"Any Other Arsenal"--September 12, 2019

Any Other Arsenal--September 12, 2019

"For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." [Ephesians 6:12-17]

"Don't bring a knife to a gunfight," the old saying goes.

The point, of course, is that kind of struggle you are in tells you the kind of response you should make.  And if you find yourself someday in what they call a Mexican standoff, like in the movies, where you've got a whole circle of people drawing guns at each other, each able to shoot at you without getting close, you don't want to be the one holding just your pocketknife.  The kind of attack should be a warning about what kind of defense you mount.

History is full of pertinent examples.  As Europe was consumed by the Great War, the armies of the great Continental powers learned that chemical weapons couldn't be thwarted with tanks, and that an enemy armed with mustard gas could rain down death on your soldiers without having to fire a bullet at you.  In Vietnam, American forces had to engage an enemy that didn't fight by "conventional" rules, and we learned that tanks and armored vehicles designed for cleared fields were not nearly so overpowering for an insurgent enemy that could fight guerrilla style and then disappear into the jungle.  And eighteen years ago, as the smoke still billowed from Manhattan and the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, when our nation had to reckon with the previously unthinkable notion that someone would fly our own airplanes into our own buildings to use our own infrastructure as a weapon, we realized that we were again facing down a struggle that required a different kind of response.  For whatever else those moments meant, they were clear lessons that the kind of weapon and the sort of enemy you are engaging determines the kind of defense you mount.

And in a sense, those chapters from history only confirm what the letter to the Ephesians had been telling us for nearly two millennia already.  You don't bring a knife to a gunfight, and you don't fight a spiritual power with the standard military arsenal.  There is no amount of bullets you can shoot, bombs you can drop, or drones you can send to engage an opposing force of the spirit.  Like the title character in V for Vendetta notes, "Ideas are bulletproof." So the writer of Ephesians offers us a different kind of armor, one that is suited for engaging with the powers at work all around us.  For the followers of Jesus, our struggle was never one of flesh and blood, and that means that violence and revenge are never the right tools for the job to join that struggle.

I don't think we often realize just how truly radical a claim that is for the apostle to make here.  When Ephesians uses the metaphor of putting on a suit of armor, he is suggesting that each of the things he lists--truth-telling, the gospel of peace, the readiness to bring good news, righteousness and justice, faith, and the Spirit--are what we are equipped with instead of weapons.  Paul doesn't mean that we just take up the same old weapons of the imperial army and inscribe religious words on them.  He doesn't mean that we get faith AND a shield, or the Holy Spirit AND a sword.  He is saying, quite literally, "Because we aren't fighting a flesh-and-blood army, you don't get a metal sword or a leather belt. You don't need them.  You get the right tools for this struggle: the truth, the peace of God, the righteousness of God, and the Spirit of God."  Physical weapons will always prove ineffective against the powers that operate in minds and hearts, and in fact, they often turn out only to serve to strengthen the opposition.  You can't shoot at the idea of hatred, but when you resort to trying to solve things by shooting at them, you only strengthen the power of hatred.  You can't intimidate the concept of fear by rattling your saber, but when you do threaten with a sword, you only give power to fear as an entity. Ephesians is simply telling us that we have been using the wrong ammunition for the real struggle, because the followers of Jesus aren't taking on a country, a nation, an empire, or a people-group.  We are engaged in a struggle against powers that aren't simply "out there" on "on the other side," but which are insidiously good at getting their claws into our own hearts, too. If we are in a fight against sin, hatred, and evil, we had better be clear that those forces aren't across a border or across an ocean, and they are not located only in "OTHER people's hearts," as though our own hearts are not still constantly fighting off the infection, too.

Look, I get it. When we feel attacked, whether it is from someone else's words, a physical threat from someone else, or even the memory of a terrorist attack that shattered our sense of security, our instinctive reaction is to want to do something to attack back, and we reach for whatever weapons are at hand to do it.  But like we human beings seem to have to keep learning at every point there is a new kind of weapon or tactic or battlefield to engage, fighting the new struggle with the old weapons is not only futile, but usually strengthens your opponent.  Ephesians simply calls us to remember that our struggle as Christ-followers can never be resolved with killing, never be ended with shooting, and never be decided with more high capacity magazines.  As intimidating as all of those are supposed to be, they are simply impotent against the real powers with which we are engaged--the diabolical powers of sin, of evil, and of hatred that are not merely operative in some enemy nation or territory, but which seek to get a foothold in our hearts as well.  And the way to deal with such powers, Ephesians notes, is to refuse to accept their terms of battle or play by their rules, and instead to answer their brute force and fury with truth-telling, with the gospel of peace, with the presence of the Spirit, and with the righteousness of God.  These are all the arms we need, if we take the New Testament seriously.  They are all we have ever needed.

Fight the good fight, then, today, but remember that our tools for that struggle look like the self-giving, enemy-loving, cross-bearing, truth-telling, solidarity-standing way of Jesus, rather than any other arsenal.

Lord Jesus, equip us with what we need this day, and empty our hands of the weapons that will be useless in the struggle of love.