My sermon is a day or two late making it here because I was a part of the New England Songwriters’ Retreat, which was a transcendent experience for me. (If you would like to read more about that, please subscribe to my newsletter.) The retreat was close by, so I was able to slip away Sunday morning for a “preach and run” at my church. The passage was Ephesians 6:10-20.
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One of my favorite phrases is “creative tension.”
The idea is to take two things that appear opposite or contrary to one another and, rather than think of them as offering an either-or choice, to hold them both in a way that we can see greater options.
The phrase came to mind as I reflected on our passage for this morning because one of the fundamental truths of life, for me, is that responding to violence with violence is never an enduring solution and I am preaching from a passage that uses war as a spiritual metaphor.
Hence, a creative tension.
The only fight I ever had was with Johnny Pike. That is, unless you want to count the time when I was five and my brother was three and we were supposed to sing “Jesus Loves Me” before my dad preached at a church in Conroe, Texas. Miller hit a wrong note and I laughed. He punched me and we started wrestling to the point that they had to pull us apart.
So, I’ve been in two fights and the second one was with Johnny Pike.
We were both in the sixth grade at Hubbard Heights Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas, and we got into an argument over a science project that escalated to agreeing to meet on the football field across the street from my house after school. My parents said my brother came running home and slid under his bed, yelling, “Milton’s gonna get killed!” Johnny and I scrapped for a bit until we both were starting to cry; I tried to throw a punch and Johnny’s big brother jumped on me and held me down while Johnny ran away.
I am not a fighter. I don’t think violence is redemptive. One of my least favorite hymns is “Onward Christian Soldiers.” And I wonder if I would feel that way if I had spent my life in Kabul, or Darfur, or Somalia, or Gaza.
As I was preparing for this sermon, I read something written by a pastor named Austin Crenshaw Shelley who told of a time when she was in seminary and expressed her dislike for war metaphors in the Bible. Another student who was a Coptic Christian from Ethopia and whose church had been the target of a terrorist bombing said, “You prefer verses about peace because you have never needed a warrior God.”
We have to hold both ideas in creative tension as we look at these verses and listen to his metaphor.
Paul was writing to folks who were oppressed. The government was after them. They were considered dangerous, rebellious, incendiary. The lives they lived were not safe. War was a reasonable metaphor for their lives. The verses we read were the closing words to his letter. He had spent a significant part of his writing challenging them to relate to one another with kindness and love and integrity, as we have seen in the passages we have read over the past couple of weeks. As he brought the letter to a close, he told them to be strong in Christ and then used the various pieces of armor worn by Roman soldiers to describe what he meant. Once he had that picture of the soldier in their minds he said, “Our enemy is not physical,” and he talked about spiritual forces.
In other words, Johnny Pike is the least of our problems.
When I think of spiritual forces the words that come to mind are things like despair, shame, hopelessness, abuse, oppression, and prejudice. Those are all things that are larger than one person or one country; we could add to the list, I’m sure. In the face of all that, Paul said, be strong in the boundless resources of God.
When I was in college I heard my father preach on this passage and his words stayed with me, in part I think, because his whole point had to do with a preposition, and I didn’t think he had ever paid that much attention to prepositions.
He said that when we read “the armor of God” we tend to think of is possessive–that the armor belonged to God and God handed it out to us to get us ready to fight. He said the better way to read it was to hear the preposition as descriptive, which is to say the armor was God. To put on the armor of God was to wrap ourselves up in God—to be strong in the Spirit.
When God is the armor, we get a different view of the metaphor. Look at the verbs: resist, stand your ground, pray, keep alert. Paul never said anything about attacking. He talked about preparing and persisting, and then he asked them to pray for him while he was in prison that he would not lose faith.
As I thought about how to close this sermon, my first instinct was to point to people like Mahatma Ghandhi, Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King—people who have stood strong and persevered by wrapping themselves in the armor of God. And then I thought of Ivor and June Mitchell, two people I cooked with this summer in Ireland, who have lived in Belfast their whole lives working for peace. They gave me a deeper understanding of the complexity of all that had happened, as well as how tenacious and compassionate we must be to foster justice and community.
Then a quote came to mind that I learned, first, from Ginger, but dates back to the days of the ancient Greek philosophers—“Be kind for everyone is fighting a great battle”—and I thought about people I know, and millions more that I don’t, who struggle daily to survive for any number of reasons, many of which feel like forces beyond their control.
The truth is we are all fighting great battles, often within ourselves. I then get this image in my mind of people putting on the armor of God—enveloping themselves in God’s tenacious and unfailing love and keeping on. To put on the armor of God is not a call to violence, but to love and faithfulness to God and it is also a call to carry on together.
And that takes me to one final thought. In every movie I have seen where a character has to put on some kind of armor, someone helps them get dressed. They can’t put it on by themselves, which takes me back to the quote: “Be kind because everyone is fighting a great battle.”
We all need help putting on the armor of God in the middle of our creative tensions. We can’t put on the armor of God alone. We all need help being reminded that we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. We need help to remember that responding to violence with more violence is not a solution. We need help remembering we what we bring to the struggle are peace, hope, truth, trust, and love.
May we be armor-bearers for one another so that we all may know what it feels like to be loved and protected. May we be those who trust that love is the best armor of all. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
