Colossians 2:16-23

02/27/11

Colossians 2:16-23

Hudson UMC

For one of my classes this semester, I have been reflecting on the nature and practice of preaching.  I imagined that this would be fairly straightforward and wouldn’t bring too many surprises.  However, as I have shared with a few congregation members over the last few weeks, I have found the shift from preaching through one of the gospels to preaching through a letter of Paul to be very interesting and even sometimes rather difficult.  When you preach on the life and teaching of Christ, you are dealing with someone whom everyone likes and wants to listen to.  You are dealing with parts of the Bible that are largely narrative and can take on many different layers of meaning.  When you turn to preach on Paul’s letters, the whole situation changes.  There are many people who do not like Paul, who think that Paul is particularly angry, who think that Paul’s message is so different than Christ’s that we should say that it was Paul and not Christ, who is the founder of Christianity.

On top of that, with Paul, there is not so much ambiguity.  You can’t look at the text and say as easily, “We can look at it this way, but also in this other, radically different, way.”  Paul’s letters are not filled with stories but tightly organized arguments to make a specific point.  At some point in every one of his letters, Paul gets to the point where the rubber really meets the road and so there is really no avoiding the fact that, when we are really listening to him, there comes a time when the rubber has to meet the road in our own lives and communities.

 As a brief recap, let me just remind everyone that Paul has just spent a chapter in a half pointing out that, at the end of the day, Christ is of absolutely central and pivotal importance.  He has critiqued a few ways that the Colossian Christians were, whether they meant to or not, allowing Christ to be pushed to the side.  Now that he has made his theological basis absolutely clear, everyone now knows that Paul is making all his arguments from a completely and radically Christian point of view, that is, a point of view that is rooted and grounded in Christ for everything, he moves to his serious exhortation.

“Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths.  These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”  When we look at these words in context, we can see that Paul is saying, “Don’t be deceived.  You have received Christ Jesus the Lord, the one in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily and you have come to share in that same fullness.  Your evil has been taken by him and nailed to the cross.  You died with him in baptism and you were raised with him through faith in the power of God.  You have been forgiven, not by human beings, but by God himself.  So, because of all of that, don’t let people judge you because you eat certain foods or you avoid certain foods.  Don’t let people judge you because you celebrate a particular holiday or because you choose not to celebrate it.  What really matters is Christ and, so long as you are united in Christ, those other differences simply do not matter.”

He continues on.  “Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.”  There were, and still are, people who bind up real faith with a particular kind of lifestyle of discipline in one form or another.  There are some who say that, unless you live a certain way, you can’t be a Christian, or unless you have received a great vision from God, you can’t be a real Christian, or, if you don’t pass their particular doctrinal scrutiny, you can’t be part of the church.  Paul says that this is nonsense.  None of those things are more basic to the Christian life than the actual live, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.

So far, it seems that Paul is making a pretty standard, “live and let live, think and let think,” argument, but this is not totally the case.  “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world?  Why do you submit to regulations, ‘Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch?”  Paul has just been pointing out that, if people can be united in Christ, the particular ways that each person happens to carry that life in Christ out seem to be of little consequence.  In fact, he has said that nobody should try to judge the Colossians about food and drink or about festivals, new moons and Sabbaths, which means that he is not saying that, if the people follow their own voluntarily restricted life or if they do not do so, they are not Christians.

However, once he has made it clear that he is not questioning their faith or their commitment to Christ, he asks a very natural thing.  Granting that there is not anything inherently wrong with submitting to regulations like those of the ancient Jews, the question still remains, “Why do you submit to them?”  This is a rather searching question.  If the answer we give is, “Well, there is no real reason why we do it, we just do,” the implication is that, since they don’t really matter and we know they don’t really matter, we should be able to give them up at a moment’s notice.  Our particular preferences for what songs we sing, whether they are traditional hymns or more contemporary songs, whether we practice communion one way or another way, how we decorate the church, should all become things that aren’t worth fighting over since, at the end of the day, there is no reason that we have to do things one way and not another.

The thing is, most of us aren’t usually prepared to say that there really is no reason why we do things the way we do because, if we say that, it means that we have no good reason to resist change, and nobody likes change.  However, the moment we say that it matters whether we do it this way and not some other way, we have Paul’s whole argument calling us on the carpet.  What can our ways of doing things possibly contribute to the Christian life above and beyond what Christ has done and who Christ is?  The answer, of course, is nothing.  Paul was an apostle who came from a radically Jewish background, who had a deep compassion for his Jewish brothers and sisters, but who also ministered in many Gentile contexts, from Asia Minor, which is modern day Turkey, to Greece, to Italy, and beyond.  Everywhere he went, he saw the Gospel transforming people’s lives, so he knew that it couldn’t be because of whatever culture he happened to be in.  The Gospel had a transforming effect in every culture, which means that it cannot be held captive by any culture.

One might say, “Big deal, so Paul is saying that we should be more flexible.  Don’t we all know that already?  Is there really a danger here?”  The answer is that there is absolutely a danger.  Paul finishes out this chapter with these words.  “All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings.  These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.”

These are words that probably made many people in Colossae very angry indeed.  After all, there were clearly many people who believed that doing certain things would make them better, or make God happier, or something along those lines.  After all, when people restrict what they do or what they eat or what they touch, it is almost always to make themselves more aware of what they do and, thus, help them to avoid self-indulging behavior.  But Paul is saying that these things are not inherently helpful.  At best, they are “human commands and teachings” that refer to things that are passing away.

As was pointed out last week, Paul’s concern is not that people would be led astray by things that are obviously destructive, but that they would be deceived by plausible arguments.  It is the fact that the arguments are plausible, that is, that sensible people might be convinced by them, that makes them so dangerous.  The same is true for these ways that we insist on doing things.  Paul will grant that they have “an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body.”  However, it is precisely this appearance of usefulness that makes them all the more dangerous.  That is why so many people get mislead into thinking that there is only one way to live as a Christian; the things that they are asked to do make so much sense, it must be useful.  Not so says Paul.  On their own, they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.

All of this is great to talk about, but do we really still do things like this in our modern world?  We sure do.  Paul is speaking out against any tendency to substitute another set of ideas or practices for Christ.  Surely we do not have to look very far to find things that people have substituted for Christ.  In the conservative direction, we see that there are those who place the Bible as a text in the central place in their lives instead of Christ.  The argument that can be made to support this goes like this, “The Bible is how we learn about Jesus so it must be good.”  You all know that I can never pick on only one side, so we can’t stop there.  In the liberal direction, we see that there are those who substitute social justice and acts of mercy for Christ.  Their argument is, “Jesus showed us that we ought to care for the poor and love one another, so it must be good.”

As shocking as it may sound, I believe that these, too, are things that “have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.”  How is that, you might ask?  After all, both seem to be working with some pretty good arguments.  In the first case, the passion for the written form of God’s word can very easily become collapsed into the following of rules for rules’ sake.  When we do that, we place the Bible as our authority, not because it bears witness to the even greater authority of Christ, but because we have simply decided that this ancient text that has been authoritative for so many should be authoritative for us, too.  When we look around and how Christian faith and the Bible are treated in our world today, we can see that it is incredibly easy to try and reduce everything that God has done into explicit statements that are always and everywhere valid and lose sight of the powerful, dynamic and personal nature of God’s work among us and in us.  If we take this point of view, Christ can have nothing to say to us about how we interpret the Bible because we only care about Christ because he is one of the things taught about in the Bible.  However, we must always remember that it is with Christ that we died to the ways of the world, not with a book, even one so unique as the Bible.  We need to never forget that, if we really believe that Christ is the truth in its fullest sense, whatever we mean when we say that the Bible is the truth, we can’t mean the same thing as we do when we say that Christ is the truth.

In the second case, it is very easy to place our trust, not in what Christ has done on our behalf and in our place independently of us, but in our ability to do the same kinds of things that Jesus did.  Immediately, when our acts of justice and mercy take the central place and push Christ out, he becomes nothing more than the example of good behavior.  Good deeds become virtuous in themselves and we quickly begin to wonder, “Why is Jesus special?”  After all, many people have done good deeds and cared for people.  If it is really the good deeds that count, why be so dogmatic about faith in Christ?”  By what standard can we decide what qualifies as social justice or good deeds?  Christ can no longer be our standard because, if we have taken this point of view, we only care about Christ because he was so good at being good, not because he is truly the controlling center of all our thoughts and actions and the real definition of what good really is.

The ultimate lesson that we need to learn from Paul here is that it is very easy to trust in something, anything other than Christ; it is easy to forget that by making anything other than Christ the basis of our decisions is to make Christ not that basis, in spite of all our best intentions.

Again, the implications of this are absolutely radical, that is, they go to the very roots of the Gospel and of the Christian life.  Upon what do you put your trust at the end of the day?  If it is anything but Christ and Christ alone, it will shake, it will crumble, and it will one day fall to the ground.  We must not trust in our money, or, if not our money, we must not trust in our ability to work hard.  After all, if we have learned nothing else in this recession, it is that being a hard working person cannot always guarantee you a job if the economy gets bad.  We must not trust that we have lived a good life, doing more good than bad because, when we look at what lengths God has gone through to redeem us and make us his own, never once does he weigh our good deeds against our evil deeds.  We learn that nothing other than Christ will support us, but that Christ can attacked by the entire world and will not bend or break under it.  Any time we try to collapse Jesus and the Christian life into a list of dos and a list of don’ts, we are missing out on the dynamic power of God in our lives.  Everything needs to be done in the light of Christ.  That means we need to read the Scriptures in light of who Christ is or else we will misunderstand what they are really saying.  It means that we cannot even define what “justice” or “mercy” is without looking at Christ, or else we will close it off from him and make it into something that is un-Christian.  Yes indeed, it means that even a set of guidelines that are so authoritative and helpful as the Ten Commandments must be understood and defined in light of what we see in Christ or else we will transform even them into something they were never intended to be.

Even when something seems to be so important that we think that it goes to the core of who we are, Christ is more important still.  Christ is the one upon whom we can depend, even when we cannot depend on ourselves; he is the one who loves us, even when we do not love ourselves; he is the one who wants the best for us, even when we seem to be intent on choosing the worst for ourselves.  It is with Christ that we have died and been raised from the dead.  It is Christ in whom we live today and it is Christ in whom we will live forevermore.  Let us cast everything aside that would try to take his place.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Colossians 2:4-14

02/13/11

Colossians 2:4-14

Hudson UMC

If the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians was about the centrality of Christ and the last chapter and a half are about concrete ethical exhortation, chapter two and the beginning of chapter three are, in my opinion, the heart of Paul’s whole interaction with the people.  Here we have Paul getting to the core of the issues that caused him to write the letter in the first place.  At first glance, the advice doesn’t seem to be all that applicable to our lives today but actually, I believe, that if we look at what is going on here, the difference from our modern world will help us to see what is really going on.  Then, when we look back at our world, we will begin to see that we really aren’t all that different from those Colossian Christians all those long years ago.

Paul writes, “I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments.  For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, and I rejoice to see your morale and the firmness of your faith in Christ.”  These words form the introduction to a very important set of observations.  If you look in your pew Bible, you will see that these two verses are separated from the rest of our text by a heading.  I think this is unfortunate.  The editors who have tried to make it easier to understand the flow of Paul’s argument have, at least in this case, made it harder to see the connections that are really there.  Remember, in the original text, there were no section headings; there weren’t even any verse numbers or even, if we go back far enough, any punctuation!

Before Paul gives any correction, he points out what the Colossians should be doing.  “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”  In simple terms, Paul is saying, “Trust in Christ.  That is what you have been taught and that is still the best way to live.  When anything comes that tries to marginalize him in any way, stay rooted in Christ.”

Now comes his advice.  “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.”  This is one of those loaded sentences; if we don’t slow down and take it seriously, we will miss what Paul is saying here and we won’t see how it actually applies to us.  When Paul says, “according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirituals of the universe,” he is not saying the same thing twice, but is referring to what appears to be the two major ways the Colossians are, in point of fact, not remaining rooted first and foremost in Christ.  The problem is that, if we take these points seriously, they might not necessarily seem all that bad, and so we might not understand why Paul has a problem with them.

Let us start with “according to human tradition.”  What was going on at the time was that there was a major revival of ancient Jewish practices in Colossae.  As a side note, there has been a tradition, especially in Methodism, to divide the Jewish law into two parts, a moral law and a ceremonial law.  The moral law is defined by the laws that deal with how we live our lives and includes the Ten Commandments as well as any other law that deals with how we relate to God or how we relate to other people.  The ceremonial law is seen as restricted to the laws in the Old Testament that deal with things like ritual cleanliness, the special rites of the Jewish people and the special festivals that happen throughout the year and things along those lines.  In the New Testament, we read, not least in Paul, that Christ has fulfilled and done away with the law, but surely Christ has not undone the ethical nature of God and his people, right?  In order to deal with this, Christians have often made the point that, while Christ has released us from the ceremonial law, he has not released us from the moral law.

It must be said that this way of looking at the Old Testament is very user-friendly and that, if we lived our lives that way, we would be on our way to living more fully as the people of God.  However, there is one major problem with this whole way of thinking, and that is that the ancient Jews would simply not recognize the sharp distinction between moral and ceremonial laws.  To them, what we might call the ceremonial law bore a moral imperative.  You must keep them to be a good Jew.  In fact, if someone followed all of what we would call the moral laws but consistently broke the ceremonial laws, they would be cut off from their people, perhaps even more quickly than if they broke the moral law.

All of that is to say that, when we realize that the law was regarded so highly at that time, it is not all that surprising that people wanted to follow it carefully.  If we couple that with the fact that the Israelites had been following the laws of Moses for about two thousand years, if someone had even a single traditional bone in their body they might be attracted to that way of life.  After all, it had deeper roots than about anything else that was going on and so much of it made sense.  If we add to all this the fact that Jesus himself was Jewish and would have followed many if not all of these laws, it would not be hard to come up with an argument that could be used to say that Christians needed to obey the Jewish law.  What I think we absolutely need to understand if we are to take this issue seriously is that we are not dealing with people who were intentionally trying to shove Jesus out of his central place, but with people who were doing everything they could to please God, and what better way could they do that than by following the law that God himself gave his people?

When we turn to consider what Paul meant by being taken captive, “according to the elemental spirits of the universe,” we see something that is at the same time very different and yet very much the same.  In order to understand what Paul is talking about, we need to understand that “elemental spirits of the universe,” is a compact phrase that expresses several possible things.  In ancient Greece, there was an obsession with what the world was made out of.  It was more or less universally accepted that everything was made up of four elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire.  The question that remained was, “How do these four things make up everything else?”  And perhaps the more pressing question was, “Which of these four things is the very most basic?”  For example, if fire is the simplest of the elements, then Earth, Water and Air could be said to be made up of fire.  This whole way of thinking intended to cut behind what we can see and touch and penetrate into the mysteries of the world, or, perhaps, in light of the Colossian tendencies we noticed last week, the mysteries of God.

A related but somewhat later use of the phrase, “elementary spirits of the universe” was in scientific works.  Euclid’s geometry was praised in the ancient world for its simplicity and its beauty.  It started with five postulates, or statements that were thought to be self-evident, and then the rest of geometry was simply deduced logically from them.  It was simple, it was beautiful, and it was the most rigorous way of thinking that anyone knew.  The goal in science at the time was to find out the small number of “first principles,” or “elementary spirits of the universe,” upon which everything else depended, like in geometry.  Then, it would be possible to use our deductive skills and understand the universe in a way we couldn’t before.

What this means is that there were people in the Colossian church who were engaging in the natural science and philosophy of their day and Paul is worried that it is leading them to push Jesus out of his central place.  Now, it cannot be stressed strongly enough that we cannot jump from Paul’s critique of ancient science and philosophy to a general condemnation to anyone who engages in and appreciates modern science and philosophy; I especially want to make that clear because I myself fall into that category to a certain degree.  Ancient science and philosophy was very much religiously charged.  To engage in natural science at that time was to deal with questions about the foundations of the universe and, to be in the conversation at the time required one to embrace a particular way of thinking that was not at all friendly to Christian convictions.  In spite of the fact that some might disagree, modern science is actually far more open to distinctively Christian ideas and convictions than science has ever been at any other time in history.

The point is that both ancient philosophy and science at the time treated the questions they were asking as having ultimate significance, that is, they were the very most important questions that could be asked and that there was no way to get any deeper than them.  This is the problem that Paul has.  As we have seen throughout the letter so far, Paul affirms that the only one who is truly ultimate is Christ.  Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the one through whom and for whom all things were created, the one who reconciles us to God and, in our passage for this morning, he is the one in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily.  Any attempt to get to God by some other means than by Christ, even if they seem as good and make as much sense as following the Jewish law or engaging in the best of what secular thought has to offer, is an attempt to get to God by avoiding God, which is nothing less than absurd.

Again, we will unpack these issues more fully in the coming weeks, but this is a radical thing that Paul is saying.  It means that it is entirely possible that we are pushing Christ out of his central place without necessarily even realizing that we are doing it.  It also means that there may very well be things that we do that seem good, and perhaps even are good in their own way that are taking Christ’s place in our lives.  It means that we might just have to look long and hard at these things and make some difficult decisions that might get people around us looking at us and thinking that we are different.  Two weeks ago, I included a quotation by Thomas F. Torrance and I want to say it again.  “In the great hierarchy of truths, to be absolutely related to what is of permanent and paramount importance in the center, carries with it a requirement for us to be only relatively related to everything else.”  To be absolutely related to Christ carries with it a requirement for us to be only relatively related to everything else, even if it seems good, or at least harmless.

It is because of this utterly radical nature of Paul’s statements that I want to go back to those first words in our passage.  “I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments.”  You see, Paul is not concerned with the Colossians being led astray by people who say things that are clearly seen to be ridiculous.  He is not worried that the people will be deceived by ideas that everyone thinks are foolish.  The problem is that the Colossians might be deceived by plausible arguments.  By definition, plausible arguments are things that we could imagine ourselves believing in.  They are clearly things that rational people wouldn’t be shocked at.  The concern is not with things that are obviously destructive but with things that seem to be good, because it is the things that seem good but are actually deceptive that are the most dangerous.

So what does all of this mean for us today?  It means that we have to take seriously the fact that we might not have all the answers, that something might need to change.  It doesn’t take much to look around and find people who mean well but live in such a way that is either destructive to themselves or to others.  And yet, though we need to take this seriously and really place ourselves open to critique, we do so as an act of faith.  Paul’s letter, again, is not primarily a word of condemnation but a word of grace.  He knows that the Colossians are not evil people who are looking to abandon Christ at the first chance, but people who desperately want to be faithful in every aspect of their lives.

What do we have to risk by taking a hard and searching look at what we do and think to see if Christ is really central?  It may be that we find that Christ is indeed in the center of our lives and rejoice that we are participating in Christ’s ministry in this community.  It may be, however, that we find that there is something or other that is hindering us from being as faithful as we might be, something that, whether we meant it to or not, is sneaking into that central place.  In fact, it is entirely likely that we will find something like that, because none of us, to my knowledge, are yet perfected in love.  But what does it mean to find such a thing?  It means that we are empowered to let God transform us further than he has yet done.  It means that, as God has brought these competing things to our attention, we can more effectively allow God to take their place and fill us with joy.  If it is something that is bad, we are further sanctified by God and our lives will be the better for it.  If it is something good that is taking more than its share of our devotion, it will be put back in its proper place and our priorities will be more balanced and our love for our neighbors will be all the stronger as it flows from our love of God instead of trying to do everything on our own human strength.

So, I would challenge each of you, my brothers and sisters, to join with me in a season of self-examination.  I do not mean that we should join in a guilt trip, nor that we should be out to find faults, but that we would simply allow the light of God’s grace to shine on our lives and release us from any darkness that might be there.  Paul’s concerns are not primarily directed at children he needs to reprimand, but fellow Christians that just need a reminder of what really matters.  As Paul says in our text, when we were buried with Christ in baptism, we were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead…erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.  He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.  Let us allow the God who has loved us so much show that love to us even more intensely in the week to come.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Colossians 1:24-2:5

02/13/11

Colossians 1:24-2:5

Hudson UMC

There is always a certain amount of doubt about what exactly is going on in the communities to whom Paul sends his letters. Part of the reason for this is that we do not have any letters that people wrote to Paul, only what Paul wrote to them.  What this means is that, if we want to understand what was going on in a particular community, we have to do a kind of “mirror reading,” where we look at what Paul has to say and try to figure out the situation that provoked his letter.  This might seem at first glance that this is a remarkably arbitrary way of doing things and indeed I have raised this very issue in classes.  However, it isn’t as bad as you might think.  Paul wrote many letters that we have today.  We can compare and contrast what he says to one church with what he says to another church.  There is, understandably, a great deal of overlap between them, but there will often be one or two things he emphasizes in a particular letter that are simply not present in others.  When we look at what sets a particular letter apart, we have at least narrowed down our possibilities.

I say that because, when we look at Colossians, especially this passage, that way, we find an interesting issue that, the more I read the letter, the more I am convinced lies at the heart of the Colossian situation.  Paul uses the word “mystery” four times in Colossians, more than just about any letter.  Three of those times are in this passage.  Listen to how the word comes up in our text.  “I became its servant according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints.  To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory…I want [your] hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

If I were to try to say clearly and directly what I think is lying under the surface here, I would say this:  The Colossian Christians are very much interested in the mystery of God.  In fact, they are so interested in what they call the mystery of God that they are convinced that, at the end of the day, it is what really matters.  The only problem is that they don’t all agree on what the mystery of God is. 

As we will see from some of the next discussion, there seem to be two major ways people have been trying to know the mystery of God.  The first and most obvious we could say takes a Jewish form.  There seemed to be a revival of ancient Jewish practices in Colossae at the time, with people looking back at the Old Testament and saying, “Hey, God gave these commands to his people a long time ago.  Why aren’t we doing them, too?  If God commanded it, doesn’t it have to be good?”  Even if we, along with Paul, disagree with this, it has a certain logic to it.  The other way that people were trying to know the mystery of God was through pagan philosophy and cosmology.  We will hear more in the next passages about “the elemental spirits of the universe,” which is either referring to true paganism, a theory of the four elements, earth, fire, air and water, or the basis of a logical system.  To people who had lived so long in a pagan context, this tendency cannot possibly be surprising.

However, there is a deep problem with all of these ways of thinking.  After all, the Colossians that Paul is writing to are not just secular citizens of Greece, they are Christians.  When we look at the alternatives that are mentioned, Christ is conspicuously absent.  If these people are supposed to be Christians, shouldn’t Christ, perhaps, have something to say regarding their approach to God?  Paul obviously thought so.  After all, he just spent many verses praising Christ as the image of the invisible God, as the one in whom the fullness of deity was pleased to dwell, the one who reconciles us with God through his own blood.  To be a Christian and to try to find some way to God that somehow bypasses Christ is simply irrational.

Let’s take the three times that Paul uses the word “mystery” in this passage to see what he has to say about the matter.  “I became its servant according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints.”  Paul speaks of this mystery as having been around throughout all the ages, but has now been revealed in an unprecedented way.  What can he possibly be talking about?  He isn’t talking about a new system of theoretical ethics.  After all, if you look at what the earliest Christians believed about right and wrong, they were remarkably similar to what the Jews of their time believed.  Paul is not speaking about a fundamental change in what is right and what is wrong.  He is also not speaking of a shift in how we should approach practical ethics.  It is true that the earliest Christians were well-known as being particularly moral people, but, though they did tend to apply their ethics more completely in their lives, if we took each of their actions by itself, none of them were totally surprising.

The question that we need to ask is, “What has been around, in some hidden form, since the very beginning, but has now been revealed to the saints?”  The only answer that makes sense with Paul, is Christ.  To Paul, Christ has, in a sense, always been around, because all things were created in, through and for, him.  He is the Son of the one God of Israel, who has been with him since the very beginning, which means he has been present throughout the long history of Israel.  However, this Son of God, who has always existed in deep and dynamic fellowship with the Father and the Spirit, has been revealed among us as the man Jesus of Nazareth.

Now, if we look at Paul’s words again, it might be argued, “Paul is equating the mystery with the word of God, not with Jesus.”  The problem with this is that, in our modern American context, when we hear “the word of God,” the first thing that often comes to our mind is the Bible.  This way, when we hear that Paul wants to make the word of God fully known and that the word of God is indeed the mystery we are talking about, our tendency is to think that Paul wants to explain the Bible to us really really well.  However, one thing I hope you remember from the Gospel according to John is that Jesus is referred to as the Word of God who was with God and who was God.  When we realize that, when the New Testament speaks about the word of God, it is first and foremost speaking of the living word of God made flesh in Christ, we realize that, when Paul speaks about making the word of God fully known, he is saying that he wants the Colossians to know Christ, that it is devotion to Christ that will enable them to understand the mystery of God, for the mystery of God is Christ.

When we look at the next sentence, we see the second time Paul talks about mystery.  “To them, [that is, the saints,] God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”  At this point Paul is speaking, not so much about the mystery itself, but of the riches of the glory of this mystery.  When we look at what he says the riches of the glory of the mystery of God is, what do we find?  We find that these riches are Christ in us, the hope of glory.  This is incredibly important because, just as Paul’s point, that Christ the word of God is the mystery of God, is so important because people were hoping to find a deeper and more profound mystery than Christ, his point here, that the riches of the glory of this mystery is Christ in us, is important because it seems that the people wanted the glory of the mystery of God to be something greater, or at least different, than Christ in them.

The last time the word mystery appears in our passage is when Paul says, “I want [your] hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that [you] may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”  In ancient Greece, there were a huge number of religious and philosophical schools, where you could go and be instructed in a particular way of thinking and living.  If you didn’t like one school of thought, you could go to another.  If one group kicked you out, there was always another one to go to.  In fact, when Paul goes to Athens, the writer of Acts pokes fun at the people who lived in this center of learning.  “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.”

Why were there so many different schools?  Why would people always be developing new ways of thinking and living?  A big part of the reason is that Greece was a nation that was full of people who had become so well organized that they had more free time than other people had, so they were able to dedicate more of their time to thinking about life, the universe, and everything.  The problem is that, once you start really thinking about the complexities of life, you realize that there is no end to the questions you could ask.  It is easy to confuse a new way to look at the universe with a genuine insight that brings you closer to the truth.  We have accounts from the early Christian centuries that various philosophers would modify the views of their schools ever so slightly, then found their own school, just so they could seem more important.  As a side note, it bears a striking resemblance to some of the splintering of the church that has happened in the past and is still happening now.

Part of the reason that people were and are so interested in new and different ways of thinking and living is because we have this sneaking suspicion that there is something more out there.  We seem to want something sufficiently simple that we know that we are capable of it but something sufficiently complex so that we can feel that we are actually doing something and so we can have a good reason to explain why some people don’t have the same insights that we do.  We deeply hope that truth is accessible to us but we also are fully convinced that knowing the truth means we have to make some serious changes to our life and way of thinking.

This is exactly what is happening in Colossae.  People have heard the good news of Jesus Christ, that God has come among us and has radically changed the way we relate to him, that somehow it is through Christ that we receive grace and are reconciled to God.  The only problem with this, at least in the eyes of the Colossians, is that it just seems too easy.  Where is the deep soul searching?  Where is the detailed and organized rule of life that we crave to be able to show the whole world that we know something that they need to know?  Surely, there must be something more; surely it cannot be that easy.

And yet, this is precisely what Paul is saying.  He has already, at the end of only one chapter, made extravagant claims about the centrality of Christ.  He is trying to show these people who want to follow Christ but feel the need to engage in all kinds of philosophy and ancient Jewish practices in order to really get at the mystery of God, that the only answer they need, indeed, the only answer there is, is Christ.  Paul is saying, in so many words, “There is no mystery of God beyond Christ.”  To push Christ out of the central place because he doesn’t fit our definition of what is sufficiently mysterious is to say to God, “You don’t seem to understand the mystery of God as well as I do.  You, after all, say that Christ is enough.  I disagree.”

What is Paul implying about the whole attempt to get behind Jesus through these other means?  If we were to paint it as strong as possible, it would be to say, “To engage in these other searches for truth when the real truth has been presented to you is to show that you have not yet come to know the truth.”  While that certainly gets at the root problem, Paul, in spite of his feisty nature, is not usually so harsh.  His words are not nearly so much geared at condemning those who are intentionally trying to throw the gospel out, but at showing compassion toward and giving guidance to those who have not yet understood the full implications of Christ.  The danger of substituting other things for Christ is very much real and we can see it all around us if we have eyes to see it, but we are not usually dealing with barefaced hypocrites who are actively trying to undermine the gospel, but people who need some help connecting all the dots.  I know this because I am just barely beginning to understand what Paul is saying here.

At the end of the day, when Paul emphasizes that the Colossians should not be looking for a mystery of God other than and beyond Christ, he is not saying that they should be satisfied with something less than ultimate, but that by doing so, they are avoiding the only one who really is ultimate.  Their understanding of truth in Christ is far too low.  In point of fact, to say that we have to be content with Christ, as if Christ is somehow something less than the most important thing in our world and lives is to show that we do not yet understand that, in Christ, the fullness of God has met with us and continues to meet with us.  To look for something deeper than Christ is to be looking for something that is deeper than God and we cannot be surprised that we don’t find anything like that because there is nothing like that.

Christ is indeed the very mystery of God.  He is a mystery that is at the same time truly revealed to us and really open to our knowledge, and yet utterly greater than we can ever think or imagine.  As we get further into the letter we will see some of the concrete ways that people were pushing Christ out of the center of their lives and we will consider some ways, that may even surprise us, that we do the same thing in our world today.  However, what is important is that, when we talk about Christ being central, we really mean it.  Christ is the mystery of God, the living Son of God who cannot be put into a box and who causes all of our hard and fast rules to be redefined in light of who he is.  He is the one absolute in this variable and shifting world.  He is the greatest example of the love, mercy, and utter self-giving compassion of God, and he is the one who empowers us day by day.  Let us rejoice that we have a God who has loved us so much that he has met us where we are and gives himself to us so completely.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Colossians 1:15-23

02/06/11

Colossians 1:15-23

Hudson UMC

When I first started seminary, I imagine I thought about the significance of the Trinity about as much as most everyone else does:  that is to say, I didn’t really think about it at all.  However, I spent my whole first year with Dr. Colyer, who has thought long and hard about the Trinity and showed me that John Wesley was actually much more concerned about the Trinity than we often think.  All of a sudden, I was confronted with the fact that something that I just kind of checked off my “to believe” list was actually fundamental to Christian faith.  It was an amazing experience.

At the beginning of my second year of school, I set myself to the task of finding out just exactly what lay at the very root of Christian faith.  What is it that we believe from which everything else flows?  I thought about it pretty hard for a couple of weeks.  Then, Alli and I were in the car and I exclaimed, “I’ve got it!”  She replied, “Got what?”  “I know what the single most important doctrine of Christian faith is.”  “Really?  What is it?”  And I said very seriously, “The Incarnation.”  Now, if you haven’t picked this up from me by now, the Incarnation is the technical term that is used to describe the fact that the God of the universe took on flesh and lived among us as the man Jesus.  Alli just looked at me and said, “Really, Travis?  Jesus?  Jesus is the most important part of Christianity?”  You see, even though I had struggled mentally to try to really get down to the roots of my faith and what I perceived to be the faith of the church throughout history, my conclusion wasn’t anything that a fourth grade Sunday School student couldn’t have told me.  Jesus is the most important part of Christianity.

It might sound incredibly simple and self-evident, but the more I think about it and the more I look at the world around me, the more I realize that this simple idea so easily gets swept under a rug, so easily gets forgotten, or rather, gets pushed to the side.  If you forget everything you learned growing up in the church, or, if you, like me, didn’t grow up in the church, forget everything you have learned in the church, and just looked at what gets talked about in our culture when they talk about Christianity, would you tend to get left with the idea that, when we talk about our faith, we are talking first and foremost about the centrality of Jesus to everything?  I don’t think you would.  I think that you would find two or three key issues that are probably moral and ethical in nature that tend to divide the nation, each side looking down on the other.

Why is it that when we, as a society, stand up for our faith, we end up standing up, not for the true divinity and true humanity of Christ, for the incredible love that God has for us that he would take on the brokenness of the world and heal it from the inside out, that we have been forgiven and so we show our gratitude by forgiving others, but for various aspects of legal policy, one way or the other?  I think it is because it is so easy to get worked up over what the culture is worked up about and it is hard to stay focused on central things when everyone around seems to be focused on peripheral things.

Believe it or not, this is exactly what was going on in the Colossian church.  We will see it more clearly as we continue through the letter, but the Colossian Christians seemed to be entirely obsessed with things other than Christ.  There were some who were insisting that, since Christianity began as a group within Judaism, that even Jesus was a Jew, for example, Christians can and indeed should engage in all of the ancient Jewish laws, not just the ones that deal with morality, but also with those that tell us what we should eat and what we can and cannot touch.  On the other side, there were those who understood that Jesus came so that God’s love might come to everyone, Gentiles as well as Jews.  Since God came and met them where they were, it seemed to mean that they could continue in all their pagan ways of thinking, considering their philosophical systems to be as important, or even more important than Christ.

Once we understand that Paul is responding to a tendency to push Jesus out of the central place because of some kind of ideology, whether Jewish or Gentile, whether moral or cultural, we can begin to understand just what he says in our passage for today.  It is, perhaps, one of the most beautiful and strong declarations of the centrality and significance of Christ in the entire Bible.  Speaking of Jesus, Paul says, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him.”  Here is Paul affirming in the strongest terms that Jesus is God.  One of the key things that the Jewish tradition in particular affirmed only God could do is create, and here is Paul saying that everything that was created was created in Christ, Christ is the one through whom the various rulers of the world were created, meaning that Christ is far greater than all of them put together.

“He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.”  The classical Jewish conviction was that, before we were alive, before our great-grandparents were alive, before our nation came into existence, before the mighty kingdoms of the ancient world rose and fell, before there was anything at all, there was God.  The question, “What was before God?” does not only meet with the answer, “Nothing.”  It is also seen as a totally irrational question.  To even ask the question means that we expect to find something that came before God and, since God has always been, it is an utterly meaningless question.

Think about what else this is saying.  It is saying that Jesus is the head of the body, the church.  It is Jesus who is finally in charge, he is the highest ranked person in the whole church, he is the one from whom the church draws its life.  Without Christ, there simply is no church.  Paul is also saying that Jesus is not just raised from the dead, but that he is the firstborn from the dead.  Though we talk about the resurrection, we need to always remember that, though Jesus was the first to be resurrected in glory, he won’t be the only one.  In fact, we are promised that each of us will participate in Christ’s resurrection before the end.  That is why, though we weep when a loved one dies, we do not grieve as if death were the end, for we hope in the power of the resurrection, that, just as God raised Christ from the dead, he will also raise us from the dead.

Now we move into the climax of Paul’s exclamation.  “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”  This is one of those statements in the Bible that is absolutely packed with meaning.  First, we read that, in Christ we have the very fullness of God dwelling among us.  We could spend all day unpacking that.  It means that in Christ we get to see who God really is.  Everything we saw Jesus doing in the Gospel of John was the very activity of God.  Jesus is not just a prophet, not just a great moral teacher, but truly the presence of God in our midst.  When we look into the face of Christ, we see the face of God, a face that we have never seen anywhere else and that we could not have seen any other way.

To a certain extent, if that is all that Jesus was and did, it would be enough.  In a world where we are surrounded by voices that tell us either that we can never know God because God is so far removed from us ordinary people or that God is whatever we choose to make God be, it is an amazing thing to have God meet with us in such a dynamic and personal way as he does in Christ.  Sometimes people get upset with Christian faith because it says, “If you want to know God, you need to know Jesus.”  People don’t like that, of course, because it seems so restrictive.  Why can’t we come to know God in a completely different way?  But if we are really dealing with a God who is so completely different than anything we know in our daily lives, the amazing thing is not that there aren’t many ways to know God, but that there is even one!  When we think about how amazing it is that, in Christ, we come face to face with God, we should be astonished that God has loved us so much that he has actually gone out of his way to meet with us, to show his love in a way we can understand, and give himself for us completely.

What is more is that this really shouldn’t be all that surprising to a culture that is so enamored with the natural sciences.  After all, if you want to investigate subatomic particles, you don’t get to make up your own mind how you are going to do it.  There are some ways that are simply incompatible with such an investigation.  You can’t look at atoms with a telescope nor with a standard microscope.  And yet, nobody complains that atomic theory is exclusive.  In any field of investigation, we have to go where we can encounter the reality we seek to know and we have to treat it in accordance with what it actually is, not what we wish it was or how we decided ahead of time how it would be fair if it was.

However, Jesus is not only the definitive revelation of God in our midst.  Jesus is also the means by which we, who live in this broken, hurting world, can be united to God and live with the very Spirit of God dwelling inside of us.  The language that Paul uses here is that Christ makes peace “through the blood of his cross.”  We live in a world that holds up self-sacrifice as the ultimate form of love and yet lives as if this made no difference because we tend to get caught up in our own problems.  But it is important that we remember that with Jesus, we are not just dealing with a great example of human love and mercy but with the incredible mercy and compassion of God.

What this means for our investigation of Colossians is that Paul is setting out the very most basic of Christian experience.  Whatever else might be different from congregation to congregation, all Christians are bound together by this basic encounter with God.  God has made peace with us.  It is a peace that only God could make but that, because of God’s amazing mercy and kindness, we are presented to God holy, blameless, and irreproachable.  This is crucially important.  This is the foundation upon which he will build the rest of his argument.  If Jesus is central and of primary importance, it means that absolutely nothing else can be.  It is as Scottish theologian, Thomas F. Torrance has said, “In the great hierarchy of truths, to be absolutely related to what is of permanent and paramount importance in the center, carries with it a requirement for us to be only relatively related to everything else.”

Paul finishes up this passage by reminding the Colossians that faith in God is not a blank check, as if we can say, “Well, now that I’ve made that decision and prayed that prayer, nothing else is required of me.”  He says, “Provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised in the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.  I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel.”

This is, again, incredibly important to remember as we continue through this amazing letter.  Paul is going assert over and over again that Christ is primary, Christ is central and that, if we allow anything, even if it seems to be good, to take Christ’s utterly central place, we have effectively turned our back on the gospel.  He is so concerned that they “continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised in the gospel” because this is exactly what is happening in Colossae.  For some, Christ has been kicked out of his central place by Jewish ethical practices, which, while by no means externally evil, have become more important to those people than the living Son of God.  For others, it means that Christ has to stand in judgment over the way their pagan culture teaches them to think, which while, again, not overtly evil, tends to treat Christ as something considerably less than the way we have access to the mystery of God.

Indeed, we will see many more references to mystery and the mystery of God before our time in this letter is done.  I think that you will find that, the more we dig in to what was going on in Colossae, the more we begin to understand our own culture, both conservative and liberal, both young and old.  Some of the specifics have changed, but the Colossian culture is so close to what we see in our context today that it gives me goose bumps.

So, just as Paul wanted to remind the Colossians about the amazing majesty of God in Christ, through whom we have been made new before he gave his corrective advice, let us stop here and be deeply impressed by this fact.  We have a God who loves us and does not only love us in the abstract but in the concrete.  We have a God who does not just say loving things to us from his throne in heaven, but goes out of his way to leave that throne and meet with us where we are, to spill his own blood for us and our salvation, to suffer and endure much hardship just so that we, broken and sinful people though we are, get to be with him, both now and forever.  Our God is far greater than we can even imagine and what we learn about God in Christ continues to break through our preconceived notions and enrich our understanding and lives.  Let us go into the world in utter amazement at the love of God and let that amazement inspire us to share the good news we have received with others, for it is good news for them, as well.  Let us pray.

AMEN