Colossians 1:11-20
Our readings this morning invite us to put the first things first in our faith. The readings from Colossians and Luke invite us to go back to the basics of our faith. Who is God? Who is Jesus? What does the Lord have to do with me and want with me?
There is a principle that many military leaders learn in their first few years of leadership. The principle is “put first things first”. This principle can be illustrated with a simple example: you have two bowls – one filled with pebbles and one empty – and rocks. The leadership challenge is to get the rocks in the bowl with the pebbles and have a flat surface across the top. How do you get everything to fit in? It takes some outside of the box thinking, but you get the rocks and the pebbles in the bowl together by putting the rocks in first and then adding in the sand. You put first things first.
Here’s the problem: you and I live in a world full of distractions. We each have our favorite distractions – the TV, social media, politics, gossip, the internet, work, feeding our grudges and resentments, video games. What is your biggest distraction? Put another way, what do you turn to instead of having to deal with God or with other people? It is not to say the things we turn to to distract ourselves are bad or wrong in and of themselves. Enjoying a movie, working, playing a video game are fine things in and of themselves. We’re each also introverts or extroverts and have varying degrees of energy to do things. But human nature is that we take things too far. Our distractions are like the pebbles in the example. If we consume a steady diet of them, they can consume us and we can lose sight of God.
Our readings this morning refocus our attention to the first things, the big rocks of our faith. There is a theologian from the second century named Iraeneus who said something to the effect that “the glory of God is a human being who is fully alive.” I think what he meant by that is that God is glorified, God is brought honor and respect when we human beings are fully alive, when our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits are filled with the things of God. That is what our readings are inviting us to experience this morning.
How does the apostle Paul invite us to be full of the things of God in our reading from Colossians? Put another way, what are the big rocks of our faith? There are three things that I see that are the core foundations of our faith: they are God, Jesus, and the Church.
Before we talk about them more, we need to say one other thing about our modern world and its distractions. Part of the modern world’s design is to distract us with technology or things to buy or with the latest trips to go on (or all three of the above). Think of the number of ads you see every day trying to sell you something or get you to think a certain way or to go to some event. Again, it’s not to criticize these things themselves. But they have the effect if we consume too much of them of not exercising our minds and thinking for ourselves. Paul wants to correct that in Colossians. To be in Christ is to be someone whose mind is thinking – thinking about the things of God. To be in Christ is not to be a spiritual robot, it’s not to be a human being who is numb to the world, or someone who blindly follows political leaders or influencers. Instead, to be a Christian means that your spirit is alive, alive in a deeper and more meaningful sense than just that your heart is beating. It means to be alive to invisible things, things not seen like grace, mercy, and the peace of God and alive to the ways to love and serve others. Again, this is not about book smarts or how capable we are at doing things. Many of the early Christians did not have a lot of schooling. They faced illnesses and physical and financial limitations as we do. And yet, the Lord called them to be brothers and sisters in Christ.
The first big rock of our faith then is God. It can seem obvious that God Almighty is the center of everything. But it is easy to forget. We can go through a whole week, a whole month, whole years without giving much attention to the fact that God is the Maker of all things and that God has certain expectations, the biblical word for this is ‘laws’, for how the people of God, God’s creatures, will live and act.
Pastors are not immune from losing sight of God. There have been times in my life since being ordained where I’ve forgotten to pray on my own, where I haven’t felt much like being a Christian, or when there was too much else going on to really take God’s will seriously. I wish there was an easier solution to get out of that kind of forgetfulness and aimlessness, but there isn’t. God isn’t like a genie who if we rub the bottle three times the right way, will grant us our wishes.
Instead, the Bible shows over and over that spiritual renewal happens when something shakes us or wakes us up from our spiritual and moral sleepiness. That can be the example of someone of faith, a personal crisis, being convicted by someone else. That waking up is the first part of spiritual renewal. The second part involves the old school church word, ‘repentance’, which at a basic level means turning around. Repentance means to intentionally go in a different direction than the one you are on. When Jesus in the gospels tells the disciples to ‘repent’, what he is saying is go in a different direction, think a different way, think about God and God’s will for your life and go that way. After being woken up from spiritual slumber and deciding to go in a different direction in your life, the third part of spiritual renewal is what the Scriptures call “walking with the Lord”. That’s a churchy way of saying that to be a Christian means to live your life with and under and for God.
On Friday, Eliza and I were running errands around town over our lunch break. One of the places we stopped was the Moondragon shop on Main Street. Eliza’s mom had knit a bunch of wool hats and Moondragon had a collection point. When I dropped them in the box, the woman at the counter stopped me and asked if she could tell me about her project. “Sure, I said.” I got the whole history and at the end of our conversation, as I tried to excuse myself because I had to go back to work, the clerk thanked me and said, “may the divine spirit bless you.”
It caught me off guard because most of the time, we don’t bless one another. How often outside of church, does someone offer you a blessing? How often do you bless someone else? Sadly, the answer is probably not often. While the clerk at Moondragon and I as a Christian probably have a different understanding of God, God is also much bigger and more powerful and holy and righteous and alive and full of grace and truth than I can imagine. The point is, one of our first big things as Christians to always do is to take God seriously. That God acts and does things and speaks and says things and calls and asks people, you and me, to do things.
The second big rock of our faith is the person Jesus Christ. This is the apostle Paul’s main point in his letter to the Colossians. Listen to Paul’s words, which are originally thought to be a hymn:
He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, he is the first born of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things seen and things unseen, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him an for him…for in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Let’s break this down. We’ll go back to the blessing I received from the clerk at the Moondragon store. What the Scriptures and the church teaches and God reveals about himself is that God is not some unknown entity. While God is not a person like we are people and God is of the spiritual, God is not some nameless wind who is mysterious. Instead, Paul’s message is that Christ is the image of the invisible God. Put another way, if we want to know who God is and what God is like, we look at Jesus. The things Jesus did, the things Jesus taught, the way Jesus lived his life and offered his life as a sacrificial offering, that is God.
The second thing Paul teaches about Jesus Christ is that everything finds its beginning and end in him. The important thing to remember is that Jesus didn’t just appear at random 2,000 years ago when he was born in a manger. Instead, in one of the great mysteries of our faith, Jesus Christ was there at the beginning of creation. We believe that God is one God, in three persons – the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When we pray, God is like Father to us, providing for us and encouraging us, he is Christ to us, saving us and healing us, and he is Holy Spirit to us, reenergizing us and leading and advocating for us.
The third thing Paul teaches about Jesus Christ is that he forgives and he reconciles people with God and God with people. In Christ’s death on the cross, our sins are forgiven. In Christ’s death on the cross, the hostilities that exist in the world are transformed and enemies can become brothers and sisters in Christ. In Christ’s death on the cross, God makes peace with us.
The third big rock of our faith is the church. Here is the verse from Colossians that we read: “He [God] has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” When we become a Christian, we come under new management. God has kicked the old management (Paul calls this the power of darkness in Colossians, other places in the Bible it’s call the “world’s ways” or Satan or sin and evil) and brought us under new management (what Paul calls the “kingdom of his beloved Son”). To call Jesus Lord is to see him as our Master, as our leader, as our boss.
His management style, his leadership, his lordship is way different than how we are used to things working. In the kingdom of God, in Christ’s way, might does not equal right, instead truth and justice are what makes right. In Christ’s way, money is not the end all be all, instead, the first are last and the last are first, the hungry are filled and the rich are sent away empty. In Christ’s way, it is not about me, myself, and I, and instead our lives are shaped by mercy and love and humility.
The church is the third big rock in our faith because the church is where the ways of Christ are supposed to be practiced and lived out. In the church, might does not make right. Our power is not in how much money we have, but in how faithful we are. In the church, we don’t insist each of us on our own way and instead, we follow the way of love which seeks see one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.
The church is the body of Christ here on earth. Last week, our Catholic brothers and sisters heard a message from the new Pope and American bishops warning against treating immigrants in an inhumane way. With the large scale immigration raids currently going on, Priests and Protestant pastors have been denied entry into ICE detention facilities to offer communion, prayer, and spiritual guidance to migrants.
This is wrong. It is wrong and immoral because the people who have been detained are human beings who are created in the image of God whether they are citizens or here legally or not. And it is the church’s concern, according to our reading from Colossians, because we believe that Jesus Christ is to have the first place in everything. Communion and prayer are the basic ways that every human being shares in Christ and receives Christ. And so the Pope, Catholic bishops, and other pastors near detention facilities have been pushing the authorities to remember that the people they are arresting and detaining are human beings and that God cares about them and that we as a nation need to honor all of life and to treat all people with dignity and respect and decency no matter who they are or where they are from. Why? Because we are the body of Christ and the ways and things of Christ is what we are about. Sometimes that means we need to work with political leaders and business and sometimes that means we need to oppose them. Again, why? Because according to Paul, for us Christians, Christ is first in all things and all means all.
The big rocks of our faith are God, Jesus Christ, and the church. We do this by worshipping God, studying Scripture to know God, and serving God by loving one another here in the church and those outside of the church. Amen.