Prayer subverts, Prayer engages, Prayer bleeds

... praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints,
Ephesians 6:18

Ephesians 6:18 – Ephesians
Second Sunday of Christmastide – January 3, 2021 (am)
   

I.               Introduction

Were you there?  This is the year that was, 2020.  I have read with interest the manner in which this past year has been described….

A year we would like to forget
The annus horribilus
The year turned upside down
The year that will live in infamy
and finally……. 2020, goodbye and good riddance.

In the AARP magazine, which I am quite annoyed to receive actually, and have never asked for, they conducted a survey of those who had lost loved ones to Covid, and also with survivors.  Mrs.  Geneva Wood of Seattle, a survivor,   had this to say.  “I survived.  It could have been prayer………. or it could have been the potato soup!”   That deserves both a chuckle and a pause, yes?  Not only for her, but for us as well, prayer is a mystery.  We might well ask, ‘is it prayer or it is the potato soup?   Turn if you would to Ephesians chapter six.  Before I read the passage, I want to explain where we are headed this morning.   The first thing is that we would do well to withhold judgement on the year behind.  As our gaze is lifted by scripture, we may begin to see a bigger picture.  The second thing is that this passage is hinged in vs 18 on the word [participle] “praying”.   As we pray, we subvert, we engage, and we bleed.  And that is our privilege, our honor and our calling.

[read Ephesians 6:  10-23]

II.              The armor of God and OT connections:

Paul speaks in graphic, powerful images as we will see this morning.  And that is the whole point of graphic images.  They are designed to etch an indelible picture in the mind and heart.   Notice first of all what he has to say about the nature of a real and present enemy:

-schemes of the enemy
-wrestling against the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers
-this present darkness
-the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places
-the evil day
-the flaming darts of the evil one

This is the backdrop against which the spiritual armor of God is arrayed.  I wonder if the imagery here echoed in some sense for the readers of this letter. It should have I think and it should for us as well.  Turn to Isaiah 59.   The first 15 verses of the chapter outline the sins, faithlessness of the very children of God who ‘hope for justice, but there is none, who under their watch truth has stumbled in the public square, and where even simple uprightness has found no home….  Beginning in 15:b we are told that the Lord saw it and was displeased.  We read that the Lord himself wondered that there was no man, no one to intercede on behalf of truth, justice and righteousness.  There is no one to save! [read vs 15-21.]   Did you catch it?  The breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation?  Yes, and it is God himself who arms himself.  He will fight for his people.  Do you see the implications?   Paul is calling his readers to the armory of God, to take up arms in imitation of a great savior, and in so doing become like Him.  Like it says in 1 John 3:2-3

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.  The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know Him. Beloved, we are God’s children now and what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is….”

Is this not an encouraging thought this morning as we begin, to know that even as we live under the shadow of an evil day that we know who we are and that as we put on the armor of God, we become day by day more and more like our savior?   And so we fight, we subvert, we engage and we bleed.   It is interesting that the next verses in Isaiah describe a future glory and a bright hope and we will look at them more closely as we close later this morning.

III.             The hinge of prayer.

  It is powerful in its essence.   [read vs 18] I find it fascinating that he does not begin a new thought here.  Some translations render it ‘having prayed’.  There is a strong and unmistakable link between the presumptive call to persistent, watchful, alert prayer and the armory, the ‘panoply’ of the weapons of war that the believer is called to put on.   One may wonder if prayer is yet another weapon in that armory, or whether prayer subsumes the other categories.  We can say this for sure. It is made effective as we take up the weapons in our spiritual arsenal.  May we pray with faith believing.  May we pray with a growing faith in the truth of God’s word.  May we pray with readiness, with prepared hearts, with courage, with a growing ability and commitment to stand with and for one another….

And there is more.  Notice that the metaphors stop when it gets to prayer.  He does not say ‘take up the mighty weapon of prayer.’  He simply says, ‘having prayed, having prayed’.  There is a presumption that prayer be continually on our lips, that we pray according to the Spirit of God.  And there is a personal edge to his plea.  Paul desires fervent, ceaseless, watchful, persistence, alertness, all of which I take to mean that for Paul the stakes are very high indeed.  And what does he want them to pray?  For his release from prison?  For comfort?  For personal exoneration? For his cloak or a psalm book? No, he asks that they pray he would lean into the courage to which he is calling them, the courage to speak truth boldly, to declare with boldness the mystery of the gospel.   He is pleading for their personal engagement with him as they pray.

Just a word on the nature of these weapons.  These are the weapons of the Roman army, who have conquered wherever they marched.  Their weapons were designed to be used collectively, in phalanxes, led by leaders of tens and hundreds and thousands.   These weapons were in fact state of the art.   I was reminded that if I had a friend who happened to be a heart surgeon, I probably would not give him a scalpel as a birthday gift.  Why not?  Because I would presume that he was pretty particular about that item and it would be crazy for me to think that something that I might buy on Amazon for four dollars would actually fill the bill.  I have notoriously bad judgement in gift giving I am told, but even I would not have the cheek to do that.    I am also reminded of a time when in school I was called along with my classmates to take up our weapons, very particular ones.

It was biology class, freshman year in High School, and we had to kill and dissect frogs in the relentless pursuit of our scientific path.  And for reasons that I have never really understood that could not happen without thirty 14 year olds pithing and gutting frogs.  Toward that end we each had to purchase a dissection kit complete with little stabber things, a pipette, and a scalpel.  It is a wonder to me that we did not stab one another and mingle our blood with that of the frogs.   I think I paid about two dollars for the kit and it is of course long, long gone.  I have little memory of those tools but I think I can safely say that they were not of the highest quality.  Though they were worthy of our skills they were cheap, and we all lost them somewhere along the way.  Not so with the weapons of faith.  They are the weapons that God armed himself with.  And prayer particularly is the very weapon that Jesus honed over and over again as he subverted and engaged and bled for you and me.

IV.             Prayer subverts:

I know it is a funny word to choose.  Why not simply say ‘prayer fights or ‘or prayer goes to war?’  Let’s begin with a definition of subvert: “to undermine the power and authority of an established system or institution”.  We have an enemy who is determined to destroy all that God loves.  We subvert that enemy. For the believer according to scripture the nature of this fallen world is not that it has degenerated toward an unreasoning chaos as if the 2nd law of thermodynamics implies a relentless descent into disorganization and unexplained pain.  That is not the message of scripture. The distinction is critical.  This earth is occupied soil, under the reign of one who would destroy everything that God has loved and declared good.    As I have said once before from this pulpit, G.K. Chesterton is exactly right when he describes the incarnation, that we have just celebrated, as a violent and aggressive subversion of the rule of a ravenous enemy under whose reign this earth trembles.  I have wondered where the battle field for the Ephesians lay.  Where did they feel the chains and the fiery darts of the enemy?   Then I turned to Acts ch. 20.  You remember the scene. The apostle Paul is anxious to get to Jerusalem before the days of the great feast.  His travel itinerary is complex.  He bypasses the city of Ephesus and makes a connection in Miletus to the south.  He sends word to the Ephesian elders to please come to Miletus where he wants to speak with and pray with them.  Remember his words in vs 28-31.

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God,[e] which he obtained with his own blood.[f] 29 I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; 30 and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. 31 Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears…

            Paul is ringing the alarm bells for the leaders of the Ephesian church.  The attack will come, and soon. The flock under their care will be attacked by fierce wolves who will spare not and will seek to distort the truth and cause many to give up and lose courage.  Do you remember how this scene ends?  Paul kneels down with them on the docks….

36 And when he had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all. 37 And there was much weeping on the part of all; they embraced Paul and kissed him, 38 being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again. And they accompanied him to the ship.”

And that leads me to the second image I want us to see about prayer this morning.  First, it subverts the powers that rule this world, and second, it causes believers to engage.

V.              Prayer engages:

We are going to head back into Ephesians 6 in a moment but let’s stay with Acts 20 for a second.  Notice how it wraps up in b 36-37.  They knelt down and prayed. They embraced. They wept.  The sorrowed.  They longed for reunion.  Simple things perhaps, but that is at the core of what Paul desired most in their prayers in Ephesians 6.  ‘Pray for boldness for me’ he pleads, ‘that I might have boldness as I ought to speak the right word, the word of courage at the right time.’  He was seeking engagement!  Was that not what Jesus was seeking in the garden when He asked, ‘can you not watch with me for one hour?’

Let me paint a picture for you, a true story I heard recently.  A young man wanting to serve his co-workers by sharing the gospel began to simply ask them if he could pray for them about anything?  Several took him up on the offer [and by the way, I have never had anyone reject such an offer, it seems so benign.  After all they think, whether it is prayer or the potato soup, what could it hurt?]  Anyway a number of weeks later he overheard one co-worker tell another, “hey, you got anything that so and so could pray for you.  It’s Thursday, and Thursday is the day that he bangs on God’s door for us!”  So, what is going on there?  It is nothing less than subversion, and it is nothing less than engagement!

A bit of a rabbit trail for a moment.  One of the knocks on corporate prayer meetings is that sometimes we can feel so disconnected from the matters for which we pray.  We have all heard the old saw, ‘it always seems like we wind up praying for someone’s great uncle Rico who is going in for gall bladder surgery.’   And, that is surely a danger, but let’s take a moment and examine it.   The reality is that the prayer for someone’s Uncle Rico can serve an unworthy purpose, namely that for a moment our own vulnerability is deflected.  It allows us to sidestep real engagement which is a great and present danger of prayer.  And yet, the tendency is only there because of the very engagement that prayer cultivates. The very power of prayer to engage our hearts can cause us to stiff arm each other when we come together to pray.    And let’s consider if from another angle.  As we pray for Uncle Rico and his upcoming surgery a surprising thing may happen.  We might begin to actually care about him.  Further, that disconnected prayer might actually mean something very different to Uncle Rico himself and perhaps to his wife and daughters, yes?  There is a principle here worth remembering, Prayer is not only driven by our love for one another.  Rather, turn it on its head.  We will come to love those for whom we pray.  So, be careful brothers and sisters, prayer may catch you unsuspecting, and drag you kicking and screaming to places of engagement that you never intended to visit!

Let me give you another example of this idea of engagement.  In Luke 13 Jesus heals a woman who has been bent over with a spirit of infirmity for eighteen years.  The Jewish leaders are aghast that Jesus would have the temerity to do this on the sabbath.  Remember their reaction.  “Are there not six days of the week when this could have been done?  Do you remember Jesus’ rebuke in vs. 16?

… ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” 17 As he said these things, all his adversaries were put to shame, and all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him.

The key here to me is the phrase ‘daughter of Abraham’.  Jesus has to remind them that this is their sister, a daughter of Jerusalem, one for who they should rejoice.  He is asking them to examine their own hearts.  The sting of the rebuke is because of their utter lack of engagement on her behalf. We can be sure that they had not prayed for her, because they had not engaged their souls on her behalf.  I really like how the NIV puts it, where Jesus says to them…. Think of it!

Prayer subverts.  Prayer engages.  And here’s the third thing.  Be careful because prayer bleeds…

VI.             Prayer bleeds:

Just as real genuine engagement caused by persistent prayer can be dangerous, it is also true that prayer can cause us to bleed! The Ephesian elders fell to their knees, praying with and for their beloved apostle Paul, aching for what they knew awaited him.  Their hearts were bleeding. [Are we familiar with the derisive phrase, ‘bleeding heart liberal’?  It is used in reference to people who champion any number of liberal causes with an unrestrained, messy emotional involvement.   I pray to God that I may ever be a bleeding heart liberal, if the alternative is to cultivate a detached heart.  May we be willing to metaphorically and perhaps even physically bleed for one another.

It was right here, well ce-10 if I remember correctly, many years ago now when our elders had a congregational meeting to report on and to resolve a difficult issue in the life of the church. As the dialogue rolled out, one of the elders, much loved, no longer here quietly said these words, “I will bleed for this body.”  He said it without drama, without raised fist, with nothing more than quiet but earnest conviction.  Does anybody remember those words? 

When I heard them, I was stunned because he was speaking in a category for which I had no real frame of reference.  I felt like I ought to remove my shoes, seriously!  The gentleman did go on to bleed metaphorically for this body in ways that he could have little imagined at the time. So, be careful about prayer. If you want to insulate yourself against engagement, don’t touch it with a ten foot pole! Also, be careful for this reason.  When you pray it can get messy.  Better wear your work clothes, because if you are not careful you will bleed.  [just a parenthesis.  As I get older the skin on the back of my hands gets annoyingly thinner and thinner and more than once grandkids have said to me as we are doing something out in the garage, ‘grandpa, you are bleeding again!’  I will look at my hand and wonder to myself, how did that happen?  So it is when armed with the weapons of spiritual war, that we may expect to get dirty and to bleed.  So, bleed well brothers and sisters.  Blood and tears are not signs of weakness or defeat.  They are our emblems of fraternity.  Rejoice in that fraternity with one who did not stop short of bleeding and dying for you and me!

VII.           Conclusion:

I want to circle back to the idea I talked about as we began this morning.   It is natural and even morbidly fun to describe in retrospective this ‘annus horribilus.’  For many of us who have lost loved ones, who have not even been able to grieve as we ought, for those of us who have lost dear ones, jobs, financial solvency, health and security, the year 2020 will leave long lasting scars. Does anybody around here simply long to see a mask-less face?  Of course we all do, yes? This was the year of no visits to nursing homes, of having temps taken with little laser beams at every turn. It was the year that many of us spent Christmas alone.  It was the year of staying away from those we love.  Articles about the horrors of 2020 abound.  They will appear on your screen unbidden.  But how are we as believers to process a year of deep grief and loss?  Just a few thoughts as we conclude.

a.     The nature of our armor suggests that we advance, not retreat. God’s word calls us to a future of hope, to song even, and the world needs to hear us sing!

b.     We can expect to ache and to bleed as we engage in prayer for this world that is so very beautiful and yet at the same time, so dark.

c.     The certainty of a bright dawn is the bedrock upon which we stand as adopted children and fellow heirs and ambassadors for the Lord Jesus.

Isaiah 60:1-3 captures this idea for us.  As Isaiah’s words would have anchored and encouraged the hearts of the busted remnant of Israel, may they also offer hope for us this morning as we look to a new year, as we put on the armor of God and go out into enemy territory to subvert, to engage and to bleed.

“Arise, shine, for your light has come. 

And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

For behold, darkness shall cover the earth,

And thick darkness the peoples;

But the Lord will arise upon you.

And his glory will be seen upon you.

And nations shall come to your light.

And kings to the brightness of your rising.”

Next Sunday: The Just Judgment of God, 2 Thessalonians 1:1–12