Whose Armour?

tl;dr: A sermon about hope for the fight based on the God's Armour passage of Ephesians.

Scripture Text

Ephesians 6:10-24 (CEB)

Video

Transcript

We've reached the end of this series on Ephesians. We've covered some big topics like salvation, diversity in unity, new creation, and a liberatory reading of the household code that invited us into an empowered mutual servanthood. Somehow, despite some of those themes of diversity and liberation, the team we managed to assemble for this series were five white men.

The Call to Fight

That does put us in positions of relative privilege, as the ones who benefit in the short-term from unjust systems. A very privileged interpretation of this text might be one that is about dominating through force or coercion, that this is about how we need to fight to establish ourselves and protect our people against those other people. It's about being tough.

Or at the very least, maybe it's "spiritual warfare" which for me mostly makes me think of an episode in Xena Warrior Princess. Xena and Gabrielle are recruited into a battle between angels and demons and there's lots of flying around and sword fighting and it was really cool to teenage Ryan.

There is still a strong contingent of the Christian tradition that would say things like that, even though it is hard to reconcile with Jesus. It is also hard to reconcile with this text, which quickly establishes that our battle is not against human enemies. That idea falls apart even faster within the context of the rest of the letter spending so much time talking about things like reconciliation between groups that don't get along. It's clearly not about one group needing to dominate the other. Let's quickly discard that framework, because it doesn't really deserve any more attention than that. See a couple of sermons in the Fall if you do want to engage more with that topic.

Principalities and Powers

But this text does support the idea that we do need to be ready to fight in some sense. We don't have a battle against human enemies, but we do against what many translations put something like "principalities and powers." My apologies to the tech team for all the plosive p's in repeating this phrase. With maybe some exceptions for the charismatic tradition, "principalities and powers" is not language that we normally use.

The Common English Bible translation instead unpacks that into "rulers, authorities, forces of cosmic darkness, and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens." That's doing something interesting, because it essentially includes the two possible ways to understand who the enemies are in this battle. Rulers and authorities suggest earthly human power structures, the ways that we dominate each other. Forces of cosmic darkness and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens suggest something more supernatural. We might use a word like demons. Or it at least suggests something more abstract about our way of living in the world.

Ephesians does not say a lot directly about the nature of these powers and principalities. It's not generally something that was high priority for the original Paul or any of these other authors who wrote later in his name.

But they do come up at a higher rate in Ephesians than anywhere else in Paul. According to Clinton Arnold in Ephesians: Power and Magic, Ephesus was seen to be a major centre for magical practice. By "magic" we mean something like: learning the correct speech and actions that allow you to control spiritual forces that would otherwise harm you.

In addition to other ancient sources, this claim by Arnold is supported by Acts 19, which describes Paul's time in Ephesus. That includes encounters with several people who practiced this kind of magic and then repented by burning all their very valuable magical texts. Acts attributes more demons to Ephesus than anywhere else in Paul's journeys.

That may be why Paul talks about these powers and principalities more in Ephesians than anywhere else. As is always true with reading these letters, they have a context with specific things the audience was thinking about and that the author was trying to address.

So that's one half of what we saw in the CEB translation, the demon half. And there is a good argument that this is all that Paul meant here.

Most modern interpreters don't like reducing it to only be about that, though, for a few reasons:

1. There's the modernist bias, that we often start with a presupposition that there is no evidence to believe that such demons exist. If the text is only about those, and we dismiss those, it doesn't leave us with anything else that it says.
2. There's the practical pastoral concern that it can create a scenario of being so focused on these spiritual forces battling out there, it's easy to ignore what's happening right in front of you.
3. The one that is most compelling to me: there are plenty of other biblical texts and extra-biblical texts from the same time and even a couple centuries earlier that suggest these two ideas can go together, not be contradictory. These often align the imagery of these spiritual forces with systemic injustices or more broadly the battle between good ways of being in relationship and bad ways of being in relationship. Even within this text, it goes on to explain that the weapons and armour for defeating these evil forces are things like truth, peace, salvation, justice, and the word of God. If it were strictly talking about evil demons, you might expect more "magical" tools like prayer, fasting, maybe some charismatic gifts which Paul isn't afraid to talk about elsewhere. Also, this text references back to Isaiah which was within a context of being conquered by a literal foreign empire and seeking liberation from that.

So, there is good reason to believe that it is at least talking about this more abstracted battle between good and bad ways of being, the way of God and the way of the oppressive Empire. Perhaps that's in addition to literal spiritual forces, but I have a hard time believing that it only meant literal spiritual forces.

Either way, there are a couple more important points here.

First, evil does exist. It's true that we can't neatly divide between the good people and the evil people, like a lot of Xena and other media from when I was a kid. There's a good argument that this is what the original sin, knowledge of good and evil, meant, that kind of blanket judgement of a person's value. But that doesn't deny that evil does exist within many of the ways that the world operates. If you look at the news and we're being honest, it probably won't take you that long to find something happening that you want to describe as evil. We know that evil exists.

God's Victory

To paraphrase something from G.K. Chesterton, which I believe I first encountered through Rachel Held Evans: the reason we tell fairytales is not to teach children that dragons exist. Children know soon enough that dragons exist, that the world can be scary, that evil happens. The reason we tell fairytales is to teach children that the dragons can be defeated. That's a big part of what I think is happening here in Ephesians. They knew the evil existed; what they needed to know was that it could be defeated.

The recipients of the letter were told they didn't need to be afraid of these evil powers anymore. They didn't need to be constantly resorting to their own magical efforts to try to contain them, because God already won.

This motif of Jesus defeating evil as well as death is a common one throughout the Pauline letters, as well as other texts like Revelation and Jesus' casting out demons in the Gospels. In the Adult Ed today, we'll look a bit at some other motifs in the New Testament for explaining exactly what was accomplished by Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. This is the most prominent one: that somehow Jesus defeated evil and death.

I haven't completely dropped social media this year for Lent as I often have in the past, but I have tried to maintain stricter limits. I'm trying to find that balance of staying informed without being overwhelmed. That does mean that some days with how fast the news is changing that I miss about 6 stages of commentary on new tariffs, then counter tariffs, then a reversal of part of a tariff, then a delay of one tariff but another one added, then a reversal of part of the reversal from earlier in the day, and I'm very tired of the word tariff even with less social media.

One of the ways that I do feel overwhelmed when I spend too much time on social media soaking up every bit of bad news is that I want to know what I can do to defeat these evils. I want to jump to fixing the problem.

That gets me closer to the Ephesians' magical approach. They were trying to constrain evil through their own efforts, as I am often tempted to do. The message that they needed to hear was one of transcendent hope and grace. They were told to be confident in God's victory. It might not always look like it, but the victory is assured. It wasn't solely their job to defeat evil through sheer effort, with the right magical words or actions.

I found myself thinking that this is the main message I needed to hear from the letter, too: I, alone, raging against the darkness, cannot fix everything. Fortunately, I am not alone.

This God does not sit back and wish us good luck defeating evil. This God has led the charge into the darkness. This God is one who entered the trenches, who has defeated evil and is defeating evil.

How: God's Armour

This passage is often referred to as the "armour of God" and that leaves upon a couple of possibilities for how to interpret the preposition "of." Tom Yoder Neufeld unpacks this well in his commentary. He argues that it is a mistake to believe that it is God giving us necessary protection for our battles, like God is just the blacksmith. Instead, this is God's armour, the mechanisms by which God fights. This text, first and foremost, is saying what God is like and has done, summarizing a letter which has largely been about what God has done.

I thought it was interesting in Marcus' message a few weeks ago when he mentioned how Paul and those others who wrote in his name get cast as legalistic. I've heard that version, that Paul is all about the harsh rules that we must follow. Therefore, they conclude, we need to dismiss him and everything he wrote. I've also heard the version that Paul is obsessed with a cheap empty version of grace, that God has already forgiven us no matter what we've done to hurt each other, so don't worry about things like social injustices that we are participating in. Therefore, Paul does not adequately prepare us to be capable of things like apologizing or learning to love people better. In conclusion, we should dismiss him and everything that he wrote. We've got one big chunk of people upset at Paul for one idea and another big chunk upset at Paul for the complete opposite idea. I think those two extremes are missing that there is a third option. According to this text, the battle is fought by "putting on" this new reality, this new way of being that was revealed most fully in Jesus. We are invited to inhabit the way of God, participating in God's battle with God's armour. This aligns with much of the other language of Ephesians to this point, about being the new creation in Christ. We don't fight our own battle through our own magical efforts, essentially the legalistic reading of Paul. We don't sit back and pretend there isn't a battle either, which is essentially the cheap grace reading of Paul.

Each piece of armour, what God's new way of being looks like, could be its own sermon. These are big ideas: truth, peace, justice, and the word of God. We don't have time for that. Believe me, I was ready to give a rant on the concept of truth in the disinformation social media age. You've been spared from that with the time limits on these sermons, which I am pushing close to, so it is time to wrap up.

The main takeaway is that the church is called to a way of being that follows God's lead and stands in contrast to the powers. Where the powers use misinformation and disinformation to amass wealth and influence, God is truthful and calls the church to be truthful. Where the powers seek to divide and incite violence, God reconciles humanity and calls the church to be peacemakers. Where the world accepts injustice if it benefits them, God seeks justice for the most marginalized, even at cost to themself on the cross, and calls the church to do the same. This is who God is, that is how God defeats evil, and that is what we are invited to put on as well.

Resources

Books

Florer-Bixler, M. (2021). How to have an enemy : righteous anger and the work of peace. Herald Press.

I have referenced this book multiple times before. It is very good at acknowledging that we do have enemies in the sense that we do have those who are actively opposing what we would consider to be the just way of being in the world, and then looking at how we deal with them in a Jesus-like way. Like I tried to do, it doesn't accept either extreme framing that there is no battle or that our battle is about dominating others.

Du Mez, K. K. (2021). Jesus and John Wayne : how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company.

This is a historical book that traces the development of the macho violent Christian masculinity imagery over the past century, more relevant to some discussion of the call to fight version of Christianity that I largely cut out from the sermon.

Arnold, C. E. (1989). Ephesians, power and magic : the concept of power in Ephesians in light of its historical setting. Cambridge University Press.

This was the most academic commentary that I went through. It is largely focused on what the "powers and principalities" were in the Ephesians context – how they likely understood these spiritual forces as well as gods like Ephesian Artemis – and what "Paul" was saying about Jesus' victory over them.

Neufeld, T. Y. (2002). Ephesians. Herald Press.

Tom Yoder Neufeld's commentary also covers the whole letter, but from an explicitly Anabaptist perspective. There were a couple of key points that came up in his discussion of the "God's Armour" section which I used in the sermon.

Videos

For more on Artemis of Ephesus, here's a good video from Religion for Breakfast. That doesn't impact much about how we read Ephesians, but it is interesting as part of the setting where her worship was quite possibly part of what was meant within "powers and principalities" (the Clinton Arnold book cited above also discussed her place in Ephesian religion).