Shoes

Sunday, August 22,2021
Pastor Arne Bergland

Ephesians 6:10-20

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak.

Beloved of God, Grace, Mercy and Peace is yours in Christ Jesus,

What’s on your feet this morning? No doubt you have a lot of choices. If you are like my wife, you have A LOT of choices. Sandals, tennis shoes, heels perhaps? Probably not snow boots or overshoes, not yet anyway. When I used to work with California Lutheran University, I could swear that if California outlawed flip flops and Uggs our students would all be barefoot. What is on your feet this morning? What does it say about who you are or where you are going?

What are you using to protect yourself these days? Masks? Washing your hands? Social distancing? Vaccinations? Two years ago, who would have thought these things? But they have come to be universal weapons in fighting the pandemic.

What have churches used in this time of social distancing? Emails, YouTube, live stream, zoom, pre-packaged communion… These are some of the tool’s churches have used to share the good news. Who would have thought when Pastor Langness started drive in worship that you were way ahead of the curve in preparing the way for socially distanced worship?

The people of Ephesus didn’t know about the Covid virus, but they had plenty of issues that vexed them. The letter that they received from Paul was intended to give them hope. He began with a reminder of what God has done and advice on how one might live faithfully. In this letter three verbs stand out as summation of what Paul would have us know. “Sit, walk, and stand.”

“Sit.” The first part of Paul’s letter reminds us of Christs victory for us. he writes, “Believers have been raised up and seated with Christ.”

“Walk.” By the fourth chapter Paul urges the Ephesians to action. “I beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling”

“Stand.” The decisive victory has been won in Christ but there is still evil that seeks to disrupt and divide and create havoc in the world. The world is on fire, both literally and figuratively. What can one person do? God provides protection, tools for the faithful that we might face each day. He writes, “Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

In the Bible translation, the Message, I love how Eugene Peterson shares the first part of our reading. “And that about wraps it up. God is strong, and he wants you strong. So, take everything the Master has set out for you, well-made weapons of the best materials. And put them to use so you will be able to stand up to everything the Devil throws your way.”

In writing to the Ephesians, Paul is addressing folks who were a minority living under the authority of a military empire. They understood what Paul was talking about using the various pieces of military equipment to speak of how God might protect the faithful. The church over the centuries has frequently read this in a literal manner, raising armies to defeat the unbeliever. Notice in this list…belt, breastplate, shoes, shield, helmet, and sword that all the pieces of armor are defensive leaving the sword, the word of God as the only offensive weapon.

Such language may not be helpful in our context but the images they intend to reflect do. Paul wants the Ephesians to know that truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and God’s words are the protection given to the faithful. These tools are there to prepare us to tell the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ.

Paul tells the Ephesians to “stand firm.” This standing firm is not suggesting solo crusaders tilting at windmills like Don Quixote. The ongoing work that faithful people are called to be about is a community effort. This is something that is never really finished. To be faithful is to strive together to live a faithful life, sharing love and seeking peace and those things that are pleasing to God.

New Testament scholar Brian Peterson warns that we can too easily mistake who the true enemy is. It is easy to mark those with whom we disagree as evil. In doing so we dismiss those with differing political, social, or religious points of view. Rather the schemes of evil that Paul refers to are more insidious. Peterson writes that “evil lurks behind the camouflage of cultural common sense, compromise in the name of being reasonable, and unacknowledged personal benefit from unjust systems.”

It is true only God can win the final victory. The faithful however can be a harbinger of that victory, God’s hands, and feet in the world, doing the work of proclaiming the good news. Finley Peter Dunne was a 19^th century journalist who penned the idea that newspapers exist to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Various theologians over the years have suggested that this is the work of proclaiming the Gospel as well. “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I think that is our task as we think about lifting the “sword of the Spirit.” We give hope to those who are hurting and yet stand strong against the schemes of injustice, oppression, and selfish living. Taking up the whole armor of God moves us from complacency and paralysis to action.

Many years ago, I was visiting an Inupiat family in Brevig Mission Alaska, a small town north of Nome accessible only by boat. At the end of the visit, the mom turned to me to sing an old country western song, “When you pray, will you pray for me because I need your love and your care. When I pray, I will pray for you because you need my love and my care.”

God has won the victory that sets us free. But God’s enemies still fight on.

Faithful followers of Christ are called to stand firm for the truth, to share the good news, to work for the right.

So, I ask you, what do you have on your feet this morning? What you put on tells the world something about who you are. What shoes are you wearing? Are you ready to step out in faith where Jesus has led the way? Are you prepared to share the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ?

Sit, walk, stand, live a life worthy of your calling. I pray for you; will you pray for me?

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

The book of Romans is a letter. An actual letter. Like, a letter written by hand and then sent to someone else for them to read. Paul, the author of this letter, wrote a lot of letters. Paul was an apostle, that is, someone who is sent – in this case, he is one who is sent to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the furthest reaches of the known world. He’s really, really good at it.

At the time that Paul writes this letter to the church in Rome, he’s been doing this work for probably twenty years and is at the peak of his career. He’s developed a great pattern in his work: visit a place, get to know the people, continually share his faith with them, help gather a community of believers from all walks of life, and stay with them while they learn how to be followers of Jesus. Then Paul leaves – after all, he’s got other places to visit and more people to teach. He is an apostle – he is sent. But he doesn’t leave the church abandoned. He writes letters back to these churches, especially when he hears about crises or conflicts. Sometimes they need comfort, sometimes challenge, sometimes critique, but always he writes as one they know and love. They welcome his input.

The letter to the Romans is not like that. Paul has never been to Rome. There is already a Christian church there, one brought over likely from Jerusalem very early in the faith. And the church in Rome has recently seen conflict. A few years before the writing of this letter, the Roman emperor expelled all the Jews from Rome. Because Christianity was effectively a form of Judaism at the time, Christians were also exiled. After the emperor died and the Jewish Christians returned, they found a church that had continued to grow and develop – this time with Gentile Christians.

It’s hard for us to understand how shocking and despicable this would have been. Two weeks ago I preached on Acts 10, and how Peter’s vision of God calling all animals clean and good to eat flew in the face of millennia of culture, history, and society for Jewish Christians. Jesus himself was Jewish and kept these laws – surely if anyone else wanted to be Christian, they could likewise follow these rules. Peter’s vision and the general movement of the church revealed otherwise.

That didn’t mean it made things easy. It is hard to let go of tradition and expectation and legislation as the Spirit moves us to new places. I hear people struggle when someone sits in their pew or wears sweatpants to church. Let’s be honest: those are enormously trivial things. If still we grind our teeth at the thought of these worthless infractions how much more might faithful people be driven to despair by moving on from the purity laws ordained by God?

This is the faith community to which Paul writes. He writes to a church redefining and fighting. It is a church that feels a deep rift, a painful split, one that goes deep into matters of identity and righteousness, one that threatens to dissolve into name-calling and condemning and finger-pointing and disgrace to the very name of God in whose name they mean to gather – and if we’re honest, we know how that feels. Those fears are not unfamiliar.

So how does Paul start his letter? He has no standing in that church in Rome. They don’t even know who he is – and if they do, it’s possible that they might still remember him as he was in his youth, an aggressive persecutor of the early faith. What can he say that would possibly invite them to listen to him, to hear the word he will share, to receive the message that he hopes will join them together in the work of the gospel?

He keeps it simple: he tells them the truth. He tells them who he is, and it is fully wrapped up in who Jesus is. His self-introduction is the story of the gospel. Nothing he can say about himself means more than who he is in Jesus Christ.

He tells them he wants to come see them, that he wants to be with them, that he hopes he can share some spiritual gift – but even more than that, so that they might mutually encourage each other in faith. He doesn’t want to come to them because he’s better than them, because he can fix them so they can get things right, because they’re obviously sinful mess-ups who just haven’t been taught the truth. No, he wants to join them for mutual encouragement in faith. He wants to walk with them. He hopes he has something to offer them in his teaching and leadership, but just the same, he knows he will grow by being with them as well.

What if that’s how it’s supposed to be? What if we’re supposed to talk about what we believe and why, not because we’ve got it right and we want to establish our superior knowledge, but because we know that God works through our mutual encouragement in faith? What if we were not ashamed of the gospel, not afraid of getting it wrong, not worried that someone would think we were weird for talking about what we believe and why and then asking others the same? What if we trusted that the power of God was at work in this mutual encouragement? What if we were not so proud and short-sighted as to think that the way we see God is the only way God works in the world? What if we actually believed that God is at work in the world, that God has already been working long before we showed up, that we arrive as much to learn as to teach?

Ah, but I know the argument against it: we’re supposed to keep polite conversation, right? What don’t you talk about at the dinner table? Religion and politics, right? Look where it’s gotten us. It’s gotten us to a place where we can no longer have civil discourse, where we are more likely to condemn than to seek to understand, where we claim a Christian can only look one way, live one place, vote one direction, take one moral position. It’s gotten us built up and walled off and fighting against our own beloved members of the family of God.

So don’t do it. Take Paul’s example. Tell people who you are. Tell them where you’re from. Tell them what you believe. And then invite them to do the same. Make your story of faith as natural a part of your introduction as where you work and where you live and who’s in your family. And when someone’s story is different, listen to it. Hear it. See God at work in it. Be amazed. Allow for the mutual encouragement of faith, because this is how the gospel is shared.

No matter where you go from here, no matter where you find yourself, no matter what comes next for you – you can do this. You are called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel which is the power of God for salvation for everyone who has faith – no matter what. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Shoes

Sunday, August 22,2021
Pastor Arne Bergland

Ephesians 6:10-20

Past Sermons

Belonging Begins with . . . Showing Up for Each Other

Belonging Begins with . . . Intentional Hospitality

A Word for Worriers and Workaholics

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

Belonging Begins with . . . Showing Up for Each Other

Belonging Begins with . . . Intentional Hospitality

A Word for Worriers and Workaholics

About Augustana

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Shoes

Sunday, August 22,2021 Pastor Arne Bergland

Ephesians 6:10-20

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019 Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

About Augustana

Quick Links

Contact Us

Worship Hours

Sunday, August 22,2021
Pastor Arne Bergland

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson