In a Deeply Divided Time, How do you Fight for what is Right? Here's How

When it happened on January 6th, I couldn’t believe it.  I couldn’t believe folks would break into the Capital like that.   And they did so with such violence, even murderous rage.  

Yet here’s the strange thing.  Others seemed to be trying to behave better, even calming down the ones who wanted to destroy the place.   And does anyone remember the face-painted guy with the Viking helmet, the Q Shaman, they call him?  Gosh, he looked scary.  But then I saw a video of him deliver, well, how can I say this, a kind of nice prayer in the Senate chambers.

Now, granted, he shouldn’t have been there in the first place.  In this country, that’s not how we roll.  If we don’t like how an election turns out, we don’t crash down doors or murder police officers or put other people in fear of their lives, including public servants in their 80s for Pete’s sake.  We don’t storm the capital.  That’s not what this country is about.   And all that violence didn’t accomplish a thing.   Once law enforcement cleared everyone out, the Congress just returned and did their duty, facilitating yet another peaceful transfer of power, as we’ve been doing now for over 200 years.     

But how did it come to that, to a day of such mayhem and death?  More crucially, how did folks, many who in their day to day lives hardly had a parking ticket, who owned businesses, held down jobs, cared for their families, even regularly attended church get swept up in something so destructive, so hurtful, so horribly misguided?

In these words, God shows us not only how it happened, but how to make sure you don’t ever make the same mistakes.  But God does more than that.  God shows you the weapons that do change things, that do defeat evil as nothing else can.  In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

Ephesians 6:10-18

Do you realize that you’re a soldier in a war against dark and powerful forces you can’t even see?   How do you fight a war like that?   More importantly, how do you win it?  How do you make sure you don’t become the very evil that God is enlisting you to fight?   Here God tells you.   You fight the battle with the powerful armor and weapons that God has given you, weapons of love over hate, of redemption over judgment, of life over death.  And as you fight with those weapons, you will discover that no weapons more powerful than those even exist.

Did you ever notice it when you read the Bible, especially the New Testament?  All these followers of Jesus never ask why.  They never ask.  God, why am I being persecuted?  Why are we experiencing so much injustice, so much pain and hurt?   They don’t ask those questions anywhere.  Why?  They already knew the answer.  God had enlisted them in a war, and in a war, when hard times hit, you’re not surprised.  That’s how war is.  

But they understood too, that in that war, Jesus had given them the weapons they needed to win. And God gives you the same weapons, but before we get to how you use them to resist evil in your own life, and in this world, you need to understand something crucial. 

Almost all the things that God lays out here, you use for defense.   That’s because the greatest danger you will face in fighting evil is the evil getting through to you.  And when that happens, the evil won’t kill you.  No, it’ll capture you, and you likely won’t even know it.  You put on the whole armor of God to stand against what, to stand against the brute force of the accuser (that’s what the word Devil means here)?   No, God says, I give you the armor to stand against the wiles of the accuser.  That’s an old-fashioned word, wiles.  So, what are wiles exactly?  Wiles are devious and cunning strategies you use to manipulate or persuade someone to do what you want. And the number one strategy, wile, that the accuser will use is to trick you into thinking that you’re not doing the devil’s work at all, but God’s, that the one leading you is God.   

Years ago, a preacher named Nicky Gumbel, told me something that confirmed a battle I knew very well.   Nicky said: If you hear a voice of condemnation, it will never be the voice of God.   Now, God might come as a voice of conviction, the voice of someone who loves you enough to warn you away from a bad habit or decision.   But God’s voice will never condemn you.   Yet, I knew.  In the past that voice of condemnation had tricked me in just that way.  

When I first started as a pastor, I had unrealistic expectations for what I could do.   And when I inevitably failed to live up to those expectations, I’d hear that voice of condemnation.   You’re not faithful.  You’re lazy, a failure.  Before I got out of the shower, that voice had already so bruised me up, I’d go into my office defeated and discouraged.   

And then, with the help of a wise counselor, I realized.  That voice of condemnation, that abusive conscience wasn’t God at all.  And if I kept listening to it, it would destroy me.  But for longer than I’d like to admit, I believed that voice of evil was the voice of God.   So, if that voice has ever come to you, then fight it, stand against it, and don’t ever believe it is the voice of God.

But, that voice of condemnation doesn’t just lead you to condemn yourself, it leads you to condemn others.  And what hurt that creates.   Those folks storming the capital didn’t think they were attacking our democracy.  They thought they were defending it.    They believe they stood on the side of God.  That’s why the Q-shaman delivered a prayer in the Senate.   And over history, so many got deceived in that same way, with disastrous results.  My great-great grandfather fought to defend slavery of all things.  And he thought he was doing right.   And the folks who called for the crucifixion of Jesus, thought they were on the side of God too.

So how do you protect yourself from that becoming you?  You ask yourself?   What drives me:  fear or love?  Am I trying to convert my enemies or to destroy them?    Can you guess the right answers?   But knowing the right answers and living them out, that’s hard.  That’s where prayer comes in, prayer that enables you to see the truth and to live it out. 

You see, when I first looked at Q-Shaman, that bare-chested Viking come to pillage the capital, I wanted to condemn him, to see him as less than me.  But then when I saw him give that prayer, I realized.   If I condemn him, I condemn myself.   Was he wrong in what he did?  Yes.  Was he caught up in evil?  Yes.  But was he evil?  No, at least no more than I can be.  The great writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky said it well.  Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, and nothing is more difficult than to understand him.   But that’s what Jesus calls us to do.  

And when we do that, we are discovering the weapon which evil cannot stand against.  For Jesus doesn’t call you to be a doormat.  Jesus calls you to be a fighter.   In the armor, God describes here, God gives you no armor to defend your backside.  Why?  Because in God’s army, you don’t ever back down.  You don’t ever run away.  You stand and fight.   And the fighting Jesus calls you to requires more courage, more strength than any weapon of violence ever could. 

Have you heard where Jesus says:  Turn the other cheek or if someone takes your outer garment, give him your inner one too or if a soldier asks you to walk one mile, walk two?   But did you know?  Jesus isn’t giving you strategies to give up.  Jesus is giving you strategies to fight. (These insights and the stories below come from a book by the Biblical scholar Walter Wink - Engaging the Powers)

For example, Jesus says.  If someone hits your right cheek, turn the other also.   And that detail right cheek, tells you what you need to know.  That meant, the person hitting you was giving you a backhanded slap.  That’s the only slap you can give on the right cheek.  You see.  In Jesus’ day, you only used the left hand when you went to the bathroom, and you never used it for anything else.  Let me just say as a left-hander that would have been a crappy world to live in, and yes, I intend the pun.   Now a backhanded slap communicated humiliation.  So, when you turned the other cheek, you threw your assailant off.  He can’t use his left hand to slap you.  But if he hits you, well, that implies respect, that you are his equal.  Now we may not get that but trust me Jesus’ listeners did.   Jesus was telling them how to resist.

And in that whole second garment thing, Jesus was giving folks a way to fight gross injustice.   For a bunch of reasons, debt had become a big problem in Palestine.  Rich folks were always finding ways to get people so deeply in debt, they could take their land, even the shirt off their backs.  But, if you were poor, you only had two garments.  So, if they took the first and you gave them the second, you were naked.  And as embarrassing as that might be for you, it’s worse for them.  In Israel, it was way more shameful to look at someone’s else’s nakedness rather than your own.  So that oppressor would be freaking out, saying, please get your clothes on.

In fact, during apartheid, some South African women took Jesus’ advice.  Soldiers came with bulldozers to demolish their village, telling them: “You have two minutes to clear out.”  So, what did they do? They stood in front of the bulldozers and got naked.  And those soldiers, all church going Afrikaners, got so embarrassed they turned tail and fled.  And they never came back.

And as for the second mile…well, in the Roman army, you could only compel someone to carry your pack for one mile.   If they carried it for two, and your officer found out, you got in big trouble, maybe even trouble that could kill you.  So, if you ask to go another mile, that freaks that soldier out.  It turns the tables on him.  He may even beg you to take his pack off so he doesn’t get in trouble. 

And when you resist in Jesus’ way, not only does it stop violence, but maybe, just maybe, people get changed.

The writer Angie O'Gorman writes of the night a strange man kicked in the door of her bedroom, yelling at her as he came over.  But Angie didn’t scream or fight, she thought.  Whatever he does, won’t just harm me, it will harm him, so let me see if I can stop it.  So, she asked him.  What time is it?  He said 2:30.   And she said: My clock says 2:45.  I hope your watch isn’t broken.” Then I asked him. “How’d you get in?”  He said. “I broke the glass in the back door.”  And she replied.  “That’s a problem, because I don’t got the money to fix that.”   Then he talked about how he had no money.   They talked some more.  She asked him to leave.  And he refused, saying, “I got no place to go.”  So, she said.  “I’ll give you some sheets and you can make your own bed downstairs.”    And so he did.  Was she scared?  You bet.  She didn’t sleep a wink.  But the next morning they had breakfast together, and he left.  

In the same way, a woman was walking down a lonely street, carrying a load of packages.  She sensed a stranger coming up on her from behind.  So, what did she do?  She wheeled around, handed him her packages, and said, “Thank God you showed up!  I hate to walk alone in these streets, and these packages are heavy.”  And he walked her home, safely.

Or take a gang of thugs harassing a village in the Philippines.  The police did nothing, so what could the villagers do?  They could attack and kill them.  They had the numbers. But instead, the churches gathered, and a thousand strong went to the gang leader’s home.  They surrounded it and celebrated communion, but refused it to him, ordering him to leave.  They talked all night.  And by morning, he had surrendered his weapons, disarmed his gang, and repented, even admitting the government, then led by the dictator Marcos, was supporting them all along.    

Do you realize that our own nation is one, that at its best, follows Jesus’ way?   You see, democracy is the most non-violent way of governing the world has even seen.   Back in the day, when power got transferred, somebody died, one leader just killed another.  But our nation showed a way to transfer power by votes and not violence, and that way has changed the world.  

In our work with other churches in Bold Justice, we stand in that way too.  We don’t bring change by threats or violence.  We bring it by calling our leaders to listen to those who elected them, those they serve, and we call them to be converted to a better way, a more just and fair way.  And when we do, we don’t create enemies, we build allies.  We don’t defeat opponents. We win them over to a better way.   And we do it together, conservatives, liberal, moderates, all bound together by a vision of a better way.   And as we do that, evil gets defeated, and God wins.   

Do you know Christians overturned the greatest empire in the world without firing a shot?  How did they do it?  They did it in the Jesus way.   And the Emperor changed from an enemy into an advocate, transformed by the love of God.  In the same way, women won the right to vote.  Dr. King led the victories that defeated the evils of Jim Crow.     For when you walk in Jesus’ way, when you walk in the power of prayer and the loving strength of God, evil doesn’t stand a chance. It may cost you, but you will win.  The cross shows you that.  For the cross stands not as a symbol of defeat, but of victory.  On that day, God showed.  Forgiveness defeats the devil not vengeance.  God’s love destroys every evil, even death itself.   And in that love, the powers aren’t destroyed, they’re redeemed, saved, restored, and so are we.  So, live in the love.  Trust in the love. Pray boldly that God will empower you to stand and fight in the love.  For that love wins, and nothing, not even death, can stand against it.  Let us pray.