Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · September 10, 2006

Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Prayer of the Day

Lord Jesus, in this hour of worship we humbly, yet boldly ask that you dress us in fresh, new garments that show the world the change for the better, that you have created in our hearts.  Amen.

Scripture

Ephesians 6:10-20

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in God’s might and power.  Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against, successfully resist, the devil’s fate, the evil one’s schemes, tactics, craftiness, tricks.  For our fight, our struggle, is not against human beings, but against principalities and powers, organizations, authorities, rulers, who originate the darkness of this world against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  Therefore put on the whole armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, when things are at their worst, you will be able to resist the enemy’s attacks.  You will have enough resources to hold your own ground.  Take your stand then, with truth as your belt, righteousness as your breastplate, the gospel of peace firmly on your feet, salvation as your helmet, and in your hand the sword of the Spirit, the word of God.  In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.  Pray.  Pray in the Spirit on all occasions, always interceding for all of God’s people. 

Pray also for me, that I may be able to speak the message, that I may fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains.  Pray that I might speak it boldly, just as I should.

Message

Get Up!  Get Dressed!

Rick Frost

When I was a kid, I had to wear a uniform.  Did anybody else have to do that when you were a kid?  Actually, I didn’t have to.  I wanted to.  I wanted to really badly.  In the summers, for instance, we would get up early and grab our fishing rods.  We would jump on our bikes and ride to the pier where we would meet our friends, and we would fish just about all day.  The uniform?  You bet.  Cut-offs, flip-flops, hats, sunglasses.  Store bought bathing suits – no way!  T-shirts to cover up the upper body – never!  That’s what real island kids wore in those days.  That was our uniform, and we were proud of it.

In our college days, we also had a dress code.  Anybody remember that?  For instance, the men in our fraternity were required to wear a shirt and tie to dinner on Friday nights.  Such were the ways in those days of young, southern gentlemen.  As president, during my senior year, it was my duty to enforce this code, which some of the younger males among us believed to very much be cruel and unusual punishment.  So to curb this rebellious James Dean attitude, I intelligently placed a sign on the bulletin board that read, “Anyone not wearing a shirt and tie to dinner on Friday night will be fined $5.”  Now, that was a rather healthy sum back then.  I have the date here, but I’m not going to tell you when that was.

At six o’clock, sharp, the dinner bell rang.  I did my duty and escorted the housemother to our place at the head table, and we were followed by 73 young men who filed into the dining room, in shirts and ties, and sat down where they were supposed to sit.  Just as the chaplain was about to offer a prayer for the meal, the seventy-fourth man slipped into his chair, shirt and tie on… and nothing else.  I covered the eyes of the housemother.  That wasn’t really necessary, because she had spent a little too much time at happy hour.  She wasn’t seeing too much of anything, anyway.  The neat thing was, no rules had been broken.  I couldn’t fine this guy.  No fine was levied.  But I want you to know that story was all over campus in just a matter of hours.

Uniforms, dress codes, clothing.  In our text today we are going to be asked to put on some stuff.  We are going to hear words, just as we have already heard, that were offered to the churches in and around Ephesus, which, as you know, is probably modern-day Turkey.  These are words designed to address some very important things.  They are things like God’s eternal purpose for God’s creation, and, according to Paul, the very high goals God has for God’s Church in that day, and to this day, and for everyday folks, just like us in this community of faith.

Now, according to the book of Ephesians, “We exist,” says Paul, “as a community of faith to share the message of God’s love and grace.”  Remember, we talked about that at length a couple weeks ago.  That’s good, and that’s important, but it goes much, much further than that.  He also says that the Church – you and I – are to be the means by which God demonstrates to the principalities and the powers of this world the awesome, and mysterious, seemingly impossible, never before accomplished thing that God is doing.  Namely, Paul says, “bringing together, reconciling, uniting Jew and Gentile.”  Now, for those of us who are biblical scholars, you know when Paul uses the words “Jew and Gentile,” that means uniting, reconciling, redeeming all people everywhere, according to the eternal purposes of God.

This is a huge vision, folks.  This is why Ephesians is in your New Testament.  This is the first time such a vision was ever spun by the people of God.  And the purpose was to effectively create under the headship of Christ, someday, a united Church. 

We have a long way to go.  Don’t we?  But, for those Disciples among us, you know that the polar star of our denomination for 150 years has been Church unity.  That’s right.  We are right in that mix, but we have a long way to go.

The purpose of uniting the Church of Jesus Christ in the world, according to Ephesians, is to prepare for God’s reign over the whole universe.  Did you know that?  We are to be preparing for the kingdom that Jesus talks about, that is coming, that is the center of his message – the reign of God someday that will be an awesome, staggering, ultimate enterprise.  That is the setting of our text for today.

Now, the problem was and still is that the powers and principalities, the rulers, and the authorities of this world are not onboard with that vision.  They are not onboard with that eternal purpose of God.  I’m sure you know that.  The powers and the principalities, the authorities, and the rulers are, what the theologians call, being involved in, wrapped up in, enmeshed in what is called “the domination system.”  That is the system that is characterized by unjust economic relationships, oppressive political relationships, biased racial relationships, patriarchal gender relationships, and of course, the use of violence to maintain all of those things.

Dominance.  Now, it doesn’t seem to really matter whether it is in Rome or in Washington, whether it is in China or the Middle East, whether it is capitalism or communism, whether it is democracy or dictatorship, the basic system has persisted in its present form for almost 5,000 years.  Somehow, somewhere, back when, organized political communities found that conquest was fantastically lucrative.  The result was warfare.  Warfare became the central preoccupation of the state – of every state.  Plunder and conquest gave rise to new classes of people, new systems, new ways of life.  For those new ways of life to survive, they depended on ever-new conquest.  Whole societies, nation states, even cultures found themselves locked into a struggle for dominance.  No one was able to escape.  If an attacker has bigger and better weapons, then it becomes the matter of great urgency on the part of the victims to arm themselves with even bigger and better weapons.  Of course, once you start that spiral of violence, once that gets started, no one is free to choose peace.  As someone said, anyone can impose on all of us the necessity for power. 

Does that sound familiar to anything you’ve heard recently?  If not, folks, just turn on your TV, because you’re going to hear a lot of it in the next day or two.  You’re going to hear a whole lot more of it in the next month or two.

In today’s text, we Christians, Christ’s followers, are told, “to be strong in the Lord and put on the full armor of God, so that we can stand against, successfully resist, the evil one’s schemes.”  For as Paul said, our fight is not against human beings but against the powers and the principalities, the organizations, and the systems, the rulers, and the authorities who originate the darkness in this world.

Now, I think, in order to do that, we need to learn a whole lot more about what we are being asked to resist.  I know I certainly need to learn more, and I believe you need to learn more.  I think we need to learn a whole lot more about what the Bible calls the powers and the principalities.

In my judgment, no one knows more about such things in the world today than Walter Wink, professor of biblical interpretation, Union Theological Seminary, New York.  He has spent his entire life tracking, studying, publishing about the powers that be.  Here is just a taste of his insight:

All of us deal with the powers that be.  No one is exempt.  They staff our hospitals.  They run city hall.  They sit in corporate boardrooms.  They collect our taxes.  They head our families, and much, much more.  They are the people in this world who run things.  But, they are a whole lot more than just the people who run things.  They are the systems, the institutions, the structures that weave society into an amazing intricate fabric about power and relationships.  Now, these powers surround us on every side.  These powers are very necessary.  They are very important.  They are very useful.  The fact is, we could not function without them.  They deliver our mail.  They put food on our table.  They maintain our roads, and on and on.  But the other fact is, the powers and the principalities are also the source – the underlying source – of unmitigated evils.  See the rub?

Let me just give you an illustration.

A corporation routinely dumps known carcinogens into a river, the source of which is the drinking water for towns downstream.  Another industry attempts to hook children to addiction to cigarettes, despite evidence that a third of those people are going to die prematurely from smoke-related illnesses.  A dictator wages war on his own citizens in order to maintain a grasp on power.  A power plant exposes its workers to radioactive poisoning, and an employee discovers this and attempts to blow the whistle.  All of a sudden, the employee is forced off the road by another car and dies, and, all of her documentation is mysteriously, surprisingly missing. 

Welcome to the world of what the Bible calls “the powers and principalities.”

Now, let’s make sure we understand.  The powers are not always so brutal.  People have jobs.  People make a living.  Some of the enterprises actually contribute something important to humanity.  Products are life enhancing, even sometimes life-saving.  The powers and the principalities don’t simply do evil.  They are also doing a lot of good.  In fact, they are often doing good and evil all at the same time.  And what’s really important for you and I to understand is, they form an incredibly complex web that none of us can escape.  It’s for real.

But, the powers and the principalities are not merely, as I said, the people in power or the institutions that they staff.  A great many of their decisions are driven by forces that they do not control.  It might be the performance of the market, or the pressures to compete, or the cost of workers or materials, or the policies of the nations sitting next to them.  The point is, when we seek to really look at and learn about the powers and principalities of this world, we become aware that there are greater forces at work that are unseen, that are powerful, that shape who we are and have a lot to say about our future.

These invisible powers – the spiritual forces that impinge upon our lives – are the things that I think our Scripture today calls us to fight, and calls us to resist, and calls us to stand against.  Everyone in this room knows that.  We’ve said it a thousand times together.  We all know there is more going on in this world than most of us know.  There is a whole lot more going on in this world than what we can see, and smell, and taste, and hear.  There is a whole lot more going on in the world than the media reports to us.

But this is the good news.  What the scholars and what the theologians are rediscovering is something absolutely critical, not only for your life and for mine, but also for the next millennia, and for this planet.  They are rediscovering that everything in creation has a spirit.  Did you know that?  You have a spirit, and I have a spirit.  Your family has a spirit, and my family has a spirit.  Your church has a spirit, and we even call it what?  The Broadway Spirit.  Our city has a spirit.  Our nation has a spirit.  All of the nations of the world have spirits.  Everything, folks, has a spirit.

Stay with me.  This is amazing.  Everything in creation has its physical aspect and its spiritual aspect.  That means that the powers that be are not simply the people and their institutions.  It means that they have a spirituality at their very core.  If that is true, that means that IBM and General Motors have a spirituality.  Oh, my gosh!  Every business and every school has a spirituality.  Every church, and every corporation, and every government has a spirituality.  Every sports team and every agency has a spirit.  Everything in creation has that visible and invisible, that inner and outer, that physical and spiritual dimension.

Folks, if Walter Wink is correct, we are on the brink of rediscovering something we have lost to our detriment.  We are rediscovering that everything has a soul.  Everything has a spirit at its very core – everything that has been created, that is being created.  If that is so, that means nothing, absolutely nothing, not DNA, nor the United Nations, nor anything else can exist without God at its very core.  And if that is true, then everything, absolutely everything is answerable and accountable to God.  Just do the logic.  Oh, my goodness!

As everybody here knows, the spirituality that you see and encounter in institutions is not always good.  It is not always benign.  In fact, it can get sick.  It can be pathological.  The point is: institutions, governments, corporations are creatures just like you and me.  They have a vocation.  They have a purpose for being here just like you and I do.  They have a calling from God.  Their sole purpose is to serve the general welfare.  Did you know that?  They have no other reason for being.  And when they refuse to do that, their spirituality becomes diseased.  They become what the Bible calls demonic.

Now I have never been able to take demons very seriously.  I was raised like most of you to cut through all that stuff, the superstitious.  But if the “demonic” means that the spirituality that is produced when the soul of that institution turns its back on its divine vocation and calling – the reason it is here – then I can only believe in the demonic.  You and I can point to it every single day.  You can see it.

So when we Christians are told to put on the “whole armor of God” so that we can stand against, successfully resist the devil, the demonic schemes, it makes a huge difference if we know that our job is not to cast out the demons.  Our job, instead, according to this text, is to take a stand and recall the spirit, the soul, of that institution, that organization, that ruler, that authority, to what God has for it to do – its divine task.  Wow!

What weapons, what tools, have we been given to do that with as Christians?  How are we going to conduct this fight?  How are we going to be successful in resisting?

Paul says, “Take your stand with truth as your belt.”

Now, this is a hard illustration, but…  For instance, were you told the truth about Iraq’s weapons, programs, and its link to terrorism when this nation signed on to the invasion of that country?  The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee this week says that you were not.  My question for you and me today is, “Whom should you be calling?”

“Take your stand with truth as your belt and righteousness as your breastplate.”

For instance, is it ever right to use any form of torture on any human being regardless of what that person has done or what that person knows?

In the conservative evangelical publication called Christianity Today, David Gushee published an article.  He is a professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.  This is a Southern Baptist school, folks, not exactly a bastion of liberalism.  Here is a guy who took a stand.  He published this article, and the title of it is “Five Reasons Why Torture Is Always Wrong.”

I made a commitment to God that I will make those five reasons available to you this week somehow, because I am asking you to consider, and asking you as a Christian, what measure do you believe can legitimately be taken to extract information from prisoners held by the governments that belong to us?  If you don’t believe that it should, whom should you be calling?

Those are just illustrations.  We could go on and on. 

Just hear the words of Ephesians.  Paul says, “Take your stand with truth as your belt, righteousness as your breastplate, the gospel of peace firmly on your feet, salvation as your helmet, and in your hand the sword of the Spirit – the Word of God.  And pray.  Pray for all God’s people, and pray also for me that I may be able to speak the message, and may fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains.  Pray that I may speak it as boldly as I should.”

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Fragrant One, let your sweetness be upon us, that we might wear your essence of glory, honor, strength, and love.  Let us first put on our Christ, and then enter into our days.  Amen.