By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
August 26, 2012
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Ephesians 6: 10-20
John 6: 52-71
As a pastor I’ve seen a few folks die. And yet, because of their faith they are still alive. One is remember is Alice, a dear lady from my last church, who had for years been a hard worker for the church, generous, hospitable, kind. She came down with cancer, and the most difficult thing for her was the realization that she could no longer “do” as she once did. She became very anxious about the state of her soul; how could she please God if she couldn’t “do” anymore?
We talked about and prayed about the great challenge of faith at the time of dying—how the greatest act of faith is simply to surrender our belief that anything we can do makes any difference, and to totally trust ourselves to God’s hands at the last. The great challenge is really to believe that we are saved by grace, through faith, and not by works. It is hard to believe sometimes, but this is the ultimate act of faith: to give up any hope that by our actions we can save ourselves or win God’s love; and to trust totally that God loves us and saves us; to say with Jesus, “into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Her family still sends me e-mails about her last days: about how, as she lay in the bed in the ICU, with her sister and her daughters by her side, they held hands and sung hymns and laughed when they forgot the lines; and soon after that, Alice entered the Kingdom.
In our epistle lesson today, the author of Ephesians writes, “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you will be able to stand your ground, and after you have done all you can, to stand.”
What he means is that, when we are facing the onslaught of life’s battles, we don’t turn tail and run. Sometimes we can’t advance either. Sometimes the best we can do is stand, neither fight nor run, but take whatever it is that the Evil One is dishing out. Sometimes that is all the faith we have.
But it is enough. Even though Alice was lying in her deathbed, she stood. She stood.
Notable in the panoply of armor of God is the description of the shield: “Take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish the flaming arrows of the evil one.” Ancient Roman shields were made either of wood or of oiled skins stretched over a wood frame, and flaming arrows were a very effective weapon against them. They were terrifying to behold flying at you; but worse, they would catch your shield afire, which sorely tempted one simply to throw his shield aside and make do without it. Make do without a shield when you are about to confront an army carrying javelins? Not a good idea. So the temptation to throw down your shield and follow the Monty Python battle cry of “Run away!” was pretty powerful.
I would imagine that legionnaires holding flaming shields would have a hard time obeying their centurion who would be yelling “stand fast” as the barbarian hordes came charging at them. But stand they must, shields in hand, flaming or not, or they will certainly be defeated.
Ephesians’ military analogy seems apt. The flaming arrows of The Evil One have the ability to turn our own faith against us, the same way that enemy arrows could turn a legionnaire’s shield against him. There are times when our faith seems like it is our worst enemy. You’ve spent your entire life, as Alice did, trying to do right by others, worshiping regularly, loving God and praying regularly, trying to live like Christ; and suddenly disaster hits. What good is your faith then?
We’re studying the book of Job in Tuesday Bible study and those are precisely the issues we’re addressing. What good is your faith if you’ve been faithful all your life, but bad things happen anyway? After all, you’ve spent your whole life believing in and serving a good God, a faithful God, a covenant God. All of a sudden disaster hits, and it’s like a flaming dart catching our shield of faith on fire. Suddenly our belief that God is a God of love seems like a liability—or worse, a lie. God has let us down, and we face the same temptation Job did, to curse God and die. We’re tempted to throw down our flaming shield of faith, and run.
In our Gospel reading, it is Jesus himself who sets the Shield of Faith afire. Jesus has been describing Himself as the bread of life and telling his listeners that they have to eat his flesh and drink his blood and they’re getting pretty grossed-out. The problem is that He’s demanding their full, undivided commitment, to follow Him fully and completely. And sure, following Jesus was all fine and dandy in theory, and committing to Him fully is a nice thing to say when we’re in church, but to suddenly realize that it requires everything—that to be His disciple requires a total transformation of our personal habits and inner nature—that’s too extreme. Jesus has set the shield of faith afire. And so, the passage says, “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with Him.”
They decided to fling that flaming shield of faith away and run the other direction.
That’s a temptation that we all face at various times, and one of the ways we face it in the regular church year is with stewardship season. Every year we come back to you and ask you to give money to support the church. And it always seems like a challenge because often our personal budgets are getting tighter and tighter. A report just out says that the average middle class wage earner is worse off now than she was ten years ago. Zip! A flaming dart right in the shield of faith. Then there’s the capital campaign the church is running, to which you have likely already contributed. Zip! Another flaming dart! Not to mention that there are charities we all like to support, that are doing so much good in the world, and yet are working with fewer and fewer resources. And we’ve got kids in college now! Zip-pow! A double-whammy, two flaming darts in the shield of faith!
Maybe I need to cut back on my giving!
Is God asking too much of us? But God asks everything of us.
In Stewardship season, we are reminded, in actually only a very small symbolic way, that God asks everything of us. God is sovereign Lord, and we are God’s servant people, and we’re called to surrender all to God through Jesus Christ. We give financially as a sign of our commitment, to show how willing we are to stand with Christ who gave Himself in service to God and His life in order to save us.
In times of financial hardship it’s especially hard to do that with our money, and it’s important to pray on it and think on it and be practical and realistic. But at those times a case can be made that maybe it’s especially important to give. There is no time it is more essential to stand your ground than when your shield is aflame and you’re tempted to throw it to the ground and run for cover.
Here’s the Gospel truth: the shield of faith is always aflame. It is aflame when Jesus hands it to us.
To take up faith in Jesus Christ is a promise of comfort and hope and assurance, true; but it’s also the promise that we will have crosses to bear, obstacles to overcome, responsibilities for others, spiritual battles to fight, and sacrifices to be made. So the choice from the minute we have faith is either to fling down the shield of faith and run, or to stand.
In John, the Twelve choose to stand. “Do you also wish to go away?” Jesus asks them, and Peter replies, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
Despite all the challenges of Christian life, all the flaming darts that come our way, faith sees that there is no other Lord to follow, except this Lord who will accept no half-measures. And if we stand with Him, especially in the darkest of times, in the most challenging of situations, then, like the man said, what does not kill you makes you stronger.
For us Christians, by the way, we modify that saying slightly: what does not kill you makes you stronger; and what does kill you welcomes you to eternal life with Christ. To live is Christ, to die is gain.
The author of Ephesians believes that we Christians have an option that the average soldier in battle probably wouldn’t have had. He seems to believe that the shield itself will put the fire out. The shield of faith apparently has fire-extinguishing qualities. Unlike the shields of soldiers. If you hold onto the shield of faith it will put the fire out for you.
That seems to contradict common sense; but it also seems to be true. If the challenges of discipleship in this economy, or in the midst of your personal or family crisis, or in your honest wrestling with the troubles of the world, if those challenges have set your shield of faith afire, hang onto it, blaze and all, despite the feeling of panic it may give you; and if you stand, you’ll discover that your faith has become strong enough to put the fire out for you, because your faith has become more focused, not on yourself, not on your abilities to meet the needs or solve the problems of the world, not on the sacrifices you need to make, but on God—God who loves you and certainly stands with you.