You Who Were Once

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Ordinary 16C

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Colossians 1:15-29

¹⁵He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. ¹⁹For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰and 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. ²¹And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, ²²he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him— ²³provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel. ²⁴I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. ²⁵I became its servant according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, ²⁶the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. ²⁷To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. ²⁸It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. ²⁹For this I toil and struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me.

What do you do while you brush your teeth?  I mean, do you ‘multitask’?  Do you try to do something else, like put your shirt on, or shoes, or do you straighten something in the bathroom or wipe the sink while you’re brushing?  Maybe you just wander around the house, or watch television, or listen to the radio…

I think most of you know the bathrooms upstairs over at the parsonage both have windows that face out over the old cemetery.  Most mornings I just turn and look out the window and look at the markers that are there, or watch the traffic coming down route 3.  Yesterday morning, as I was brushing and looking out the window, a movement in the lower right corner of the upper pane of the window caught my eye.  I focused in on it and it was a spider, just your basic, tiny brown spider with a small body and long legs, seemingly suspended in midair, moving it’s two … or maybe four front legs in these more or less repeating patterns.  Occasionally one of its back legs would seem to stretch out and then … go back.  I drew a little closer and moved so that there was something other than grass in the background when looking at it, and I was finally able to make out what I knew was there but hadn’t been able to see until then – it’s web. 

There are some spiders, those huge, yellow and black ones that are this big that show up in the late summer or fall that can whip out a web in what seems to be just a few minutes that stretch all across God’s green earth – the ones that you have to duck around or under when you walk under the pear tree – the ones whose web sticks to you and feels like it might, if circumstances were right, slow you down a bit.  When you get a look at their webs  - especially the ones they build covering a window FRAME – they are things of beauty.  They are symmetrical, intricately woven, spaced just so, and the spiders sit in the very center of them.  It all looks so nice and CLEAN and NEAT. 

But this spider that I saw yesterday morning, it’s web was … well … a mess… it seemed to be that it was just trying to get that one corner of the window pane stretched across with web strings so it would hopefully just CATCH something.  There didn’t seem to be a lot of attention to detail or esthetics.  But to watch the spider in the window as it worked on the web, it was being as careful as any other spider I’ve watched.  It knew what it needed to do, and didn’t stop to compare it’s web to another spider’s.    

But ultimately, it served the same purpose as the no less meticulously woven webs that the other spiders put up: to catch food.  The application may be different; the end result is the same.   

Paul usually spends some time at the beginning of his letters giving some words of greeting and/or encouragement, or in some cases gives an abbreviated version of what he is getting ready to explain in more detail in the rest of his letter. 

In the case of his letter to the Colossians, his opening is setting the tone for the rest of the letter. He seems to be reminding the Colossians of the depth and breadth and height of who Jesus is in these verses. 

Paul is otherwise very down to earth in what he teaches the way of following Jesus to be.  His is a very “nuts and bolts” approach to faith.  It’s not just about what you believe, it’s about how that belief translates into your everyday life.  How you treat your neighbors, your family, your slaves, and your enemies.  How your inner motivation – the feeling you have in your heart – reflects on the actions you engage in from the skin out.  It’s about continuity between your spirit and your body: a consistency that is born of the Holy Spirit guiding and directing you.

Here, he stops for a while on what you believe, and he gets a little carried away.  Not that that’s a bad thing. 

We have this beautiful paean – this hymn – a psalm – to who Jesus is.  The image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the one in whom all things in heaven and on earth were created … I can go on – the head of the body – the church – and the one through whom God made peace with the world … through his shed blood on the cross…

It is an awe-filled description, a beautiful depiction of Jesus Christ as the Savior and Redeemer of the world, as the essence of God made human. 

Then he gets to what we’ve numbered verse 21 and he makes it personal. Up until that point, he has been talking in cosmic terms – humanity, the cosmos, Earth, all creation.  In verse 21 Paul brings it down to the personal level.  You who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him – provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.   

In other words, what we believe matters. 

Yes, of course what we DO matters as well, but it has to be born out of what we believe.  Our belief has to have SOME effect – ideally a radically transformative effect – on what we DO – with our lives, with our words, with our best efforts.  The two do not exist in isolation from each other. 

Paul goes on to extol the wonders of this “doing born of being” – this action prompted by belief.  The fact that he drew a connection between the two was somewhat radical in first century Roman-dominated and Greek-influenced society.  In many cases, the idea that how one believed in esoterica – the insubstantial realm of philosophy and ideas – would actually influence or make a difference in how one LIVED was tenuous at best, laughable at worst. 

And that can sometimes still be the case today.  We live in a world that looks askance at folks who let what they believe – their worldview, their faith, their relationship to God – influence how they respond in the actual, physical world – it seems to be somewhat anachronistic – out of place – in our day and time - and yet it is the reality in which we move. 

What does it mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton? 

It means that we take a look at ourselves to see if we do, in fact, allow our beliefs to influence our actions.  To the extent that they do, we are working on two levels of existence – the physical kingdom of God here on earth, and the spiritual one we are building within. We may feel more like the tiny spider in the bathroom window, spinning a haphazard, disorganized, not-too-pretty web, much more than we feel like the big, bold, slick spider with the amazingly intricate web on the porch floor-to-ceiling window, but we are just as sure of what we are doing and where we are going to end up – if you’ll pardon the specific details of the analogy … sustained and nourished by that web.  It is, for the most part, invisible, but it stretches to surprising lengths, and occasionally, just sometimes, if we catch it in the right light, we can catch a glimpse of it.  

Let’s pray.