Clapping Back at Jesus

Trinity Cathedral

Year A Proper 15

Isaiah 56:1,6-8
Psalm 67
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

But the [Samaritan] people [of the town] refused to welcome [Jesus], because He was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do You want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them and they went on to another village.… (Luke 9:54-55)[1]

I’ll come back to that in a moment.

One of my favorite pieces of contemporary slang is “clapback.” According to Urban Dictionary, a clapback is basically a comeback or a retort, most likely pumped with attitude and sass. The term goes back to at least Ja Rule’s rap titled “Clapback” in 2001. It’s the rhetorical backhand that is the response you give when you are insulted. The term is mostly used in social media settings to describe when folks start trading insults and feuds come and go fast and furious.

Of course, there are many ways you’d use a clapback- particularly effective is pointing out the hypocrisies of whoever just insulted you. Or when you can point out people abandoning their ideals for the sake of expediency. That gets pretty easy when so much of one’s life and thoughts are online.

So, the concept of a clapback is not a new concept at all; just a new word for what happens when you have a beef with someone and you go about conversation.

The term has been echoing through my head as I’ve been reading our gospel passage over the course of the week.  The gospel passage has not one but three examples.  First, Jesus claps back at the Pharisees and instructs his followers on the spiritual meaning of a matter of the law.  Second, Jesus claps back at his disciples who just aren’t getting it. But then, a Canaanite woman claps back at Jesus, and this is important—she wins. She gets what she wants.

Consider the scene:  Jesus is walking along with the disciples, and then there is a woman who is misbehaving in a couple of different ways.  First, she’s a Canaanite; Canaanites and the Jewish people did not get along.  In fact, they had beef going back at least to the time of Moses and Joshua, when the Hebrews forcibly conquered Canaanite land after the Exodus and the wandering.  Second she’s a woman addressing a group of men; that’s pretty transgressive.  Third, she’s yelling at them from a distance, which is just rude.  It’s not uncommon to ignore those who are breaking so many social mores at once.

Jesus doesn’t even address the woman until the disciples are annoyed enough to ask him to do something about it.  When he does, first he says, essentially, “I have nothing for you.  I’m here for those of my religion, of my nation.”

But she doesn’t go away.  She doesn’t shrink back.  She comes right up to Jesus and kneels at his feet.  Close enough to touch.  She wasn’t invited.  She wasn’t bid to do this when she asks him again for deliverance for her daughter. 

Jesus then makes a more pointed stated. Just a minute ago, he simply said who he was here to serve.  Now he’s going to tell her who he will exclude.  He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

I need y’all to hear me, and more importantly to hear Jesus.  Jesus just called the woman kneeling at his feet and begging on behalf of her daughter a dog.  We have a derogatory term in our language for female dogs.  We need to recognize that Jesus called this distraught mother kneeling at his feet our word for a female dog.  Let that image sink in. 

Then comes the clapback. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

She says, “Fine, I’m a dog, but sometimes people treat dogs nicely.”

I’m not sure what was in the woman’s mind at this moment.  Was it shame at being brought further down?  Was it a willingness to shame Jesus into action?  was it sass or desperation?  Was it both?

I don’t know.  But it was enough to change Jesus’s response. He is impressed with her faithfulness and heals her daughter.  All while the disciples are standing there.  I wonder what was going through their minds.

Now there are two paths to interpreting this story at this point.  The first is to ask whether Jesus changed his mind; or repented of his own hard-heartedness.  The text is silent on Jesus’s internal monologue; and that’s frustrating.  We are so used to thinking that Jesus is sinless that the idea that Jesus would individually express the systemic sin all around him in the culture he inhabited leaves our theological constructs with a problem.  By that I mean that our understanding of Christ being a sinless perfect sacrifice on the cross could be endangered by admitting that Jesus had to repent of something evil.  But, frankly, making Jesus’s sinlessness obvious was not a concern for Matthew while he was writing, so we have this story that does nothing to make our theology neat and tidy. 

Thanks, Matthew. 

In any case, this interpretation means that Jesus learned not to be racist, and this is the turning point of the Gospel at which Jesus knows that the Gospel is for everyone and must be available to everyone, regardless of any human-made divisions.  Jesus’s mission will bring into reality the dream of Isaiah’s prophecy we also read today: that God’s house will be a house of prayer for all, and all are welcome to gather.

The second, more traditional understanding seeks to preserve Jesus’s sinlessness, and it does so by suggesting the episode was a test—that Jesus was going to heal the daughter all along, but he had a point to prove. It comes to the same conclusion:  that the Gospel is for everyone and must be available to everyone, regardless of any human-made divisions. 

But the traditional interpretation immediately raises the question: Who needed to be tested? Usually, people say the faith of the woman needed to be tested.  But frankly, she seemed to have the faith bit locked down.  She’s the one bugging him relentlessly.  Why further test someone who is so obstinately seeking Jesus out because she is already convinced that Jesus can help her.

So I am going to go ahead and for the sake of argument assume the traditional stance.  Jesus is sinless, and in this case, he is testing someone--but he already knows he’s going to help the woman.  The woman seems faithful already.  I think that means we have to look at the disciples.

There is a popular image of the disciples as good-natured bumblers.  Salt-of-the-earth fishermen.  Fine people; if a little slow on the uptake as to what Jesus was laying down for them. 

But there’s a pesky story that has never been far from my mind since I read it years ago.  Namely, that among the disciples there were at least two who had no issue with the ideas of destroying all of the men, women, and children of a village, all because the villagers had heard about Jesus and didn’t want any trouble.  In other words, the disciples had among their ranks a few who openly advocated for the genocide of a village of a different ethnic group because of a perceived offense.

That’s pretty far from a definition of ‘good, fine people.’  The disciples, given a little bit of power, were ready to go into ethnic cleansing.

The culture they lived in upheld these ethnic divisions. We see those divisions when the disciples want to destroy a village; we see it when they wish this foreign woman at Jesus’s feet would just shut up.

So, if Jesus knew what was going on and what he would do for the woman that might mean he wanted to teach the disciples something in this interaction.

I suggest that he wanted them to witness the moment when his message went from being one to Israel only and became something for everyone.  And I think it was important that the disciples saw that change as a result of an impetuous woman’s clapback.

So, here is a powerful man; the messiah; getting told off by a foreign woman—in front of his followers no less—and Jesus does not try to save face by reasserting his ‘no.’ He acknowledges the justice and compassion of the woman’s cause, and relents.

That is amazing. Typically, when you’re surrounded by your friends and someone comes at you, you don’t back down.  Not in front of your people.

But Jesus did.  And in the process, Jesus showed by example that the gifts of God’s gracious reign are for everyone.

Now, we stand outside of the text; but by being in the stream of the Christian tradition, we may as well be standing around Jesus and the woman, too.

We’ve just listened to Jesus respond in a racist way to a woman, and then change his tune.  Our Lord and Savior got called out for his racism, he accepted that he responded to the woman according to a racist social structure, and he rewarded her faith with divine healing.  In so doing, he showed the disciples what it means to repent of the evil that surrounds them and us.

You can probably guess where this sermon is going next.  We’ve reached a point in our national life where the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists feel free to take to the streets.  This is not news to those of us who study hate groups.  These white supremacists have been telling us that for the past 8 years that their recruitment has increased, sometimes exponentially.  Even if they were exaggerating, the images of Charlottesville serve to convince that the groups may still be exaggerating, but they are not lying.

Now, we sitting here may not claim racial superiority.  If you do, repent and return to the Lord today. 

But there are a number of us who are in a position to either aid or abet racism or challenge it. 

You see I am from Mobile, AL.  My hometown has an infamously distinguished pedigree of institutionalized racism.  And if you sitting here, and white, you probably know what I mean when I say that , there are conversations that white folks will only have with other white folks.  Nothing but my skin color grants me entrance to these conversations, and they are not pleasant conversations.  And these conversations make me a party to continuing a conspiracy of white supremacy that I want nothing to do with and cannot easily avoid.

I’ll give you an example.  In 2002, I was starting my undergraduate degree, and hoping that after military service, I might find a career in the FBI or some other law enforcement organization.  Sitting in the office of the college recruiter, he looked at me, and began the conversation that white men only feel comfortable having with other white men. 

He said to me, “Robert, you have two things going against you in this world; you are white, and you are a man.  You should consider taking a degree in finance instead of criminal justice; that way you will be more hirable than those who will take a degree in criminal justice.”

In a world in which women earn at best 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, and in which the poverty gap between whites and blacks is steadily increasing with black unemployment double that of white unemployment, I was shocked and frozen by what he said.  For this man and many like him, any perceived loss of power is considered a threat.[2]

In this recruiter’s office, I was being brought into a conspiracy to maintain supremacy over others.  It was a wake-up call for me; yet while I did not challenge him then and there, I never took a class in finance.  I’ve always wondered what he told women and African Americans he counseled. 

Perhaps you have also known those conversations. In the course of our work, our days, and our lives, we may find ourselves in a situation in which someone we speak to wants to know if we are a safe person to talk to about keeping and maintaining supremacy, just as the college recruiter did with me.  It comes in conversation:  a sexist joke, an observation about how races do certain things, a slang term for someone from a different country.  When that happens, it is assumed we agree with the other person, or we are essentially being asked if we are in the conspiracy of this world, to keep those divisions in place.

You know that you have a choice—an uncomfortable choice: half-hearted agreement in the hope that the conversation shifts to something more pleasant, or silence, or confrontation. 

The Gospel passage today begs us risk confrontation.  It may mean that we have to tell someone why we cannot participate in such a conversation.  It may mean remembering aloud to the other person that our connection to God and to all of humankind renders racial divisions meaningless at least, and malicious at most.  And that can be a hard thing to say.  My own track record in confronting such speech is not as good as I wish it was. And yet the imperative is there—whether we are the ones who clap back at racism, or have our ideals thrown right back in our face when our silence equals complicity.

The good news is that we do not do this alone. We never have.  The presence of God makes all things possible for those who face enormous odds.

I want to go back to disciples. Well after this moment with the Canaanite woman.  Well after thar desire to destroy a village, the Holy Spirit descends upon them and empowers them.  Suddenly, they are baptizing Gentiles and coming to grips with this inclusive work of God.  Then, in the 8^th chapter of the book of Acts, Peter and John and Philip go to Samaritan villages, to preach the Gospel and live in peace among the ones they rather have seen killed.  After Jesus ascends to Heaven, the story of the early church is the story of recovering racists trying to keep up with an inclusive God as they get kicked in the pants by the Holy Spirit into situations and with people they would not have chosen on their own.

That’s the work God hands to us every new day.

Shall we get to it?   

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[1] In my sermon, I mistakenly said this in not in the yearly lectionary.  It is, Year C, Proper 8.

[2]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/09/women-and-equal-pay-wage-gap_n_3038806.html, http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/wealth-gap-grows-between-black-and-white-us

Blood and Bodies in the Streets. Which ones were our neighbors?

Proper 10 Year C

Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" —Luke 10:29

The Good Samaritan.

If one were to pick the most famous, most familiar parable that Jesus told, this would most likely be it. 

We name hospitals after this parable.

We name laws after this parable.

We complement kind people by calling them this.

There is probably a temptation to say ”Ah, this story,” when the passage is read. 

Time to zone out; check email or scores on the phone. 

We know what this one means.

In fact it’s easy to think that we’ve over-mined it for meaning.

Weeks ago when I saw this was the passage for this week, I jokingly thought for a moment about what it would be like to stand in the pulpit, repeat Jesus’s last line—“Go and do likewise”—and sit back down.

That thought did not last long, and it certainly cannot stand when there is blood running in the streets.

Honestly, blood runs daily.

But this last week in particular.

500 dead or injured in Baghdad as ISIS bombed a shopping district full of people celebrating the end of Ramadan—and the bombing of the Istanbul airport three days before that.

And closer to home—two African American men—Alton Stirling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota—shot to death by police within a 24 hour period.  Their last moments of life caught on video and broadcast to the world.  The videos are harrowing to watch.  The spread of blood; the last gasps of breath.

And then Thursday night. 12 people were shot at the end of a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, by a sniper who was particulary targeting police officers.  Officers Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, and Lorne Ahrens died in that attack as they tried to protect protestors, making it the most deadly day for law enforcement since 9/11/2001. 

I am personally haunted by the image of a Dallas police sergeant being comforted by a doctor or a nurse at Baylor University’s hospital.  The sergeant is African-American, probably over 6 feet tall, crying, being hugged by a petite white woman.  When I see those stripes on his arm, I see my own father, who wore those same stripes for so many years before being promoted.

All of this stands out from a level of background violence that should shock, but it does not seem to anymore. 

Issue the ‘thoughts and prayers’ and we move on.

And wait for the next shooting.

May God forgive me for even for a moment thinking that there was nothing left to say on these of Jesus’s words.

Because, like the lawyer before Jesus, so often we ask who our neighbors are in the hope that we might find some exception.

Let us look again. 

Maybe we can see something new. 

But maybe we should start somewhere else. 

The parable of the Good Samaritan comes in the tenth chapter of Luke.

But let’s look at chapter 9 for a minute.

In Chapter 9(:51-56), Jesus is heading to Jerusalem for the final week of his life.  Along the way, he and his disciples pass a Samaritan village.  When they inquire about staying at the village, the village refuses.  This is not all that surprising.  Jesus and the disciples were Jews, and the Jews and Samaritans hated each other.  Feeling the sting of the village’s refusal, the disciples James and John ask Jesus if he wants them to call down fire from heaven to consume the village.  Jesus gives that request a firm ‘no’ and rebukes the disciples.  I wonder what he said there.

I mention this so that when we talk about the Good Samaritan, we can keep in mind that this wasn’t simply some polite rivalry, or disagreeable cold shoulder that the Jews and Samaritans mutually give to each other.  These disciples of Jesus were ready to lay waste to an entire village of Samaritans—men, women, and children.  That is the level of hatred we have to keep in mind when we read about Jesus talking about Samaritans around his people.

The fact that, at the end of the story, the lawyer could not bring himself to say the word Samaritan bears witness to this hatred.   When he has been trapped into admitting that a Samaritan was more kind than the religious leaders of his own group, all he says is “the one who showed kindness” through clenched teeth.

But all week as I read this passage I kept coming back to the exchange before Jesus tells the story—and the motives behind the lawyer’s question.

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"

He wanted to justify himself. 

How often are we doing the same?

“I may have sinned this much, but this other person is worse.”

“This other person is wrong.”

How often do we grasp for something that says we are righteous compared to others?

More correct compared to others?

How much do we long to find ourselves deemed okay? 

Approved by others or our ideologies?

Saved?

Well-adjusted to our living situations? 

In terms of our existence, we know that there is much wrong with the world. 

What do we grasp at to give us some assurance that everything will be okay at the end?

"Am I right with God?"  

"Can I know that separate from being able to name those who are not?"

"Do I have purpose?"  

"Can that purpose help me determine who does not have purpose?"

"If I am not greater, am I lesser?"

This existential anxiety is—I think—at the root of the lawyer’s question.

It is a sense of not knowing what to trust to take us to paradise—on earth or elsewhere—and so we either search for what will guarantee our reward—or we seek to create and control it here.

But we are also finite beings.

We have limited energy, limited knowledge, limited intelligence, limited resources, limited abilities, limited perspective.

Overcoming any of these takes time—which is also limited.

In the face of our finitude, we wonder if we have done enough.

"Did I hustle enough to make it to the next payday?"

"Did I save enough for retirement?"

"Will that medical bill end me?"

"Will my children be successful?"

"Will I coast on fumes into the Kingdom of Heaven?"

"If we have done all we could with what we have, Oh God, please let it be enough."

And how do we know we’ve done enough?

How do we know we didn’t misuse our precious limited time on something that didn’t count?

"Jesus, will helping this particular person be on my final exam, or can I skip over them?"

So, wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"

If love of neighbor is the way to eternal life, then, the lawyer asks, how do I set the brackets around those who are my neighbors? 

How do I categorize people correctly so that I do not waste my time helping the wrong people?

Who is within the realm of my care, and who can I ignore?

This leads to one of the most liberating but frankly aggravating aspects of the Gospels.

Time and again, Jesus gets asked for a checklist for heaven. 

“Tell us what to do,” people say.

Am I in or out?

Have I filled in enough boxes?

Did I prove myself good enough.

“I fed 15 hungry people today, so now I get my heavenly coupon book stamped." 

"756 more good deeds to go, and I’m done.”

Jesus always frustrated that type of thinking, because the goal was never simply about how much we do.  It’s about who we are called to be. 

Time and again, Jesus refused to quantify the practice of goodness.  He simply notes that goodness and perfection are our destiny as we conform to the image and likeness of God, and asks us to trust that the faithful seeking of these is sufficient. 

Almost always, the questions Jesus got assumed that there is a minimum that has to be done. 

“Jesus, what is the minimum we have to do to earn your favor?”

That is one way of putting the lawyer’s question. 

And when Jesus asks the lawyer to name which character was a neighbor to the man who fell among thieves, Jesus reorients their conversation away from the lawyer’s question about limiting one’s responsibility.  The lawyer wants to define who deserves his love, but Jesus suggests that love seeks out neighbors to receive compassion and care, even when established boundaries and prejudices conspire against it.[1]

There is no minimum we can do for a predetermined set of people we define as worthy.  God’s own perfect love is not like that, thanks be to God.  Instead God asks us to trust that we can be empowered to fight against our own programming, our anxieties, our prejudices, to show forth God’s love and care.

All of that seems well and good. There’s no new ground broken here.  I don’t think I’m out on a limb in this interpretation. 

But we wish Jesus had been reasonable all the same.  

Theoretically we can get behind the idea that everyone is our neighbor.  But how do we actually practice this?  Our finiteness—our limitedness—keeps pushing us to set those brackets around those who will receive are care.  More importantly those brackets define whose is outside of our care. 

“We can’t do it all!” we cry out.

So we set our brackets.

We hear or we say:

“Don’t send money overseas, we have poor people here.”

“Why are they adopting from Africa, we have orphans here.”

“These workers do not deserve a living wage because these other workers do not have a living wage either, and we value the latter more.”

“We feel bad for all of the shootings, but we need to shut down our media intake and remain silent until we have all of the facts.”

“Police are part of a systemically racist oppressive regime and cannot be trusted at all.”

“Black Lives Matter is a racist over-reactionary movement fomenting anarchy and violence and cannot be trusted at all.”

These brackets we set on our care help us categorize our own sets of ‘us’ vs. ‘thems.’

These brackets become our short hand classification of who we love in reality while we try to maintain an illusion of loving everyone theoretically.

So, how deep is our love?

Who consistently benefits from our silence about the injury of our neighbors?

Who consistently find themselves outside of our caring, because we just don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the situation?

Who consistently has their issues filed under the heading “not our problem?”

Once we identify those who consistently fall outside of our care, we expose the reality of our brackets of care—

Those same brackets Jesus calls us to expose and obliterate through life in the Holy Spirit.

What do we do next?

There are many things to be done.

Educating ourselves on the scope of the problem of racism within our society and the criminal justice system is important.

But even though study is important, Jesus didn’t tell us to form a humanities club to debate another’s oppression.

So here is something more tangible.

Go to your neighbors.

Your white neighbors. 

Your black neighbors. 

Your latinx neighbors.

Your native neighbors.

Your police neighbors. 

Ask them what concerns them, given the world we share. 

Listen to hear, not to debate. 

Listen for the pain.

Listen for the fear. 

Listen to the officer who wants to make sure he makes it home to his 4-month old child tonight. 

Listen to the police supervisor who prays that this not be the night he has to tell his officer’s wife he died in the line of duty.

Listen to the black mother whose 13 year old son is about the get the talk—

the talk about how his responsibility is to make sure he gets home that night regardless of the disrespect a cop shows him. 

Listen to the black man who thought one night he would die in his own front yard, his keys in his front door, when a cop drew down on him because the cop thought the pager in his pocket was a gun.

Listen to the anguish of the father of a biracial child whose skin is dark enough to change every encounter he has with people different from him. 

Listen to the Native American talk about the high number deaths in her community at the hands of police that never make it on the news.

Be vulnerable enough to name your own fear, to God and neighbor.

You may be surprised to hear the fear you are carrying if you dared to speak of it aloud.

The commonality of fear that maintains our brackets will only crumble when we let go of these fears.

To name these fears is to rob them of power.

To pray for your neighbor’s fears is to put them under God’s power and care—and perfect love casts out all fear.

Ask your neighbors to pray for you.

The better world we long for will come when we are willing to show we want to truly break down the brackets we use to define ‘neighbor.’  If we cannot deal openly with the fear and hatred our legacies of oppression have left us as inheritances, we will never get beyond a power struggle that leaves history littered with winners and losers.  Our children will inherit that power struggle.  Might we try something different this time?

We should continue the story begun in Luke chapter 9 with John and James ready to destroy a Samaritan village.  After their journey with Jesus on Earth, and after their being given the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, in Acts chapter 8, Peter and John go to Samaritan villages to love and work among them, which was only possible after setting aside old dividing lines.

Let us go and do likewise.

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[1] Matthew Skinner in David Lyon Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor’s Feasting On The Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008) 243.

Meeting the Principalities and Powers

Sermon; St. Matthew’s, Chandler

Ephesians 6:10-20

 “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

I have always been interested in why people do the things they do. I was blessed that I was able to focus on that passion in my academic work.  In my undergraduate program, I focused on history and sociology to prepare for teaching social studies. During that time, my studies took a dark turn.  I focused on 20^th century history with an emphasis in genocide and religious violence.  An intense class on holy war within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam set the trajectory that took me from teaching high school to further study of religion and conflict at ASU, where I studied violence, torture, religion, sexuality, and politics—all of which are topics one is supposed to avoid in polite conversation at dinner parties. 

As I was studying these grisly topics, and continuing today, I’m haunted by this question:  To what extent can we name the violence of the last century and this century as something beyond the depravity of humankind?  What do we make of the Holocaust? Rwanda? Armenia? This country’s genocide of (and later attempts to wipe out the cultures of) indigenous peoples? Is it enough to chalk up the body count of the last 120 years to mechanized warfare, arms races, totalitarian governments, and effective propaganda campaigns by regimes bent on eliminating others?  We can fairly accurately describe the mechanisms of war, of economic oppression, of the social systems that hold others as deserving of apathy or death, but is there something else?  Is there something beyond the materialistic phenomenon we can study that accounts for the depravity humankind visits upon others? 

Paul would say there is something else afoot, something more than the material world we see.  And he does so in language that sounds odd to modern ears.  Paul speaks in a number of his letters of the "principalities and powers."  By this Paul means the spiritual and worldly forces that exist in opposition to God.  We hear about these powers in Ephesians today.

Contrary to the modern division between the spiritual and political that holds that the political is no place for the spiritual, Paul is:[1]

concerned with spiritual realities precisely in their relationship to political realities. Ephesians 6:12 contrasts the “enemies of blood and flesh” with the true enemies, using a five-fold repetition of the word “against”:

For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh

          but against the rulers
          against the authorities
          against the cosmic powers
          against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places

While the first use of “against” describes those whom the struggle is not against, the remaining four uses describe the actual enemies against whom Christians are called to struggle. These four references move from the earthly realm to the heavenly, connecting the political realm to the spiritual. The terms “rulers” (archas) and “authorities” (exousias) are common terms in the New Testament and usually refer to human rulers and the authority they wield.[2] The third term, “cosmic powers” (kosmokratoras), is understood by most scholars as referring to a supernatural power, moving us from the [material] political realm into the spiritual. Finally, “spiritual forces” (pneumatika) refer explicitly to nonhuman forces, which are said to be not on earth but “in the heavenly places” (en tois epouraviois).

Taken together, these four terms describe “enemies” that span both the earthly and heavenly realms—transcendent, spiritual realities with earthly, political manifestations. The verse recognizes that earthly power relations are animated by spiritual realities that transcend any specific “flesh and blood” person or ruler.

More can be said about the powers and principalities, which stand for a dominion opposed to God.  The powers and principalities traffic in practices and ideas that keep us from seeing each other as equally beloved and redeemable by God.  The powers would prefer to derail the ministry of reconciliation Christians are called to witness to.[3]  Remember that a few weeks ago we read in Ephesians that Christ created in himself one new humanity, reconciling all to God in one body.[4]  In contrast, the powers and principalities keep telling us our differences are final and irreconcilable; attempting to cut us off from God and others.  Further, for the principalities and powers, there is active hostility to the equal loving regard we are offered by God.[5]  Colonialism, sexism, racism, and other forms of social stigma all fall within the control of principalities and powers that devalue the beloved of God while simultaneously telling others that they have a divine right to maintain an oppressive social order "for the good of us all."  Control and power is sanctified in lieu of holiness, forbearance, love, justice, and grace.  The principalities and powers resort to threat, harm, shame, and death.   You can know who you are dealing with by the fruits they produce.  And it is important to call the demons by their names.

The powers and principalities are not as transcendent nor as powerful as God, and yet they are more powerful than we humans on our own.  The promise of order and control that the powers and principalities offer is seductive.  This seductive quality of the powers and principalities explains their continued presence in our world.  We find ourselves caught by the powers and principalities in fallen institutions greater than the sum of our personal failings.[6]  And these powers are strong enough to corrupt even the holy things of God to their own use.  For instance, the very passage we are talking about this morning has the blood-stained dishonor of being one of the passages used to justify the slaughter of millions over the centuries through holy war In which Christians traded the spiritual armor and sword of God for that of leather and steel.[7]

This is the reality that Paul is speaking to:  that behind the forces of evil and degradation we see on earth, there are active spiritual forces at work seeking to destroy and corrupt the creatures of God.  To make such a case for spiritual evil in our modern setting is difficult.  And yet, it is worth noting that regardless of the degree to which we claim human or demonic agency in the problems of the world, it is evident that there are forces and institutions and persons that profit from death, degradation, alienation, and division.  These are powers that Christians have a duty to unmask, name, and engage.[8]

And there is good news.  Earlier in Ephesians, Paul writes that the greatness and goodness of God is at work through and in Christ, who is placed above the principalities and powers.[9]  The Church's role is one of proclaiming God's power—testifying to God's coming reign to these spiritual forces.[10]  And the promise we inherit is the coming complete destruction of these forces at the consummation of history.[11] 

How do we live into this good news?  How do we face this in-between time?

One way in which we practically live out our commitment to unmasking and engaging the powers is by heeding the reminder that they exist and that we are called to resist them.  At our baptism, and at our reaffirmation of the baptismal covenant, we promise and pray that we will “renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God" and ”renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God."[12]  These renunciations speak of throwing off the world's claims about the proper place of others and seeking instead to discern the wild and radical things God is choosing to do. It means de-centering the will to power we find within ourselves in favor of God's will and mission for humanity.  It may mean taking chances since resisting the powers and principalities is not a popular option; hence Paul’s warning to stand firm in truth and faith and righteousness. 

But there is also a promise we share; a conviction Paul held that we are also offered in sure and certain hope.  Paul was convinced “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[13]  This persistent love, stronger than the worst that the world and its powers can attack us with, is a love worth clinging to.  It is also the basis for a gospel worth proclaiming with boldness.

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[1] The following block of text is taken verbatim from Robert Williamson’s “The Politics of White Supremacy—Ephesians 6:10-20.” http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/the-politics-of-white-supremacy/.

[2] See, for example, 1 Corinthians 15:24; Ephesians 1:21.

[3] 2 Cor 5:14-21

[4] See Eph 2:11-22.

[5] See Gal 3:28.

[6] This current course of the world is what is meant by the terms institutional sin, or structural sin. 

[7] As I was meditating on these verses from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, I couldn’t help but consider how these verses have been used in Christian moral reasoning in relation to violence.  In Christianity, there are three frameworks for understanding the use of violence:  pacifism, the just war tradition, and holy war (which is more of a notion than a clear framework). Both pacifism and the just war tradition name who is or is not a legitimate target of violence.  Pacifism holds that no one is a legitimate target of violence, and this was the prevailing opinion until the 300s AD.  Following Christianity’s conversion to the state religion of the Roman Empire, the just war tradition began its development.  A component of that moral reasoning was the attempt to delineate between combatants and non-combatants.  What makes holy war more of a notion than a framework is also what makes it instructive across religious lines—and holy war is different from pacifism or a concept of a just and limited war in that it divides the world into good and evil, eliminates neutrality, raises the stakes to a matter of ultimacy and immediacy, and prescribes no limits to the violence that can be visited upon the enemy. What makes holy war so dangerous and bloody is that the enemies made of flesh and blood are considered to be the earthly warriors in the ultimate cosmic battle of Good vs. Evil.  What happens on Earth is interpreted as a mirror or an outworking of the battle in the heavens, and so the targets of violence are to be given no quarter. In this thinking, there is no proper etiquette fit for those deemed to be direct agents of Satan. 

[8] These actions echo Walter Wink’s trilogy of books about Engaging, naming, and unmasking the powers and principalities.

[9] Eph 1:20-23

[10] Eph 3:7-12

[11] 1 Cor 15:24-28

[12] BCP, 302.

[13] Romans 8:38