How to Accept Your Acceptance, Colossians 1: 21-29 by Rev. Charles Swann

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there came a time when my family and I, for reasons of my employment before I went to seminary, had to move to and live in Columbus, Georgia. In those days, Columbus was a rather drab and unattractive mill town. It has changed greatly in the last few decades, but in those days it was one of the dullest places I have ever known.

And yet, we were happy there. We made ourselves at home there, in spite of the town’s surface unattractiveness. I used to tell people that Columbus was a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there. We found much to be glad about in Columbus. We made many friends there. We were especially happy in our membership and participation in the Edgewood Presbyterian Church of Columbus, the church that was my springboard into ministerial studies.

We made ourselves at home in Columbus because we were reconciled to our location and circumstances, and we seized on what was good about them. Being reconciled and finding much to be glad about is at the heart of this lesson from the letter to the Colossians.

I.

The very first step in our pilgrimage toward spiritual contentment is to come to grips with the difficulty of being reconciled with our reconciliation with the God of our religion--facing and admitting how hard it is for us to accept our acceptance by God.

It is hard to believe that God loves us. It is easy to sing hymns about it; but it is hard to feel it. We say with our lips that God loves us warmheartedly; but we cannot honestly say that we actually feel that love warming our hearts.

I think this is so partly because we don’t love ourselves warmheartedly. We look at ourselves and we don’t like what we see. How can anyone, including God, love us? We don’t see or experience ourselves as being very lovable.

Also, it is hard to see God’s love in the pain we feel…in the sorrow we experience…in the disappointments that assail us…in the state of the world about us.

And, it is hard to accept our acceptance because we can’t escape the feeling that something more radical should have happened in our lives. We go through the motions of being church people. We do and say what the church bulletin says we should say and do next, but we don’t feel closer to God by having done it.

I think a part of our problem may stem from childhood religious and cultural conditioning--and especially from childhood here in the Southland--that values “conversion” experiences. I am sure you have heard the one about the fellow who was such a staunch old-time Presbyterian conservative that he wouldn’t eat any kind of rice except Uncle Ben’s converted rice. I remember how totally nonplussed I was by an experience I had as a student supply pastor, before I had completed seminary and been ordained. One of the members of the church came to me one day and announced that his son--call him Johnny--had been “converted” the night before and wanted to join the church. Johnny was seven years old. I didn’t have any idea what a seven-year-old could have been converted from, but we went to the session, where the elders gently convinced the father that we should wait just a few more years before Johnny made his profession of faith.

The keyword in this incident was “converted.” In this case, it spoke of Johnny’s father having been brought up in a Southern American religious culture that valued radical separation from the world and from worldliness. To make a profession of faith in Christ was to be “converted.”

I cannot claim, nor do I wish to claim, a conversion experience. And for those of you who are like me in that respect, if we really examine ourselves, we may find that the question nags us: Is it really enough to have never known not being part of the church? Is it really enough to have never known a time or state when we did not consider ourselves to be Christians? I was born and raised in a very conservative social and religious environment, one in which Christians were supposed to be “born again” and I cannot pretend that it left no marks on me. I did not have a so-called conversion experience and I remember how comforted I felt by reading William James’ exposition of the once-born and the twice-born in his book Varieties of Religious Experience. I am once-born, and it is okay. It is okay for you, too.

Another reason why it is so hard for us to feel--actually feel--the love of God is because we are forever running away from that love. We are like our own children, impatiently wanting to leave home, to strike out on our own, to be independent.

As children, we don’t want to be stifled and controlled by the love of our parents. We want to be totally independent. We parents really don’t want to be loved by God as much as we love our children, because we fear that it would demand changes and commitments that we don’t want to make.

We prefer to keep God at arm’s length. We prefer a God whom we can visit on Sundays, but who will not be too terribly involved in our lives on the other days.

But remember, Dear Hearts and Gentle People, that alienation from God always results in alienation from people. It results in the less-than-wholehearted embrace of our fellow church members and our neighbors. It results in coldness to and detachment from God’s needy and suffering children.

II.

A truth about us that we must face is that we really do need some kind of conversion experience--but on a continual, daily basis, not as a once-in-a-lifetime event. We need this, not in a blinding light experience such as Paul had on he Damascus Road, but every day on Highway 140. We need the kind of quiet, completely undramatic experience that is contained in deciding, moment by moment, to continue in the faith we profess.

We are not called to “walk the sawdust trail,” as responding to altar calls was described in the old days of big brown tent revivals with sawdust in the aisles. We are called to continue--to continue--in the faith we have professed. And to continue in the faith means to examine continually both the context and the content of our lives.

Being reconciled with God is not a matter of one dramatic spiritual event; it is a matter of daily decision making. Every day, I must decide anew to continue in the faith, to follow Jesus Christ. In every human encounter, I must remind myself that I am looking at and talking to a child of God.

To continue in the faith is to seek reconciliation with all God’s children. In the church at Colossae, the most important need for reconciliation was between Jewish and Gentile Christians. To make peace between two groups with different histories and different customs and a long record of despising and excluding one another, as these two groups did in Colossae, is peacemaking worthy of Christ. Analogous in our world and time is peacemaking between blacks and whites, women and men, Orientals and Occidentals, Arabs and Jews, haves and have-nots, old and young, management and labor, religious liberals and conservatives, and even--even--between Republicans and Democrats--because God loves all of them and all of us.

Such reconciliation is not an easy task. The Greek word Paul used for his toil and striving is literally translated “agony,” and he depended on energy from God to get it done. But to continue in the faith is to try to bring about some reconciliation--not in Iraq or Pakistan--but where you live and work.

III.

Our lesson from Colossians concludes with Paul setting out his great aim. It is to warn every person and teach every person and to present every person mature

in Christ. Here is the very dream of God for your life.

The word “mature” was chosen carefully, I think, because it was a technical term in the Greek mystery religion for the fully initiated cult member. The church at Colossae was being troubled by the influence of pagan religion as well as by divisions between Jews and Gentiles.

The Jews, before coming into the Christian church, would never have believed that God was the God of the Gentiles, or even cared about them. The Gnostics and the mystery religionists would never have believed that the elaborate and esoteric knowledge they thought necessary for salvation would ever have been the possession of more than a select few.

But in Christ, everyone may attain fullness and wholeness of life. The fact is that the only thing--the only thing--that exists for every man and every woman in the world is Christ.

There are gifts of thought and understanding and skill and talent that will never be the common possession of all people. There are privileges and pleasures that all will never share. There are heights of achievement that all will never scale. But to every man and every woman, the good news of what God has done in Christ is open and free, and the power of God to transform our lives into newness is readily available to all who desire it. We need only to ask for it. Amen.