The Armor of Light

Romans 13:11-14
The First Sunday in Advent 2010

“Coming soon,” the anthem says. “Coming soon.” “The night is far gone; the day is near,” said the apostle Paul. In the meantime, how do we “lead lives worthy of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:12)?

A couple weeks ago, while planning for this morning’s worship, I was going over the epistle lesson for today in the presence of a staff member who shall remain nameless. When I got to verse 13, I said, “Hmmm. No reveling or drunkenness, no debauchery or licentiousness, no quarreling or jealousy.” When I paused at the end of that list of prohibitions, she shook her head and said, “Wow. What else is left?” That verse seemed to put a damper on her Christmas spirit, and that’s why she’ll remain nameless.

A lot of people look at the religious life that way, don’t they? Don’t we? For many people, a religiously committed life is synonymous with a legalistic, rules-based existence. “Thou shalt not. . . .” is the name of the game. I suspect that most of us have experienced feeling that way at one time or another to one degree or another. For many people, Baptists in particular are associated with a rules-based, “Thou-shalt-not” brand of religion. The truth is, we “got it honest,” as they say. It’s in our genes. We’re trying to turn it into a recessive trait around here, but it’s still in our genes.

The very first Baptists who separated themselves from the Church of England in the early 1600s insisted not only on a personal profession of faith but also on leading “a life worthy of God,” as Paul puts it in 1 Thessalonians 2:12. Along with “believer baptism” from which the name “Baptists” was derived, a personal profession of faith and leading “a life worthy of God” were combined by those early Baptists to distinguish their vision of Christian faith and practice from the state religion and the cultural Christianity of 17th-century England. So far, so good.

But here’s where the problem comes. It’s not just a Baptist problem, even though Baptists are famous for it. It’s a universal human problem whenever and wherever the positive is reduced to the avoidance of the negative. Whenever and wherever people try to produce what is good by focusing on what is bad, the good becomes distorted. That’s what happened to many of those early Baptists and to many more of us ever since. And that’s a problem.

Think about it. It’s one of the first lessons of driving. We say, “Keep your eye on the road!” We don’t say, “Keep your eye on the ditch!” The problem with keeping your eye on the ditch is that your where your eye is, your had will imperceptibly follow. We don’t say, “Keep your eye on the tree so you don’t hit it!” Where your eye is, your had will imperceptibly follow. When you are teaching someone to catch a ball, you say, “Keep your eye on the ball!” You don’t say, “Keep your eye on all the places you could drop the ball.” If you train your eye on all the places you could drop the ball, you can’t possibly catch it. But that’s what happens whenever and wherever we reduce the positive to avoiding the negative or try to produce what is good by focusing on what is bad.

It’s amusing, really, how much time and effort Christian commentators down through the centuries have spent interpreting for their readers exactly what is meant by the words in Romans 13:13 that the NRSV translates “reveling,” “drunkenness,” “debauchery,” “licentiousness,” “quarreling,” and “jealousy.” That’s the kind of juicy list that could keep a Baptist preacher occupied for the better part of a Sunday morning or Sunday evening or Wednesday evening—those were the days, weren’t they, when you could go to church three times a week to hear sins expounded on and elucidated?

This morning, instead of spending time obsessing over “the works of darkness” in v 13, I’m going to focus instead to “the armor of light” that Paul tells us to put on as a way of leading “a life worthy of God.” Now, I understand that “putting on armor” may not be an image that’s consistent with your everyday thinking. But we have other expressions that are not so far removed from Paul’s: “bullet-proof vest,” “nerves of steel,” an “iron constitution.” Athletes and wanna-be athletes these days pay a premium to wear a brand of clothing and gear called “UnderArmor.” Whatever you might call it, Paul says that you have at your disposal a protective agency. Put it on.

Paul calls it “armor,” as it is translated in verse 12, and the particular word that Paul uses implies that this protective agency is active, not passive. “Armor,” as we usually think of it, is a passive system of defense, a protection of last resort. Armor was invented to avoid the negative, right? But listen to how the Greek word hoploi that Paul uses in this morning’s epistles lesson is translated in other passages where he uses it. In 2 Corinthians 6:7, hoploi is translated “weapons” in the phrase “weapons of righteousness.” In another passage, in Romans 6:13, NRSV translates the very same phrase less combatively as “instruments of righteousness.” In John 18:3, the betrayal of Jesus reads this way: “So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons,” hoploi. So, the first thing to see about the armor, the protective agency, that Paul is talking about in this morning’s epistle lesson is that it is not merely passive. This armor is not just about avoiding the negative. There is something decidedly active about this armor.

It is, after all, not just any armor. Paul calls it “the armor of light.” Now, I’m aware that “the armor of light” may just sound entirely too Harry Potterish for some of us. Harry’s back, you know, in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I.” Don’t miss him—if you are old enough for its PG-13 rating. It’s dark and it’s scary, and to be truthful with you, when I preached sermon titled “The Gospel according to Harry Potter” the weekend the first Potter film was released nine years ago this month, I had no idea that J.K. Rowling’s seven-book series would conclude with the explicitly Christian symbolism that it does. It never occurred to me that Rowling would turn out to be a kissing cousin of another British master of fantasy, C. S. Lewis. So if Paul’s image of “the armor of light” sounds too much like Harry Potter for your taste, perhaps you would feel better about associating it with C. S. Lewis whose “Chronicles of Narnia” are replete with imagery of light as an expression of the gospel.

But the apostle Paul doesn’t use light imagery nearly as often as I would have expected. The particular word “light,” in the expression “armor of light,” phos in Greek, occurs only six times in the seven indisputably authentic letters bearing Paul’s name. By way of comparison, the little book we know as 1 John uses it five times in its five little chapters. Paul uses it only six times in seven letters. The Gospel of John uses it 16 times. But Paul, not so many times. And that makes how Paul uses the word “light,” phos, all the more important.

When Paul says, “Put on the armor of light,” he is saying “Put on the active presence of the creative power of God.” “Put on the active presence of the creative power of God.” Remember all the way back “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was void and without form and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.” That’s Genesis 1:1-4, and that’s where Paul goes to understand light. Listen to what he says in 2 Corinthians 4:6: “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” The light in “the armor of light” is the active presence of the creative power of God that shone not only out of the darkness in beginning, but now “has shone in our hearts” in Jesus Christ, Paul says.

Why in the world would we obsess over the negative in our lives and others’ lives and in our world when the active presence of the creative power of God already now shines in us? That’s not a Harry Potterism, folks. It’s a physical and material reality of our existence every bit as much as it is a spiritual and mystical reality of our existence. Remember how last week in his sermon on Thanksgiving Baxter Wynn talked about the rise of the field of “positive psychology,” psychology that actually studies sane and healthy people to try to understand what contributes to health and sanity. What a novel idea! Well, a similarly quiet revolution has been occurring in medicine in the last fifteen or twenty years. “The science of health” has begun to grow up alongside the science of illness and disease and injury. “Health Science,” according to one physician who practices it, includes the study of “cell physiology, protein structure, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, exercise physiology, anthropology, experimental psychology, ecology and comparative neuroanatomy” (Crowley and Lodge, Younger Next Year, p. 31).

Health science suggests, among other things, that while human aging is inevitable (if we live so long), bit the gradual decay of our bodies and our brains that we associate with aging is not inevitable. Our bodies and brains were designed with amazing capacities to renew and restore and rebuild and regenerate themselves. Our bodies are massive, life-long regeneration projects renewing and recreating and rebuilding cells, tissues and blood and bones. Health science has shown that “daily exercise, emotional commitment, reasonable nutrition and a real engagement with living” (Ibid., p. 34) can not only maintain health but can even reverse the tide of physical and mental and emotional decay that we so often associate with the second half of life. Ironically, even skeptics must admit that the healthy lifestyles associated with rules-based religion turn out to correspond to the empirical observations of health science. But for centuries, science and medicine have obsessed over the negatives like Baptist preachers preaching sin all the time. But in recent decades, health science and healthy religion alike are beginning to focus on renewal and restoration and regeneration. When we “put on the armor of light,” we take up a holistic message of growth and relationship that is as material and physical as it is spiritual and mystical.

In another passage in which Paul uses the word light, phos, he speaks in Romans 2:19-20, not of receiving light but of being light: “a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children.” The “armor of light,” then, is not only a renewing and restoring and regenerating agency grounded in God’s creative power that shines in our hearts for our own salvation and our own health and our own wellbeing. Putting on the armor of light also involves our becoming a light to others who are in darkness. Jesus used exactly that image in the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5, when he said, “You are the light (phos) of the world. . . . Let your light (phos) shine before others” (vv 14,16). The “armor of light,” then, is also our active agency in the world for renewal and growth and restoration and regeneration and relationship.

We are “children of light” (phos, v 5), Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5. He says that we lead lives worthy of God this way: “encourage one another and build up each other. . . . Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (vv 11-18). You may be accustomed to thinking of these kinds of words as standard religious tripe. But the new health science is discovering that the kind of “emotional commitment” and the “real engagement with living” exemplified in 1 Thessalonians 5:11-18, Matthew 5:14 and 16, and Romans 2:19-20 are critically important variables in human health and wellbeing.

What 1 Thessalonians 5 makes clear that we might have overlooked in the other passages is that there is no such thing as “a child of light,” only “children of light.” The light of God’s creative power that shines in our hearts and involves us in becoming a light to others only exists in community, more specifically in a community of encouraging and building up one another, of peace and admonition and patience and seeking to do good to one another and to all and rejoicing always, praying without ceasing, and giving thanks in all circumstances. That kind of community can’t be reduced to rules-based religion. That kind of good can’t be produced by focusing on what is bad. That kind of positive can’t be created merely by avoiding the negative. Why in the world would we obsess over the negative in our lives and others’ lives and in our world when the active presence of the creative power of God already now shines in us?

“Coming soon.” “The night is far gone; the day is near.” In the meantime, how do we “lead lives worthy of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:12)? In this season of light, Advent, in which we prepare yet again for the coming of Christ, may you put on the armor of light, the “true light (phos) which enlightens everyone” (John 1:14), “the light (phos) of the world” (John 8:12, 9:5), and let that light that shone in creation and shines in your heart shine before others. Put on the armor of light.

Photo by Arti Sandhu, by license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

Beyond Fear

Isaiah 12:2-6
The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost 2010


We’ve all experienced it at one time or another: fear. I was running late on my way to step-father’s funeral. It’s true enough that they wouldn’t start without me; but I knew that my mother would be worried, and I knew that the colonel at the head of the military honor guard would be looking at his watch. To make up lost time, I cut across Fort Bragg on a deserted two-lane road at a speed concerning which I shall forever take the Fifth Amendment.

In an instant of inattention, the right-side wheels of my Tahoe slipped off the pavement into a deep rut gouged over the years by Humvees and heavy trucks and tanks and military machinery that I don’t even know what it’s called. I’ve never seen a roadside rut so deep. It was a narrow canyon along the edge of the asphalt just wide enough for my tires to drop all the way down into it and give me one of those vibrating chair experiences with the additional thrill of a ridiculously high rate of speed.

It was a moment of fear in which seconds lasted an eternity. Random thoughts raced through my mind. Random thought number 1: “I’m tearing the suspension out from under my truck.” Random thought number 2: “My mother will be attending two funerals this week.” Random thought number 3: “I wonder if I will go airborne?” And then I actually laughed at my own inadvertent joke. “Fort Bragg”? “Airborne?” How ironic is that? “I’m going to die on Fort Bragg on the day I was supposed to bury my stepfather on his beloved post.” In the meantime, my heart was pounding furiously, and I was sweating profusely, even though the air conditioning in the truck was working just fine. Fear.

It’s a survival mechanism practiced and perfected on African savannahs for millions of years before we humans moved into cities and suburbs and belted ourselves into SUVs and sedans and trucks in which we die in truly amazing numbers every year. “Fight, flight or freeze” is a chemical and electrical response in our bodies to a stressor. That morning on Fort Bragg “freeze” saved my life. While every nerve ending in my body screamed, “Do something, stupid!” something else said, “You’ve already done something really, really stupid. Do nothing, stupid.” That part of my brain that won locked me down in a freeze: “Do nothing stupid.”

I aimed for the rut and I prayed I could keep the tires in it while I took my foot off the gas pedal and let friction and the gravitational pull toward inertia slow the truck down. At about thirty five miles an hour, I began to tap the brake pedal, and at about fifteen miles an hour I turned the wheel and tapped the gas and the front tire popped up out of the rut and the rear wheel followed. Back on the pavement, my heart was still pounding furiously, and I was still sweating profusely. I thanked God, and I thanked “fight, flight or freeze,” especially freeze.

There are any number of simple morals to that story. One is when you find yourself in a rut, don’t jerk the wheel. The rut is frightening, but jerking the wheel is fatal. Would that we understood in our marriages and our businesses and our politics and our economics, when you’re in a rut, don’t jerk the wheel. Do nothing stupid. A second one is if you insist on traveling at a high rate of speed, keep your life insurance paid up and always wear dark pants.

In a more subtle reading of the story of my experience with excessive speed while crossing Fort Bragg it becomes something of a parable. The fascinating thing about our “fight, flight or freeze” mechanism is that it kicks in so fast that we don’t run because we are afraid. We become afraid when we discover that we are already running. Our subconscious chemical and electrical survival response mechanism is so quick that our conscious mind only subsequently interprets our experience as “fear.” And that’s why what we call “fear” can save our lives: chemical and electrical reactions in our bodies that work faster than our conscious mind can drive our action—or our inaction, as the case may be.

But that is also why what we call “fear” can destroy our lives. When we human beings abandoned the savannah to move into urban centers and then into “sub-urbs,” we carried our internal chemical and electrical reactions with us into the overcrowded boxes and canyons of city life and from there to the sedentary isolation of the cul de sac. Far from the savannah, we human beings have become our own primary predators by automobile, diet, substance abuse, firearms, inactivity, isolation, loneliness, and 24/7 news of national disasters and human atrocities and political rhetoric and cultural commentary that triggers our fight, flight or freeze mechanism when there is nothing for most of us to fight or flee or freeze to survive. This repeated and constant triggering of the survival mechanism that we call “fear” turns our own body into our own worst enemy from the inside out in relation to ourselves and in relation to each other.

In this morning’s Old Testament lesson, Isaiah 12, we heard words spoken in and to Jerusalem in a time of great fear, a time of national and international terror and crisis. It’s impossible to be exact in dating the words of this poetry that form the conclusion in chapter 12. Isaiah the son of Amoz was active as a prophet for more than 40 years and maybe more than 50. It’s pretty clear that his words in chapters 1-12 were used and reused, applied and reapplied, at different times even during his own lifetime. (Don’t tell me you’ve never heard a preacher preach the same sermon more than once!) It’s also clear that Isaiah’s words were reworked yet again when they were included in the mammoth anthology that is the book of Isaiah as we have it.

But let me set just a little of the historical stage of the decades from which these verses originally come. In 745 B.C.E. (or “B.C.,” as you may be accustomed to thinking), a new king came to the throne in Assyria, modern-day Iraq. His name was Tiglath-pileser III, and if you knew your ancient history well, just hearing the name “Tiglath-pileser III” should make you shudder with fear. Tiglath-pileser III was an aggressive and effective field general in command of the most powerful military apparatus that the ancient Near East had ever seen up to his day. He was a ruthless and effective administrator of his nation’s internal and imperial affairs who built the ancient Near East’s greatest empire up until his time in fewer than 20 years on the throne.

Beginning in 742 B.C.E., the year that Isaiah was called to be a prophet, according to Isaiah 6:1, Tiglath-pileser III began campaigning—as in military campaigning—repeatedly into Syria and eventually into Israel where he captured Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, in 732 B.C.E. And when he did, as was his practice, he deported tens of thousands of Israelites from their homeland and brought the threat of Assyrian military might within miles of Jerusalem. The Old Testament scholar in me would love to spend a month of Sundays—thirty or thirty-one of them—describing the international and national stage on which Isaiah the son of Amoz proclaimed the words of deliverance and thanksgiving and salvation that are our Old Testament lesson this morning.

They were decades of terror and hope, of recurring war and intermittent peace, of political infighting and courageous alliances—and foolish ones too. They were decades of nationalism and internationalism, decades of religious pluralism and religious reactionism. They were decades of destruction and building, decades of high taxes and great wealth for some and destitution for others. In such a time as this, Isaiah of Jerusalem sang of deliverance and and thanksgiving and salvation: “Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my might. . . . Give thanks to the Lord, call [God’s] name. . . . Sing praises to the Lord. . . . Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” “I will trust, and will not be afraid.”

There is a consistent word woven into the fabric of Scripture, spoken by prophets and priests and angels and messengers: “Fear not,” as the King James translates it. “Fear not” to Abraham when the future of his household was in doubt (Genesis 15:1), and “fear not” to Hagar when she was expelled from Abraham’s household (21:17). “Fear not” to Isaac in a time of conflict (26:24), and “fear not” to Rachel when she was in hard labor (35:17). “Fear not” to Jacob on the prospect of leaving all he knew behind in Canaan to move to Egypt (46:3), and “fear not” to Jacob’s sons in Egypt (50:19). “Fear not” to the people of Israel in the wilderness at Mount Sinai (Exodus 20:20), and “fear not” on the verge of entering the land of promise (Deuteronomy 1:21). “Fear not” to Joseph (Matthew 1:20), and “fear not” to Mary (Luke 1:30). “Fear not” to Simon Peter (Luke 5:10), and “fear not” to the women at the empty tomb on the first Easter morning (Matthew 28:15). “Fear not” to the father of a dying daughter (Luke 8:50), and “fear not” to all who are faithful (Luke 12:7).

In time of uncertainty and anxiety, in times of terror and war and infighting, nationalism and internationalism, religious pluralism and religious reactionism, again and again the gospel words, “Fear not!” are woven through Scripture, spoken by by prophets and priests and angels and messengers. It is true enough that fear-mongers frequently succeed in capturing public attention and swaying entire populations to fight, flee, or freeze. But it is just as true that voices that call us beyond fear are those that give us the courage to live and to love and to create, to plant and to build and to paint and to carve and to dance, to sing and to laugh and to give thanks even in the most difficult times and the most desperate straits.

“I will trust and not be afraid” is not a statement of denial. It’s not an escapist sentiment. It’s not the posture of an ostrich with its head in the sand. In January of 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered an inaugural address that is counted among the great pieces of American oratory, not because of its political program or its partisan persuasiveness but because it spoke of a spirit beyond fear in a fearful time. He rightly characterized that time as a “dark hour of our national life.” But in that dark hour he spoke words that have resonated ever since: “first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt was not in denial, nor was he an escapist.

He called on the American people to “face our common difficulties” with the recognition that “They concern, thank God, only material things,” he said. “Happiness,” he went on to say, “lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow [human beings].” Each member a minister, anyone?

Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (John 14:27). The words of Jesus and the entire body of Scripture insist that fear is no way to live. So do not fall prey to your fears or anyone else’s. Don’t jerk the wheel.

Fear is an evolutionary survival mechanism, but when it is repeatedly and constantly triggered in the life of an individual or a family or a society or a nation, fear destroys life, the very thing that it evolved to save. So take these words to heart. Commit them to memory. Live with them and in them and by them: “God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid.”


This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

The Hope to Which God Has Called You

Ephesians 1:11-23
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
(Celebrated as "All Saints Sunday")


At the conclusion of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray, we pray, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” Join me in saying that conclusion to the Lord’s Prayer with me, would you? “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

This morning’s New Testament lesson from the book of Ephesians looks for all the world like a commentary on the end of the Lord’s Prayer. If you are the kind of person for whom seeing is believing, you may want to look at it on page 949 in the Bible in the pew rack in front of you—or if there’s no pew in front of you, then you’ll find a Bible in the rack under your pew. Page 949. Ephesians 1:11-23.

Verses 20-22 of the first chapter of Ephesians pile up allusions to kingdom: verse 20 says, God “seated Christ at God’s right hand in the heavenly places”; verse 21 says, “far above all rule and authority” and “above every name that is named”; verse 22 says, God has put “all things under Christ’s feet” and made Christ “the head over all things.” There are six allusions to kingdom in three verses: “For thine is the kingdom.”

If you happen to be an especially observant reader, you might have noticed among the allusions to “kingdom” in verses 20 and 21, the word “power” occurs, not once but twice. Verse 20 says that God put God’s “power to work in Christ when God raised Christ from the dead.” And then in the middle of the “kingdom talk” in verses 20 and 21, we read that the rule and authority of Christ is “far about all rule and authority and power.” But the “power talk” isn’t just in verses 20 and 21. It had already started piling up in verse 19 that speaks of “the immeasurable greatness of God’s power . . . according to the working of God’s great power.” “Power” four times in three verses. “For thine is the kingdom and the power.”

Before we arrived at verse 19, sprinkled in among verses 12 through 18 are four references to “glory.” Verse twelve says, “For the praise of God’s glory.” Verse 14 says, “To the praise of God’s glory.” Verse 17 says, “the God of glory.” And verse 18 refers to a “glorious inheritance.” Glory, glory, glory, glorious, four times in seven verses. “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” “Forever?” Verse 21 says, “Not only in this age but also in the age to come.” Forever.

Once you have seen the piling up of kingdom and power and glory in these verses, it’s hard not to read the passage in front of us this morning as a commentary on the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer. And especially so, because the conclusion to the Lord’s Prayer and Ephesians 1:11-23 exhibit an identical perspective that you cannot miss once you have seen it. Think about it this way. In the center of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray there is a series of seven petitions or requests to God: may your name be held as holy; may your kingdom come; may your will be done; give us this day our daily bread; forgive us our trespasses; lead us not into temptation; deliver us from evil. Jesus taught his disciples to pray for these seven things to come to be in our lives. But the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer does not speak of things that we are to ask of God that they may come to be. No. The conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer speaks of what already is: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” The Lord’s Prayer and Ephesians 1:11-23 share an identical perspective in speaking of the kingdom and the power and the glory: they already are.

The book of Ephesians says that because of what already is, we share in “an inheritance” in verse 11—and a “glorious inheritance” at that, according to verse 18—“not only in this age but also in the age to come,” and the guarantee of that inheritance is the Holy Spirit that has already been given to us. In the translation in the pew Bibles, verse 14 refers to the Holy Spirit as “the pledge of our inheritance,” but that’s a pretty puny translation. The word that the New Revised Standard Version translates as “pledge,” which sounds to us like something that is only promised, is actually a technical business term in the ancient world for money that is paid up front as the first installment. The word arrhabōn in Greek is not a promise or a pledge or even a deposit but the first part of the whole that guarantees that the remainder will be paid in full. We share in an inheritance, a glorious inheritance, that has already begun because the kingdom and power and the glory already are.

The inheritance of which Ephesians speaks is not a promissory note the value of which depends on the performance of our parents’ or grandparents’ investments in the stock market or bonds or real estate or precious metals or commodities or futures. Ephesians 1 says that the riches of a glorious inheritance among the saints is already stored up for us. In Christ, says verse 11, we have already obtained an inheritance the first installment and the guarantee of which we have received in the presence of the Holy Spirit with us and among us and in us. The Holy Spirit is the ground of Christian hope “not only in this age but also in the age to come”: the glorious and powerful and eternally sovereign rule of God is already present in our lives as “God with us” revealed in Jesus Christ and given to us in the Holy Spirit on earth as it is in heaven.

The references to “all the saints” in verse 15 and to the “glorious inheritance among the saints” in verse 18 and to “the heavenly places” in verse 20 make this passage an obvious choice as the epistle lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary for All Saints’ Day, which is November 1. Because in this congregation we observe the first Sunday after November 1st as “All Saints’ Sunday” and set it aside to remember and celebrate the lives of those among us who have completed their journey from God with God and to God, I saved Ephesians 1:11-23 over from Monday to today to remind us of what already is and to remind us of the inheritance that we share in what one day will be for us as it is for “the great cloud of witnesses” by which we are surrounded, as Hebrews 12:1 puts it.

In the New Testament, the word “saints” does not refer to heroic individuals who have been lionized by tradition and beatified and canonized by church authorities. Instead, the word “saint” refers to every believer among the faithful. The book we know as Ephesians that we are reading from this morning is addressed “to all the saints who are faithful in Christ Jesus” (1:1). At the beginning of his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul addressed the congregation as “all God’s beloved . . . who are called to be saints” In between services this morning, Joe Roberts told me about a sermon he heard when was in high school in which the preacher said that the best indication of how broadly the term “saints” applies in the New Testament is that Paul calls the folks in Corinth saints and then levels 28 moral charges against them in his letters to them. As sure as we are all sinners, we are also all saints, according to the New Testament.

This morning we have called the names of saints among us who have completed their journeys from God with God and to God, and we thank God for their lives this morning. You and I are still on our journey. The grief that many of us have experienced in the past year and that many of us still experience now is an indication that we still walk through the valley of the shadow of death. But we never walk alone. That’s one reason why we come here to this place week in and week out, whether there are 1200 of us or 750 of us or 500 of us or 200 of us or 100 of us or only two or three of us gathered in Jesus’ name where Jesus has promised to be. We have made a commitment to God and to one another that none of us should ever walk alone. No matter how hard the journey gets, we will walk with each other where Jesus has promised to be.

The one of whom the psalmist confessed, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; “for thou art with me” is called Emmanuel, which means “God with us,” and is with us still in the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. So there is no shadow of death through which we must pass that is so dark that the light of the presence of God cannot shine in it. We do not ever walk alone. God walks with us, and God knows our grief.

Genesis 6:6 says that God was “grieved at heart” to see the violence and the bloodshed and the evil by which God’s good creation was overtaken. Psalm 78:40 says that the rebelliousness of God’s own people “grieved” the Lord, as does Isaiah 66:10. The gospel of John tells us that “Jesus wept” in grief at the tomb of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35, KJV). And our Lord was “grieved, even to death” in the garden of Gethsemane as the hour of his own death approached (Matthew 26:37-38). Indeed, he “has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4, KJV).

God knows our grief. And that is why, as the old hymn says, “earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.” Because as real as our grief is and as real as our loss is and as real as our pain is, the kingdom and the power and the glory forever of the one with whom we walk is already and as real as our grief and our loss and our pain. “The hope to which God has called you,” according to Ephesians 1:18, is grounded beyond grief and beyond loss and beyond pain in what already is. So that you may know “the hope to which God has called you,” will you say again with me that conclusion to the Lord’s Prayer? “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” Amen.


Photo of All Saints Day in Salwator Cemetery, Cracow, Poland, by bildungsr0man, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com

Like Trees by the River

Psalm 1:1-3; Luke 19:1-10
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost 2010

Note: First Baptist Church of Greenville, S.C., was officially organized on November 2, 1831. Since the congregation’s year-long celebration of its 175th anniversary in 2006, it has become our custom to celebrate the last Sunday in October as “Founding Sunday.”

In the 1820s, when William Bullein Johnson began a preaching mission at the newly constructed Greenville County Courthouse in the town of Pleasantburg, as Greenville was called then, he could not possibly have imagined that it would come to all this. It’s not that Johnson lacked for vision. He was one of the founders and a president of the first general convention of Baptists in America that began in 1814 in Philadelphia. He was one of the founders and the second president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention that began in 1821. He was the instrumental force in the founding of the school that eventually became Furman University in 1826. And then, when sectional rivalries and the great debate over slavery destroyed the unity of Baptists in America, he became one of the founders and the first president of the Southern Baptist Convention that was formed in 1845. He is credited with having been the catalyst for the founding of the First Baptist Churches of both Columbia and Greenville, South Carolina. It’s not that William Bullein Johnson lacked for vision. But neither he nor anyone else could possibly have imagined what God would grow from what began with Johnson’s preaching in the courthouse of Greenville County.

To paraphrase the apostle Paul, William Bullein Johnson planted, others watered, and God gave the growth (1 Cor 3:6). In the case of this particular congregation that he planted, from its beginnings in the courthouse in Pleasantburg in the 1820s to its formal organization in 1831 in what had only that year begun to be called the town of “Greenville,” this congregation’s life together as a people of God and a body of Christ has grown and developed and matured no farther than a few blocks away from the Reedy River.

As rivers go, the Reedy isn’t all that impressive. It’s only about 70 miles long from its headwaters in northern Greenville County to where it joins the Saluda River at Lake Greenwood. For more than a century, it was little more than an open sewer line running whatever color of dye the textile mills along its banks were discharging into it that day. It has been identified as “the historically most polluted river in South Carolina.” Even now that it has been cleaned up—and it has—bacteria levels in the Reedy continue to run some eleven times above the safe limit under Federal clean-water guidelines. Don’t wade in that water!

But here’s the thing. From the Cherokee villages that once dotted its banks to the giant mills that once drove Greenville’s economy to beautiful Falls Park and the Swamp Rabbit Trail, the Reedy River has seen it all. The Reedy River has flowed through every era of this region’s history from Cherokee hunting grounds to the District of Spartanburg to the District of Greenville to the town of Pleasantburg to the City of Greenville. For the last thirty-six years, this congregation has been situated directly on its banks, but from its very beginning, this congregation has never been any farther than a few blocks from the river. We have always been, as we are now, planted like trees by the river.

It’s a biblical image from the very first psalm: “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on [God’s] law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.” A contemporary psalmist has written it this way: “We were made for the banks of the streams of life, and we were meant to thrive like trees by the river, roots deep in the river, tall trees by the river, strong and green.”

It's a biblical image that fits this congregation in our location and in the architecture of our sanctuary. I’m going to climb out on a limb here to suggest that the largest tree along the entire course of the Reedy River is the central architectural feature of this room, the trunk of which rises more than 60 feet above the floor and the limbs of which extend some 90 feet over your heads right now. When this sanctuary was planted like a tree by the Reedy River, a claim was laid to a biblical image and a spiritual reality of this congregation’s life: like trees by the river.

This morning’s gospel lesson takes us to a city famous for its trees. It was known as “the city of palms” in antiquity, according to the book of Judges (1:16; 3:13), and its name means “fragrant.” Jericho is watered by streams that flow from underground springs. It was a crown jewel and playground of the powerful and privileged for millennia. Members of the Jerusalem aristocracy wintered there to escape the cold winds and occasional snows of the mountains. Jericho counts among its proud owners no less than Cyrus the Great of Persia, Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Mark Antony of Rome, and Cleopatra of Egypt (who received it as a sign of his love for her from Mark Antony). Herod the Great rented Jericho from Cleopatra and then went from renter to owner after her untimely demise.

I think it’s no wonder that the traditional location of the Mount of Temptation where Jesus was tempted with “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (Matthew 4:8) towers high above Jericho to the west of the city. It is as though Jesus was invited to add his name to the long list of illustrious and powerful owners of the city of palms.

In the gospel tradition, however, Jericho is most often remembered not for its famous owners or for its palms but for a sycamore tree that was reportedly climbed by a tax collector of great wealth but small stature, a man by the name of Zacchaeus, who on account of the crowds could not see Jesus as he was passing through Jericho one day. On account of climbing that tree, the story goes, not only did Zacchaeus see Jesus but Jesus saw Zacchaeus and invited himself to Zacchaeus’s house. Onlookers scoffed that Jesus would make himself the guest of one who was a sinner, but in gratitude for the grace that Jesus extended to him, Zacchaeus committed half of all his possessions to the poor and promised to restore four-fold whatever he had acquired by fraudulent means—and tax collectors for Rome were famous for their fraud (those folks who scoffed knew whereof they spoke!). Encountering Jesus changed Zacchaeus’s life, and it changed the lives of others around him; on account of that change, Jesus pronounced, “This day salvation has come to this house.” There is a world of different ways to preach Zacchaeus and Jesus, Jesus and Zacchaeus in this passage. But this morning I’m preaching the tree in the center of the story. The sycamore tree.

The kind of sycamore tree that grew in Jericho was a fruit tree native to southern and central Africa that was introduced into Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. The sycamore fig was highly prized by the Egyptians in antiquity. We know from Egyptian art that it was a featured specimen in Egyptian gardens, no doubt because it flowers and fruits year-round. What gardener wouldn’t want such a specimen in her or his garden—flowering and fruiting all year round? Perhaps on account of its constant flowering and fruiting, in ancient Egyptian mythology the sycamore fig is depicted as a tree of life standing at the threshold of life and death, connecting the two worlds of life here and life hereafter. It was a favored wood for the caskets in which Egyptian mummies were placed.

Zacchaeus could have shimmied up one of the famous palm trees in the “city of palms.” But instead, he happened to climb a tree that was considered in antiquity to be a “tree of life” and a tree that the prophet Amos in the Old Testament is said to have made a living cultivating (Amos 7:14). This is no ordinary tree, you see. It is a tree with a rich and powerful symbolic history that tells us who we are like trees by the river. It is a tree of life cultivated by prophets, flowering and fruiting year round, a tree from which people can see and encounter Jesus, a tree that leads to provision for the poor, the restitution for wrongs and salvation in sinners’ houses.

Cultivated by prophets and proclaimers of the word from Amos to William Bullein Johnson to Leon Latimer and L. D. Johnson, among many others, we are trees by the river on account of whom others can see and encounter Jesus. It is in our Christian nature to flower and bring forth fruit year-round, what the apostle Paul calls “the fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Bearing that kind of fruit makes us like trees by the river on account of whom others can see and encounter the Jesus who invites himself into the lives of sinners, rich as well as poor, powerful as well as powerless, urban and urbane as well as rural and simple. We existence in this place on the bank of a river so that others may see in Scripture and in the light of Christ and in the waters of baptism and in the table of the Lord and in the empty cross and in the tree of life the one who is found always in “the least of these” who are hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison.

We can see ourselves as Zacchaeus, small and struggling to see Jesus moving among us. We can see ourselves called to become like Jesus, buried with him and raised to walk in newness of life. But this morning, even more, you and I, together with those who have gone before us for the last 179 years of this congregation’s life, are the tree planted here never more than a few blocks from the river as a way for others to see and encounter Jesus.

William Bullein Johnson could not have imagined the particulars of all this. But he understood this part at least as well as we do and maybe better: not for the benefit of ourselves but for the sake of others to see and encounter Jesus, “We were made for the banks of the streams of life, and we were meant to thrive like trees by the river, roots deep in the river, tall trees by the river, strong and green.” According to the psalmist, you see, we are all the sycamore tree, “those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers. . . . [We] are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.”

Jesus still passes by. Let them see Jesus because of you. Let them see Jesus because of us.

Photo of the Greenville County Courthouse, ca. 1905, from the Coxe Collection of the Greenville Historical Society.
Photos of the Reedy River by Walter Ezell, used under license of Creative Commons.
Photo of Jericho by Stephen Conger, used under license of Creative Commons.
Photo of sycamore figs by Ferrell Jenkins.
Photo of the Mount of Temptation © 2007 Francesco Dazzi, All Rights Reserved, http://www.francescodazzi.com/.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.