Dwelling Richly

Sunday, December 31st, 2006
First of Christmas
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Colossians 3:12-17

12 As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. 16Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. 17And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Dear, Beloved, Sweetie, Sugarplum.

Have you ever stopped to think how the way someone is addressed sets the tone for the whole conversation? If you were to receive a letter, and the opening word was one of those (Dear, Beloved, Sweetie, Sugarplum), you would usually more or less know what to expect in the body of the letter. It is, I think, what we find more often than not comforting when we open scripture. While there are significant passages that get … shall we say … a little hard-nosed, if you take the general tone of scripture, especially the New Testament, you find that it is in many ways a love story. And it is the story of the love of God for humankind.

In his letter to the church at Colossae, Paul does set the tone by his greeting;

“To the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae”

If you are familiar with the New Testament, it may slip right past you as an example of a pretty much standard greeting at the beginning of the epistle.

Imagine, though, what it would mean to you to be a person who just recently heard the story of Jesus, and only in the last few weeks decided to become a follower of Christ.

You have no point of reference for what it means to BE a ‘good Christian’, you struggle to figure out how following Jesus is going to affect how you live your daily life, you get together with a small group of fellow believers who are in the same situation you are in … there are four or five people in the group who have been Christ-followers longer than pretty much everyone else. The one person who first brought the news of Jesus to the city, who helped start the group, moved on to another city three months ago, and left that first small group of converts to lead the rest of you. There’s a definite tie-in with the local Jewish Synagogue, but you are no more familiar with THEM and THEIR scriptures and rituals than you are with the local temple to Aphrodite. You’ve just never really gotten into “religion” – ANY of them.

That was what attracted you to this Jesus in the first place, he wasn’t about “standards and practices” – what words to say when, what incense to burn on what day, what prayer to recite at which hour, but about actually being in a RELATIONSHIP with God – the picture you got when you first heard the story was of what you never had – a loving, caring, giving father. And you wanted to be with him and be like him and be IN him all at the same time.

*****

Something was going on with the church at Colossae, on that much scholars agree, and somewhat as well on the nature of what it was – there were what seemed to be practitioners of a type of Jewish mystic tradition that fell back on ritual and merged it with some of the early ideas that said that in order to be a TRUE follower of Jesus you had to UNDERSTAND certain things in a CERTAIN WAY – it later developed into Gnosticism, we’ve mentioned it before, but in short it was a type of faith that was at it’s core EX-clusionary rather than IN-clusionary. It defined itself by who was part of the ‘in’ crowd, rather than opening its doors to the whole of humanity, as Jesus did in extending his arms on the Cross at Calvary.

The short of it is, there were folks who had moved into the group – the church – at Colossae, and were proclaiming that ‘special’ brand of knowledge that was required to be true followers, and people were becoming confused, some were dropping back or dropping out, some were swallowing the new stuff hook, line and sinker.

The fact of the matter is it is not only the ‘Newbies’ who are susceptible to misunderstandings, to confusion about what it means to be a Christ-follower. How many times have we heard someone share in their testimony that it wasn’t until they were an adult – after a lifetime of going to church – that something clicked – something got through – to make them realize just how important that RELATIONSHIP was, rather than the practice of going to church on Sundays, Wednesdays, and the occasional Tuesday or Thursday, like a good committee member or even a deacon? Can we each think of people whom we’ve known who simply attended church out of habit, because it was the acceptable thing to do, not because there was a true desire to or even an interest in seeking a deeper relationship with God in Christ?

In missions terminology, we speak of ‘Cultural Christianity’ – that is, bearing the name ‘Christian’ because the Christian church – whatever the local predominant denomination might be – has been so identified with BEING from a region, or country, or state, or area, that to be called a Christian has become identified more with one’s nationality or heritage, and is NOT a way of describing one’s faith pilgrimage. Most often I grew up hearing it in relation to the countries identified with the Roman Catholic tradition in Latin America, and I witnessed the hollowness of Cultural Christianity on at least a weekly basis, if not a daily basis.

I think I’ve shared with you the struggle involved in growing up as the son of missionaries in Chile, and having to come back to the States periodically – ultimately for good – once I graduated from High School – what made coming back to the States so difficult for me, first as a teenager, and then for college, was that I found Cultural Christianity to be AS present within our own Baptist tradition as anywhere else, and coming from a lifetime of being literally supported – affirmed, cared for, taken care of – by an agency of the Southern Baptist Convention, it was at best eye-opening, at worst completely disillusioning – to the point of turning me off to the whole idea of church – to see evidence of Christianity being NOT about faith, but about social standing or expectations.

I’ve come to the point in my own personal pilgrimage where I am able to understand and to a point affirm the need to recognize secular holidays and days of remembrance within the context of worship. That’s not to say that I am comfortable with it, but I understand that as a church we are called to bear witness to truth and righteousness in whatever context they appear, and that, I consider to be part of why we follow the civic calendar of the United States of America. If we were a congregation in another country of the world, we would to some degree probably celebrate and/or acknowledge, for example, our independence day, if there were such a date, or the date of the official organization of the nation of which we were citizens.

But what are we – Jerusalem Baptist Church, in Emmerton Virginia – really and truly ‘about’? What is it that is at the core of our being? What has kept us here for one hundred and seventy-five years? What has kept us GOING for this long?

Very simply, it has been the Spirit of the living God.

Do we look today as we looked one hundred and seventy-five years ago? Not at all. As we sing in worship, do we SOUND today as we did a hundred and seventy-five years ago? Probably not at all. We will have opportunities to sing again some of those long-forgotten hymns in the coming months. Do we ACT today as we did a hundred and seventy-five years ago? I would suspect that, though in the way we TREAT each other it is not that different, the way we interact, the way we speak to each other, would sound about as foreign to Elder Braxton as if he had hopped on a ship and traveled across the big pond to a far distant land.

So what has been the uniting thread through the years?

It has, I TRUST, been the love of Christ, being shared, being spilled over, being made EVIDENT in our actions, words, and manner.

There is another Missions term I’d like to share with you this morning. The word is ‘unchurched.’ It is a term used to describe someone who has had little or no exposure to matters of faith in the context of a local body of believers – someone who may have been taken to church as a young child but who probably cannot remember the last time they were inside a church building for anything other than a funeral or a wedding.

Did you know that, for all of the richness of the history that has been accumulated for what was first Royal Oaks and later became Jerusalem Baptist Church, even having been here for one hundred and seventy-five years, we are surrounded by people who can’t remember the last time they were in church? There are people within 10 miles of this building who know they are surrounded by probably a dozen churches but are really not interested in stepping into any of them. Some of them don’t bother coming up with a reason. Others have very good reasons for not wanting to step inside. It usually involves someone who DOES step inside one of these buildings on a regular basis, but you wouldn’t know it from the way they live their lives the rest of the week, perhaps even for the rest of the afternoon.

Paul is telling us, showing us how it works. How we are to treat each OTHER, and everyone else. There HAS to be something here that will draw people back, if we’ve been that faithful witness for seventeen and a half decades, there’s no reason we can’t be an even STRONGER witness to the love of Christ in the NEXT seventeen and a half decades.

(Reread passage in its entirety)

Look around at each other. There are people here that you know and love. There are people here you’ve gotten to know over the years, or months, in some cases. But the key word is ‘know’.

How many people are here that you’ve known only a short while? Do they outnumber the ones you’ve known for at least a decade or more?

Dearly beloved of Christ, brothers and sisters; if we come to church to only be with people we know, if we only make worship something familiar to US, something WE are comfortable with, that speaks to US because we’ve been around it all our lives, there will be very little that will be attractive or UNDERSTANDABLE to someone who has never been in a worship service or who has had a terrible experience with a supposed Christ-follower.

It’s not a popularity contest. It’s not about pandering to the masses. It’s about being genuine. It’s about being real, being honest, being open, and being vulnerable in the presence of God with each other. That’s an uncomfortable position to be in for ANYONE. Unless that vulnerability takes place in an atmosphere of acceptance and trust that precludes – that LITERALLY ELIMINATES the possibility of that trust being violated or betrayed.

Life is hard. Hard enough. There HAS to be a place where we can come and know that we are safe. Whatever they’re dealing with, whatever happened last night, whatever happened last week, whatever we’re facing this afternoon or this evening or tomorrow. This is what Paul meant when he said ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly’ – if we make Jerusalem such a place, if we can make our discomfort secondary to the needs of those who’ve never experienced an extended, loving caring, committed family, we will look even LESS like the Royal Oaks family of the 1830’s, but we will still be recognizable as the most important thing we are – the body of Christ.

My invitation to you as 2006 comes to an end is to think about the people you know. Think of the ones who might not be involved in a church in the area. If they ARE, affirm them, encourage them to continue to be involved there. But if someone you know does NOT go anywhere, invite them to come to Jerusalem. The CHALLENGE for us all is to make this a place to which they will want to RETURN.

Let’s pray.