Putting On The Pads

"Putting On The Pads"

Ephesians 6:10-20
August 23, 2009

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor
of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 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. 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. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the
breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you
ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. 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. Take the helmet
of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 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. Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message
may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I
am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak.

I think sometimes we Christians of the 21st century forget to contextualize our
Scriptures, we forget to put these writings into their own historical contexts, and so we
impugn them with our own particular historical contexts, forgetting that they arise within
the context of their own times, their own particular past. I think this is especially true for
passages like this, where we can easily imagine the putting on of the helmet, the
gathering up of the sword, images easily grasped from a myriad of movies that showed
us what an ancient Roman soldier might have looked like. What we forget is the larger
historical context, the larger reason why this early Christian writer might have used
such an image, even as he speaks of proclaiming a gospel of peace, which seems an
odd tension if you think about it—the gospel of peace, the good news of peace to be
shared by putting on the armor of God, the weapons of war. What we forget is how
totally militarized Roman culture really was; what we forget is how completely drenched
Roman life was in the mechanism of war and conquest, and how everything was geared
towards both conquest, and keeping intact those conquered territories. Essentially, the
moment Rome began its brutal conquest of the rest of the Mediterranean world, it was
always on high alert, always going to battle somewhere in some far flung corner of its
empire, with barbarians and unvanquished tribes nipping at its edges, ready to pick off
this or that piece of its colossal empire. Rome, for 500 years or so, was simply in a
state of constant war, even in the good times, it felt like an eternal war, even to those
Roman citizens who believed in the sword, and Roman peace, pax Romana, was simply
nothing more than a tongue and cheek way of saying, “Roman peace at the edge of a
bloodied sword.”

That is the context of this passage, this call to arms, this call to take up the instruments
of war, and use them against powers not made up of flesh and blood, but something
more sinister, something more powerful than Roman armies. And yet, if you think about
it, how could any empire not always be in a constant state of war, somewhere, and
somehow? Empires simply don’t maintain themselves, they must be worked on,
expanded and defended, but, eventually, history has their way with them, and they
decline, even eternal Rome. When Rome was in its heyday, when the coffers were full,
and the boundaries of the empire had been pushed to its greatest lengths, and the
armies were not too occupied with putting down the various revolts of the people it had
tried to vanquish, even then you would find war mimicked, replicated in the great
coliseums, the great games found in Rome and other major cities. Sports were the way
the masses way became witnesses to wars that were being fought by its armies in
various parts of the empire, gladiators fighting to the death, mimicking what was
happening in the real world, in another place. Its seems so odd that that a culture
already so drenched in blood and violence, so entrenched in its own powerful war
machine, would then want to witness such violence being played out in its stadiums.
You can see why our Congregational forbears, the Pilgrims and the Puritans, had such
a deep suspicion of games, any games, because they seem to smack of paganism, of
Rome—and so in 1647 “the Massachusetts Bay Company passed laws against the
playing of shuffleboard and in 1654 proscribed against lawn bowling. This mood
dominated American Protestantism from 1640-1820. The first "organized" games didn't
take place in the U.S. until 1845.” (Homiletics Online)

But we shouldn’t be so horrified by the Romans, or even the extreme reactions of our
theological ancestors to their games, or any games, for that matter, because I often
wonder if our modern sports stadiums are nothing more than modern coliseums, where
our gladiators, our athletes essentially play out some of that unconscious aggression
within us while our own soldiers fight wars in far flung places. Team sports have
exploded in our culture, college and pro, and stadiums are expanding and teams are
arming up with the best recruits possible, the best players money can buy. My favorite
time of the year is coming up, fall, and my favorite team, my alma mater, Alabama, will
be playing its first game of the year against Virginia Tech, and I can’t wait. I am more
mad about Bama football than I used to be, even when I was actually attending the
school, and I have often wondered why that the case. Maybe there is something in our
genes, in our cultural DNA that makes many of us so competitive, so fiercely partisan
for our side, our team, whatever, some trait that connects us to those long deserted
coliseums that once dotted the Roman empire in its heyday.

But if you live in a constant state of aggression and war, it will eventually deform you,
scar you, and make you irrational and too suspicious and cynical of others, something
that would happen later to the church, as it melded with the state, and began its various
inquisitions and heresy witch hunts.   Though this example is not a perfect example and
may even sound glibe, I even think the way our modern sports rivalries have become
infected with this divisive spirit, this spirit of eternal war—in my own setting, the rivalry
between my school and Auburn University, has become so toxic, so negative, that I can
barely stand it, even as I want nothing more than to beat them every year. I’ve never
seen such bile coming from both sides, as if this was real, as if this really mattered—we
talk about each other as if the other side was evil incarnate—they’re cheating in
recruiting, their players lack character, etc, etc. Though I am very competitive, it gets
harder and harder to watch it, because both sides seem to lose perspective—it is, after
all, a game, and nothing more. And though it may mirror some deep, sinful aggressive
nature within us, in the end, on Saturday, it really is nothing more than a bunch of
young men running around with awkward looking pads and helmets fighting over a
leather football. We lose perspective when we take our teams too seriously, when we
take the stadium and coliseum too seriously, and we simply forget that there are
greater battles, battles of the spirit, that matter deeply, and that can have powerful
consequences if we fail to arm ourselves in order to engage them.

That is what the writer of Ephesians seems to be trying to tell us, at the every tail end of
his letter to the church at Ephesus. Here the writer harkens back to the image of the
Roman soldier, those men populating the streets of Rome and Ephesus, populating big
and small towns, and he points to the outfit of such soldiers as a metaphor for the
spiritual battles of his fellow Christians. As I said earlier, this is a culture drenched in
the military, the Roman military, and in the work of war, and so it’s a natural leap for him
to make, but of course, it’s a loaded metaphor as well. It’s loaded because of those
early Christians had a reputation for being a people of peace, a very non-aggressive
people, who often were forbidden to serve in the military themselves, and yet here a
military metaphor is being used. Still, the military outfit get transformed, but more on
that later, because what must be attended to first is who the battle is against, these
principalities and powers, these forces of evil, the wiles of the devil, the cosmic powers,
that must be fought against. These forces are demonic, they are aggressive, they wish
to steal and destroy and what they are, are forces within the universe and within our
hearts that contribute to racism, “segregation, apartheid, fatalism, the Mafia, addiction,
bondage of the will, totalitarian states, a celebrity culture of glamorized Bad Girls and
Boys, serfdom in the middle ages, attempted bribery of legislatures through large
campaign contribution, and genocide.” (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol 3, 377) It’s
those things and many others, forces that never seem to be fully squashed, that always
seem to pop up throughout history—the sexual enslavement of women, and children,
the rape of women as a weapon of war, sexism, heterosexism, the abuse and neglect of
children, those things that should not be, and yet always seem to be. I don’t want
overstate this naming of these cosmic powers, I don’t want to make them more powerful
than they are, because this is still God’s world and it is still a good world, but what I do
want to do is what the writer is trying to do here, which is to name the reality that there
seem to be forces in this world, whether they be within our hearts, or within our world,
or both, that seem to constantly be at war with the best of human nature, at war with
what is good in this world.

And so the writer of Ephesians says that we are strap on our armor, our defenses,
against the enemies that are spiritual in nature, those forces that are not flesh and
blood, but who cause flesh and blood humans to do horrible things to themselves and
others.   And though the metaphor is obviously militaristic, is drenched in the militarism
of Rome, it’s important to mention a detail that is often missed when these particular
weapons of spiritual warfare are strapped on—almost everything is defensive, the
armor, the shield, the breastplate, etc, all of them are meant to protect the combatant,
except for the sword, the word of God, which, despite what we tend to think, is not
Scripture—they would not have had the New Testament fully intact yet, nor recognized
it as Scripture yet—but is instead that Gospel of peace, that proclamation that there is
Good News in this One from Nazareth, that there is hope, despite the principalities and
powers, despite the cosmic powers that seem to destroy so many lives in this world.
Even the command in the text, to “stand firm” is a defensive measure, not an
aggressive one, as if the enemies were about to a launch a wave of attacks against this
spiritual armored soldier. Don’t give into the forces themselves, the forces of
negativity, the forces of evil, the forces that say there is nothing we can do stop the
genocides, the rapes, the wars, the abuse, in this world, because it has always been
that way. Do not give into the forces of cynicism and despair, the writer of Ephesians
seems to plead with us.

Listen, I do think there should always be a concern when a writer of Scripture uses a
military metaphor in describing the gospel of peace, simply because some throughout
the history of the church have used such metaphorical language to justify their
readiness to go to war against real flesh and blood and do it in God’s name. And yet,
God is powerful and God is good and God can transform the instruments of war into
instruments of peace. Many of you know have probably noticed that I have been doing
some reading on the Inquisition lately—not to get pointers or anything like that, so don’t
be afraid—and what is fascinating is how some of the instruments of torture used by
the church’s inquisitors would one day be transformed into instruments of healing by
modern day surgeons. God can take the instruments of war, of death and destruction,
and do something new with them, as God takes different difficult times in our own lives
and eventually transforms them into something good.

I want to conclude with a story about those instruments of pain, those weapons of war,
a war against the beauty of the human body, so to speak, those instruments of torture
that have now become instruments of healing. Janet Lutz was a chaplain in an Atlanta
hospital, and she tells this story some time right before her retirement from the hospital
that she has worked at for many years.

One of the things we do is we go around and bless the hands of all the people who
work in the hospital. I go around and find the people in the basement and the people
who are cleaning the toilets and people who are serving the food. And when I go
around finding people, wherever they are, they're often startled and then really touched
by it, as am I. And in the basement of a hospital, in a windowless room, they pack the
surgical instruments before surgery. Each surgery has a list of all the instruments they
need, and at the top of the list is the patient's name and the technician is given this list,
and it's up to her or to him to pack these instruments and take them up to the OR for
the particular surgery.

One of the women told me that as she packed these instruments and she knew the
patient's name, she would pray for that patient, and that she had been doing that for 40
years. And I thought, no one knows that she's doing this. Here she is, a person who
has been working at that hospital for longer than most of us, who is doing this
incredibly important job that has to be done precisely and carefully. As she's doing this,
she's praying for the patient she will never meet and the patients that she will never
see. She'll never know the outcome. She only knows that she's helping to make their
surgery possible. And then I found out that most of them did it. You know, people work
really hard and are so essential but often not seen by patients and families. They just
assume these people are all doing work, and they don't realize how rich their lives are
and how rich their stories are. (http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?
storyId=98451551)

To pray for 40 years, to pray over instruments that will cause some immediate pain, but
will hopefully be an instrument of healing, now this is a person who has not given into
the principalities and powers, who has not embraced cynicism that there is nothing that
she can do to make the world a better place, even in her work in a windowless room in
the basement of a hospital, packing the steely and grotesque instruments needed for
surgery. What God does over and over again, in our decision to stand firm, to say
“yes” to the goodness of this world and to the Gospel it is worthy of being given, and in
our decision to say “no” to the principalities and powers, to the forces of cynicism and
hate, what God does in that moment is to transform the world, one instrument at a time,
one life at a time—it is to believe that God can take on the forces that seek to destroy,
the things meant for pain, and do something new and good with them, as God did with
the cross thousands of years ago. If God can do such a thing with such a horror, then
surely can God can do such a thing in our lives as well. Amen and amen and amen.