The Hard Things

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 08.22.2015

Scripture Lesson:  Ephesians 6: 10-20

For the last twelve years, I’ve blogged, jotting my thoughts down onto the virtual paper of the internet.  It’s a writing discipline, like journaling, only shareable, so I’ve kept at it, even as blogs have slowly died, replaced by Instagram and Vine and stuff that doesn’t require all that pesky writing and reading.  

Early on into my bloggery--I think that’s a word--I was looking around for an image that struck my fancy, something evocative and intense and preferably involving some dude with a beard.

What I found, and what I’ve stuck with all these years, is an image drawn from a mural in the Kansas state house, selected primarily for beard-awesomeness.  It’s a wild image of radical abolitionist John Brown, the Bible in one hand, a Sharps carbine in the other, cast against a stark, malevolent sky.  I like the style, and love the facial hair, obviously.  But I’ve always struggled with John Brown as a historical figure.

Here, a man who considered himself radically, zealously Christian, whose entire life revolved around the Bible and a faith that I share.  He was right, radically and completely so, about the racism of 19th century America, and the monstrosity of slavery.  And yet he was also willing to take up the sword, quite literally, when it came to his beliefs, the heavy sabers he used to hack other human beings to death.  He was willing to engage in acts--like the futile and obviously doomed attack on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry--that drew blood.

My Jesus-following fluctuates between Augustine’s Just War and a more Mennonite/Quaker approach to violence.  So while I understand the place of war and coercive power in society, and the need to defend the innocent, I struggle with the whole killing thing relative to Jesus.  It’s just hard, hard to mingle a radical orientation towards love of enemy with a willingness to terminate said enemy with extreme prejudice.

It was because John Brown’s faith so fuddles me that I recently decided to read a recent historical biography by UT-Austin professor Evan Carlton.  It’s entitled Patriotic Treason, an excellent, thoughtful exploration of this peculiar human being.

What was most striking about this narrative of John Brown was that he ended up seeming considerably less insane than one might think, given how impossibly hard his life was.  He was a gifted farmer and tanner, and yet his life fluctuated from feast to famine.  He’d invest, do well, start rising up, and then there’d be a market-bubble collapse or a drought, and it’d all come apart.   He gained and lost homes, was forced to move and restart time and time again, which he did.

But harder still was his family life.  He was a tough father, but much beloved by his children, because hard as he was, all of them knew he loved them, and as adults every last one of them respected him.  Those that lived, at least.  Because his family life was broken not interpersonally, but physically.  John Brown had fifteen children.  Nine of them died.  Nine.  One lived for three days, dying just a few days before his first wife died from a postpartum infection.  He buried the child and his wife together, and Brown family stories recall that he slept on that grave for a week, weeping and whispering to his beloved wife.   Four of his children by his second wife died in a single week, ranging from a newborn baby to a seven year old, all succumbing during a cholera epidemic.  He dug those graves himself, all in a row.

There was a study that came out this last week, on how modern parenting in the Western world makes us unhappy, about how hard and stressful it is managing all of our kids activities.  I think that if we tried to tell John Brown how hard we have it, we’d need to be sure he didn’t have a sword or a carbine handy.

In the face of such a life, wracked by hardships we can barely grasp and with death ever present, it’s perhaps easier to see how the martial worldview might seem more natural, less distant.  That helps, more than a little bit, as we encounter the blend of warlike imagery and the Gospel message in the Book of Ephesians this morning.

This letter-ish thingummy is one of what Bible scholars call “deutero-Pauline” writings.  That means that it was most likely not written by the Apostle Paul himself, but by one of his disciples writing in his name.   Scholars believe this for a variety of reasons.  Ephesians 2:20, for example, seems to assume that the apostolic period is over, which would be odd had the Apostle Paul been the one writing it.

But mostly, its the writing style.  Paul had a very consistent voice, his language concise and elegant and powerful.  Paul was clearly a sharp and trained rhetorician, meaning he’d been trained in the classical style of persuasive speech.  The author of Ephesians also had a--oh, how to put this--distinct--style and vocabulary.  One of the more notable features of that style is a tendency for words to tumble out in a pile, like saying “..in the strength of his power.”  Thoughts ramble on, circling and churning.

Even if this isn’t written by Paul, it’s still clearly written from the perspective of someone who was formed by Paul’s teaching.  The author of this letter presents us with how we are to deal with life, once we’ve had the audacity to assert that we are disciples of Jesus Christ.

A significant part of that is the recognition that the journey of faith is hard.   Ephesians is an eminently practical book.  The faith it teaches engages with and shapes the actual life we lead, and life ain’t easy.  Into that reality, the writer of Ephesians pitches out a series of metaphors for what it takes to cope with the things we struggle with in this world.   

For imagery, he goes to the world of martial struggle, and specifically the armor and weapons that would have been worn by a soldier in the Roman era.   The “shield of righteousness,” for example, was a thyreos.  This wasn’t a little round buckler, but a large curved rectangular full-body riot shield, behind which you could hide your entire body.   

The makhaira, the sword that is the Word?  It’s a generic Greek term for a single bladed cutting implement, meaning it could reference anything ranging from a butterknife to a ninja’s katana.  

Every one of these metaphors is drawn from the idea of conflict, that we are in a mortal struggle with an opponent that poses a grave danger to our integrity as persons.  The author of Ephesians makes it absolutely clear that this is metaphor, completely and totally clear that the battle that is being waged is not one against other human beings, but about “rulers, authorities, and the cosmic powers of this present darkness.”

And here, this passage about the objects of war turned to spiritual conflict speaks to both my struggles to understand my crazy bearded brother and our own spiritual condition.

John Brown’s primary point of strength, if you read about his life, was not his rifle.  It was his radical commitment to the Gospel, and the message of hope and reconciliation between all peoples that the Gospel implies.  He was, because of this, resilient in the face of a life that was harsh beyond our capacity to grasp.

That faith also made him strangely immune to the influence of the culture around him.  It meant that the pervasive, inescapable racism of the 19th century had no purchase on his soul.  He was a personal friend to Harriet Tubman.  Frederick Douglass sat at table as a long-term guest of the Brown household, and marvelled that Brown’s whole family didn’t notice race at all.  Brown just assumed, because the Bible told him so, that every human being was a child of God, period.  

The conclusion that Patriotic Treason comes to about Brown was that he simply could not accept, tolerate, or stand his culture’s racism.  The institution of slavery was a horror to him, an inherently violent monstrosity that he was utterly unwilling to bear, even as the world around him either defended or tolerated it.  Those things were the powers and rulers of his age, the dark memetic spirits that corrupted our national character.

The armor of Christian faith may not lead us to violence.  I think, honestly, that it is vital that that we take care that they do not.  But what they should do is have an effect on our willingness to succumb to the the soul-illnesses of a given culture.  Where the great ebb and flow of popular assumptions swing and move through us, following Jesus authentically demands that we check those assumptions against the claims of the Gospel.

And yes, that’s a hard thing.  The influence of culture is potent on our souls, and important to continually test against the core ethic of our faith.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.