Paul was the master of the metaphor and here in Ephesians 6 he draws a picture to which everyone of his hearers could relate.  Roman soldiers in full battle regalia were a familiar sight.  They presented a formidable profile, and as the conquerors they set the standard for what it took to win in battle.

 

At the Christian camp I went to as a youth, we spent a lot of time with the details of the outfit.  We had to make sure that the breastplate of righteousness was secure, and the helmet of salvation fit properly, and we all wanted to make sure that we had the sword of the spirit because that made us look especially fierce.

 

But lest we press the significance of the symbolism too closely, we need to realize that Paul’s words are more poetry than prose here.  The message is less what style of shield we are using or what brand of shoes we are wearing than the fact that there is a battle going on and we need to be prepared.  The battle is a spiritual battle and it is being waged against the “principalities and powers”.  Those “principalities and powers” are both ominous and invisible and we need to remain ever vigilant.

 

The unseen host of devils and demons to which Paul alludes have been the subject of much conjecture and preaching over the centuries.  I want to lift up one this morning that is not named but which I have to believe is omnipresent in Paul’s mind and is a sin with which we all contend.  If we are going to have a faith that works, we are going to have to deal with this one.  This particular demon contends for our souls on an almost daily basis and its devices are especially devious.  It doesn’t matter if you are a kid going to school or a retiree enjoying the fruits of her labors, the noon-day demon is going to make a claim on your soul.

 

I speak, of course, of the demon called acedia, otherwise known as the sin of sloth, which originally gained fame as one of the original seven deadly sins.  Unfortunately, I can see some of you unbuckling your breastplates as we speak.  If there is one thing that hardworking Calvinists have no patience with, it is laziness, because that is the way in which we often think of sloth.

 

 

I.                 Acedia is the Sin of the Long Haul

 

Actually, laziness or sloth are mistranslations of the work of the noon-day demon.  As one who loves words and who listens for the right one like a safe cracker listens for the tumblers to drop, I will admit that I take a certain perverse pleasure in peppering you with the subtleties of the meaning of a word you may not have heard of and could care less about.  But I ask you to hang in with me and I promise you it will be worth your while.

 

The word acedia was originally coined by the desert father and fourth century monk, John Cassian, because it typically attacked a monk in the middle of his long and wearing day, tempting him to abandon his post (spiritually speaking) either by making him fall asleep or by distracting him from his prayers with restlessness.  Any one of us who have tried to say our bedtime prayers and fallen asleep in the middle of them or have found our mind wandering during our time of prayer in church on Sunday morning have had, at least, a passing acquaintance with the noon-day demon.

 

But for those who have given their whole lives to the devotions of a prayer life which they believe holds up the moral pillars of the world, an onslaught of inattentiveness and restlessness can undermine their high spiritual purpose.  Like many of us I suppose that I have often dismissed those who have devoted themselves to a monastic life as escaping reality in a mysteriously sequestered existence.  But some years ago I got a glimpse of the work of those devoted people, and came away with increased appreciation for their role in the world.

 

The occasion was my installation as Pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in Summit, New Jersey.  Now you need to know that Summit is the site of a Dominican Convent which sits prominently atop a knoll near the center of that town.  It is a beautiful and peaceful setting with its interior gardens guarded by high walls.

 

On the night of my formal service of installation an emissary from the Convent brought me a beautifully inscribed card which recognized with appreciation my new position in that town’s religious community, and promised to remember me every day in their noon-day prayers for as long as my ministry lasted there.  I have to tell you that I have never received a sentiment like that before or since and it moved me.  Often during the stresses of a daily ministry in what we fondly call the realities of the world, I remembered the promise of that small band of prayer warriors and found the strength that they were praying for.

 

That was the work of John Cassian in the fourth century but he found that it wasn’t easy work.  In fact what Paul calls the principalities and powers were constantly trying to undermine him.  For Cassian the battle was the toughest in the middle of the day.  One can imagine the desert heat draining him of energy, and his mental toughness waning after having already been at prayer for some time.  The particular demon with which he contended overtook him in the form of apathy and indifference.  Isolated by the loneliness of monastic life and never able to see the fruits of his spiritual labors, we can understand his coming to doubt the significance of his role in life.

 

We may be more inclined to identify this state as “compassion fatigue” or “burnout” or diagnose it as depression, but the clear insight of the desert fathers is that it attacks us in the middle of the day or in the middle of life.  Try on “mid-life crisis” for size and you might find the symptoms of acedia.

 

Acedia seems to be a sin of the long haul, when stamina and hope are worn down by the sheer length of the journey like the Israelites in the desert.  The great story of the Exodus in the Bible is often called to mind during Lent.  The people of Israel had been delivered from the power of the Pharaoh and dramatically led across the Red Sea by Moses not only to freedom but also to a period of desert wandering.

 

But they quickly found out that freedom is not all that it is cracked up to be.  Sure, they had been delivered from Pharaoh, and sure, they were on their way to the Promised Land, but the in-between time was getting to them.  The noon-day demons were attacking.  The journey was getting hard; food was scarce; patience was wearing thin; doubts began to intrude.  When that happens, it is easy to attack the leader so Moses took the hit.

 

“How could you let this happen to us?” they cried.  The fleshpots of Egypt began to look pretty good.  Security always trumps insecurity when you are in the middle of uncertainty -- even when the price of that security may be your very humanity.  This was the first crisis of Moses’ leadership and he had a mutiny on his hands.  He and Aaron and the Lord quickly conferred and they gathered the people together with the message, “Draw near to the Lord for he has heard your complaining.”

 

It is the patience and the forbearance of God that is in evidence here.  It seems that God always pushes us beyond our comfort zone but then accommodates to our weakness.  There are no words of condemnation here.  There is no anger at an obvious lack of appreciation.  Rather there is an understanding and compassion that the likes of us tend to wear down under the stress of the long haul and are especially susceptible to the attack of the noon-day demons which infect us with hopelessness, and depression, and fatigue.

 

You see, the noon-day demons tempt us to give up, whispering to us that what once seemed so full of promise is in fact going nowhere, that our efforts are in vain.  That’s what it’s like in the middle of a marriage isn’t it?  How often have we seen people who have been together for 15, 20, 25 years split!  Somehow the love that brought them together and the purpose that kept them together has not been enough to sustain them together.  The children have left home, behavior patterns have shifted, but now they have to rediscover their love, reinvent their relationship, and recommit for the long haul.

 

Certainly, every minister reaches a time in her ministry when the going seems especially difficult, and you just want out.  I was going through such a hard patch in my first church, and since it was my first church I had no previous experience with the noon-day demons.  In fact I didn’t see it as the middle, I saw it as the end.  I thought to myself, “Is this what it is like?  You work hard, you wear down, and you leave exhausted and unfulfilled.”

 

To think of that as a rhythm for ministry was not a happy prospect, but in the insecurity of my uncertainty, I saw no other way out than leaving.  It was then that the voice of God came to me through one of the teenagers of that church.  I don’t remember the context only the words that I have repeated to myself over and over through the years, “Sometimes it’s easier to stay than to leave”, she said.

 

As we move into the middle of our days, the middle of our lives, the middle of our jobs, the middle of our academic preparation, the middle of our marriages, sometimes it is easier to leave for all of the wrong reasons -- because we are worn out, because we are tired of trying, because something new looks more inviting.  That old monk had learned that such is the character of the battle of life in which we are engaged.  The noon-day demons will continue to attack and manifest themselves as weariness, depression, apathy, and indifference.

 

II.             The Monastic Remedy

 

But the wisdom of the desert fathers who dealt with such temptations on a daily basis was to develop techniques for staying awake, for remaining faithful, for being present to God, and attentive to the joy at the heart of our faith.  Basically they called those techniques work, prayer, and humility.

 

Now as good Calvinists you will welcome work as a remedy.  Work is something you know about and you do it well.  However, while work was seen as a remedy against acedia by the ancient monks, it was not the compulsive overwork and sense of driveness about productivity that marks our overworked lives in which we seek to be distracted from distraction-by-distraction.  As we all know, it is all too easy to hide from God behind our busyness and our own self-importance.

 

You see, work in the monastic tradition had little to do with the kind of driveness and ambition that pervades our culture, but it looked more like a quiet resolve to stay with the job at hand, to remain present and faithful to what must be done.  When we say, “hang in there” or “stay the course”, we are recognizing that while faithfulness is not always easy perhaps the only way out is the way through.  If you tried walking the labyrinth up in the gym last weekend, you began to experience the spiritual discipline that has this at its heart.

 

Now we need to be very clear that the kind of work we are talking about is not just keeping on keeping on -- a kind of nose to the grindstone drudgery that drains the joy out of life.  The psychotherapist, Vicktor Frankl, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz during World War II offers primary experience for what we are talking about here.  As a Nazi prisoner enduring the horrors of a death camp, Frankl knew what it meant to have freedom, health, dignity, and personal identity all stripped away.

 

But as he reports it, the one freedom that remained was the act of choosing -- the liberty to choose one’s own response to a situation, no matter how appalling that situation might be.  And that choice is the conscious, courageous determination to find meaning in one’s life no matter how miserable and hopeless it may seem.  It is that kind of work that can dispel the fog of acedia and the weariness of depression.

 

Robert Schuler likes to talk about turning your lemons into lemonade but this is more than just the power of positive thinking, it is choosing to trust that God is still a part of your life even when it doesn’t feel like it.  It is choosing to trust that God is walking with you even when you don’t see God’s footprints in the sand.  It is choosing to trust that you will be given the strength to continue even when you don’t know where it is coming from.

 

You see that is the way God works.  It is the manna from heaven approach.  We are seldom given the grace to know what the next day holds or what is beyond the horizon.  We have only the promise of the presence of God in every circumstance of life and that is enough.

 

Amen.