October 27, 2024 Reformation Sunday Ephesians 6:10-24

             For most of my lifetime I’ve felt that American politics were relatively civil.  Republicans and Democrats disagreed for sure, but the debates were civil.  Fact checkable truths seemed to rule the day.  And if your party or your favored candidate lost an election you knew you could just wait until the next election cycle and try again.

            With this current election it seems like both parties have raised a level of anxiety such that if the other wins the very future of the nation is in peril.  Perhaps that is true.  Perhaps that is not.  I’m not a sociological expert.  What is true is that elections have always mattered.  Quite often in the past the outcome of an election did have a major impact on government policies and the daily life of the average person.

            Even so, it feels like this election is bigger.  And when it comes to the presidency and the House and Senate, it all seems to be up in the air.  (Although I understand it is reasonably likely that both houses of congress with see a swap in which party leads them.)  It all creates a lot of tension.  That tension has been building for years, perhaps decades.

            Politics used to be something that people would have polite disagreements about.  Now you better watch what you say, and there may well be plenty of severe arguments breaking out again this year when families gather around the Thanksgiving Day table.  If you’re lucky everyone at the table will be rooting for the same football team so you can have at least something to agree on!

            American democracy and American life has felt pretty tame for many people for quite a long time.  That’s not so in the present day.  Who knows if things will calm down or if they will continue to escalate.  Perhaps the heightened anxiety of the present day helps us to understand the imagery we read in Ephesians 6 about putting on the armor of God.

            Ephesians 6 talked about putting on the whole armor of God: the belt of truth around your waist, the breastplate of righteousness, as for your shoes – whatever makes you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit – which is the word of God.

            You get the picture of a well-armed soldier who is ready for battle.  But let’s be more specific than just that.  The author of Ephesians pretty clearly has in mind a Roman infantryman.  I don’t know how much you know about the Roman army, but Rome’s infantry was for all intent and purposes unstoppable.  It was the core of their military might.

            When the Roman infantry went to battle they did not act like a hoard with swords and shields wildly attacking an enemy; and then being victorious because of luck or superior fighting training.  The Roman infantry was successful because it was highly disciplined, strategic, and systematic.

            There is debate over how the infantry actually attacked.  There are lots of theories out there.  Most of them are fanciful.  I understand the History Channel has a program describing the way the Roman infantry defeated the ancient Britians outnumbered by 50 to 1 using a sawtooth attack pattern.  Like many things on the History Channel, it is probably more fantasy than fact.  What is certainly true is that the tactics the Roman infantry used changed over time.  They were good at incorporating things they learned from their enemies.  What is consistent over the centuries is that they made good use of some form of phalanx and wedge tactics.  The phalanx is where you line up infantrymen in shoulder to shoulder and a few layers deep.  If you’re in the front you’d hold your shield in your left hand and your sword in your right.  Being shoulder to shoulder your combined shields became like a wall.  There would be slight gaps left which you would use to thrust forward with your sword.  If you were in the front there would be someone behind you ready to take your place, and pushing on you to give more force to the forward motion. 

They would commonly combine the phalanx with a wedge formation.  You wouldn’t attack enemies in a straight line but rather in a point or wedge.  You moved forward, whether at a walk or at a run keeping the formation as tight as possible.

About the only way to stop the Roman infantry was to flank them or run around behind them.  But if you did that the Romans would combine their shields to be like a tortoise shell around them.  They were tough to attack like that!

A soldier in the Roman infantry was well discipled and did not fight alone.  He was part of a coordinated but flexible group. 

Let’s make sure we include all of this when we picture the armor of God that Ephesians is describing, and the lifestyle it suggests for Christians. 

Here in America in the 21^st Century we have the false understanding that faith is something that is to be kept personal and private.  We make an artificial division between church and state; and we make a similar artificial division between a private and public life.  We see faith as something that belongs in our private lives.  We tell ourselves that keeping faith personal and private is part of being respectful to others and their beliefs. 

Ephesians would certainly accept the notion of being respectful to other people, but it does not see faith as being personal and private.

Another mistake that we Americans have developed is to think that there is a model of a godly life or of a successful life.  Many people believe the myth that an ideal life is one where you grow up in a safe and stable household.  Then you get a job or go to college.  In time you move out, get married, buy a house, and have your own family.  Part of being a family is making sure your kids are raised to be well rounded; and that includes going to church.  Along the way with raising your family you save money for retirement.  Eventually, if all goes as it should you reach retirement age.  You retire and now have time for hobbies, travel, volunteer work, and leisure – in other words, all the stuff you wished you could have done but couldn’t because of a job and family.  Ideally you’re still healthy enough to enjoy the travel and hobbies for many years.  Eventually you die, but we don’t talk about that.

Does that sound like the ideal for American life?  Perhaps I could call it the myth of the American life?

Ephesians has no capacity to understand that.  It does not see life as safe and stable.  It does not see life, and especially faith, as individual efforts.  And it certainly does not see faith as part of a well-rounded life; and something you do once a week in worship and maybe a bit of personal devotion time.

I don’t want to come across as harsh.  And I don’t want to outright condemn the faith life of many people that involves engaging in weekly worship and having personal devotions.  It’s just that’s not in the vision of Ephesians or any of the New Testament.

Go back to the idea of the armor of God and the Roman infantry.  Ephesians sees life as a battle between good and evil.  Good wins in the end, but evil is a powerful and clever foe.  The Roman infantry adjusted its tactics and created new ones over time.  Any time you’re in a war you don’t just start with one strategy and stay with it to the end.  A war begins with certain tactics.  The opponent counters.  The initiator of the war adjusts tactics to take into account unexpected things in the opponent’s response.  The opponent adjusts in turn.  On and on it goes.  Look at World War 2.  All sides were developing new weapons and new tactics as time when on.

Evil is a clever and adjusting opponent.  We need to be just as clever and able to adjust.  Life is not intended to be a peaceful laid-out plan set by society that you try to follow.  Life is a battle with evil as it morphs with each new day.  You do not battle alone, though.  Just like the Roman infantry was not a collection of individual fighters.  It was individuals joined into a coordinated force.  We weaken ourselves when we think faith is to be kept private and individual.  I’m not sure how that ever seeped into American Christianity, but it certainly isn’t biblical!  Even when Jesus sent his disciples out on missionary journeys he never sent them out alone.  They always went as teams, or at least pairs.

            You have been equipped by God for battle.  You have your body, at whatever age or shape it may be.  You have your faith.  You have a God-given sense of morality.  You have your church community.  You have: cleverness, determination, conscientiousness, creativity, emotionality, and agreeableness.  It is all held together and maintained by God’s gracious love.  As Ephesians would describe it, that gracious love is not soft and quiet and quaint.  It is forceful – a fire, an arrow, a sword.  All of them capable of effectively battling the wiles of evil.

            While we are to be loving always, let us not be fearful or timid in our lives of faith.  Through that God’s will is done and our faith is truly a blessing to our world.

 

October 20, 2024 Ephesians 5:6-20

    Ephesians 5:10 said, “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.”  What does that mean?  That’s easier said than done!  It is fine to say to a little kid to be kind and loving to people.  Share.  Don’t be selfish. …all of the basic virtues we use in our society.  But when you become an adult and shoulder adult responsibilities, life gets a lot more complicated!  How are we to find out what is pleasing to the Lord?  Too many things are gray.  We often don’t begin to have clear enough information to go on.

I’m going to lay out some depressing thoughts but hopefully they will get us to deeply understand a verse that comes up later in what we read from Ephesians today.  And I think we’ll get some solid things to go on about pleasing the Lord.

            As you may remember, I spent last week at Camp Lutherlyn in western Pennsylvania.  It was for a course I’m taking called Environment and Religion in Northern Appalachia.  Camp Lutherlyn was founded shortly after World War 2.  Since then it has grown to 642 acres.  It hosts close to a thousand campers every summer.  It has year-round programming and a full time environmentalist on staff.  During the school year local districts send their children on field trips for learning and team building.  It’s an impressive place.

            The environmental program there is what I’d call a practical environmental program.  They have high efficiency buildings.  They try to conserve resources wherever possible. Food waste and paper products from the dining hall are composted and put on the gardens; which grow some of the food that is eaten.  There is a high efficiency solar powered house built from reused lumber, straw as walls and insulation, and plastered with natural plasters and stucco.  Someone lives in it year round, but it is a display house and proof of concept; again at a practical level.

            From this description you could reach the conclusion that Lutherlyn is a quaint model proving that faith, environmental sensitivity, and kindness can lead us to a utopian society.  But not so.  And that is a big part of why the class took place there.

            Lutherlyn has an abandoned coal mine on it that leaches toxic chemicals; which requires monitoring and clean-up.  No one knows how long.  There are mines dug by the Romans that are still leaching toxins thousands of years later.  There is also an abandoned oil well on Lutherlyn.  Though the camp wants to preserve its forest land and mature the trees for carbon sequestration, financial needs usually requiring timbering off the mature trees every decade or so.

            The camp has leases for its natural gas rites.  A gas well pad is located immediately adjacent to the camp.  It has wells running several directions, including under the camp.  Now the camp’s lease was not written by any ignorant local.  It was created by an industry expert.  But the well has changed hands and the new owner violates the terms of the lease.  So, despite the Bible’s discouragement of lawsuits, the camp has had to sue the well’s current owner for breach of contract.  The well owner has more lawyers than the camp and the camp can’t afford six figure legal fees to fight them.  So they reached a settlement deal out of court; which largely undermines the originally well-written lease.

            Ironically, next year the camp is building a forty acre solar array right up against the gas well!  I’d love to see an arial photograph of that when it’s completed!

            Here’s the place the camp is in.  Despite having great numbers of summertime campers and year round programming; all of which brings in lots of money, it is not always enough to cover the enormous costs of running the camp.  Should they save their trees and fire the environmentalist?  Should they not have signed a lease for the gas rites, knowing full well that the gas under the camp could be extracted anyway by just drilling wells nearby.  So they’d get nothing?  Should they cancel all the faith and environmental education programs?  Should they cancel the school programs?  Or should they charge more for everything, which would price it out of the reach of many people?

            Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.  Quaint thought.  Hard to put into practice when you consider all the complications of the world!

            Here’s where you may feel guilt, but that is not my intent.  We humans, especially us in North America, are extracting enormous amounts of energy from the earth – far more than can be sustained for all that long; even forgetting things like climate change and environmental damage.  Our lives, our devices, our cars, our homes, our… just about everything about us, is an unsustainable mess.

            Many in our society pride themselves in being environmentally sensitive, but they don’t understand the whole picture.  They don’t consider the extraction of resources half way around the world in order to make their phones or build their cars.  They don’t take into account the decline of medicine, sanitation, communication, and the like if our extraction of resources were to stop.

            There is no good way out.  Ephesians 5:16 which we read earlier said, “…make the most of the time, because the days are evil.”  It is easy to think of evil as something obviously and destructively distinct from good.  Our politicians certainly like to paint that sort of scenario.  But that is not the case.  Evil does not come in the form of a man in a red suit with a tail and carrying a pitch fork.  And evil does not come only in the form of obvious seduction, or overt cruelty, or even a gradual slippery slope away from the good.  Evil has many forms.  Perhaps we need to include in those forms the way it can twist its way in and through goodness such that it is impossible to pull them apart.  In Romans 7:21-25 St. Paul writes, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that swells in my members.”

            If the “good old days” ever feel simpler or better think again.  If St. Paul, writing almost 2000 years ago finds evil inextricably weaving itself into everything good.  He couldn’t escape it no matter how hard he tried.  And we can’t either.  Evil is just that tightly woven into the good.

            St. Paul continues, “Wretched man that I am!  Who will rescue me from the body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

            There we have it.  God alone.

            When we start our worship services with a confession and forgiveness it may be tempting to look back over the week and think yourself a good person.  I certainly hope you can feel that way most weeks.  And yet, even if you think you’ve been a perfect angel, don’t deceive yourself.  Certainly try, try, try with all your might to be good.  But if you fool yourself into thinking that you have actually been perfectly good, then evil has got quite a strong hold on you.

            We do all things with a genuine sense of humility knowing that it takes the power of God, and God’s power alone, to truly separate us from evil.

            So, we’ll end where we began.  The line, “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.”  That is indeed what we do.  Our only hope of accomplishing it is through the genuine humility of knowing the inescapability of evil but that God does do it.  Notice the text does not say, “Do what is pleasing to God.”  Or, “Know what is pleasing to God.”  No, the author of Ephesians knows full well the impossibility of our situation.  “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.”  It is a goal.  It is a desire.  It is a driving force.

            Perhaps the best news is that God does have the power to overcome evil.  When you try to do what is pleasing to the Lord, and evil makes it inevitable appearance trying to undo your efforts, by your very attitude towards it you are undoing evil.

            Evil likes surety and simple answers and absolutes.  That is where it thrives.  Those are all easy answers.  What is pleasing to God is not always clear, but it is in the striving that God does conquer evil through us.

            Let me end be rereading the final line of our text: “Give thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.