05/08/11
Colossians 4:2-18
Hudson UMC
What does it take to expand the kingdom of God? What does it take to reach those who have not yet been reached by the transforming power of the gospel? That, in many ways, is the main thrust of the last passage in Colossians. Paul ends his letter, as was common at the time, with a list of greetings for various people that are known both to himself and to the people he is writing to. I will probably not touch on anything he said during those eleven verses, so I apologize for any struggles with names I have caused you.
But I want to get back to the question that seems to be illuminated by this passage. What does it take to be about God’s business of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ? As it turns out, the most prominent voice that tends to be heard in reply to this question owes a great deal to our modern American consumer culture. It treats the church as something of a provider of spiritual goods and services, a place for people to go, like a spiritual supermarket, and pick and choose which of these spiritual goods and services they would like to consume.
When this model is used what is the goal of the church? The goal of the church is to spend a great deal of time working on programming, so that there will either be a wide variety of spiritual goods and services so that anyone and their brother can come in and find a half dozen ways, that are meaningful to them, to participate in the life of the church, or there will be a focus on developing a handful of spiritual goods and services that are of very high quality so that, though not everyone will find themselves at home in the particular church, those who do will find it very meaningful. But is that the gospel? Is that what Paul is doing? Is that what Jesus asked us, or rather, commanded us to do? It seems that something is missing.
Think about what this has to say about the nature of Christian faith. It says that the most important thing about us is what we do, that we have Bible studies, that we have social groups, that we have a choir, that we have a bunch of committees. All of those are wonderful, by the way, but is it, in the end, what the church is really about? Are we really no more than the sum total of our programming? Is the secret to church growth trying to be as much like Walmart as we can be, or perhaps being a smaller and more specialized boutique?
Paul, one of the greatest Christian leaders in the history of the world, would often solicit support from the people he wrote to. Here, as he is finishing up his teaching, he says that he is hoping to “declare the mystery of Christ, for which” he is “in prison, so that” he “may reveal it clearly, as” he “should.” Now, it is easy to imagine that, when Paul says that he wants to “declare the mystery of Christ,” he is speaking of preaching and, of course, he is. However, he is not only speaking of preaching. For Paul, declaring the mystery of Christ is something that takes place every moment of every day. It is not something that is reserved for preachers, but something in which the entire body of the people of God is involved, simply because they are bound to Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. What this means is that you ought not to be sitting there thinking that ministry is something that you do or perhaps something that is done to you. Ministry is something that is woven into the very fabric of your lives and is something that you are involved in personally, even if you don’t realize it.
Let me give an example. This semester, I had to write a paper analyzing this congregation’s missional practices and proposing some ways that we might be able to improve, since there is always room for improvement. Some of you were kind enough to be interviewed as part of the research for this project. When I began to think about what has happened before I was appointed as your pastor and what I have seen over the past five years, I began to realize that ministry sometimes happened without people having the slightest clue that they are hip deep in the ministry of God, in declaring the mystery of Christ. There are a few people who have become active participants in the life of this congregation over the past few years because someone invited them. Often it took the form of a common passion or a need that the new person could fill. What I was struck with is that the people who were doing the inviting, those who have participated in other ways, would never, in a million years, say that what they were doing was evangelism or consider themselves evangelists. And yet, that does not change the fact that it was exactly what they were doing and exactly what they are. Because of our tendency to limit the definition of missionary or evangelist in a narrow way, we often think that we are not missionaries or evangelists, but it is not only what we have been called to be, but what we are. If you pray for your family and friends, especially if they are not Christians, you are a missionary and you are an evangelist.
It is important that we take a moment and consider the issue of prayer, as it is the other major topic that Paul brings up in the first few verses of our text for this morning. When we think of mighty preachers, and Paul was certainly a mighty preacher, we think of people who are so keyed into what God is doing and saying that they can just walk into a situation and proclaim in such a way that bears fruit. Though it seems that way sometimes, we see that Paul does not seem to think this is so. Paul knows that it is only by prayer that what we do has power and authority, that lives are changed and that hearts are warmed.
He asks the Colossians, “Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving. At the same time pray for us as well that God will open to us a door for the word, that we may declare the mystery of Christ.” I can imagine the people responding, “Paul, what are you talking about? You have traveled all over the known world, proclaiming the mystery of Christ everywhere you go. Even in prison, you have been engaged in the ministry of evangelism. Do you really need us to pray for this? It seems that you have opportunities everywhere you go.” And yet, Paul is convinced that he needs the prayers of the people in order to be effective.
There are a few members of the congregation who are willing to stand up and proclaim the good news of God to the people of God. There are others, I am convinced, that would find tremendous joy in doing this, even if they feel too frightened to do so. However, there is not anyone in the congregation who is unable to pray. You might not feel comfortable praying out loud in a group of people, you might not feel that you are a good pray-er, whatever that is, but you are all capable of crying out to God and playing a role in the mission of God.
It is possible that you might say to me, “But pastor, that isn’t really ministry. After all, we aren’t doing anything while we pray.” I wholeheartedly disagree, on both counts. In point of fact, prayer is indeed ministry. In fact, it is perhaps the single most important and most needed ministry. We desperately need prayer. We need to pray in groups, we need to pray on our own, we need to pray for specific things, we need to pray that God’s will would be done, we need to pray that God be present during difficult times, we need to pray that God would be present during easy times, we need prayer that God would move in our midst, that God would take our actions and multiply their effectiveness and transform the world here and everywhere, and we need to pray in such a way that our whole lives become living prayers so that we might, as Paul instructs the Thessalonians, pray without ceasing. We have tremendous need for prayer in all of its forms, just like Paul did.
The concern that we are not really doing anything when we pray needs a bit of correction. Why do we think like that? I am more and more convinced that we say things like this because we live in a nation and culture that is results and achievement driven. We want to work hard and get a job done. Those who behave in a way that brings high achievement are praised by our culture and those who do not produce much in this sense are criticized.
Additionally, we live in a world that is still obsessed with causality. In spite of advances in Quantum theory proclaiming that, at the most basic levels of the universe in which we live, we simply can’t speak in causal terms, we still hold that model of thinking to be the standard by which everything else is judged. If we can’t make a clear, undeniable, causal connection between prayer and events, which we can’t, our culture will judge prayer as ineffectual. However, speak to anyone who makes prayer a vital part of their lives will bear witness to the fact that prayer is indeed helpful, is indeed something that transforms their lives and is something that makes a legitimate difference in the world. It is true that those who do not pray cannot understand this, but that is no different than someone who refuses to engage in mathematics not understanding the personal satisfaction of working out a difficult proof, or the elation of a scientist who performs a delicate experiment successfully. There are many things that cannot be understood except by those who participate in them, and, while there are many people who will never understand the beauty of mathematics or the natural sciences because of a lack of training or experience, each of us can engage in prayer, each of us can participate in this vital ministry.
Many people find books like Daniel and Revelation difficult to read and understand. This is not surprising, as they are written in language that we do not often use that is quite foreign to the Western tradition. However, they do something that we need to pay attention to. Both of them retell portions of history from a very different point of view. Take the virgin birth. On a purely natural level, thinking only socially and biologically, what do we see? We see that there is a woman who is pregnant out of wedlock. She claims to be pregnant with the Son of God, but most people would dismiss that right away, since that is something that, according to our daily experience, simply does not happen. We see the woman treated harshly because of this experience and her son growing up to be a teacher and a leader. When we see things this way, especially after the life of Christ, we might find these lives significant, but from a purely secular point of view we would tend to see Jesus’ leadership as the triumphing over oppressive social structures and not being meaningful in itself.
When we read the book of Revelation, we get a different picture altogether. “Then another sign appeared in heaven; and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven crowns. And his tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth and the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child.” This seems at first glance just to be a fanciful story that may or may not have a tragic ending. However, when we realize that it is a telling of the story of the virgin birth, that the woman giving birth is Mary and the child is Jesus, it takes on a whole new significance. The author is presenting this story in such a way as to point out what was going on in the spiritual realm when Jesus was born. The language is poetic, but it is no less a real description of the invasion of God into the kingdom of Satan.
What I want to highlight is not any particular part of these prophetic books or to take a solid stand on how they must be interpreted. To do so would seem foolish, as the greatest bible teachers throughout history have hesitated to do so. What I want to point out is that there is a whole other way of understanding what is going on that we are simply not able to see from our limited point of view. God can see things that we cannot and understands that our actions have greater meaning than they at first appear to have. The point is that we don’t have our world of space and time over here and the spiritual realm over there, but rather they overlap to a significant degree. When Jesus was born in our world of space-time, war broke out in heaven between, as the text tells us, Michael and his angels against the dragon and his angels. What we do here on earth makes a difference in the heavens and prayer plays an important part in that.
Being Mothers’ day, it seems appropriate that mothers can give us a great example of what real prayer for the kingdom of God looks like. All mothers worry about their children. They want the best for them, they want them to have the best opportunities, and they hope that they will make good choices. Whenever someone is in a difficult time or making mistakes, there is a mother, somewhere, praying. That mother may not always realize that she is praying; it might disguise itself as pure worry, but her intense passion and concern for her children, that comes from her great love that she has always had, and always will have, is an inspiration to us all. Who knows what your prayer does, who knows what sin and trouble you have saved your sons and daughters from by your prayers, who knows what might have been, had they not had a mother who lost sleep because she cared more for them than they sometimes cared for themselves? This kind of loving concern, of placing others above ourselves, is the kind of selfless giving we are called to in Christ. This kind of all-consuming passion is a model for our prayer for the kingdom.
So, just as Paul was convinced that the ministry God had called him to was simply impossible without the prayer of the people, know that the ministry of this congregation is no less impossible without your prayer. You might not belong to the prayer team, you might not call yourself a prayer warrior, but you really are a vital participant in the prayer ministry of this congregation and the kingdom of God worldwide. Pray for the ministry, that we might declare the mystery of God with clarity, as we should. Let us pray.
AMEN
No comments:
Post a Comment