If You Have Been Raised

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Ordinary 18C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA
Colossians 3:1-11

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ²Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, ³for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

⁵Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). ⁶On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. ⁷These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life.

⁸But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. ⁹Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices ¹⁰and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. ¹¹In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

It always seemed like an … unreachable goal… until I thought I had reached it. 

^“Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth”

It was always something others were doing too much of – this setting their minds on things that are on earth – I walked around with a sincere look of concern and preoccupation for the hundreds – nay, THOUSANDS who slogged through their day without a moments thought to those things that are above. 

Until I was slammed with an onslaught of … LIFE that forced me to spend some time paying attention to what I had heretofore considered bothersome – things that are on earth. 

The trouble, I discovered, was that for whatever amount of time was needed, there were some things here on earth that needed tending to.  Relationships.  Friendships.  Responsibilities.  Duties. 

Paul’s drawing the distinction between what is earthly and what is worldly had haunted me because I was taking his words at full force from the inception.  I was considering any level of though regarding earthly things – and not just the things he lists here in the passage – but just about ANYTHING having to do with earthly existence – to be something to shun, to run from, to close off. 

In taking Paul’s words into consideration this morning, I need to balance them against the actions of Jesus during his earthly ministry.  In those instances, I see that Jesus spent an awful lot of time concerned with what I had at one point considered ‘earthly’:  He fed the hungry, he cared for and healed the sick.  He confronted injustice.  He called people out who were NOT involved in making this worldly existence a lighter one, and challenged them to engage with those around them in such a way as to MAKE a difference IN their earthly existence.

So what does Paul mean when he says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly”?  We can go through the list: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry) and it is amazing how quickly we can grow an extra elbow in our arms so as to make it that much easier to pat ourselves on the back.  We’re no fornicators, we are no longer impure, or allowing our passions to control us, or flooded with evil desires or … greed…?  Or are we?  We would just as soon stop thinking about this stuff and close our minds to the possibility that there is more going on here …

It has to do with how we view things.  The clue is in the parentheses.  In the NRSV it comes right after the word ‘greed’ and seems to be clarifying just what that word means.  He has written, “Which is idolatry”.  Looking it over, it does seem to be pretty clear that the worship or the acquisition and retention of wealth is idolizing money and the power it brings.  I think we can all agree that that is a bad thing.  But if we start to work our way back through the rest of that list: evil desire, passion, impurity, fornication … ultimately, there is in each of those something that has placed a higher value on something OTHER than God in our lives.  They all seem to have a connection to the sensuality of the human experience – not strictly sexual, but to any part of us that revels in the senses with which we inform our existence here on earth: that treasures and holds that sense so dear that we don’t even realize the power it has over us.  Yes, in many cases it IS sexual, but it can easily be something else:  the sense of hunger – or it’s opposite – the feeling of satiation – satisfaction from having eaten a well-prepared and delicious meal – that gets morphed into this obsession with food – with having enough on our plates to feed two or three people, or to hide behind phrases like “comfort food”, “momma’s cooking.” 

Please hear me when I say that the first toes I am stepping on when I get into this are my own.  In my lifetime of being the son and grandson of good, church-going, bible-reading, covered-dish serving Baptists, I can MAYBE count on one hand the number of messages I’ve heard regarding gluttony. 

I’m not saying, “Starve yourself”.  I AM saying “be mindful of what you eat, and realize that if it is going on your plate and doesn’t get eaten, someone else is going without” … Yesterday we were up in Fredericksburg, and decided to eat supper at Ryan’s Steakhouse.  As you may know, it is a buffet style restaurant.  You can eat as much as you are able for one fairly reasonable price.  In fact, last night’s tab was comparable to yesterday’s lunch tab at McDonald’s – for much better food, if you ask me, but that is beside the point.

As we were drawing the evening to an end, Caleb spoke up and asked me what happens to the food that doesn’t get eaten.  I answered that I hoped that Ryan’s does what many restaurants do – they donate food that has been prepared but not eaten to an organization called Second Harvest – that takes the food from restaurants and distributes it to homeless shelters and soup kitchens to feed folks who may not know where their next meal is coming from.  But to be truthful, there are maybe just as many restaurants who don’t bother, who discard uneaten food and consider the loss to be the cost of doing business. 

My point is this:  Idolatry, in one way or another, ultimately makes us the arbiter of that which holds ultimate importance in our lives.  We retain the option to decide what WE consider to be of utmost importance in our existence.  So idolatry in essence is placing ourselves ahead of God, rather than the other way around. 

We hear a lot about idolatry as the worship of statues, or images, things that in our immediate experience are rare.  But idolatry can be as insidious as thinking of something harmless, something in fact, helpful, like eating, and being so caught up in that, that we lose sight of the repercussions that are left in our practice of eating. 

So we put ourselves ahead of God, and not the other way around, and that ‘other way around’ is what the life of Christ was all about – IS all about – it is putting God first and ourselves last.  It would seem to be a fairly easy proposition, until we look at the nitty gritty of it:  do I spend time in prayer today or do I take a nap?  Do I read the Bible passage and meditate on it, or do I watch television or a movie?  Do I offer to help teach Sunday school or do I sleep in and just make it for morning worship? 

I don’t want to put a “guilt trip” on anyone.  That’s not what this is about.  I understand and honor the fact that there is a time where rest is needed and required to maintain health and to reap its benefits.  What I am looking for is an openness to God’s calling us each out to do a little something extra, something a little out of our comfort zone, something selfless, like visiting someone who is sick, or homebound.  Something that communicates that our care for THAT person outweighed our desire to do something for ourselves long enough for us to actually DO that selfless thing. 

I want to show you something (turned the page up and around for the congregation to see)

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

(This is where the original manuscript ended)

You’ve heard me ask that question before.  But notice, I didn’t write anything else.  You see, I could name things that we idolize, but it wouldn’t be a complete list.  Because each of us does our own idolatry.  We are each, all of us, including myself, guilty of that.  We don’t like to call it that, but that’s what it is. 

Putting away the old life, the dead life, and putting on that new life that we have in Christ means taking on the point of view, taking on God’s view of the world.  That doesn’t mean looking at it from a distance and seeing, for example, that from space there aren’t any geographical lines, there aren’t any political boundaries between nations. We are all one people. 

Taking God’s view of the world is taking on what God did.  God didn’t stay up “there” away far away.  God came down and lived right alongside us.  So we are called to live in this world, we are called to live from a standing, from a place in our hearts and in our minds that is informed, that is marked, that is FROM … heaven.  That is God’s view of the depth of the love that God has not just for US, but everybody.  It is a love that we can tap into, and we can understand to a degree, but we cannot fully comprehend until we are face to face. 

I would challenge us all to open ourselves to being a full moon (no jokes, please!) – a full moon that reflects as much light from God as we can, into the deepest, darkest corners of this existence, that we be as concerned and as troubled by earthly existence as God was, as Jesus was.  He didn’t call us out, he called us TO live in him.  Be in this world, but not of it.  It’s about staying here, but living into an existence that we will one day see completely.  Paul’s words, “we see through a glass darkly, dimly, but then we shall see face to face.”  It is a hope and a promise that can lighten our load, even as we strive to lighten the load, the burden that others around us carry. 

Would you pray with me?