August 23, 2009 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Good Fight

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 20
Isaiah 2:1–4
Ephesians 6:10–20

“Put on the whole armor of God.”

Ephesians 6:11 (NRSV)

Whoso beset him round
with dismal stories,
do but themselves confound;
his strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
he’ll with a giant fight,
but he will have a right
to be a pilgrim.

John Bunyan

A story from the Muslim tradition in India, in the time of the Mughal Empire, tells of Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, out hunting one day in the forest. When it was time for evening prayer, he dismounted, spread his mat on the earth, and knelt to pray in the manner of devout Muslims everywhere. Now at precisely this time, a peasant woman, perturbed because her husband had left home that morning and hadn’t returned, went rushing by, anxiously searching for him. In her preoccupation, she did not notice the kneeling figure of the emperor and tripped over him. She then got up and, without a word of apology, rushed further into the forest. Akbar, the emperor, was annoyed at this interruption, but being a good Muslim, he observed the rule of speaking to no one during prayer. At just about the time that his prayer was over, the woman returned, joyful, in the company of her husband, whom she had found. She was surprised and frightened to see the emperor and his entourage there. Akbar gave vent to his anger against her and shouted, “Explain your disrespectful behavior or you will be punished.” The woman suddenly turned fearless, looked into the emperor’s eyes, and said, “Your Majesty, I was so absorbed in the thought of my husband that I did not even see you here, not even when, as you say, I stumbled over you. Now while you were at evening prayer, you were absorbed in one who is infinitely more precious than my husband, and how is it that you noticed me?” The story goes that the emperor was shamed into silence and later confided to friends that a peasant woman who was neither a scholar nor a mullah had taught him the meaning of prayer.

It is a story of the life of faith, the journey undertaken by the mystics—undertaken by all who seek to follow God. A journey to place God at the center of life. That is what Akbar couldn’t do; he was too easily distracted. This struggle to place God in the center of our life is at the heart of our scriptural witness. It is in the first commandment way back at the beginning of the Ten Commandments in Exodus: “You shall have no other gods before me.” It is in the spirituality of the psalms as we read this morning from Psalm 20, “Our pride is in the name of the Lord our God.” It is an undercurrent in the prophetic witness of the prophets in the Old Testament calling people back away from idolatry, calling them to place God at the center and to live lives that reflect God’s justice, God’s love, God’s call for equality. And, of course, as Christians this is at the heart of our faith in the great commandment that Jesus gives: love God, love neighbor as self.

William Temple, a well-known archbishop of Canterbury in the middle of the last century, wrote about this pilgrimage of faith, saying, “We are dealing here with original sin, the least popular part of Christianity.” He went on to elaborate: “It may be expressed in simple turns as follows: each of us takes our place in the center of our own world. But I am not the center of the world. I am not the standard of reference between good and bad. I am not, but God is.”

John Calvin, our forefather in the faith, in a passage in which he almost seems to be in worship mode, says, “We are God’s own. To God, therefore, let us live and die. We are God’s own; therefore let God’s wisdom and will dominate our actions. We are God’s own; therefore let every part of our existence be directed toward God as our only legitimate goal.”

This placing of God at the center of our life is at the heart of the theme in the letter to the Ephesians, a letter that was sent to an early church or churches in Asia Minor. Tradition attributes it to Paul, the apostle. However, modern scholars believe that it was probably written after Paul’s death but by people who knew Paul. And at the heart of the letter to the Ephesians is the question, what does new life in Christ mean? Ephesians deals with the transfiguration of the cosmos in the liberating presence of Christ, the unity of the body of Christ, the church. This sublime, beautiful piece of literature is laced with the mystical sense of God’s transforming power. I love the prayer in chapter 3 that the writer writes to his readers: “I pray that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” Rooted and grounded in love, in placing God at the center of our new life.

The climax to the letter is those verses from chapter 6: “Put on the whole armor of God.” Now to be honest, I recognize that there are some dangers here when we are seeking to reflect on and engage with such a passage; we must be sensitive any time we are dealing with military or militaristic language. This is a text that in the past and today has been used by certain groups within the wider church to promote what they like to call “spiritual warfare.” I, of course, this week did what any right-thinking person does these days and googled spiritual warfare: 1.3 million results came up. Some of them seemed harmless, like selling “armor of God” pajamas for your children, but some seemed a little more sinister, with conservative Christian religious groups seeking to justify what we might call far right-wing causes and using “spiritual warfare” as a way to justify that what you don’t like, you fight.

It is true that this idea of spiritual warfare goes deep into our history and has led to some of the darker periods in church history. Going against it, it seems, are those words in Ephesians that our enemies are not of flesh and blood; yet too often in the Christian story the enemies have been flesh and blood: Muslims, Turks, anti-Semitism towards Jews over millennia, the “other” in society being referred to as demonic. The persecution of women as witches can be seen in the context of spiritual warfare. The historian Kathleen McVey writes this: “Historical study undermines the illusion, perhaps still widespread among Christians, that theirs is a history of peace while others, such as Muslims, have lived by the sword.” One of the trends in the church has been to recognize the culpability that we have for acts of violence and using ways to justify that. One of the results of this sensitivity to the complexities of military language has been to expunge from our hymnals many hymns with militaristic imagery that I’m sure many of you were brought up singing: “Soldiers of Christ, Arise,” “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and so on. I shared with you one of my own favorites that you don’t really find in hymnals today, John Bunyan’s hymn from Pilgrim’s Progress, which is printed on the front of the bulletin: “No lion can him fright, he’ll with a giant fight.” I love that image of fighting giants.

Now recognizing that there is sensitivity in this, we should be careful in approaching this text, and my strategy for approaching the text is to see it as a kind of poem, a poem in which we are being given one overarching image by the writer—that of the Christian as a Roman soldier wearing armor—and this imagery is extended metaphorically as the writer continues. Now one of the things we discover when we read the passage is that the writer of Ephesians, reflecting their time, has a different worldview based on the concept of cosmic powers, powers, and principalities. There has been a lot of work and reflection done recently on this, and even back in the last century this language was adopted. We are going to sing Fosdick’s great hymn from 1930 at the end of the service, “God of Grace and God of Glory,” and therein note the line “Lo, the hosts of evil round us.” Janet Morely, a really fine English writer and theologian who focuses on God’s option for the poor, writes about the reality of powers and principalities for the poor. She says, “They are experienced with great immediacy as hunger, disease, military oppression, and inescapable debt. For all people,” she goes on, “powers are all that kill life.”

So here it is, folks, here is the good fight that faces us: the fight for openness to new life over that which seeks to kill. We could all share examples of people we know who have undertaken the good fight, famous people like Bonhoeffer and his struggle against the Nazi regime in Germany; closer to home, Martin Luther King Jr. in the struggle to fight for civil rights. And we could also tell stories of not-so-famous people whom we’ve come across in our journeys, people who toil for justice, equality, freedom. And here is the good news in Ephesians—that there is armor for the good fight: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, shoes to proclaim peace, a shield of faith, a helmet of salvation, the sword of the spirit. But the point is it’s not your armor; it’s God’s armor. It is God’s gift to you. The fight is not about our doing, but about placing God at the center of our lives through our openness to truth, the truth of love; through our seeking right relationship with God and neighbor, righteousness; through our commitment to the journey towards peace, our seeking strengthening faith, our trust in the new life in Christ, our striving to, in St. Francis’s phrase, “preach the gospel always, using words only when necessary.” These are the elements of the armor that God gives us. Note that all elements but one are defensive. All except the sword are for defense, because if we are willing to go out and engage in the good fight, then we will be attacked.

That promise is there throughout Scripture. It struck me strongly this week in the events surrounding the release of the only person convicted in the Lockerbie bombing. He was released from jail in Scotland in order to go back to Libya, where he will die of terminal cancer in two or three months. As the Scottish authorities sought to explain that this act grew out of compassion and mercy, they were attacked—and still continue to be attacked from all over the place—for acting out of compassion and mercy, which surely are the most central of Christians virtues in the fight. Just as those here in the United States are attacked because they seek to speak up for people who are marginalized, who do not have health insurance. For them is the armor to be worn for the good fight.

Fight the good fight, the hymn says, with all thy might; lay hold on life, and it shall be thy joy and crown eternally. Amen.