Colossians 2:6-19; Psalm 138; Luke 11:1-13
Paul’s experience of Christ communities wasn’t any different than the experience that nearly every pastor I have known has admitted to. There are days when a pastor feels like tearing out his or her hair over some activity or lack of activity, over some thick-as-a-brick mind set, some head-in-the-sand perspective, some mulish refusal to engage in kingdom thinking. And lest you allow your heads to swell thinking that sort of thing never happens here, I will burst your bubble. After all, as long as I have been here, the law of averages says it had to have happened sometime. Back to Paul.
Paul rejoiced in the steadfast faith of the Colossians. But they were under pressure from the culture. Few of us really have an inkling about what it is like to in a minority, to be an outsider with views that run counter to the prevailing ideas and norms. We have always been the majority. The things we have always based our lives on, especially in matters of faith, have been the often unseen girders and beams that have given our lives form and structure. There have always been non-Christians, but they were few and they kept their non-belief to themselves.
Even the so-called “Christian” ethic had a way be being throttled. I don’t know about your upbringing, but mine was decidedly more anti-Catholic than pro-Protestant. Jews sometimes were slightly better. Jehovah’s Witnesses were more prevalent than Mormons. Pentecostal and Charismatic sects were just odd. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism were mentioned only in grade school geography books. Ethnicity was solidly pro northern and western Europe and particularly skeptical towards eastern and southern Europeans with multi-syllabic names. Then there was racism, even in northern cities and towns.
According to the Pew Center for Religion report published in 2012, nearly every branch of North American Christianity is taking a hit. The old line Protestant denominations are dwindling. Traditional African-American congregations are barely holding their own, as are Pentecost faith expressions. The evangelical portion of American Christianity which soared in the last quarter of the 20th century has leveled off and started to decline. The Roman Catholic Church is holding its own, but only because many of its newest members are immigrants from Latin America. Euro-American Roman Catholics are declining at similar rates to their Protestant sisters and brothers.
As we move further into the 21st century, Christians in North America may well learn a lot more about being in the kind of minority that believers in Colossae and other first century places were. Paul wanted to insure that the Colossian faithful wouldn’t give in to the old religious systems some of them had followed. But more importantly Paul was concerned that they not believe the lies of the false teachers which were roaming the territory distorting the teachings that Paul and the other apostles brought. His Colossian correspondence is a full-scale rebuttal of the false teachings that were bombarding the early faithful. That’s why, as we saw in last week’s Colossian reading, Paul dove right in with the hymn about the pre-eminence of Christ and declared that his mission was to present believers mature in Christ.
Paul continues, in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase:
My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you’ve been given. You received Christ Jesus, the Master; now live him. You’re deeply rooted in him. You’re well constructed upon him. You know your way around the faith. Now do what you’ve been taught. School’s out; quit studying the subject and start living it! And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.What the Colossians have been given is more than a simple gift or a free pass. They received Christ, and that entailed some responsibility. The Colossians are not a bottomless pit into which Christ has been stashed, like a prisoner locked in a dungeon and the key thrown away. The Colossians are to be like an information kiosk where people may find out more about Jesus. They are to transmit the gospel from one person and generation to another.
Paul didn’t just remind the Colossians of when they received Christ Jesus, he also reminded them of their receiving the proclamation and teaching, and their response to it through confession of faith, baptism, and their living as members of Christ’s body. Because Christ dwells within all believers through the Holy Spirit, they are committed to walking (conducting their lives) in union with the indwelling Christ. The past event of receiving Christ should be a present reality in the believers’ daily lives.
That’s why Paul says that believers are “rooted and built up in him and established in the faith.” Christ is more than just a tether. Christ is the foundation, just as pilings driven deep to bedrock and massive concrete bases are the rooting foundation for a skyscraper. Faithful life takes more than a little bit of religious soil around our feet.
I have a couple of tomato plants living in pots on the patio. The plants look good and fill the wire cages that support them. But they aren’t really rooted. A couple of weeks ago they blew over in a storm. The pots aren’t fastened to the patio. The plants are top heavy. They suffer from the whims of the weather. A lot of Christians are top heavy with their religious piety, but their roots in Christ are very shallow, not really embedded. They sit on the surface, like my patio pots. Disciples are rooted in Christ.
A story – true or not – is making its way around the Internet. A pastor, taking up a new call in a large church, began in a different way. On the Sunday he was to be introduced, he showed up early outside the church dressed as a street person. He did all the usual street person things and got the usual responses from people going into the church. He went inside the church and sat in the sanctuary and the ushers asked him to move. He was stared at and avoided. As the service began and the leadership called forth the new pastor, the congregation was shocked into silence to see the street person come down the aisle. The pastor broke the silence by reciting Jesus’ parable of the sheep and goats from Matthew 25. After he finished, he looked towards the congregation and told them all that he had experienced that morning. Many began to cry and many heads were bowed in shame. He then said, “Today I see a gathering of people, not a church of Jesus Christ. The world has enough people, but not enough disciples. When will YOU decide to become disciples?”
Disciples are rooted in Christ. They are also forgiven. The faithful participate in this mystery of redemption by way of their baptism. They are buried with Christ as they descend into the waters, as the waters rush over them, and they are raised with Christ by the same power of God that raised Jesus from the dead. The fourth century bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, said that “nothing is more blessed than this burial.”
The philosophy of the world says that we are worthless and unforgiven. The world is full of people who, in order to make themselves feel valued, have a habit of making others into scapegoats by telling them that they are bad people. Baptism and the forgiveness that it symbolizes tells us that we are beautiful children of God. We bear God’s image. We are created good.
Rooted and forgiven, we are freed from obsessive compulsive enslavement to rituals and formulas which become superstition. Our relationship with God in Christ through the Spirit is personal. No one can dictate it to us. We can spend our lives modeling other people’s methods and means of faith, but ultimately we have to work out with fear and trembling our own reconciled relationship with God and couch it in the words and ways that fit God and our individual self.
We all say the Lord’s Prayer from memory, probably with little thought to the words which automatically roll of our tongues. The reading of it in Luke’s Gospel often catches us off guard because the one we know is from Matthew. So it is good to think about the words, the phrases, the pauses, the silences. Sister Joan Chittister has written about prayer,
“There is only one thing wrong with the traditional definition of prayer: it misrepresents God. ‘Prayer,’ the old teaching said, was ‘the raising of our hearts and minds to God.’ As if God were some regal, distant judge outside ourselves. But science — with its new perception that matter and spirit are of a piece, sometimes particles, sometimes energy — suggests that God is not on a cloud somewhere, imperious and suspecting. God is the very Energy that animates us. God is not male humanity writ large. God is the Spirit that leads us and drives us on. God is the voice within us calling us to Life. God is the Reality trying to come to fullness within us, both individually and together. It is to that cosmic God, that personal, inner, enkindling God, that we pray.”(1)When we are rooted in Christ, redeemed by Christ, and freed with Christ, our prayers — and our lives — will be truly blessed as disciples faithful no matter what the world tries to tell us.
Thanks be to God.
(1) Sr. Joan Chittister, cited by Brian D. McLaren, Facebook, July 26, 2013.
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment