It was an epic battle, and maybe the cleverest boxing bout in history. The Rumble in the Jungle, Don King called it. The heavyweight champ, George Foreman, was in the African country of Zaire — formerly and presently called the Congo — to do battle against the supposedly washed- up bigmouth, Muhammad Ali. Foreman was America’s champion: a good guy who waved a little America flag after winning the gold medal in the ’68 Olympics, after some of his black track-and-field colleagues had raised black-gloved fists on the victory stand in protest of America’s persistent racism. Ali was a draft-dodger who went to jail because he would fight for himself but not his country. He was a convert to the Nation of Islam. Foreman was a slugger, Ali a boxer. Everyone thought Ali was too old and rusty to regain his title from the new champ. His only chance was to dance around the ring for 15 rounds and try to avoid the knockout punch of big George. Nobody gave him much chance at his age of lasting that long, though. What happened inside that ring is now the stuff of boxing legend. Instead of avoiding the punches of the hard-hitting champ, Ali played “rope-a-dope” for eight rounds, leaning against the ropes, hands held high to protect his face. Ali’s corner kept yelling at him to get off the ropes, where everyone thought he was most vulnerable. But the magical Ali had a counter-intuitive strategy. He would let Foreman punch himself out. He would take blow after blow, deflecting them, dodging them, absorbing them, countering when possible. Round by round Ali taunted Foreman on their clutches, telling him he was losing, his punches didn’t hurt, he couldn’t win, he was beaten. By the eighth round, poor George was a tired puppy dog, flailing wildly, missing time after time. Ali struck quickly and decisively, knocking out Foreman with a vicious right hand.

We come this morning to the last of this series of sermons from the book of Ephesians. You can almost see old Paul in your mind’s eye when he gets to this part of his letter. He is in a dark Roman prison, feet shackled. He is sitting at a makeshift desk with a low-burning candle about him. He is hunched over the parchment with quill in hand, straining to see with his notoriously bad eyesight. He’s going to hand this letter off to Tychicus to circulate in all the churches, beginning with Ephesus. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to write again, so he’s been putting down everything crucial for the church to remember about how it is a chosen community. It’s a theological tour de force, this work, lining out the big themes of who Christ is, what God has done in defeating the powers of darkness and death, how we are to live in the times until the victory celebration. He has been telling us to quit ordering church life on any basis except the unity of humanity in Christ. He is clear about how to act toward strangers and toward one’s own family. Now he is trying to figure how to sum it all up.

I wonder if he looks down at his ankle chains just then, looks through the bars at the armed guards, and catches the irony: He is a prisoner talking about the victory of Christ and the certainty of the church’s future. He believes the Roman Empire has no future, despite looking like the heavyweight champ of the world at the moment. A man who seemed on the ropes, nailed to a cross by armed troops, put in a grave and seemingly defeated, came to life again and proved the power behind the world’s punches pathetic. It was the mother of all battles, and Christ has won the war, even if many still can’t believe it.

But maybe Paul is wondering, as he gets down to the end of his letter, if his readers will be wondering why — if Christ has, in fact, won the victory — things seem still so hard for the church. Why is it so hard to live openly in the name Christ? Why do we still struggle against evil and wickedness? Like cutting off the head of a snake in a field and throwing on a fence rail, you know it will wiggle and writhe until sundown, even though its demise is sure. In the same way Paul is trying to urge the church to vigilance in the remaining battles of a war already won. We must be strong in the Lord and put on the whole armor of God. He knows we must still fight the good fight, but we must fight with the armor and weapons of the very One who has already defeated the invisible powers.

Now, some of you are too comfortable with military imagery when applied to the Christian life, and others of you are too uncomfortable. Some of you wish for the moral clarity you felt when you sang Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition. You knew the enemy was demonic and the fight worthy. Others of you can hardly bring yourself to sing Onward Christian Soldiers because you believe it only inspires images of conflict and crusades that do damage to the church’s commitment to peace. The truth, I believe, lies between these two extremes, as it often does.

William Temple was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War. Three years after Britain entered the conflict, he preached a sermon on the armor of God. He believed that the war against the Nazis proved once and for all that those who think belief is just a private matter between a person and God and that all that matters really is whether one behaves properly couldn’t be more wrong. The fight was not just against one bad action or a series of them, he said; it was against the principalities and powers of darkness. Britain was warring against the false belief of Aryan superiority and the deadly idea that the German people should dominate the world as God’s chosen people who could use any means to establish their rightful rule. That is idolatry, the worship of some other God than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Even if the allies were to defeat the enemy armies, though, Temple said, that would not be the end of it; they would have to beat back the false belief that fueled it. [Reprinted in 20 Centuries of Great Preaching: Vol. IX, eds. Pinson and Fant (Word, 1971), pp.186-88.

If we have to be at war today, don’t you wish we could have one with similar moral clarity? But isn’t the truth of what Temple said and what Paul said still true in our day? Isn’t it true that even if we kill Osama and Saddam, we are going to have to defeat the false beliefs that fuel their fury? The same is true of us. America is not right because we are America and call on the name of God; America is right only if it is right and does right. We have to ask why we don’t learn that our problems tend to get worse and not better by rushing to war. The cost is enormous in dollars and dignity both. We seem no closer to peace.

But war against the invisible powers of wickedness is not just a matter of foreign conflict. We find these powers at work in our own society still. Racism, for instance. It is a false belief. Idolatry. And Christ has defeated it, proving that it has no future, since he died for one and all the very same way. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not abolish racism. Racism still lurks in the hearts of millions of Americans, waging war against people of color, despite being wrong and beaten. Or what about or social policies of giving preferences to the wealthy over the poor? What is the basis for that if not the invisible powers that keep people oppressed and hopeless on the idea that money buys privilege and access, while the lack of it buys silence and ignorance? Or what about the false belief that happiness is a worthy pursuit rather than an outcome of a good life? How many of you parents are ready to tell your children, No, I don’t care if you are happy; I care if you are good. If you are good, you may also be happy, but if you are happy without being good, then you are no child of your heavenly Father!

This is why the church has to put on the armor of God more than just the armor of the military. The battle is within as much as without. The armor of God is what God wears into battle, but it has to do the equipment of character more than the character of the equipment. We are invited into God’s own private closet and told to suit up. Look at how God is decked out for battle.

The belt of truth, first of all. Truth is the first casualty of war, we have been warned many times. And now we are seeing signs that the Bush administration may have been loosening the belt of truth in order to get us into the battle in Iraq. We pay a dear price for that. Dave Bliss is paying for that, as is Baylor University as a whole. The cover-up is a great embarrassment to a Christian school that prides itself on doing things the right way. The belt of truth fits nicely alongside the breastplate of righteousness. When you are doing what is right, the bullets of the enemy can’t penetrate. People can attack you, say things about you, but they cannot defeat you because nothing sticks. If Bliss hadn’t paid players illegally, Baylor wouldn’t be in this mess, maybe Patrick Dennehy and Carlton Dotson would not have been at Baylor in the first place, and Dennehy would be alive today. Likewise, if Saddam had treated his people and the world community with respect, Iraq would not be occupied today, either.

Then there’s the shoes that take you onto paths of peace and not war. These boots are made for walking, but are they military issue or Rockport gum-soles? Are they made for trampling an enemy or running to someone’s rescue? Add the shield of faith and helmet of salvation and you have all the defensive armor of God. God wants us to be prepared for battle: not with first-strike intent or preemptive motive, but with a strong enough character that we can withstand whatever blows come to us on the ropes and not be knocked out.

The one offensive weapon Paul describes is the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. This word is not logos in the Greek, the eternal word that is Christ himself; it is rhema, the simple act of utterance. We are to speak to the powers that seek to do the world and us harm. We declare them defeated and announce their demise. We invite them to give up and get with the army of God that is dressed in God’s own armor.

Years ago in South Africa, before the fall of apartheid, the government cancelled a protest rally. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for the people to rally instead in St. George’s Cathedral. Fearing more political activity, soldiers entered the church and lined the walls of the sanctuary with rifles at the ready and bayonets fixed. Tutu addressed the crowd. He declared that the powers of segregation and oppression had already been defeated in Jesus Christ and that the government that sought to prop up a lie was doomed to fail. Then he turned to the police: You may be powerful — very powerful — but you are not God. God cannot be mocked. You have already lost. Finally, when the tension seemed at its peak, the wily little holy man came down from his pulpit, flashing a radiant smile. He started bouncing up and down with glee. He turned back to the soldiers and said: Therefore, since you have already lost, we are inviting you to join the winning side. The crowd howled, the police drifted out, and the people began to dance. [Cited by John Ortberg, “Roll Call,” in The Christian Century (Aug. 9, 2003): p. 17.]

My friends, the only way to win the war against the powers of evil in this world is to fight it on God’s terms and with God’s armor and weapons. Christ has already done for us what ensures ultimate victory. For now, he is calling all to armor up for the sake of peace. Armor all!