Be Strong in the Lord by Rev. Kathy Sides (Preached at Fort Des Moines UMC 8-26-12) Elmer, a rough and gruff farmer from Iowa who didn t want anything to do with God, died and went to Hell. The devil put him to work breaking up rocks with a sledgehammer. To make it worse, he turned the temperature and the humidity way up. After a couple of days the devil checked in on Elmer to see if he was suffering enough. The devil was amazed when he found him happily swinging his hammer and whistling a tune. The devil walked up to him and said, I don t understand this. I ve turned the heat way up, it s humid, and you re crushing rocks and sweating. How can you be happy? Elmer smiled, looked at the devil and said, Oh, this is great, it reminds me of the hot humid August days on my farm back in Iowa. I thought Hell would be horrible, but this is wonderful! It s just like home! So, the devil decided to try something else. He dropped the temperature, and added driving rain and torrential wind. Pretty soon, hell was a wet, muddy mess. But when he checked again, the devil found Elmer happily slogging through the mud pushing his wheelbarrow full of crushed rocks. Again, the devil asked Elmer how he could be so happy in such awful conditions. Elmer replied, This is great. Just like farming in April back in Iowa. The devil was completely baffled. He didn t normally have such trouble making people suffer. But, then again, he didn t often get Iowans in Hell! In desperation, he tried one last ditch effort. He made the temperature plummet. Hell was blanketed in snow and ice. Confident that this had done it, the devil checked in on Elmer again. He couldn t believe his eyes when he saw Elmer dancing, singing, and twirling his sledgehammer in glee. Don t you realize its 40 below zero!? screamed the devil, How can you be so happy? Hell s frozen over! cried Elmer, That can only mean one thing; the Cubs have finally won the World Series! We re pretty good about telling jokes or funny stories involving the devil. I ve heard a number of them and some are pretty funny. But in our scripture for today from Ephesians, Paul reminds us that in reality, the devil is no laughing matter. He tells us that as Christians, we are engaged in a struggle against the rulers and powers of darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil; he tells us that we need to be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Paul goes on to tell us that we can be strong in the Lord and stand in the strength of his power by taking up the armor of God with which to withstand evil and stand firm. He goes on to list five items of armor we are to put on: 1
1. the belt of truth 2. the breastplate of righteousness 3. shoes for proclaiming the gospel of peace 4. the shield of faith 5. the helmet of salvation 6. the sword of the Spirit More about those pieces of armor in a little bit, but first I want to say more about what we as Christians are supposed to be standing against. It seems like sometimes we in the mainline denominations don t talk all that much about the devil. I guess we prefer to talk about God and Jesus, and the love, grace and forgiveness offered to us, rather than emphasize the dangers of the devil. I m not sure why that is. Maybe we re just more comfortable with the good than we are the bad. Or we don t want to scare people, or we don t want to seem too much like the hellfire and brimstone preachers some of us may have encountered. I know that I have always thought it better that people be drawn to God by love than scared to God by fear. I would think God would prefer that. And yet, the presence of evil in our world is real. Very real. Not talking about it won t make it go away. From the very beginning there was evil. Even in Eden, God warned Adam and Eve to stay away from one tree; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But they didn t, and so from way back at the beginning of humankind, we ve known about evil, and sometimes chosen to participate in it. I checked the numbers, and in the Old Testament, the word evil is used 376 times. Quite a few of those times it is used in reporting that someone did what was evil in God s sight. In the New Testament the word evil is used 115 times. There are 35 references to the devil in the Bible, all in the New Testament. While the person of Satan appears in the Old Testament, he is portrayed more as an accuser than as a personification of evil. For instance, in the book of Job, Satan is someone who observes the goings-on on earth and reports his findings to God. When we get to the New Testament, the term Satan begins to be used interchangeably with the devil, and it is clear that the devil is evil incarnate. The first place we encounter the person of the devil in the New Testament is in Chapter 4 of Matthew when we hear of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness by the devil. Jesus temptation is also recorded in Mark and Luke. Jesus speaks about the devil in a few other places in the Gospels, calling him an enemy and liar, and making clear that the devil is opposed to God. 2
Other times throughout the New Testament whenever the devil is mentioned it is clear that he s not a nice guy. We have no idea from scripture what the devil looks like. I m not sure when or why we started imagining the devil as a red guy with pointy horns and a pitchfork. We may not know what the devil looks like, but we know what the devil is. Evil. I m sure there are a lot of ideas out there about the devil. Some people might even argue that there really is no devil, that he is just kind of a character that people made up to give form to the idea of evil. Others might claim that the devil was made up by Christians so we would have someone to blame besides God for all the suffering and bad stuff in the world. Still others might say that the devil is a tool used by Christians to try to scare people into turning to God. Listening to some preachers or evangelists talk, you can understand how it would be possible to get that idea. Reality is, you could debate the existence on non-existence of a person known as Satan or the devil, or Beelzebub or whatever name you want to use, till you re blue in the face and never come up with conclusive proof either way. Just like you cannot convince some people that God exists, you cannot convince some people that the devil exists. I don t know everything there is to know about the subject of the devil, but I know two important things. One is, the Gospel writers report Jesus encountering personally some entity they referred to as the devil. Jesus speaks of the devil as though it were a real being, a force in opposition to God that we ought to be concerned about. So, I m inclined to believe that the devil is real. The other thing I know is that it doesn t really matter what the devil looks like or even if the devil ever actually appears in a form you can see and hear, I know that the devil is real because evil is real. You don t have to look very far for evidence of the existence of evil. Watch the news, read the paper, look around. People could not do the things they do, treat one another the way they do, unless there was a force of evil at work in the world. Sometimes the evil is of such horrendous proportions that all the world takes notice. Things like Hitler s death camps or the terrorist attacks on September 11 th, just to name a couple. Other times it s on a smaller scale and no one seems to notice, like a wife and children who live in fear of a husband and father who beats them, or a young man who is killed because he was gay, or a child who learns to hate someone who looks or talks different from them because that s what their parents passed down to them. Maybe those things are less noticeable, and we can ignore them more easily, but they are no less evil. 3
What sometimes scares us is that we as Christians are called not just to notice evil, but to stand against it; not just name it, but to fight it. That s not always easy. Sometimes we don t feel strong enough. Sometimes we live with evil long enough that we get desensitized to it, we tell ourselves it might not be as bad as we think. Sometimes we don t know what to do, where to start. This might sound funny, but it s kind of like cleaning my house. Friday was supposed to be my day off, but I still hadn t finished this sermon yet, so I thought I d finish it Friday morning. But, then Sam wanted to invite some friends over after the football game, so I was forced to start cleaning. I started in on the kitchen about 8:30, thinking it would only take a little while and then I could move on to the rest of the house and surely get to my sermon after lunch. Earl sent me a text about 12:30, asking if I d had time to run and get some cat food, which we were completely out of. I texted him back, telling him that I had been working on the kitchen the entire time since he left for work, and I was just now almost finished, still needing to scrub the floor. Knowing I had hoped to finish my sermon he texted back, Wow, maybe you could use that in your sermon. Does cleaning the kitchen fit any of the lectionary reading? I rather flippantly texted back, Only under the topic of fighting against the devil, which is the Ephesians passage. I really didn t mean it, but down on my hands and knees scrubbing, I began to wonder if there was anything cleaning the kitchen had to do with fighting the devil, or if you prefer, fighting evil. And, as strange as it sounds, I came up with a couple of things. First, it occurred to me that sometimes evil kind of sneaks up on you, like the clutter in your kitchen, and you don t notice how bad it is, or how hard it will be to confront it, till you finally face it. Those papers that were laid on the table and the cup on the counter and the toys on the microwave would have only taken a couple of minutes each to deal with if I had dealt with them when they were first laid there. But just a little clutter didn t seem enough to bother with, so they stayed there. And became the foundation for more papers, and more toys and more cups and more of everything. So by the time I was forced into cleaning the kitchen, what could have taken just a few minutes each day had turned into hours of sorting and finding homes for what surely were hundreds of little items: a marble here, a rubber band there, a twist tie, a clothespin, a water bottle, and on and on and on. So it is with evil. It might not seem so bad at first, something we can live with and not worry about unless it gets worse: a little lie here, an unkind comment there, an unspoken resentment, a grudge, a prejudice, and on and on. 4
Little by little it piles up until it has become something that seems so overwhelming that we re not sure we have the time or energy to deal with. Maybe just leave it alone till tomorrow. The other thing I thought about when I was thinking about whether my kitchen and evil had anything in common, was that it s easy to want to think that the problem is someone else s fault. I don t know what percentage of the junk in the kitchen was mine, but it sure started to seem like most of it was someone else s. It was easy to start to feel resentful that the other five persons who helped make the mess weren t there to do their part. It s like that with fighting evil sometimes. Sometimes we feel we re alone in the battle and that it isn t fair that others aren t doing their share. Or, that we re working awfully hard and no one seems to appreciate our effort. Sometimes dealing with evil whether it is in our own lives or in the world around us like cleaning the kitchen, seems a daunting task; something we d rather not tackle, or something that maybe someone else really ought to take responsibility for. And sometimes we ignore it in the hopes that it will go away. Only it doesn t. And we are called back to the words of Paul that suggest that we are responsible as Christians to stand against it; to, as Paul writes, Stand against the wiles of the devil, and to Struggle against the spiritual forces of evil. Sounds far worse than facing all the clutter in the kitchen! In fact, it sounds downright terrifying. Except, the good news is, we do not stand alone, or in our own strength. Paul says, Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. We are not alone or unequipped. We have the power of God behind us. And, we have the armor of God to help us in the battle. We are to fasten the belt of truth around our waist; God s truth, which is stronger than the lies of the evil one. We are to put on whatever shoes will make us ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. There are several items designed to keep us safe, to protect us; the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith with which we will be able to quench the flaming arrows of the evil one, and the helmet of salvation. Lastly, we take up the sword of the Spirit, which Paul says is the word of God. If you read the accounts of Jesus encounter with the devil in the Gospels, you ll notice that ultimately, Jesus triumphed by being able to quote God s word in the face of the devil s temptations. We are to do the same. 5
And finally, Paul advises, after putting on the armor of God to protect us, we are to pray. Not just once in a while, when the going gets tough and we are getting overwhelmed and beaten down, but at all times. Paul is not giving advice as someone who has just been watching from the sidelines and doesn t really know what it is like to be in the heat of the battle. He writes, Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak. It is thought that Paul referred to himself as an ambassador in chains, because he was writing from a prison in Rome, arrested for refusing to stop preaching about Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen. He does not ask the people to pray for his release, or pray that he will avoid controversy or trouble. He asks that they pray that he might declare the gospel boldly. May our prayer be for that same boldness that Paul desired. May we ask for the strength to declare with boldness the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ; in the face of whatever resistance, intolerance and just plain evil we might encounter. To that end, may we put on the armor of God, so that we might stand against the wiles of the devil. And if that sounds like a daunting task, remember that we do not stand on our strength alone; we stand in the strength of God. So, as Paul says, Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power! Amen. 6