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