Sermon Tone Analysis

Flying Artillery

Just a few short miles from here is the Palo Alto Battlefield.

I routinely visit the battlefield.

It’s a great place to park and make and phone call.

176 years ago, though, it would not have been a great place to have a phone conversation.

One of the most decisive battles in Texas and eventually the United States was fought on that site.

The issue, of course, was the location of the Texas and Mexican border.

Mexicans were insistent that the border should be the Nueces River, a couple of hours north of here at Corpus Christi.

Zachary Tayler and the Texans were adamant that the Rio Grande should be the border.

So the Mexican army marches north of the Rio to meet and push back the Texans, who were coming south.

And they met in the prairie brush of Palo Alto near a pond along the Point Isabel road.. both of which no longer exist.

The Texans were outmanned by more than 2 to 1.

By all measurements of warfare of that day, they should have lost.

But they won.

They won that battle and then they won again the next day, pushing the Mexican army back across the Rio.

There are numerous reasons why they won.

But one of the biggest reasons they won was their weapons.

One of the main heroes of that conflict was Major Samuel Ringgold, who had developed what was called the Flying Artillery, small cannons on wheels that could be pulled by horseback.

Moveable cannons.

And it soon became apparent that the Texans’ cannons were better at navigating all the thick brush and mesquite trees of Palo Alto.

The Flying Artillery also employed science engineers for soldiers, guys using math to point the cannons to hit their targets with precision.

They knew they were outmanned.

They also knew the terrain.

They knew the limitations of the enemy and the immobility of the enemy’s cannons.

The Texans won.

And we live and worship right next to that battlefield.

Ringgold was one of the four Texans who died that day.

He didn’t live to see the success of his Flying Artillery.

But there’s a street in Brownsville running from the zoo and Dean Porter park and the Camilla Playhouse to the art museum that bears his name.

We use that street all the time to relax, and learn, and play.

Because of Ringgold’s Flying Artillery.

The church militant

The church is in a war.

Sometimes it seems the church has forgotten it is in a war, and at other times, when it is talking about war, both the enemy and what’s at stake are sorely misunderstood, misstated, and the entire discussion is misguided.

In fact, the passage that we are in has been terribly misinterpreted and misstated to say all sorts of things that it is not saying, while at the same time, missing Paul’s point to a church in Ephesus that is being attacked spiritually.

Much of the Christian battle and war imagery that shows up in our social media conveys a message that cannot be sustained by this text.

And it runs opposed to Christ’s grand statement that His kingdom is not of this world.

The culture wars we hear so much about have very little to do with this passage, and yet these verses are invoked time and again.

In fact, as we will see, these verses themselves would place many engaged in the culture war on the wrong side of the equation in these verses.

The Mission

Paul begins the entire section with the mission at hand.

Before he jumps into the specifics of what he’s talking about, he states the mission right up front so that the congregation doesn’t miss it:

Ephesians 6:10 “Be strengthened by the Lord and by his vast strength.”

Be strengthened.

That language is crucial to getting this entire passage right.

And if you don’ get this right, the rest of the passage is bound to go off the rails.

Do you noticed how this reads?

BE strengthened.

This isn’t “be God’s strength”, which is often the way this is spoken.

The passage is this: Allow yourself to be strengthened by Jesus, who is always “the Lord” in Paul’s writing.

Allow Jesus to strengthen you.

The church has a bad fascination with power.

It’s part of the fall.

We want to win.

We live to win.

What is part of our American individualism and manifest destiny pretty soon finds a place in the way we think about power and the church.

And spoiler alert: there is no language in this entire paragraph about winning.

But I digress.

Allowing Jesus to strengthen us presumes that we are weak to begin with, a healthy acknowledgement for all of us.

As Jesus fills us with himself, through His Word, he is giving us His strength, a strength that is marked by the Gospel and its gentleness and meekness and humility, not some cultural power trip.

The Enemy

We need to receive from Jesus His strength because there is an evil one who is up to no good against the church.

There’s an ancient piece of battle wisdom that Paul is employing here: know your enemy.

If you find yourself in a war, you better be able to identify your enemy.

Paul says it in verse 11:

Ephesians 6:11 “Put on the full armor of God so that you can stand against the schemes of the devil.”

We don’t have time to jump into all that is meant by “schemes of the devil”, but what we can say is the devil is opposed to the big picture in Ephesians.

Paul started this entire letter with the idea that God has filled Jesus with himself, Jesus is filling the church with himself, and the church is filling all things, the church is filling every corner of the world with Jesus.

And there is a big baddie that doesn’t want to see that happen.

The devil is not interested in the world being filled with Jesus by the church.

He crucified Jesus and lost.

Now, his aim is at Christ’s bride, the church.

This evil day that the church lives in, this time period between Christ’s resurrection and His return has an Evil One trying to use the evil day time period to thwart the purposes of Jesus in His Church.

It’s why Paul begins this section with “allow Jesus to strengthen you.”

If the church is going to fill the world with Jesus, the church must be filled with Jesus’ strength because there’s an evil one out to do the church harm.

The enemy is also listed in various ways here.

It’s not your typical enemy, and that too tends to be forgotten.

Here’s what Paul says:

Ephesians 6:12 “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens.”

Paul says that the struggle for the Ephesian church is an unseen enemy.

Again, we’re not going to take time to unpack everything these phrases mean.

What we are supposed to see is that the enemy is other worldly.

Cosmic forces in the unseen world.

Spiritual warfare is real.

But way too often, that first phrase is either totally skipped over, or reinterpreted in a way that Paul is attempting to speak against here:

The struggle is not against flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood are sinners just like the rest of us.

The struggle is not against people.

I have to shake my head every time I see some cartoon or meme depicting people on the other side of the aisle with Satan’s horns.

First, that’s dehumanizing.

Second, they aren’t the enemy.

And I would venture to say that more often than not, the positions they take also don’t rise to the level of evil.

Do you know what the evil Paul opposes throughout the book of Ephesians?

Disunity

Lack of love

Personal immorality (not the immorality of the next guy)

Lack of forgiveness

Slanderous and obscene speech

Failing to fill all things with Jesus

There’s more here in this letter to this church, but you get the point.