03/07/11
Colossians 3:1-17
Hudson UMC
We live in a culture of sound bytes. If it takes more than a moment to say, many people don’t want to hear it. What we want are short, easy snippets of information that we can tuck back in our minds and pull out when the need arises. Attention spans seem to be getting shorter and shorter and if we want to get and hold people’s attention, we are told, we need to be flashy and edgy. This, unfortunately, simply compounds our tendency to approach the Bible as if it were a collections of short instructions whose meaning is obvious at a glance. People will speak of having a favorite Bible verse, but you seldom hear people speak of having a favorite Bible passage. When I was in college, people in the Christian community would be passionate about Bible memorization, but would only grab a verse here and a verse there, little proof texts or aphorisms that could be whipped out but something that, unfortunately, produced something less than a thoughtful understanding of the whole Scriptural witness.
What this means is that there are many people who, if they were asked to find the main point of Colossians chapter three or even the letter as a whole, they would point to the ethical exhortation of this passage and perhaps the next, make them into a list, and present them as Paul’s main argument. I hope, I pray that we might all have learned Paul better than that. Paul spent a whole chapter and a half doing nothing other than emphasizing the absolute centrality of Christ, that he is the image of the invisible God, the one through whom and for whom all things were created, the one in whom everything holds together, the firstborn from the dead, the one who reconciles us to God, the very mystery of God, the one in whom we are rooted and built up in faith, and the one in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily. In the second half of chapter two, Paul critiqued the major systemic ways that Christ was being pushed out of central place in the Colossian community. So, if Paul has spent so much time emphasizing that Christ is what really matters, that Christ is the center of the universe and so ought to be the center of our lives, that Christ is the one in whom we have died and been raised to new life, it seems that his main point is not to give us a list of things to avoid and a list of things to do.
The rest of Paul’s letter to the Colossians could be said to be answering the question, “If what you say is true, how then should we live,” and, as such, it does indeed give us things that we should do and things that we should avoid, but they are not merely lists that we can detach from what he has said so far. He even begins this section by placing it in the context of everything he has already said. “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed in glory.” All of what Paul has to say is rooted deeply in the fact that in Christ, God has done something remarkable that has changed the world and utterly transforms our whole situation.
He continues, saying, “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life.” What Paul is saying to the Colossians is something like this. “Once upon a time you were disobedient people. You were engaged in all kinds of destructive and sinful behavior. However, that sinful, disobedient person has died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Your life is so bound to Christ’s life by the power of the Holy Spirit that nothing in all of creation can separate you from him. So, because of all that, set your minds on things that are above; put to death whatever in you is earthly because, though you used to do those kinds of things, they are completely incompatible with who you have become, the children of God.”
The point is that Paul does not do what so many people have done throughout the ages. He does not point his finger at the Colossians and say, “If you don’t shape up, God’s going to get you.” He doesn’t put them on a guilt trip, but simply proclaims the Gospel to them again. He reminds them that, in Christ, they are utterly new creations, people who have been made whole and empowered by the very Spirit of God dwelling inside of them. That is why they need to put to death the things that are earthly, not because God will get them if they don’t and so because they are afraid, but because the very life of Christ has been implanted into them and there is nothing more absurd than people who are defined by the life of God in them behaving as if they were dead like those who do not know God.
When we look closely at the way Paul speaks, we might get a little confused. First he says that the Colossians already have been raised from the dead with Christ and that their lives are hidden with Christ in God; then he says that there are certain things that they have to do. We can almost imagine the people saying, “Wait a minute, Paul. If we are new creations, why do you need to tell us that we need to live a certain way?” This question might come more easily to us today than it did back then because we are so often surrounded by people who either say, “You aren’t a new creation until you get your act together,” or “You are a new creation, so it doesn’t matter what you do.” Paul doesn’t fit into either mold, and, because he doesn’t fit into either mold, it is very easy to misunderstand him.
What Paul does here and in many other places has been described by Biblical scholars as the Indicative/Imperative couplet, that is, he makes a statement about what is the case, then tells the people what they must do. People often speak of this as an element of Already/Not Yet; that is, God has already done the work, has already made you new and has already won the decisive victory, but the implications of this are not yet totally evident in our lives for one reason or another.
The reason why I bring this up is to show you that, if you have noticed that Paul does this, you are not alone, that many others have noticed it, too, and have thought about how we are to understand it. It helps us to realize that, though nobody believed in the power of God to transform the lives of men and women as much as Paul did, after all, he was transformed into one the greatest champions of Christian faith after he had tried to destroy it by hunting down many Christians so they could be killed, he also wants to make sure that we understand that Christians are not yet perfect. Christians still need instruction, they still need to be reminded of the Gospel.
What I really want to lift up here, though, is that Paul is not content to tell us what to do and what to avoid as if, so long as we just had a good enough understanding of right and wrong, we wouldn’t have any problems. Before he was a Christian, he was a Pharisee, one of the most dedicated people to God’s law. If doing all the good things and avoiding all the bad things were all he cared about, he would have never become a Christian; he could have stayed how he was. He would not have made the authorities upset, he would never have had to go through all the incredible suffering he had in his life, and he certainly would not have been executed for his devotion to Christ. Paul is interested in something that is far bigger and far more powerful than morality. He is interested that people have their lives hidden with Christ in God, that they might truly be those who live with the life of God.
What really matters is Christ and being united to Christ through faith. Why, then, does Paul care how the Colossians live? Why should he give them such specific advice if what really matters is that they are in Christ through the Holy Spirit. We hear things like this all the time. We hear, on one side of the church, people who say, “Simply believing in Christ is not enough, you need to live like we tell you,” and, on the other side, people who say, “Believing in Christ is all that matters. How you live really isn’t all that important.” I think the reason that we fall into those extremes, and sometimes go back and forth between them, is because we do not understand just how radical it is to be united to Christ. When Paul says that Christ is central and that, at the end of the day, Christ is all that matters, there is a sense that he has made things easy for us; after all, we don’t have to elaborate a complicated way of life, we just need to look at Christ.
However, living consistently with the fact that Christ really is the incarnation of God among us, the God who utterly transforms us and empowers us like he empowered the apostles who were ordinary people like us and then the Holy Spirit drove them to do amazing things, is not easy. When Paul says, “Because your life is hidden with Christ in God, live this way,” he is saying, “What you are is a child of God, a brother or sister of Christ, a fellow-heir with him of the kingdom of God. If that is so, you simply can’t be living like an enemy of God. It simply makes no sense.” That is why we need to put to death whatever is in us that is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed. That is why we must get rid of things like anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language. That is why we must not lie to one another.
Paul gives positive advice as well. “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” It is here that we really can understand just how serious the call to holiness really is. By saying that Christ is central and of paramount importance, Paul is saying that Christ is our standard of behavior. We ought to do the kinds of things that Jesus did, say the kinds of things that Jesus said, and think the kinds of things that Jesus thought. It means we ought to avoid all the things that Jesus avoided, which includes absolutely every kind of sin. It means that, unless we have somehow reached the purity of life and heart that Jesus had, we still have farther to go and we ought to be far more concerned with what God is calling us to and not so much about the sin we perceive our neighbors to be committing.
The rubber really meets the road in the words, “if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” We are to forgive others like we have been forgiven. But what does that mean? It is possible that there are some here who don’t think of themselves as forgiven because they don’t think of themselves as having done anything needing forgiveness. However, most of us are probably all too aware of the fact that we have made mistakes, that we are not as we ought to be. To simply say that, because we have been forgiven for not being what we ought to be, we also should forgive others for not being what they ought to be, would be something that most of us would have a hard time doing.
But that is not all. How does God forgive? He does not just wave his magic wand and pretend like we never did anything wrong. No, rather he came to earth, being born of a human mother, the almighty God of the universe small enough to hold in your hands, the very Word of God unable to speak. Even though he was the Lord of all creation, he had to go through those years of childhood, where he had to follow the rules of his parents, which could not possibly have been perfect, because they were people like us, and I wonder if any parent can look back and say they never made a mistake. He had to endure the awkward years of adolescence, no longer a child and yet not yet an adult. He had to learn to work hard to make a living and then he gave it up to become a Rabbi; but not a successful, well-loved Rabbi, although the poor and the weak loved him. Instead, he was a Rabbi that was largely hated by the ruling parties, who was beaten mercilessly, even though he had never done anything wrong, and then executed as a political criminal. Though he was the God who created human beings in the first place, he was killed in a manner that was reserved for those who were considered to be sub-human.
And while the mob of people was crying out that they should crucify the Son of God, the one who loved them more than they could ever love themselves, Jesus prayed, saying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Jesus did not stand idly by while people wronged him. Rather, he came even closer, so that the people could abuse him more than ever. He not only received our abuse, he provoked it to its highest pitch and took it all on his shoulders and, as Paul has already said in this letter, nailed it to the cross, healing it so that we might be like he is, not by a wave of a magic wand or by brute force, but by astonishing self-giving love. That is what God’s forgiveness looks like and that is the kind of forgiveness we are called to have toward one another.
That is why, in the end, Paul says what he does. “Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom.” To say that Christ is the center of everything and that everything we do, say, and think must be rooted in Christ is not a cop out so we can be loose with the way we live, but the highest and most demanding of life imaginable. After all, we are talking about living with the very life of God, which is far more than just a list of rules. And so, let us hear these last words from Paul in our passage. “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Let us pray.
AMEN
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