(Psalm 84; Ephesians 6:10-20) – J G White

11 am, Sun, Aug 26, 2018 – UBC Digby

Ephesians 6:10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.

What caught your attention in those verses of scripture? The devil and the forces of evil?  The pieces of armour that are described? The encouragement to pray?

These are dynamic words here, and we may need them in our challenging time.  We live in dangerous times. This week, the sky got hazy, with a red sun up high, and a red full moon at night.  All that smoke all the way from the terrible fires on the west coast. And in the news, warnings that we’ve actually had a cooler period the last few years, and the next five years will be warmer than ever on earth.

At Oasis, the gathering of our Baptist Churches, in Wolfville last week, our emphasis was on the deep need for us to come to a Turning Point. To make a turnaround, because our trajectory is downward.  How can we cooperate with God to head upwards? At the local level, many of our churches are hearing a message like the one we read in a letter we each got this summer: “YOUR CHURCH IS IN TROUBLE!”

On the individual level, our Church family seems to have so many people dealing with cancer, other serious health threats, and quite a few people in hospital who cannot go back to live at home.

What do we do in the face of danger?  What are our tools? Where is our protection, our safety, our strength?  If we think of it as armour we put on and use, we must put on the right armour.  The so-called armour of our Christian faith is not the weaponry of violence. It is not literally sword and shield.

A couple months ago here we read this story, and I want us to notice some details again, from ‘David and Goliath.’ The story of the young shepherd who took on the giant prize-fighter of the enemy, and won.  

Here is a description from 1 Sam 17 of Goliath: A giant nearly ten feet tall stepped out from the Philistine line into the open, Goliath from Gath. He had a bronze helmet on his head and was dressed in armor—126 pounds of it! He wore bronze shin guards and carried a bronze sword. His spear was like a fence rail—the spear tip alone weighed over fifteen pounds. His shield bearer walked ahead of him. [Msg]

And here is what young David does to prepare for battle with this giant: [Then] Saul outfitted David as a soldier in armor. He put his bronze helmet on his head and belted his sword on him over the armor. David tried to walk but he could hardly budge. David told Saul, “I can’t even move with all this stuff on me. I’m not used to this.” And he took it all off.

40 Then David took his shepherd’s staff, selected five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in the pocket of his shepherd’s pack, and with his sling in his hand approached Goliath.

The right armour and weaponry for David was what suited him best.  For us who follow Christ now, the words of Ephesians 6 suggest what we take into the battles of our lives.  Spiritual battles, the ordeals that our spirits face, from day to day. When faced with danger, fear, discouragement, trouble, panic, evil – take up the full armor of God: truth, rightness, peace, faith, salvation, the word of the Spirit.  These are all available to us!

Paul uses the imagery of armour for battle as he speaks of all these things.  Put them on and stand firm, he wrote. 14 Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist.  Truth is better than lies.  Maybe truth also better than secrecy and silence.  

I will always remember – with some regret – this one particular cashier at the Sobeys in Windsor. She was friendly and kind. One day as we were chatting, I said something like, “Yeah, I should preach a sermon on lying, and how to escape lies in our lives.”  She said, immediately, “Let me know when; I want to be there!” That clearly struck a nerve with her; I could tell she really wanted to find out about lying and how to break it. I never did a sermon about lying, never got to invite her in for it.

Truthfulness is such a good thing, and it comes as part of the armour of God for us. Putting on truth is a matter of not putting on lies.  And of not putting on secrecy and silence – speak the truth when needed.  And it is a matter of letting your Yes be Yes and your No be No. I discovered years ago that I would often say ‘yes, I’ll do that,’ when my real answer was ‘no, I will not be doing that.’  Takes a while to learn.

  And put on the breastplate of righteousness, it says.  Doing the right things and being in right relationships with others is as protective to the believer as body armour to a soldier.  And, as it says elsewhere, we get our ‘rightness’ not from ourselves, but from our grace source, Christ. We have a Source of doing & being right. We do not have to get life right all by ourselves.  

15 As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. How do we put on these shoes?  I have a lot of questions about being prepared to proclaim the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.  There was a lot of talk about this at Oasis these last three days. Talk of what God’s good news is for people, & how we share this gospel.  

Perhaps a clue to these gospel shoes is in the fact they are shoes.  We might have expected a gospel megaphone, or a gospel trumpet. Shoes make it seem like it is a matter of going somewhere.  ‘As you are going, make disciples,’ Jesus said (Matthew 28).  So let’s talk about whatever will make us ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. I want to go on about this in September, as we read from the book of James.  But also, one on one, let’s talk about what makes us ready to proclaim.

Then Paul says, 16 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. We might use other things to protect ourselves from evil… Why use faith?  Because faith is confidence, confidence in Jesus Christ. When you are confident in God, you can be confident in the face of terrible things.  

One way we put on faith, or confidence, in the Holy One, is by paying attention to the Holy One.  Prayerfulness. Meditation. Study of scriptures, observation of creation, attention to people – such things draw us closer to God, and we can be more confident.

Finally, Paul writes, 17 Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.  

What kinds of words do we speak in time of trouble and danger?  Sometimes our words are sword- like – harsh, sharp, ready to harm and cut.   Using this ‘armour’ is a matter of not putting on and using other things. Like David facing Goliath. He figured out that the heavy armour of a soldier was not for him – he took it off.  

So we take off the harsh words and nasty attitude.  Then, our speaking and message can be strong and good.  Leaving unhelpful words behind is easier said than done, I know.  

Sometimes, taking on a spiritual discipline for a short time will help a lot. Like friends who decided to give up complaining, in the season of Lent.  Never complain. About the weather, or the weather forecast. About the annoying things and the truly painful things. And when a complaint automatically pops out, the person notices, and the Spirit teaches a lesson on why complaining is built in, and how it can dissolve.  

The word of God can come out of us.  Once we have it flowing in us. Not just the Bible, these written words. But all the ways the Divine Word comes among us.  And Jesus Himself, the Word who is God.

Putting on this ‘armour’ is a lifelong bit of work.  We take off other things we wore that get in the way.  We learn to put on and use the good things that are all we need.  

You’re looking better dressed already!

(Psalm 4; Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2) – J G White
11 am, Sun, Aug 12, 2018 – UBC Digby

Where does your motivation come from?  Perhaps you awoke in your bed this morning and thought, “Good morning, Lord!”  Or, it was one of those days when you thought, “Good Lord, it’s morning!” What motivates you to get up, get going, and do well?

My mother’s hometown is Oshawa, Ontario. For years my grandfather worked at a General Motors factory there.  One of that city’s mottos has been Oshawa: the City that Motovates Canada!

What motivates Christians? What things prompt us to be like Christ? To Trust and Obey?

The phrases Bonnie read, from Ephesians 4, are interesting, because not only do they list some guidelines for Christian life, but they also give motivating factors. Let us ponder what motivation we have for our imitation, our imitation of God.

First, we are motivated to be honest by be- longing to one another, being connected. 25 So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.

You know me, I think of a song for every occasion.  With this phrase I starting to sing a old hymn by Thomas Ken. You know, the 17th century Church of England priest who wrote the words

Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise him, all creatures here below,
Praise him above, ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

That happens to be the eleventh verse of a hymn Ken wrote, that also has these lines:

Let all thy converse be sincere,
Thy conscience as the noon-day clear;
Think how all-seeing God thy ways
And all thy secret thoughts surveys.

Our ‘modern’ hymn books put it this way: “In conversation be sincere.” Now, Thomas Ken has the motivation for truthfulness be the all-seeingness of God – watching you, even your inner thoughts.  On the other hand, Eph. 4, in the Bible, would have us put away falsehood and be truthful to our neighbours because we belong to each other: ‘we are members of one another.’

To be honest to our neighbours, our family, our friends, is both hard and easy.  Easy, because we know honesty is the best policy, and for those we care about this matters.  But it is also difficult, when we feel the need to hide something from those who really do know us.  We are in this together: speak the truth.

We are also motivated to be like Jesus by the desire to avoid evil. 26-27 Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.

So, there is an evil danger in anger. But we know we have anger.  We see Jesus angry, at times. ‘Be angry,’ it says, ‘but do not sin.’ It’s possible to have
anger, and still be good in this world.   

Canadian storyteller, Ralph Milton, speaks of a Sunday in 1968. It was the Sunday after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot.  We were part of a church service in Teaneck, New Jersey, a church in which whites were a minority.  King’s assassination was a terrible blow to all of us who had struggled in the black liberation movement.

Church that Sunday morning began in chaos.  The planned service simply would not do, but nobody really knew what should happen.

And then, one of the men from our choir moved quietly to the centre of the chancel, and began to sing, very quietly at first, the anthem of that era, “We shall overcome.”

We joined in, all of us, and we held on to each other and we sang it over and over and over, until we had sung out our rage and our fear.  We sang that song until it changed from an anthem of anger into an anthem of hope. And we were healed back in to a community, a community of black and white who could be together as God’s people.  (R. Milton, Sermon Seasonings, 1997, p. 56)

The sun did not set on their anger.  It was possible to feel and express it, to share it, to heal it, to rise up.

We are next motivated to be like Jesus by the needs of those around us. 28 Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.

In the now old Interpreter’s Bible commentary, Francis Beare said of this:

We are bound to be struck by the implications of this injunction.  The church was welcoming into her fellowship members of the criminal classes, to whom theft was the ordinary means of livelihood, which must now be replaced by honest toil.  We have here a reminder that the gospel of Christ is not for the righteous who need no repentance, nor is the church a club for the respectable.  (Volume X, p. 700)

And so, this guidance to the thieves in the congregation is motivated by what?  Give up robbery “so as to have something to share with the needy.” The motivation not to steal is not ‘cause stealing is bad, but because there were needy people who could be helped.  

We learn to do a good thing because the thing we do does some good, not because it benefits us, right?  We give to a charitable project so it will go ahead, not for the tax benefit we will get. We become a volunteer in our community to help make various things happen, not so we will get a community service award.  We learn to recycle and reuse everything because our home planet needs this care, not so that we will have more beautiful streets to enjoy. Be motivated by the real good you can do.

Ephesians 4 also suggests we are motivated to imitate God by the goodness we have at our fingertips.  29 Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.

My step-daughter, Teanna, has statement framed on the wall of her home that came from a book she read.  The sign says:

This is your beautiful precious life.
This is your place.
These are your people.
LOVE BETTER STAND TALL
Be Kind Be You
Love Jesus
& PASS OUT GRACE LIKE CANDY!
(Jenn Hatmaker, For the Love, 2015)

That’s beautiful. 🙂 “Pass our grace like candy!”  Even better than the freezies and Tootsie Rolls that got thrown at my feet during Saturday’s parade.  Pass out grace, like candy. Yes, but… how do we do this?

In her book, An Altar in the World, preacher Babrara Brown Taylor has a chapter on The Practice of Pronouncing Blessings.  We all can bless others, silently speak a blessing.  Say a prayer, really. Don’t we know this already?

Taylor writes, the best way to discover what pronouncing blessings is all about is to pronounce a few.  The practice itself will teach you what you need to know.

Start with anything you like. [she says] Even a stick lying on the ground will do.  The first thing to do is to pay attention to it.  Did you make the stick? No, you did not. The stick has its own story.  If you had time to figure out what kind of tree the stick came from, that would be a start to showing the stick some respect…. Is it on the ground because it is old or because of some mishap?  Had it been lying there for a long time or did it just land? Is it fat enough for you to see its growth rings?

To pronounce a blessing on something, it is important to see it as it is. What purpose did this stick serve?  Did a bird sit on it? Did it bear leaves that sheltered the ground from the hottest summer sun?

“Bless you, stick, for being you.”
“Blessed are you, o stick, for turning [air] and sun into wood.”
“Blessed are you, Lord God, for using this stick to stop me in my tracks.”  
(An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor, 2009, pp. 194-5)

Barbara Brown Taylor also suggests: The same is true of people.  The next time you are at the airport, try blessing the people sitting at the departure gate with you.  Every one of them is dealing with something significant.  (p. 202)

‘Give out grace, like candy!”

And one final motivation to live the Christian life here & now is to recall how we have been treated. 31-32 Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

That is a long list of things not to do and big good things to do.  All motivated by God in Christ treating us so well, so amazingly kindly.  

I wonder, from time to time, ‘what words can I put up next on our Church sign?’  Here is my latest idea:      
SACRED SINGING
SHORT SERMONS
STAFFED NURSERY
SAINTLY SINNERS
YOU’LL FIT IN

Do you like that idea?  I fear that “staffed nursery” and “saintly sinners” are too long to fit on the sign.

We have been blessed, so blessed.  From deep in our souls, and from forehead to the soles of our feet.  Now, we can bless, bless as much as possible.

There is motivation for us to imitate God.  To be better, greater, be ‘gooder.’  To be connected better, rooted more deeply in the Divine Lover of our Souls.  This is possible: hallelujah!