The other day I was having a conversation with my cycling coach. I was talking to him about getting a new mountain bike for a particular discipline of cycling called cross country mountain biking. I was talking about frame material, the weight of the bike, the geometry of the bike, the components, and then about physiological variables that make for a winning cyclist, a high functional threshold power and VO2 max or ability to uptake and use oxygen, being lightweight and yet strong, and one’s stamina. My coach said something very interesting. He said, all of these components of your physiological fitness and your equipment have their importance of course, and some are more necessary than others. But, he said, the thing that will determine success in anything that involves endurance is being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
I think that all of our readings today are driving at this point: persevering in faith involves a mental battle in which we have to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We have to be willing to go into a kind of battle with our own fears and anxieties, and with the temptations of the rulers of this world and the overriding ways in which sin and evil has crept into every aspect of life to pull us away from God.
To put on the armour of God, we first have to take off the clothing God gave to Adam and Eve to merely cover their sin. That is, we need to allow God’s ways to reform how we understand our own lives, the lives of other people and the situations in which we find ourselves. This can be extremely uncomfortable in large part because we like the ways of thinking and reacting that we’ve inherited or developed. We like to think that we know and can determine for ourselves what’s right, what’s wrong, and how to react in a given situation. Let me ask you: how often, when you’re facing a big decision, is your first move to go to Scripture in and with prayer to ask how God has responded to a request just like yours?
Lord: how do I deal with this death? Lord, how do I deal with my burnout? Lord here’s why I doubt that you exist, what should I do? Lord I’m tired of seeing death & destruction nothing seeming to ever change? Are you there? What are you waiting for? Why aren’t you doing this thing I think you should do? Lord I think I fully understand everything that I need and I’m perfectly happy, yet I never talk to anyone else about your presence in my life, is that a problem?
To be sure, one aspect of faith is simply to go to God in prayer with these kinds of questions. But the uncomfortable part of faith is both that God has addressed every single question you or I could ever ask, every situation you and I can find ourselves in, and yet, if we go to Scripture rather than to our own experiences with these questions and situations, we can often find ourselves with answers that are hard to endure, that don’t resolve the pain or fear we experience, that don’t change the world in a way that we desire or that makes sense to us.
And it’s at this point that a lot of folks do precisely what those in our Gospel lesson today: “this teaching is difficult, who can accept it?” Because of this, many of his disciples turned back and stopped following him in faith.” While the gospel lesson is referring to a teaching about eating Jesus’s flesh. Jesus is referring more broadly to letting go of the things of the flesh - that is, the way we so often think, reason and act, how we use our time, energy and money, the way we treat people out of fear or condemnation or making black and white decisions about everything - so that we can receive Jesus’s own flesh, which is revealed in the words of Scripture, and be transformed by the Spirit working in us as we sift through those words when we come to them with our questions, frustrations, joys, hopes, losses, doubts, and uncertainties.
To put on the armour of God is on the one hand, a metaphor for the often painful process of being transformed by God. On the other hand, to put on the armour of God is also quite literally to receive the flesh of Christ as you give up your own fleshly ways of thinking and acting. It’s to be changed from what you are - dead flesh - into Christ’s likeness by God’s Spirit. Our breastplate of righteousness, belt of truth, shield of faith, helmet of salvation, the sword of the spirit and our sandals of peace, are all like the components of my bikes: each of these things is a tool that helps us persevere in following wherever Jesus leads us, no matter what we face in this life.
But receiving these tools involves one fundamental recognition on our part: there really is nowhere or no one else to whom we can go to find the meaning or purpose of what our life, what all life holds: for it is God alone who made and who orders all things, as Peter recognizes in the Gospel: how can we leave you Lord, to whom else could we go. You are the alpha and the omega, the maker of all things, the one to whom all things will return at their end. If this is so, to receive the armour of faith, to be able to put it on for the battle against our own wills so tempted by the world’s distortions, we have to allow ourselves to be uncomfortable with being uncomfortable; to turn not to our own ways, or the ways everyone else is doing or has done it, but to God’s way revealed to us in Scripture. The armour is there for us to receive, although putting it on may not provide the kind of certainty and comfort we expect, what it does provide is the way to God in Jesus. AMEN
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