Your Lives In Him

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Ordinary 17C

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Colossians 2:6-19

⁶As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, ⁷rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. ⁸See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. ⁹For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, ¹⁰and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. ¹¹In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; ¹²when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.

¹³And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, ¹⁴erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.

¹⁶Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. ¹⁷These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. ¹⁸Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, ¹⁹and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.

Most of you have heard me tell my testimony – of how the night before my tenth birthday, in the context of a summer youth camp meeting at Natchez Trace State Park in western Tennessee, with the Rev. John Wood, pastor of First Baptist Church, Paducah, Kentucky preaching, I decided to ask Jesus to come into my heart and begin to be Lord of my life. 

Though I have distinct images that have remained clear in my head in the years since, and a few snatches of conversation following the event, I couldn’t tell you what text he preached on, or if it was on some particular point of theology… really, I can’t even try to discover that memory.  There have been too many events in my life since then that have crowded out that tidbit of information. 

For those of us in this room who experienced our conversion as children, can anyone recall with exactitude those details?  I think it would be a different story if we were to ask those who came to Christ as adults or teenagers, but again, depending on the time that has passed, or events that have occurred since, our capacity to recall exactly what was going through our minds might be … compromised. 

I DO remember thinking ‘this is what I’m SUPPOSED to do.  This is how it happens… and I remember at the beginning wondering if there was going to be any rush of emotion.  I don’t remember there being any tears on my part, though there may have been some… I remember having something of a smile on my face after the invitation hymn had concluded.  

To be completely frank, I didn’t FEEL radically different.  I didn’t FEEL as different as I EXPECTED to feel.  And it has taken me some time to come to terms with that. 

There is a strand within Baptist history – it is called the ‘Sandy Creek’ tradition, that puts an emphasis on the emotion that faith elicits in you, that draws a sense of confirmation from the fact that something makes you cry, and therefore THAT must be an indicator of it’s truthfulness, of it’s validity.  And that tradition is widespread, if not universally present not just within Baptist churches, but many other denominations as well. 

There’s another strand, called the ‘Charleston tradition’, that puts an emphasis on a less emotional, a more subdued, cerebral, and reasoned approach both to the understanding of faith as well as the practice of it.  To some degree or another, both strands are present within our churches, and within us, whether we realize it or not. 

Paul’s first appeal in the passage this morning is to reconnect with that initial experience – whatever it was that first ‘grabbed’ you about the gospel – about the message of Christ; whether it was the sacrifice, or the love, or the call to redemption and to building the Kingdom of God.  “Rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”  He’s saying keep going in that same sense of … TRUST.

Ultimately, that first step involves trusting.  Trusting that something is true even though we may be less than totally convinced.  Trusting that what has been promised is real, even though we don’t have anything that would PROVE that it is that we could touch, or feel, or put our hands on.  Trusting that the story that has woven itself into our lives is one of hope and faith and love and is one that WILL make a difference, not just in our own lives, but in the lives of people who surround us. 

Our wiring, our innate desires, our very curiosity, compels us to go deeper, to think and ponder and explore as fully as we are able what the implications of the Gospel are in our lives. And it was no different for Paul and the folks of Colossae.  It is hard for us to take something at face value.   We are always looking for – waiting for – the rest of the story.  We want to know what the back-story is, what lead up to a particular decision, what influenced a certain statement or choice made that has impacted the lives of multitudes.

I think what Paul is trying to say is that there is a point at which we come up against the sufficiency of Christ. There is nothing wrong with following that desire, that curiosity, that urge to dig, to go deeper, and it’s not to say that we should STOP digging, STOP thinking and STOP asking the tough questions, but that even as we continue to do all that, we need to … rest in the knowledge that there is nothing we can do to add or subtract from what Christ has done.  In his coming, in his teaching, in his living and in his dying and rising from the grave, Jesus Christ provided for our living – for our continued life in him.  

In verse 13, “God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us, with its legal demands.  He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.”   There is a profound truth in that verse that we struggle with.  We are constantly monitoring our actions, our motivations … there is still something in us that believes that we can undo the gracious gift of God when in fact, there is nothing that can.  As Paul asks in his letter to the church at Rome – “What can separate us from the love of God?”   The answer to the question is, of course, nothing.  He is reiterating the point here, I believe. 

He’s dealing with the same stuff that seems to crop up so often for him … and for us.  We hear the gospel, we receive the gospel, we revel in its simplicity, in its accessibility, and in it’s universality.   Then it gets complicated.  We start to wonder what we need to do to maintain the ‘good standing’ … surely there must be some requirement, some standard, some threshold that would keep some in and others out? 

What Paul seems to be saying here is that, “No, what God has done in Christ is enough for all of us.  Sinners all, fallen all; broken all.”  In Paul’s day it was those who said that you had to follow certain traditions, rules, and observances. 

Hmmm … in our day, it doesn’t seem to have changed much, does it? 

It is a radical notion, don’t you think?  To chuck the whole concept that to be an acceptable follower of Jesus you need to meet certain criteria, certain standards, of behavior, of dress, of manner, of spirit. 

Wait.  If it DOESN’T mean that, then what are we left with? 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

We’re left with people who are walking together, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, reaching out to those around them who also need a helping hand, a leg up, someone who can help ease the journey just enough… who can step in at that critical point and BE Jesus to them – both to bless and to call.  To bless by extending grace where grace may not have been present before, and to call out of a life that denied that same extension of Grace and bids it be shared.  

We gather each Sunday as a fellowship of believers, as the body of Christ as we understand it and spend this time with each other, in the hopes and the expectation that from this gathering we will gain new insight, new understanding, into what it means to follow Jesus.  Something that is said or sung or prayed will trigger a response, and that response will blossom into a beautiful, flowering truth that will carry us through an experience that we may not even know is heading our way. 

While there is a traditional, mostly unspoken expectation of what coming here means for the rest of your life during the week, we know ourselves to be ‘frail children of dust’, who are sometimes strong, and sometimes not so much, but who are always reaching for the mark. 

May our joined faithfulness provide the strength we all need to move forward in the light of God.

Let’s pray.