Colossians

Colossians

Colossians 3;12-14

When Paul wrote the letter to the Colossians, he faced a huge challenge:  he did not start this church; he’d never met these people; and he had never even been to this town.  As an outsider and a stranger, he had heard that the Colossians’ faith foundation was solid.  However, Paul had also heard that the community might be losing its focus, both in how they thought about their faith and in how they lived their faith.   

This is the point at which I would like us to connect to the letter to the Colossians.  Our faith should shape how we think about the world.  Our faith should also shape how we live in the world, too.  We may not think the exact same things that the Colossians or Paul thought.  We may not make the same choices that the Colossians or Paul made.  However, we are united with them in the struggle to make some sense of the world in the light of our faith and to live that faith in real time, every day.  So, we consider Paul and the Colossians not in order to arrive at the same answers but to make sure that we are asking the most faithful questions we can ask.

So, what was the problem in the Colossians thinking?  The challenge for the Colossians was that their world had been shaped for centuries by worshiping all sorts of gods:  fertility gods, gods of love, gods of war, agricultural gods.  Name something that people are anxious about and you would find a God who oversaw that “niche” of life.  If you were anxious enough, you could make a sacrifice or pay tribute to that God and…you would feel less insecure and anxious.  After all, now the gods owed you!

So, you take people who are steeped in such practices and they join this new movement—The Way—and become followers of Christ.  At first, having made this dramatic change in their lives, there would have been the kind of surge and focus that happens when it feels like everything is new.  It’s the first week of college or the first week on the new job or the first week at home with the new baby.  No one had time for all those old insecurities…until things started to settle into a new routine.  (As human beings, it doesn’t take us long to adjust to just about anything, right?)  When things start to become routine, we discover that all of our old insecurities came with us into this supposedly new world!  How did they find us here?  Despite how easily the airlines can lose our bags, it turns out that our personal “baggage” is almost impossible to leave behind.

People are insecure.  We always have been.  We always will be.  No matter how much we might like to pretend otherwise, we know the risks of being alive and trying to make our way in this world.  As soon as we care about anything, we know our hearts will be broken.  As soon as we choose to do something, we know we might be wrong or we might lose or we might fall short in some other way.  Our desired outcomes in this life are never guaranteed.   All of this gets driven home especially hard when things not only don’t turn out our way but we never see the crushing blow coming at all. 

Anyone need a quick example here?  Top of my head?  It’s March of 2020.  Someone suggests that a lockdown is coming. “What?”  People seem to think it might last a week or two.  “That’s ridiculous!”  I hear you can’t get toilet paper or Clorox Wipes.  “That’s crazy!” What if we can’t have our Easter service? “That won’t happen!” What if we still won’t be together in person for Easter worship a year after that?  

Sounds vaguely familiar? We may have felt like “Masters of the Universe” at previous points in our lives but COVID has certainly revealed our insecurity and our vulnerability, right?  All plans are contingent and subject to change.  Honestly, I’m shocked when something that we have planned actually goes as planned!  We’ve been rattled enough that our priority now is just being safe.  We try to learn everything that we can learn.  All the while, we remain acutely aware of how much we still don’t know.

Where will we find comfort?  What will we do with our insecurities?  How will we ever find a way to “reset” things and work our way back to feeling comfortable and comforted?  When are we going to be able to take things for granted and coast again? 

It’s enough to make a person want to cover all the bases and appease the gods!  Of course, I’m not talking about Aphrodite or some fertility god.  We’re way too sophisticated for that!  No, we worship the notion that a new relationship, or a new job, or a new self-help book or some other new thing will fix us and get us back on track. We look for comfort in a glass of wine or another Zoom chat or finding a new series to watch on t.v. or in sleeping longer than a person can possibly sleep.  We try really hard to do something familiar in the hopes that the familiar will comfort us. Sure, none of these things alone are all that problematic.  They become so when we ask them to mean more than they can possibly mean.

This is Paul’s’ first point to the Colossians.  In my words, not Paul’s, when we ask penultimate things (stuff that matters but not more than anything else) to have ultimate meaning, we’re in trouble.  (I’m sorry…I was a philosophy major.)  I’ll try again, when we treat things—even really great things—as if they are gods, everything gets worse.  A relationship, a job, a new take on personal growth—there is nothing wrong with such things.  Have some wine.  Watch some t.v.  No worries!  The worries start when I ask those things to mean too much, to solve my problems, to fill the empty spaces inside.  Paul’s point to the Colossians is that what holds the universe together and holds us together is God and God, alone.  And, as always, “You shall have no other gods before me,” not success, not happiness, not fame, not even just getting your own way.  God is the ground on which we stand and the one through whom we live. 

 This certainly has been one area of revelation during the pandemic for me.  There are a lot of things that I love about the church, most of which have been temporarily taken away.  I love visiting people in the hospital.  I love singing a hymn together on a Sunday morning.  I love coffee hour and listening to the choir and Union Folk.  Heck, I love the familiar sounds and smells and sights of the building on a Sunday morning before anyone else arrives—just me and the coffee pot, singing the little tune that it sings while making our giant pot of coffee.  

All of that has been gone for a while now, longer than I ever imagined.  And yet…by the grace of God, we are still here, with more people joining us for worship than ever before, with steady support without ever passing an offering plate, with a whole new sense of how wonderful it is when we can be together because we now know what it is like when we cannot.  I still appreciate all those things that I miss.  However, the pandemic has reminded me that what I really love and what really amazes me is God’s presence, which seems to be revealed in a new way with each temporary loss.

This reminds me of how crucial Paul’s second point remains.  If you are going to live your faith, then you need to live differently.  Paul says that faith should make us compassionate and kind and humble and patient.  We live this way not in order to fulfill some set of rules or to fulfill anyone’s expectations of how a faithful person should act.  No, we live this way because being loved changes us.  We have received God’s compassion and kindness.  We see it in Christ’s life and death and resurrection.  We also experience it in our own lives.  If we trace that compassion and kindness to the one who is the source of all that is, how could we ever turn around and not at least try to be compassionate and kind people?  Wouldn’t that be just about the most ungrateful response imaginable?  When we really take to heart that God loves us— really knows us and still, somehow really loves us—doesn’t that have to make us more patient with others?  And then, when you step back and consider that the great, “I Am” loves you for who you are, isn’t that just about the most humbling thought imaginable?  There’s a reason that the old hymn is, “How Great Thou Art” and not, “How Great I Am.”

Paul drives the point home when it comes to forgiveness.   Remember, now, Paul has his own desperately urgent, personal experience of being forgiven.  God loved him enough to stop him dead in his tracks and turn his life in a whole new direction.  At least as amazingly, though, Paul was then forgiven by people who had every right to hate him.  When most people feared him, a few people stood up for him.  When he stood up to speak, more people listened.  When he took the lead, a host of people followed.  None of this would have happened without forgiveness.  That forgiveness had to be like water being given to a man dying of thirst.

Haven’t we all at some point been dying for a little forgiveness?  Haven’t we all in some other moment been tempted to withhold the forgiveness that was ours to give?  Paul’s point to the Colossians is that there is not one of us who has not been forgiven by God.  The upshot of this truth is that there is not one of us who gets to then withhold forgiveness from others.  Sure, we can forgive and still make wise choices moving forward.  We don’t have to make the same mistakes over and over again.  However, we don’t get to cherish our grudges.  We have to be the people who give those around us a second chance because we are the people to whom God has given chance after chance after chance.

Elsewhere, Paul acknowledges that this way of living can lead the rest of the world to consider us fools.  Yet, he insists that he’s willing to be a fool for Christ.  To choose to be compassionate is to risk being called soft.  To choose to be kind is to risk being deemed naive.  To choose to be patient is to risk being considered a chump.  To choose to be humble is to risk being labeled a loser.  To forgive when you have a chance to really put someone in their place— someone who hurt you or hurt someone you love—that just means that you are weak.  The funny thing is that while the world looks at you and sees a fool, you will look inside yourself and finally find some peace, the kind of peace that people used to pay the gods to find, the kind of peace that we find so elusive that we turn everyday things into gods in the hope of finding it, the peace that passes all understanding.

Even then, we are still just as vulnerable as we’ve always been.  It still feels like we can’t really plan anything that’s more than two weeks ahead of us.  There are still real risks to ourselves and to the people we love.  And yet, we are loved and somehow that love has finally sunk in.  Because we are loved, things can change and we can change with them.  Because we are loved, we can look forward to the day when some of what we miss returns but in the meantime, we can wait.  Because we are loved, we can do loving things that require some self-sacrifice (like…wearing a mask or getting a shot?) that require us to put someone else’s interests ahead of our own. Because we are loved, we can sort our choices not by “What’s in it for me?” or “What’s in it for us?” but by asking, “What is the most grateful, most compassionate, most kind next thing to do?”

May God be with us all as we make those choices…