Gear Up

Ephesians 6:13-20
12th Pentecost B

Batman is the most interesting superhero, partly because he doesn’t have superpowers. He has courage, and some well honed skills, but mostly what he has is some great gear. In Batman Begins we see him put his gear together from military equipment the research and development section of Wayne Enterprises put together. He has his modified Nomax suit, painted black, and then the memory fabric to make his wings. It isn’t magic that makes him what he is - it’s the batsuit.

We have wonderful kinds of gear available to us to help us do things we couldn’t normally do. People can now dive into the glaciers of Antarctica because of wetsuits and diving equipment, although it is still terribly cold and very dangerous. People can walk on the moon with the right gear. Environmental suits help in toxic situations.


We everyday people have gear that protects us as we do the things we do: waterproof hiking boots, breathable waterproof jackets, and neoprene gloves to help with northern MN outdoor adventures; SPF lotion for the sun; biking helmets, football pads, rollerblading wristguards, hockey helmets.

Good gear has not always been available to common people, but protective gear has long been available to certain soldiers. The armor that is alluded to in today’s scripture is the Roman armor that the people of the early Church, in the Roman Empire, were very familiar with and probably quite frightened of. The armor consisted of a helmet, a breastplate, a belt, foot coverings. Except for the sword these are all defensive weapons that are mentioned. They are to protect the soldier in his work.

The writer of Ephesians is not telling the people to get armor, and they wouldn’t be able to. He is not saying that the people of the church must have equal weapons or equal defenses to be all right. He is telling the people of Ephesus that there is another whole level of protection that is available to them that is far more important than the armor that they see on the soldiers. He describes this as putting on the armor of the Romans as a way to make his point - that armor isn’t that powerful. There is something that is far more powerful than metal. You have that available to you. This is not a militaristic reading - the violence is undermined and subverted. The writer of Ephesians takes the church to a whole new place.

They are to put on God. They are to put on God in truth, in righteousness, in peace, in faith, in salvation, in the Spirit, in the word. These are not physical weapons but elements of protection. These do not protect the body from swords but protect something much more important - the spirit, the soul. The Christians are urged to put on the presence of God, to put on Christ, one piece at a time, with all the ways they can, to protect that which is most precious, to protect what the Roman soldiers cannot destroy.

We do not have soldiers coming after us this morning, so the text doesn’t have the same punch. But we too have souls to protect; we too have spirits that need to be cared for. We live in a world of fear, and that is a danger to our spirits. We live in a world fraught with meaninglessness, and that is a danger to our being. So we too are invited to put on Christ, to put on the protection of God.

We do this through our spiritual lives, our practices of faith. Bishop Dyck has laid out a practical way we can put on Christ through a spiritual pyramid. She lists activities, practices -- reading the Bible and daily prayer, worship, service, church work, retreats -- that we can participate in that will build up our strength, help us put on Christ.

Here at Hope we have a Covenant Discipleship group and we will be inviting you to join new groups this fall. In Covenant Discipleship we meet weekly to discuss ways in which we put on Christ as we talk about our spiritual practices of acts of compassion, acts of justice, worship and devotion. We support one another and hold one another accountable to the ways we put this stuff on in our daily life, the way we use it.

In Eugene Peterson's The Message he interprets part of this reading of Ephesians this way: “Truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation are more than words.
Learn how to apply them. You’ll need them throughout your life.”

We aren’t superheroes. We don't have superpowers. We aren't soldiers. We don't have super strength. We don’t need to be. We’ve got great gear. We just need to put it on.

Never Obsolete God

11th Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 111
From Eugene Peterson's translation of Psalm 111, especially verse 8: "He (God) manufactures truth and justice, all his products are guaranteed to last -- never out of date, never obsolete, rust-proof. All that he makes is honest and true."

I saw the King Tut exhibit last week. The things in the King Tut exhibit have survived for about 3700 years – things he was expected to need for eternity: furniture, jewelry, figurines of slaves, even games. Even some of his body still remains. It’s amazing they survived grave robbers and the excavation and travels, but they probably will survive several hundred years more at this rate.

I grew up in a family that loved antiques – my grandmother was an antique dealer – so I was surrounded by old, useful things that had become special and protected. Grandma had a collection of salts – little crystal containers with tiny spoons that held salt. You spooned out your salt. Salt shakers made them obsolete. I have books over a hundred years old – they don’t smell so good, but I treasure them. I have a buffet for my dining room that was my great-great grandfathers. I never knew him, but I have his furniture. We have an architect’s table from Kelly’s great-great grandfather. I wear jewelry made for women generations ago that I never met. My bedroom set is from Ethel Olson, a woman who lived down the street from me when I was growing up – it is from the 50s. I still have one of the hand-painted lamps that was original to the set.

Most things we have these days aren’t going to last that long. I asked on my blog what things we use that don’t last as long as they used to, and what things we used to use that are now obsolete. Several people wrote about watches – pocket watches; cheap watches; wind-up watches.
Others items that are obsolete: slide rules; manual typewriters; mercury thermometers
spats; sock darners; rotary phones; fountain pens; quill & ink wells; Russia
We might like to create something that will last forever, we might want to make a mark – but we can’t even make something that will last very long, in the scheme of things. Even the oldest rocks on the earth will eventually break up and become sand and dust. Eventually the sun will blow up and the earth will die, if an asteroid doesn’t hit us first. This is not a permanent situation here. There is nothing eternal about this earth. Our home is not forever and ever. The thing we have created that will probably last the longest is the radioactive waste from nuclear energy – some isotopes will be radioactive longer than 100,000 years. Even King Tut’s things won’t make it that long.

The King Tut exhibit said several times that one thing Tutankhamen desired was eternal life, immortality. The people of that culture did an awful lot – awful, and lot – to ensure the best eternal life they could. The exhibit said several times that Tut is now immortal as he comes to life when we speak his name.

We want to live forever. We want to make an impact that will last forever. We want the things we have loved to last into eternity. But really, taking the long view, what will last forever? This species, that species, our names and histories, our art, our work, this piece of land, the earth, the sun – all will, one day, be gone.

But God – God will not wear out. God will not succumb to the slow decay or the violent blast. God will not slip away into nothingness. God does not become obsolete as fashions change. God holds the foundations of time itself, and God holds us. So even if our names will not last past the end of the earth, in God’s mind and heart we will last, we will continue, in some way.

I kind of miss having household things that I know will last my lifetime. I’m a little sorry about the planned obsolescence of things. But I don’t need to be anxious about my legacy, or that people must remember me so I can be immortal, or that I need to be buried with things that will preserve me for thousands of years – the God I know is never obsolete.

So we should take care of the things we have and buy, we should be wise about what we do with our stuff, and we should care for our legacy and most especially our children well. But the real difference we make is when we love one another, when we work for justice, when we open our hearts to others -- then we are participating in eternity, then we are part of God's work, then we truly escape the bounds of time.

My Bad

9th Sunday of Pentecost
Psalm 51:1-17

When we were kids and my sisters and I fought usually Missy was the instigator and eventually Mom would intervene and then tell Missy to apologize. Missy would refuse, and then Mom would say, "Apologize." Then she’d cross her arms and spit out,“Sorry.” Then Mom would say, “Say it like you mean it.”

I heard Paul Slansky on MPR a few weeks ago. He and Arleen Slorkin wrote a book called My Bad, a book about public apologies. They follow the trend in our culture of public apologies being less about saying, “Sorry” and more like, “If you were offended by what I did then I apologize.” It is a conditional apology meant to put the weight of the issue back on the person offended. "If you are wimpy and sensitive enough to be upset by what I did them I apologize." Takes the steam out of an apology, doesn't it? You can be offended twice, this way. He also has a blog listing recent apologies, most currently Mel Gibson’s after he was arrested for drunk driving.

The radio program also talked about the finer details of apologies. First, we want the person to feel bad. We want remorse, we want pain, we want guilt. Unfortunately, we can’t control how someone feels. We can go by what they do as we make judgments, or by how well they seem to have heard us, but we can’t make someone feel different.

Secondly, we want assurance that the person won’t do the offending thing again. An apology loses its value if, say, someone apologizes for stepping on your foot and then they turn around and stomp on it again. We want a change in behavior accompanying the apology.

When we are apologizing to God, however, it’s a little different. We see this in the Psalm today. This one is historically understood as the Psalm David wrote after being caught in his affair with Bathsheba and the killing of her husband Uriah. It's heading in the Bible reads, “A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba."

When apologizing to God, asking forgiveness, confessing our sin, it sort of does matter how we feel, since unlike other people God can tell. The language of the Psalm shows us this -- "my sin is ever before you" and "you are justified in your sentence...indeed, I was born guilty." We might say this apology is overdone these days, but we get the full expression of David's guilt and the weight of his actions as he asks God for help and mercy in the midst of the trauma of it.

In the Christian tradition we apologize and ask for forgiveness as a matter of course, to make right anything we might have messed up. Traditionally worship has included a prayer of confession every Sunday, just to cover that part. I'm not the only clergy that doesn't include a specific prayer of confession every week, but I include it especially on Communion Sunday, to help prepare us for Communion, although you can come to the table and ask to be changed here. God can work on you in Communion too. But we do ask forgiveness every week anyway, everytime we pray the Lord’s Prayer: "forgive me my trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." Forgiveness and mercy, every week, every day we pray Jesus' prayer.

But just like with apologies from the people in our lives, changing behavior is an important part of apologizing to God. We don't just say, "Give me a clean slate so I can mess up again." David asks God to “create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” He is taking his heart and offering it to God, saying, “Change it. Change me. Transform me. Make be better.”

The hardest part, really, is the asking to change. The newspaper (can't find it online yet) had an article this morning asking if, when people are drunk and do despicable things, is it really them or the alcohol speaking. Evidence says its them - their inhibitions were down but what they say was in them. What they said came out of their mouth -- like Jesus said, "It's not what you put in your mouth that defiles you but what comes out of it." So when we pray, "Create in me a clean heart" we are not asking for better control of what we say, better management of how we present ourselves to the world. We are asking for a change in what is on our minds and in our hearts. We are asking for the stuff inside us to be changed. We aren’t asking for a heart transplant, really, a different heart than the one we’ve always had but instead to be shaped so we have the heart God meant us to have, so we have the heart God dreamed us to have.

And finally David asks God to stay with him, not to abandon him, even as he faces the consequences of his behavior. "Take not your holy Spirit from me, and cast me not away from your presence." In the mess he has to face, even after his apology, David needs God with him. As he works to be changed, he needs God with him.

So we can say, “My bad,” or we can say “My heart, change it” but in the end we must say, “My God, stay with me through this.”