The 15th Sunday after Pentecost, 09/02/2018

Sermon on Ephesians 6:10-20, by Paula Murray

Reading: Ephesians 6:10-20

¹⁰Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. ¹¹Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. ¹²For 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. ¹³Therefore 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. ¹⁴Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, ¹⁵and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. ¹⁶In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; ¹⁷and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, ¹⁸praying 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, ¹⁹and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, ²⁰for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. ESV*

Gospel: Mark 7:14-23

¹⁴{Jesus} called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: ¹⁵There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” ¹⁷And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. ¹⁸And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, ¹⁹since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) ²⁰And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. ²¹For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, ²²coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. ²³All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” ESV*

Four bicyclists, including two Americans, Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegen, were murdered as they toured Tajikistan this past July. A few news reports claimed the American couple was touring Tajikistan to prove that people are good and evil does not exist, but in truth, it appears the couple just wanted to get out of the four walls of their offices and experience the world. One thing is clear from their diaries and blog, that they were astonished by the kindness and generosity of the people they met along the way. So astonished were they, that Jay wrote, “Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow human beings holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own….” I would agree that most of the time most people are more likely to be kind and generous than murderous and thieving. But the homicidal acts of a small band of Isis inspired would be jihadis also prove that evil is real. This was no mere misunderstanding, as I once read a journalist say of the Berlin Wall and the deaths of people seeking to escape communist East Germany. It was an act of terrible evil committed against people enjoying a ride through a beautiful country.

Both the Epistle and the Gospel readings begin with the understanding that evil exists, that it is real, and that it targets Christ’s Church and its members, including ourselves. Believers should not be shocked that this is so, for we begin, as Christians, with the foundational notion that all human beings are sinners, and sinners commit sin, and sin is always, without exception, intrinsically evil.

I do not suppose that most human beings have ever “liked” to claim their own sin or even sin as fundamental to our nature. But we do seem to live in an era where the very idea that there is something essentially bent to evil in all of us, from the youngest to the oldest, is looked at as medieval, unfashionable, and even, somehow, yucky. We cannot, however, hold our nose at the belief that people are sinners and be a Christian. If there is no sin and nothing to be forgiven, there is no Christ. Now Christians can disagree about the nature of the human being after Baptism. We Lutherans, after St. Paul and Augustine and Luther, believe that if an act looks like sin, sounds like sin, smells like sin, yeah, it’s a sin, whether it occurs before or after Baptism. But we also, as Scripture teaches, believe that sin is the power behind an evil act, not just the act itself. To say that evil exists, is to say that it exists not just within us but without us, too. It is a part of the state of a fallen creation, of nature itself.

This being the case, human beings are not naturally kind, nice, compassionate, selfless, generous, or any other virtue or positive characteristic you might imagine. Now it is true that we can measure altruism, the willingness to give at some cost to ourselves, in young children. Still, we all know that a child’s usual response to a request to share a toy or a piece of candy is to snatch the thing back or snarl the word, “mine.” Altruism, like any other godly characteristic, is more nurture than nature.

The idea that human beings are naturally good, without evil, is a largely an outcome of post-Enlightenment thinking dating back to the humanism of Luther’s time and a bit beyond. For all its age, such ideological sunniness regarding humanity is not well developed enough to be a philosophy. It is more a movement of affect or the heart with conceptual overtones. Frankly, it does make it easier to get through a day without having unpleasant thoughts about what our neighbors might be pondering doing. But let us call a spade a spade. To think this way in spite of the evidence of human evil all around us is to blind ourselves to the world in which we live. The consequences of such self-imposed blindness are even worse than the heartache we all feel when we acknowledge the evil around us and most especially, the evil within us.

So this morning’s readings from God’s Word remind us that we are not only the targets of evil but also too often its perpetuators. The purpose of this teaching is not to make us miserable or convince us of our inferiority to anything or anyone other than God, but to open our eyes so we might see and repent of our evil and seek to overcome evil in the world. From baptism onwards God makes himself a living presence in our lives, seeking to abide in us that we may abide in him. The reading from the Gospel of Mark warns all of us, including the faithful, that evil can find a foothold in our lives and will use even our own piety to establish and sustain that foothold so that we abide in something other than Christ. The reading from Paul’s letter to the congregation in Ephesus is a reminder that we cannot take goodness for granted. We must be aware that evil targets each of us and we must be able to use the weapons of the spirit to defend our life in Christ from such an attack.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is all about the life of the Christian, “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life”(2:10). Loosely speaking, the first three chapters are about our relationship to God in Christ Jesus, while the remaining chapters have to do with our relationships with one another and the world through our Lord Jesus Christ. In the fourth chapter, Paul writes,

Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. ¹⁸They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. ¹⁹They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. ²⁰That is not the way you learned Christ! ²¹For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. ²²You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, ²³and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, ²⁴and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Paul teaches us that we are to “put on,” the new self, the one that was made in the “image of God in true righteousness and holiness.” Later, in the eleventh verse of this morning’s reading from the sixth chapter of Ephesians, Paul uses that same verb, “put on” to warn us to prepare ourselves for our spiritual battle with evil by “putting on” the armor of God. This is not literal armor, for most of the people to whom Paul spoke could hardly afford the real thing and few of them were actual warriors. Rather, this armor is the Word of God and Christian faith and practice, spiritual defensive measures employed against evil’s wicked weapons of trial and temptation. “For,” as Paul wrote, “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” (6:12). So, says St. Paul, a commander of untold numbers of faithful Christian soldiers, put on the whole armor of God, the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the Gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and, finally, the greatest of all the weapons in the Lord’s armory, the sword of the Spirit, the very Word of God, himself.

There is no evidence that Paul ever served in a military capacity; he is clearly using simile to help us understand that we are to stand firm against the faith-killing wiles of God’s enemy even as an army stands firm as enemy forces advance. Some of us are wary of such simile, going to such lengths as taking familiar and much loved hymns like “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” out of hymnals and suppressing imagery like that in Ephesians. The distaste for martial metaphor can be extreme. Years ago, I was told by a fellow pastor that I was clearly a bad mother because my youngest son enlisted in the army. My guess is that pastor would have a tough go of it with this letter of Paul’s in terms of interpreting it honestly and preaching it faithfully. We all have our blind spots. It is hard to see what imagery Paul could use other than that of weaponry to prepare us as effectively as Christians for life in a world dominated still by sin. The world of sin is no cartoon, the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. This is serious business, the most serious business possible, a matter of life and death not just for a few but for the whole of humanity. Going forward, we all of us, from long serving bishops to the most recently baptized, must understand that we do indeed fight the powers and principalities of the evil one, and that the battlefield on which that struggle plays out is our own community, church, and home.

That battle against sin and evil is also waged across our very own selves. That is the warning Jesus gives to the Pharisees and scribes who are looking for wickedness everywhere but their own spirits. They’re looking out there for evil (point to people in nave), not in here (point to self). They see Jesus and those who follow him as protest first his followers failure to wash their hands before eating and second their eating of unclean things. Unless we are truly germaphobic, it might seem to us a wonder that Jesus’ enemies would waste time talking to Jesus about his disciples’ hygiene. But this was a big deal to those trying desperately to be holier than thou among the faithful. If you were going to try to be obey the law than you had to be all in. All law was godly and good. To obey the law was a matter not only of personal piety but also of public witness to the righteousness of God. The human traditions Jesus denied had grown up around the keeping of the law with the intent of helping observant Jews keep it effectively and faithfully. But after time, those traditions had become an end in themselves, idols to those who had buried themselves in the mechanics of faith rather than holding tight to their relationship with him at the heart of their faith. Then all that natural evil human beings hold back with God’s help come boiling out, wrecking havoc on our lives and the lives of the people around us.

Evil is real, and though it might seem fantastical in a really negative way to believe that evil is real, acknowledging that it is gives us all a chance to wrestle with it with prayer and confession and the help of the Holy Spirit. But even as we recognize that evil is real, that it has its day with us and with the world around us, we know also that its days are numbered. Christ won that war for us and creation on the cross. And to this all we can say in the end, is “Thank you, God.”

Paula Murray

E-Mail: smotly@comcast.net

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