Requiem: A Sermon After The VT Shootings

Note:  I am posting this sermon at the request of my pastor, Grover Pinson at Windsor Park Baptist Church.  Grover extended me the privilege of preaching to our congregation the Sunday after the tragedy at Virginia Tech.   

Fighting Back Like A Christian
Ephesians 6.16
A Sermon Preached at Windsor Park Baptist Church, Corpus Christi, Texas, on the Sunday following the Virginia Tech Shootings
 INTRODUCTION
            At first glance, this might seem a peculiar – even a bad – text to select on this particular Sunday.  We all watched in horror last Monday as news reports trickled in, describing how Seung-hui Cho, a 23 student at Virginia Tech, entered a class building armed with a. 22-caliber semi-automatic pistol and a 9mm. Glock and began blazing away.   By the time he turned the weapon on himself, thirty-two of his professors and classmates lay dead in the worst mass killing in recent American history.
            And don’t let the chronological mists create an artificial gap between that story and this text.  The Roman sword in the first century world was the state-of-the-art weapon of mass destruction.  The text tells Christians, in effect, to take up the semi-automatic of the Spirit.  The Bible here becomes the Glock of God! 
            In light of all of this, you might well ask, “How dare he read that passage?”
            But really, this only invites a series of larger questions.
            Paul originally chose as his metaphor for the Christian life the full battle-rattle the empyreal storm troopers of the Roman police state.  Modern refinement makes us uncomfortable with that kind of talk.  Back in 1984 the United Methodist Church voted to remove  “Onward Christian Soldiers” from its hymnal.  They had to recant due to a backlash from the pews, but their original argument was that the worship of the Prince of Peace should not employ the language of war.  Even we Baptists, always less squeamish than our Wesleyan brethren, have stopped having “Sword Drill” in favor of the cuddlier “Bible Drill.”
            Yet here is a text which bristles with ordnance like the display racks at a weekend gun show.  It reads like an EBay ad aimed at gimme-cap-clad rednecks.  How dare I read that passage?  Perhaps the better question is, “How dare Paul write that passage?”
            But, again, we’ve only pushed the issue back an additional step.  We might well ask why the church chose to include it in our Bible?  After all, not everything Paul wrote was divinely inspired Scripture.  As far as we can tell, he penned at least two letters to the church in Corinth which nobody thought to archive.  I’m sure that at some point he wrote out a grocery list for Luke to fill while Paul was under house arrest in Rome.  Yet this passage winds up on the pages of our sacred book.
          It didn’t have to, you know.  Debates over the canon are nothing new.  Unlike holy writings which claim to have come directly from the mouth of an angel, or to have been transcribed whole from golden tablets, the books in our Bible had to win their spurs, had to rise to the top of the list in a crowded field of early Christian writings.  The ancient rabbis debated over some books in the Old Testament.  The Song of solomon was up for grabs for a while and if you wonder why, just read it in “The Message.”  They wondered if Esther should make it in because the name of God appears nowhere in the whole story.  Martin Luther wanted James and the Revelation voted off the island.  He thought James preached works salvation and scouted it as “a right strawey epistle.”  Of the last book in the Bible, he said that a revelation ought to reveal and this one only confuses.  Nothing new here.  That’s why, by the way, you should never be troubled when you go to Barnes & Noble’s religion section and see these lurid paperbacks with titles like Who Changed the Bible? or The Hidden Gospels.  It is no big secret that certain writings didn’t make the cut.  It isn’t as if there was a conspiracy of guys who met in secret and then deleted all the emails before Congress found out.  All this is a part of our history.  Great scholars and  theologians, and great servants of Christ, debated loud and long over the canon of Scripture.  In the early days it was sort of like a reality show, “Athanasian Idol,” perhaps, in which the churches voted and experts advised as to which letter or gospel should advance to the next round.  If you dust this text for fingerprints you will find that it has passed through the hands – and the hearts – of some of our greatest spiritual leaders.
            How could these early followers of the Lamb endorse such an inappropriate picture the ideal Christian?  How could they picture the fully-equipped saint as an Islamic suicide bomber, bulky and burly beneath his IED, waiting to wreak havoc in a sidewalk café?  Why would they imagine the mature saint as a street gang thug strapped with is nine and looking to bust off a few caps?
            How dare I read this passage?  How dare Paul write it?  Maybe the question should be, “How dare the Church embrace that passage?”
            Now, before you prepare to stone me for questioning the authority Bible, consider the only other alternative.  If this text is inspired, consider One who inspired it and the One who spoke it. How can the God who, we have it on good authority from elsewhere in this same sacred Book,  is love give us such a violent vision what it means to follow his Son?
            How dare I read this passage?  How dare Paul write this passage?  How dare the Church embrace that passage?  Let’s try the ultimate question: “How dare God inspire that passage?”
            It might help to place the passage in historical context.  Paul wrote Ephesians at the same time as Colossians: while he was held a prisoner in Rome.  Tradition, based on hints in the Bible, holds that he spent his days chained, manacled, handcuffed to a Roman soldier (Col 4.18), the living embodiment of his own oppression.  Paul writes as innocent man deprived his civil rights Caesar’s homeland security, manacled to a Marine in a cell at Gitmo with the write of habeas corpus suspended.  Under the circumstances, he is the last guy inclined idealize Roman military might.             Instead, what he offers is an alternative form of warfare, an entirely different response based on an entirely different reality, an alternative kingdom which rivals Rome.  Accordingly, he warns that those weapons that are the state-of-the-art standard issue for the world are no match for the panoply of Christian warfare. 
            We have seen this week what human weaponry can do, what tragedy it can inflict.  This has had predictable consequences.  The stench of cordite still hung in the hallways at Virginia Tech as the cable news pundits began debating the need for gun control.  You know the arguments.  One side says, “We have to take away all the guns so the bad guys won’t have them.”  The other side says, “We have to give everyone guns to that the bad guys aren’t the only ones who have them.”
            For Christians, however, the question is not whether need to get hold weapons Cho used or whether need to take those weapons away from others.  This text tells us that we need to understand that our fight involves completely different weapons, and we need to start using them!
            Seen in that light, the real question today is not, How dare I read this passage?  Or, How dare Paul write this passage?  Or, How dare the Church embrace that passage?  Or even, “How dare God inspire that passage?”  The real question is, “How can we dare to live this passage?” 
            And that is important, because I am convinced that this text – in light of the Gospel as a whole – can tell us two things about the Virginia Tech tragedy which no other source can:  why it happened, and how we should respond.·        WHY IT HAPPENED
“…the flaming arrows of the evil one.”
            Paul tells us that our enemy is not other people, but “the evil one.”  If there was any doubt about this point, verse 12 makes it clear.  But our society has a hard time understanding evil because we’ve denied the existence of the Evil one!  We don’t believe in a Redeemer, so we have no choice but to deny our need for redemption.  

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