Worship for January 11 2026
Call To Worship
Leader: God calls us from the shadows into light,
People: from fear into hope,
Leader: from silence into praise.
See, the former things have come to pass,
and God is doing a new thing.
People: We come to worship: to listen, to trust, and to follow
the servant who brings God's peace to the world.
Leader: Let's worship God.
Old Testament Litany - Isaiah 42:1-9
Leader: Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.
People: God's Spirit rests upon him; he will bring justice to the nations.
Leader: He will not cry out or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street.
People: A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.
Leader: He will faithfully bring forth justice; he will not grow faint or be crushed.
People: Until justice is established in the earth, and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
Leader: Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out,
People: Who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it.
Leader: "I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness; I have taken you by the hand and kept you.
"
People: "You are a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.
"
Leader: "To open eyes that are blind, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.
"
People: "The Lord's glory will not be given to another; nor God's praise to idols.
"
Leader: See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare.
People: Before they spring forth, the Lord makes them known.
New Testament Ephesians 6:11-13
Sermon: Our struggle is not against flesh and blood?
Ephesians 6:11-13
New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition
[P]ut 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 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 the evil day and, having prevailed against everything, to stand firm.
2026-01-11 sermon
Ephesians 6:11-13
---
"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood.
"
Wait.
It's not?
That's a shame.
Because we're really good at THOSE struggles.
HALO drop the Special Forces.
Send a SWAT team.
In-Out.
Kill Bin Laden.
Extract Maduro.
Warp Speed.
Mission Accomplished.
But what do we do if our struggle ISN'T against flesh and blood?
What if you can't even tell who the enemy is?
What if you're not even sure there IS an enemy?
We're flesh and blood strugglers.
We're deadly in that realm.
But against the other realms?
That's when we get confused.
--
As for me and my family, it's been a wild couple of weeks.
Kristen and Our Daughter Emily came to Pensacola.
Then on Christmas Day we drove to Disney World, just like Mary and Joseph.
I mean.
Everyone ELSE was there.
With their newborns.
We went to Epcot where Our Daughter Anna works in Customer Relations as a Vacation Savior.
We spent our days park-hopping and being together.
Eating incredible meals.
Laughing all the way.
On the drive back here, Kristen said she was tired and achy.
We're over 60 now, so after a few days at Disney, of course you're tired and achy.
The next day she was SICK and achy.
So then the day after that I got sick and achy.
Because that's how competitive I am.
I'm a man.
I'm like, "Yeah, H3N2 influenza, subclade K, do your worst.
And it did.
It amazes me how husbands and wives can come down with the same virus at the same time and we men always -- feel so much worse.
Flu is proof that just because you can't SEE your enemy doesn't mean it won't pound you like a 64 year-old white male with preexisting conditions and a sedentary lifestyle.
You don't have to see it to believe it.
You feel it from your swollen eyeballs to your frozen feet.
For the next week we both laid on the couch and stared like zombies.
She says she doesn't know if she was delirious with fever or if there really was just one, week-long marathon football game where the players kept changing jerseys.
You know it's bad when you're watching the rebroadcasts, wondering,
"Didn't Alabama already lose this game?"
When you're a Tennessee fan, it never gets old.
We watched so many Beachfront Bargain Hunt Renovations we're now licensed contractors.
This has taught me our number one mandate here at Trinity is, "Keep Jean Well.
" Jean's handled her job, my job, even did Carpool Karaoke with my sermon last Sunday.
I've never sounded so good.
She offered to sub this week for me, too.
But I said, "No.
I like sounding like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"
She's right behind me, isn't she?
It's a reminder to we of the fragile male ego:
We all can be replaced.
And we'll never see it coming.
All this replacement and invisibility cloaking takes me one step closer to the point of this sermon.
Ephesians 6 tells us to put on the full armor of God to battle the demons, the cosmic powers.
To stand firm against the powers and principalities of the Upside Down, the Inside Out, the viral, the satanic.
Those demons who poof away the moment we've got a finger on 'em.
Who slip like ninjas back into the shadows.
Those are the Forces Ephesians 6 warns us about.
They're not just Special; they're HEAVENLY forces.
From a different dimension.
They're in.
They're out.
And you're left feeling like a zombie.
Unable to lift a finger.
--
All of Trinity Presbyterian Church is under attack.
We've been under attack for a few weeks now.
It's called a "Phishing" attack.
Not fishing like a peaceful day on the Gulf.
P-H-I-S-H, like the band PHISH, whose music makes more sense if your brain is in a cosmic place.
I'm more of a Grateful Dead guy, but that's a different sermon.
A Phishing attack is when hackers get your address book and pretend to be someone you know -- your banker, your doctor, your PASTOR.
They send you an email, fishing for a reply.
They want you to send them Apple Gift Cards, or wire funds, or a credit card or your Social Security number.
They especially prey on older adults who might not look real carefully at email addresses.
It happens a lot.
Somehow, they get a church email directory.
At my previous church, they asked the Clerk of Session to send them a PDF photo directory so they could learn names.
And boy did they learn names, phone numbers, and bank accounts.
The ones attacking Trinity know my name.
They make up Gmail accounts with the characters, J-A-M-E-S in it.
They connect my name to the address.
You can connect any name you want to an email address.
You can say you're LeBron James.
Because to a computer, you don't matter.
It's just a string of letters and numbers.
Back in the good-old days of the 1980's, when I got a degree in computers, it wasn't so hard to track down a hacker.
I've never been a hacker.
But, my roommate Paul was.
He was an OP, an Original Phisher.
He'd log onto the open network and pretend to be a sorority girl.
He'd strike up conversations with other nerds who had never kissed a girl either.
He'd send them all over campus to meet up for dates.
He might move your homework into different folders.
Not theft.
Just gaslighting to make you think you're losing your mind.
Anyway, LOL.
It was all fun and games until the FBI tapped our dial-up landline and came for him one day.
No charges were filed.
The school just wanted to scare the bejeesus out of him.
It worked.
Last I heard, Paul transferred to LSU - where he's now an assistant football coach.
The boss is gonna love him.
(I made up those last 2 sentences.)
I know that from a legal standpoint I was an accessory to Paul's cybercrimes.
But that's not the point of this illustration.
The point is, it used to be simpler to catch the criminals.
If you looked hard enough, you could see them.
But now, the hacking is done by AI's and bots all over the world, behind firewalls and encryption.
For attacks like the one hitting Trinity, the authorities just shrug their shoulders.
They say, "We're sorry, but we'll never find 'em.
Maybe you should be Amish."
I know it's not normal for a preacher to talk so much about computers in a sermon.
A - I'm not a normal pastor.
B - this really IS going to connect back to Ephesians in a minute.
And C - People ask me if I ever use my computer background in ministry.
Only every - single - day.
Think about it.
What's the one thing that causes you the most stress? What's the one thing that daily ruins your Zen flow of Hope, Peace, and Joy?
It's those damn computers.
Your "smart" phone.
Your smart TV.
Your smart microwave, your smart car, and -- I saw last week they're putting microchips in Lego blocks.
At least I think I saw that.
My head's still kinda fuzzy.
You need to know: I'm not just an Interim Pastor.
I'm your Religious Tech Support.
Next time you're ready to go all Nick Offerman and take a hammer to your phone, well, do it.
I love that commercial.
His phone buzzes when he's in a woodworking shop.
He says, "Lemme put that on silent."
Pulls out a 10-pound hammer and wails on it.
Makes me want to stand up and cheer.
Just like I did during that Indiana game.
And by the way, during that game, when they showed that quarterback's mom in the stands, if you weren't weeping like a baby, you need help.
I really don't think our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ cares about football.
But I do believe he cares deeply about that sweet boy and his mama.
Anyway, back to the demonic forces that plague us in the dark.
We fight a phishing attack not with flesh and blood.
We fight it the way you fight a fire.
Deprive it of its oxygen.
If you get ANY email from me, or from Hugh (yep, they're taking HIS name in vain, too), or from Jean, or even from sweet Hyunjoo –
if you get ANY email from staff that doesn't come from a trinitypcola.org address
or if anything about a message sounds in any way questionable.
.
.
Block it.
Call the office.
Pick up the phone and call me.
Let me be your Spiritual Anti-virus.
And if I can't figure it out, I'll call in the big guns: Ford.
In the worst case, we all just hitch our horses to a post out front and Ed leads us in guitar singalongs around the campfire.
Which reminds me, the Chili Cookoff is 5pm.
I'll see you tonight, if I'm still working here.
--
So finally this all connects back to Ephesians.
And it tells us that we're NOT in a battle of flesh and blood.
Which is sad because 99% of our highly-crafted weaponry is.
And if you've ever gotten hooked on Dateline, or a True Crime podcast, or watched 15 seconds of news these days, we love – WE LOVE – justice.
We crave justice.
Actually, that's not quite right.
We get all mouth-wattery about RETRIBUTION.
JUSTICE can take a long time.
And after 10 or 20 years of appeals and mistrials, it loses that juicy flavor.
RETRIBUTION, though – that's an eye for an eye.
A tooth for a tooth.
Now we're talking real flesh and real blood, am I right? Booyah.
RETRIBUTION may lead, as they say, to a world of blind, toothless people.
And we might make a few mistakes along the way.
Our bad.
And I know.
I feel it.
I feel like we little ordinary people have no power, no say.
You know the one about you don't bring a knife to a gunfight?
I know that's how it feels.
Like the problems, the perps, like they're all walking.
And we're left holding the butter knife, waiting for justice, waiting for closure that never, ever comes.
Our armor – our armor in this flesh and blood world that helps us strike down our flesh and blood enemies –
our armor might look cool in a video game or on the streets of Minneapolis –
but you know – and I know –
there's not one thing holy about it.
It's not spiritual armor.
It's not even close to the full armor of God.
I don't know exactly what Ephesians means about the putting on the full armor of God, I guarantee you it's not made of Kevlar.
It's not riding atop an APC.
Jesus – the #1 Spiritual Warrior of all time didn't even bring a knife to a gunfight.
Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior – our Real Lord and our Real Savior – brought a CROSS – a CROSS to a --- what kind of fight was it, exactly?
--
Isaiah 42 – which we read together – words that YOU, yourself read – in that poetry of spiritual war and spiritual peace, it says – and you read:
[To be my servant,] whom I uphold,
Bringing forth justice to the nations,
Not crying out or lifting a voice,
Not breaking the bruised reed
Or quenching the dim light of a candle,
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth,
[God's warrior] is the who is .
.
.
a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.
Who opens eyes that are blind, who brings out prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.
"
For "The Lord's glory will not be given to another; nor God's praise to idols.
See – God says – SEE! the former things – Things of FLESH AND BLOOD have come to pass,
and NEW things I now declare.
AND YOU KNOW WHAT?? WE'LL NEVER EVEN SEE THEM COMING.
Before they spring forth, the Lord – the LORD -- makes them known.
Now I don't know when that's gonna be.
And I don't know how that's gonna look.
Because, I'm just a guy made out of flesh and blood, just like the rest of you.
But Jesus, who brought his cross to OUR battles, is going to make it so.
I hope I live to see it.
In this world or the next.
[eos]
