Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, 8:00am Holy Communion
“Above all, take the shield of faith”.
The scriptural images before us today have a wonderful cogency and power; they at once disquiet us, I suspect, as well as comfort us. We may indeed be inclined to prefer the gospel story of the healing of the son of a nobleman, not a poor man, we note, but one who is presumably well off; that alone, of course, might give us cause to pause. Yet, it is the story about something which is done by Jesus for us and so it suits the predilection of this age of entitlement to suppose that God should heal us and provide for us whatever we think we want. After all, ‘He owes us’, we might secretly think. We are happy to be on the receiving end, takers all and givers none. Of course, the gospel story itself will allow none of that kind of nonsense.
The challenge of the gospel is the wonderful openness to the grace of God by the nobleman who “believed the word which Jesus had spoken unto him”. He did not insist that Jesus make a house call. Jesus’ word was enough. That is the wonder and the effect of the grace of Christ at work in human lives. It illustrates what it means to “be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might” that St. Paul talks about in his Letter to the Ephesians, the strength and the might to work with what is conveyed to us by the Word of God. We are not just passive receivers, the couch potatoes of spiritual blessings, as it were; no, we are called to be actively engaged with what the Word of God opens out to us.
If comforted by the gospel, at first glance, then, I am sure we are equally made uncomfortable about the images in the epistle reading from Ephesians. The images are, in their sustained rigour, unmistakably military. They suggest an aggressiveness, even a kind of bellicosity that surely makes us pause, if not shudder uncomfortably.
“Put on the armour of God,” Paul tells us and he continues to tell us through the language of image and metaphor that we contend “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual wickedness in high places”. Strong stuff. I wonder if we can hear it even in the approach to Remembrance Day and at a time when we confront the forms of active nihilism even here in Canada which arise out of our communities and ghettoes of passive nihilism, out of our spiritual emptiness; the nothingness of evil which breeds a destructive nothingness.
