know the gospel is about peace….The only
piece of this armor that can be used for offense is ‘the sword of the Spirit,
which is the word of God.’ Proclaiming the mystery of the gospel, the word of
God both cuts and salves. It is law and gospel, in Lutheran terms — trouble and
grace, in the language of homiletician Paul Wilson. Even the offensive
weapon is for healing and peace, because, in Christian terms, the Spirit kills
and brings to life.”[4]
Our weapons, our armor, is not and
cannot be offensive lest we become the very powers we are called to stand
against. We are to arm ourselves against
the systemic racism that thinks terrorism can only come from the Middle East
and ignores the terrorism of white men here in American cities; we are to arm
ourselves against the capitalistic system that teaches children they should not
be able to eat if they can’t pay for it at the school lunch counter; we are to
arm ourselves against the sexist expectations that we can enforce the length of
girls’ skirts but not whether a child wears a mask; we are to arm ourselves
against the twisted pronouncements from pulpits that say LGBTQ folk are outside
of God’s ability to love; we are to arm ourselves against the dehumanizing lie
that a woman’s body is subject to anyone but her and God; we are to arm
ourselves against the spiritual forces of evil that insist we must earn the
right to be alive on this planet by making ourselves useful as though
God didn’t make every single thing and call it good simply because it came
from the righteousness of God’s holy Self.
That is why we need armor. It is a dangerous, bone-rattling,
soul-shaking fight to stand firm against the myriad of ways that our world
tells us and that we tell ourselves and each other that we are somehow so
broken that there is nothing that God can salvage. We are to put on the belt of truth, the truth
that God so loved the entire world that God offered God’s Son, a living
link between divinity and us, not to condemn the world but to save the world
through Him.[5] We are to put on the breastplate of
righteousness, a protection of our heart and lungs and stomach and ribs so
fierce we can say with Paul that “I consider everything a loss because of the
surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have
lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and
be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the
law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the
righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.”[6] We are to put on our feet the readiness of
the gospel of peace so we can run to all four corners of the earth and proclaim
the good news, the good news that there is wholeness on offer from the
God Who calls us each by name and says I made you on purpose and I will
never leave you behind.
I don’t know about you, but I feel
much more able to stand firm in the Lord when I’m wearing all that.
And the thing is, the powers of evil,
the politics of our day, the systems that tear us down—they are very, very
strong. There will be days when we come
home looking like the kids in the after-school photos with our hair sticking
every which way and our clothes torn and our armor ragged because it was a battle. There will be days when the idea of being all
shiny and ready to go is a distant memory because we so, so tired.
Some of us may be having a lot of
those days right now.
That’s where the prayer comes in.
“Put on the whole armor of
God…praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and
supplication.” Paul knew what the battle
days were like; Professor Richard Carlson reminds us, “The conclusion of this
text (verses 19-20) contains a bit of irony in that the one giving these
instructions on preparation for battle is himself in chains as a captive.
Indeed, he is also reliant on God’s troops for their prayers. So even the
apostolic general is dependent on the Lord’s strength and on the community’s
bonds to persevere for the proclamation of the gospel in face of all
opposition.”[7] Because the thing of it is, this whole
passage is about the armor of God.
It’s not ours; it never was. It
is not our truth, our righteousness, our peace; we are stewards of the armor
God gives us to stand firm against the powers of evil in this world that prey
upon the outcast and the brokenhearted.
So we pray; we pray for direction, for guidance, for hope, for strength,
for peace, for righteousness, for truth, for courage, for love, for patience,
for kindness, for joy, for faith. We
pray like it’s the only thing that makes sense because a lot of days, it is.
It might seem odd to take the idea of
flaming arrows and swords and battle against spiritual forces of evil and match
it with Blessing of the Backpacks Sunday, but it’s actually quite
deliberate. When Gloria and I talked
about having a blessing day like this, it made so much sense to do it with this
text. As the photographs so humorously
show, kids need armor on the first day of school—not necessarily for fighting
with each other but for standing firm against the powers and principalities of
their world: against expectations that
tell them they aren’t good enough, against prejudices adults don’t even realize
we have, against their own fears and doubts and moments of thinking less of the
kids around them or of who they are. And
it’s not just kids who need to be reminded of the armor they can wear; many of
us adults going back to the office for the first time while COVID numbers
continue to rise in a nation where other people’s lives are sold cheaply to the
stock market and the loudest claim of discomfort, and work may feel like a
battleground. For those of us who have
been in the office a while, being reminded to put on our armor may be an
important thing. For those who stay
home, the rules and authorities and present darkness find a different way to throw
arrows at the shields we may have to quickly pick up again if we’ve set them
down.
Put on the whole armor of God,
at every age, not because the world is relentlessly terrible but because there are
terrible things in the world and we will be called upon to defend ourselves and
others against that which denies the wholeness of us or someone else. And above all things, all things,
pray; pray in remembrance of the blessing that God goes with you, not just in
the armor but in our very souls, bright and strong enough to stand firm.
Praise be to God for it. Amen.
[1]
Matthew 26:52; Isaiah 2:4.
[3]
The
Politics of White Supremacy—Ephesians 6:10-20 (Robert Williamson) | Political
Theology Network
[5]
John 3:16–17.
[6]
Philippians 3:8–9, NIV.
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