Fighting War

Gadreel, Angel of War, by Peter Mohrbacher

Propers: Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 21), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

What a coda to 20 years of war—images of desperate Afghans falling from the wheel wells of departing military aircraft. As more than one journalist has pointed out, the photographs this week seem eerily reminiscent of those from September 2001.

I grew up in the 80s, the last great charge of the long Cold War. I remember the Beirut bombing of ’83. I remember nuclear missile drills under our desks. I remember yellow ribbons tied to trees during the First Gulf War; which I would watch on TV after I got home from school each day, because they’d put cameras on the bombs. And we’d never really seen anything like that before.

My grandfather fought in World War II. I grew up across the street from Holocaust survivors and Vietnam Vets. All the heroes of the movies of my youth were servicemen defending us from the evils of the perfidious Soviet empire. And I’ve had friends and colleagues fighting overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq. My point is this: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t steeped in military imagery. I can’t remember a time when my country was not somewhere, everywhere, at war.

“Put on the whole armor of God,” writes St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. And this is one of the more famous quotations from the New Testament in America today.  We slap it on sweatshirts and bumper stickers. But I think we miss the point. I don’t think we quite get what Paul is saying. You and I are so used to seeing soldiers as heroes that we miss the irony in his statement. We miss how subversive it truly is, how it flips the world upside-down.

When you and I turn on the news, we identify with the technologically superior Western armies fighting to bring order to a chaotic Middle East. But the authors of the Bible are Middle Easterners, and they have a decidedly different view of us. Paul is taking the ubiquitous representative of Roman dominance, of Roman empire, the unstoppable Legion, and he is spiritualizing it, turning it inside-out.

Soldiers, in the New Testament, are not heroes. Soldiers, in the New Testament, are the invading forces of a foreign occupation who tortured and murdered the Christ. That’s a Roman cross up there, my friends. That’s a Western weapon of war.

“Put on the whole armor of God,” Paul writes, “that you may withstand the wiles of the devil; for our struggle is not with flesh and blood, but against the rulers and authorities, the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Say what you will, the man knows how to write.

He points to the Roman soldier, to the Roman armor, and says, “This stuff ain’t worth squat.” It’s for fighting and stabbing and killing mankind. But those aren’t our enemies. Human beings are not the problem, at least not in the way that we think. Our real fight is spiritual, against rulers and principalities, the cosmic forces of this present darkness.

See, Paul knows that the world is broken, and that you can’t fix it by blowing stuff up. Spiritual brokenness cannot be healed by force. Imagine, there are actually people who think that we could solve the problem of evil simply by killing the devil. Then what—send out a sniper to go cure hunger? Paul believes in a vast cosmos populated by angels and demons, spiritual forces who have all, to one extent or another, gone awry. The very governing principles of the universe are broken.

And for Paul there is no real division between the natural and the supernatural. Physics is off, biology is off, economics and politics and justice are off, because the gods have all been twisted. The fabric of the universe itself is warped and torn. And the only thing to set it right is the direct rule of God. No more intermediaries, no more messenger angels, no more gods and monsters. Only the Creator, ruling the Creation, as one with Creation. And Paul knows that this occurs, this Kingdom has begun, in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Jesus has come to heal the human heart, to resurrect the human soul. He’s come to set things right and make us whole. And the resurrection begun in Him, and which spreads through us, shall one day encompass the whole of Creation, consuming and purifying all things in the flames of the Holy Spirit, so that God at the last shall be all in all. It is a cosmic conflict, waged within, that reaches out to encompass all worlds.

Will you defeat demons with a sword? Will you bonk errant angels on the head with a stick? Please. Compared to cosmic conflict, all our pretensions of military glory are just savage, naked apes learning how to throw bigger stones faster. No, says Paul, these are not the weapons for the real fight. This is not the armor that protects us. You need spiritual firepower. “Therefore take up the whole armor of God,” he says, “that you may be able to withstand on that evil day.”

“Take up the breastplate of righteousness,” he writes, for chainmail and iron plates cannot protect the heart. But virtue can, piety can. That’s the strength we need. “Fasten about your waist the belt of truth,” Paul continues, for the belt is what holds everything together, holds everything up. We must be true in all things, or we shan’t hold together ourselves. Tell the truth in love no matter the cost.

“Take the shield of faith,” he admonishes, “for with it you will quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one.” And take note that the strength of the Legion is not in the soldier defending himself with his shield, but in defending the man next to him. The shields of the Legions infamously interlock, so that as one body, one unit, the Legion marches onward, impervious to slings and spears. Faith is for your neighbor.

“As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace,” Paul says. And I love this bit particularly because boots are synonymous with war, jackboots on the march, crushing underfoot. The Roman caligae had heavy soles and hobnails like sharpened steel cleats, so that they could not be moved, so that they pushed forward with power. And Paul is no less aggressive in calling for peace: powerful peace, advancing peace, on the march.

“Take up the helmet of salvation,” Paul presses on, for not only does it protect the head, but it terrifies the enemy. For Paul, salvation is not to be won in battle, not to be seized by sweat and blood. Salvation is already ours! We had it before the fight! We stride into the fray with our salvation on display, knowing full well that the demons and devils and powers and principalities and the very cosmic forces of the universe themselves cannot snatch our Christ from us! He is ours and we are His forever. And in the face of such terror Satan can only cower.

Finally, take “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Not a weapon. Not a blade. Not some crude cleaver of flesh and of bone, but the Holy Spirit Herself is our weapon, the Word of God lays low the foe. We are bearers of the Word, bearers of the Spirit, bearers thus of God Himself! He chooses to save humanity, to save the cosmos, through the very same sinners who broke all this in the first place: i.e., He works through you and me.

And when you have this armor of God, when you have the Spirit as your sword, flesh can do nothing to you. What will a soldier do, a Legion do? Strike us? Slay us? Nail us to a cross for all the world to see? Ah, poor fools! They don’t even know who they’re fighting! Go ahead and kill a Christian! See what happens! “Take my head,” said Martin Luther. “God will give me a new one.”

We are in a war, brothers and sisters. But it’s not a war of bullets and bombs. It’s not a war of sandals and swords. It’s a war of the spirit. A war of defiant and scandalous hope in the face of all the world’s conflicts and cataclysms. All they have is violence. All they have is pain. But we have the Risen Christ. We have the King who conquered hell and hallowed heaven. We have the promise of eternal life, already begun, which transforms every crypt into a cradle.

I’m sick of war, sick of violence, sick of blood. It only leads to more of the same. It is true that in the face of great evil, men may need to take up arms in defense of their homes. But the true conflict for this cosmos is spiritual, not technological. And the lines that demarcate that battle run straight through every human heart.

Do not be consumed with militarism. Ares is a pagan god. Take up instead the full armor of Christ, the shield of faith, the sword of His Spirit, that you may withstand on that evil day. For Jesus Christ has conquered!—by giving His life for the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.