Sermon: The Armour of God

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The ‘whole armour of God' passage is in my view one of the great passages of the New Testament.  This morning we have heard it read, and we have sung Charles Wesley's fine paraphrase. I well recall attending a seminar some years ago, when it was suggested that such passages and such hymns should be excised because of their blatant militaristic imagery; that ideas of warfare, fighting, combat, sit uneasily with faith in one who came as the Prince of Peace; that they encourage a macho, aggressive, in-your-face type of Christianity; that they evoke images of shocking aspects of Christian history, when violence was used, and sometimes still is, in the name of the Gospel.   Now I have some sympathy with this view; if you scan the Cathedral hymn-list, you will look in vain for hymns such as Onward Christian soldiers, not only because it was originally written for children, but also because it is just rather too triumphalistic and too assertive; I really do wish that Satan's legions would flee as easily as the hymn suggests; if so, there would be none of the carnage we have witnessed this past week in Baghdad or Kabul.  Or, to cite another similar hymn, Stand up, stand up for Jesus, while I assure you that I believe that Christ will indeed subdue every enemy, my experience of Christian life is not that of

            from victory unto victory,

            his army he shall lead...

as if contemporary statues of Dagon automatically fall before the ark of God. It just all sounds a bit too optimistic.  What is missing is the sense of struggle, the sense of cost; we all know that the power of Christ's victory comes not from a Rambo-like aggression, but rather from a power that was made perfect through human weakness; the power of Christ crucified. 

But I have no such problems with Ephesians 6. Because what we have in this passage is not a glorying in war, or delight in violence, or uncritical and improper application of inappropriate military imagery, but rather a skilful allegory, drawing on common and pictorial imagery from New Testament times, whose purpose is essentially practical; in other words, it is related to the realities of Christian living.

So, I will defend this passage, first of all, because it is not glibly triumphalistic, aggressive, or optimistic but essentially pastoral.   I have been helped by a section in my former colleague Martin Kitchen's fine commentary on Ephesians where he points out that whereas there has been a tendency to interpret Ephesians 6 in individualistic terms; as if we are all individual soldiers of Christ, engaged in solo combat against evil, there is good grammatical reason rather to think of the passage in corporate terms; the exhortations are in the plural.  This fits perfectly with the final section of Ephesians, which is devoted to practical, communal Christian living, asking the question, what kind of a community are we called to be? You would need to read the whole section from Chapter 4, verse 11 to get the full picture, but it gives a radical vision of a new community that stands out from the world around it, because its values are those that come from God, in the creation of a new humanity in Christ.  So consider the armour: it's the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the sword of the Spirit, who is the Spirit of holiness, the helmet of salvation.  It's no good one Christian taking up these, if the rest of us deny them. But when corporately we seek to live these virtues, then, my word, we have something distinctive to offer.

Second, the passage is not glibly triumphalistic, aggressive, or optimistic but essentially realistic. There is a fight to be fought.  You may know that the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians share some striking characteristics.  One of them is that, in a deeply mysterious way, the victory of Christ is being worked out in continuing human history. For example, in Colossians Paul interprets his own sufferings as part of Christ's suffering yet to be endured for the sake of the Church. So, yes, in one sense Christ's victory is certain and complete, and yet in another sense it is still being worked out in time. Hence, the words from our passage, that our struggle is not just against enemies of blood and flesh, but is fundamentally spiritual. And while we struggle to interpret exactly what is meant by ‘the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places', nevertheless we sense the reality of an evil that seems to be more than the sum of the parts of individual sinfulness, that seems to become systemic and structural, that can be felt.

The bottom line is that we are engaged in a fundamental struggle between good and evil; a struggle which is not hopeless because of the cross. The whole armour of God reminds us that our high calling as Christians is to struggle for the victory of good; the victory of love.

Third, the passage is not glibly triumphalistic, aggressive or optimistic but essentially devotional.  It is often pointed out that the armour is God's, the panoply of God, in Charles Wesley's skilful echo of the Greek.  This is not about graces and gifts of our own, for ‘we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves'.  But our own wills, individual and corporate, need to align with those things God has given.  Note how often the word ‘stand' appears in the passage.  It appears frequently in Paul, where it carries the idea of perseverance.  The exhortation is to stand or persevere in these graces, and not fall. It has been suggested that this may be a reference to worship; certainly, standing seems to have been the characteristic posture of the early Christian communities.  As well as the word stand, note how prayer is stressed, time after time, in the final paragraph.  Moreover, the sword of the Spirit is indentified as the word or logos of God, not here, I think, a reference to Christ the Word, but rather in the words of Ephesians 1, ‘the word of truth, the gospel of salvation'. In other words this is about all that we celebrate week by week in worship.  So there is a sense, here, that what we are doing this morning, together as a community of Christians, is essential for the victory of love, as together we seek to persevere, pray, receive God's word, renew our sense of God's claim upon us. And then go out in his name.

I have been aware, as I prepared this sermon, that the image of the soldier is one that fills our news, our prayers, and our thoughts, as we continue to see the reality of war in Afghanistan. I think all of us are moved by the courage, discipline, and devotion to duty of the members of the Armed Forces, and the great struggle and cost of war, not least in the solemn and dignified pictures of yet another return home to RAF Lyneham and the procession through the streets of Wootten Bassett.  ‘Our struggle is not just against blood and flesh...'  I started by saying that I was uncomfortable with the sense of triumphalistic militarist hymns because they lack the sense of struggle, the sense of cost. And my word, we see struggle and cost in the real world. Which is why what we do this morning is never glib; rather, it's deadly serious. Our discipleship therefore requires a like discipline, devotion and courage. For only then, can the vision of a new humanity in Christ be glimpsed, however imperfectly. Perhaps, as we kneel as forgiven sinners around God's Table this morning with outstretched hands, we'll just begin to see it.