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In 1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, published a book entitled The Cost of Discipleship. It became a Christian classic and it was required reading when I was a seminarian. In his book, he attacked the modern Christian tendency toward what he called “cheap grace.” He was not the first to use the term, but he used it more effectively than anyone before him.
What is “cheap grace?” In Bonhoeffer’s words, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. It is grace without discipleship, without the cross, without Jesus Christ. Or to put it more clearly, it is to hear the gospel preached as follows: ‘Of course you have sinned, but everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are.’”
Bonhoeffer openly and powerfully condemned the acculturated Christianity of Hitler’s Germany, which was busy compromising with and conforming to Naziism. And what happened to him as a result of his preaching and his undercover participation in plotting against Hitler was his own cost of discipleship.
In 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo. He spent the next two years in prison with the Gestapo trying to break him and induce him to become a more conciliatory voice. He refuse to recant. Instead, he defied them and openly admitted that he was an implacable enemy of Hitler and of Naziism and he would never change his mind about either. And so, in April 1945, with American forces closing in on the concentration camp where he was being held, the Nazis hanged Dietrich Bonhoeffer. One report said he was hanged with a thin wire in a manner that would cause him to strangle. Another said he was hanged from a tree in the camp. The cost of his discipleship was ignominious death at the hands of evil men.
If you will look on page 78 in your pew Bibles, you will see that the passage I have read to you is set off as a separate paragraph (pericope) with the title The Cost of Discipleship. I could think of no better title for this sermon.
I.
What does it mean to speak of the “cost of discipleship?” There are two words here: cost and discipleship. Jesus is saying, “You can not be my disciple free; it is going to cost you something.” And he proceeds to shock the crowd by telling them how much it is going to cost them.
As Luke the gospel writer tells the story, Jesus was being followed by a large crowd of people on this, his final, fateful journey to Jerusalem…Jerusalem, where he would pay his own cost of discipleship.
There were two types of people in the crowd. On the one hand, there were those in the multitude, wanting to be on hand for the grand opening of the kingdom Jesus had been preaching about. They were thinking of it, unfortunately, as a renewal of the earthly kingdom of David. They probably thought it was going to be a day of glory, rewards and rejoicing for all. There would probably be dancing in the streets, singing, feasting--a great, grand national party.
In the second group were the disciples and a few others who perceived, however dimly, that Jesus was about more serious business--a lot more serious-- than dancing in the streets. But even some of them, too, thought that perhaps this was going to be the long-awaited day when God, through Jesus, was to unveil finally the promised kingdom that would result in the great religious revival of the Jewish people.
Jesus had tried before to bring both groups down to earth. And here, in today’s reading, we find him stopping to speak one more time, to make one more effort to get the people who were following him to understand that stark realities awaited everyone who would follow him in the dark days that he knew lay ahead.
And so Jesus asked them, “Have you counted the cost of discipleship? Are you willing to pay it?” It is a question we, too, must answer.
What is the cost for us? Is it to make ourselves get up every Sunday morning and get dressed for church when we would rather stay home in our pajamas and read the Sunday paper? Is it to be nice to some of our fellow church members and act as if we are a lot more interested in them than we really are? Is it to put a little something in the collection plate on a regular basis, even if it sometimes makes us quietly say “ouch?”
Jesus said that the cost of discipleship is a lot stiffer than any of that. His words to the crowd were shocking. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
“Hate” is a shocking word, and as it is used here simply does not mean what we usually mean by it. In fact, our understanding of the word applied to its use in this passage does not make sense. The Greek word as used here is a term of comparison. It is a way of expressing willingness to be detached from or to turn away from something or someone, even from family members, who may want us to go in a different direction.
Will Willimon, who was chaplain at Duke University for years, once told a group of pastors that he had never had a call from parents saying, “Help us, please. Our son is misbehaving.” But hardly a year went by, he said, when he did not get a call from parents saying something like, “Chaplain, can you help us? Our son (or daughter) has gone overboard with some religious group and wants to go off to Haiti and work in some literacy training program after graduation. And we want him (or her) to go to law school.”
Is such a student, in effect, “hating father and mother” in order to heed the call of Christian discipleship? Yes--in the sense that the student is willing to face the terrible tension between discipleship and the ambitions his or her parents have for their child. It is not a negative matter of not liking or loving one’s parents; rather it is a matter of choosing a higher loyalty.
Jesus is a kind man, and he said to the people, “I know you mean well.” “But,” he continued, “you must understand that if you really mean to be one of my disciples, you are going to have to pay some rent on the job.” The currency in which that rent must be paid will be work and sacrifice. The rewards from doing that job will be in hearing your Savior say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
II.
Jesus said to the people then and says to us now, a discipleship that costs you nothing is not really a discipleship; it is only a pretense. Good intentions are not enough; they must be proven with good deeds. Right beliefs must always be borne out by right conduct.
What does it mean to us, then, to be disciples? And how much will it cost us?
The true disciples of Jesus are those who live out the great commandment of Jesus, which is to love God and to love people--utterly. This means right decisions that result in right actions, commitment that is proven in service and consecration that is observable in one‘s life--or it means nothing at all.
By decision, I mean to really mean what we are saying when we sing “Here I am, Lord. I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.”
Commitment is to truly mean what we are saying when we sing, “I love thy kingdom, Lord.”
Consecration means that we mean what we are saying when we sing, “Take my life and let be consecrated, Lord, to thee.”
Jesus taught us that to love God is know God as our Creator, and to love God as our heavenly Father. And to understand God as Creator and Father is to be sensitive to God’s active presence in the world.
It is to be driven to our knees, as I am, when we consider the heavens, the work of God’s hands. When I seek and find through my telescope some tiny smudge of light that I know to be another galaxy with a hundred billion suns in it, I am in awe of God’s handiwork. But I am no less awed when I lift my eye from the eye piece to throw back my head and behold the canopy of the starlit sky God has spread above us. It is then that I ask in wonder, “Who are we, that you are mindful of us?” The answer that comes to me is, “You are my children and I love you.”
To love God our Father in return means to find the strength and purpose in our lives to worship him intently, to pray to him believingly, and to follow where the Holy Spirit leads us through the words of scripture and the promptings of our brothers and sisters in the church.
To love people means to acknowledge them as our fellow children of God, made in God’s image just as we are. It is to look at other people with trust and understanding--and if they fail and fall, with compassion and forgiveness.
To love people as Jesus loves them is not to engage in some kind of syrupy sentimentality. It is to refuse to be walled off from any of God’s children by hatred, prejudice, fear or class distinction, and to try by every means at our disposal to build creative relationships with them. It is to enter into the arena of public action and commitment on behalf of causes we believe in, and on behalf of persons who need help. It is to take on other people’s problems as our problems, to share as much as we are able in finding solutions to those problems.
I have told this story before, but I am going to tell it again. It is the story of a lady who served as a Vista Volunteer, in the Domestic Peace Corps, and worked at helping poor, elderly and mostly uneducated people in a large and populous county navigate through the bureaucratic mazes that sometimes separated the people from the help they needed. County officials announced one day changes in procedures that this lady felt would work to the detriment of her poor and elderly clients. And so she went from office to office in the county office building to protest the proposed changes. The changes were canceled, and one county official gave as the reason, “Because Mrs. Swann raised so much hell.”
Well, let me not close on that note. She’ll be angry enough as it is, on the way home. Let me close instead with a note about David Livingstone, one of the most famous Christian missionaries and able Christian leaders of all time. He said that his motto had been “Fear God and work hard.” And he said of his career, “That is all I have ever done.” Let us all fear God and work hard--and we will find that the cost of discipleship is well within our ability to pay it. Amen.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Glad Places and Bad Places (Hebrews 12:18-29)
If you spend a lot of time on the Internet, whether for purposes of research, as I do, or for purposes of entertainment, as I do not, you are bound to be exposed to a lot of strange stuff. I simply ignore the great majority of it, but now and then something does grab my attention. Recently, one of those things was a list of 10 places you definitely do not want to visit. Since this seemed to be absolutely counter to the endless blandishments on the Internet of places that advertisers think you will want to visit, I decided to investigate it.
At the top of the list was the volcanic island of Oshima, off the coast of mainland Japan. Oshima, surprisingly enough, has a web site, complete with a cheery message from the mayor of the island’s town. What the mayor’s message does not mention is the constant and pervasive stench throughout the island of sulfur dioxide gas coming from the island’s volcano. Sulfur dioxide is the stuff that smells like rotten eggs. Levels of the gas rose so dangerously high in the year 2000 that the entire island had to be evacuated for five years. The people returned in 2005, but both residents and visitors are now required to carry gas masks at all times, in case the gas levels rise again unexpectedly.
You can go there if you want to; I don’t. This, in effect, is what the writer of the letter to the Hebrews said to Jewish Christians in the New Testament letter before us. The choice is yours: you can retreat into the religious enslavement of darkness and fear that your ancestors experienced at Mt. Sinai, or you can live bravely without fear in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In the sense of a bad place versus a glad place, the writer contrasts two different religious states of mind, two different spiritual cities. In the sense of taking a spiritual journey, rather than a vacation visit, our lesson presents one frightening and forbidding destination, and on the other hand, a city filled with happy celebration.
I.
It is not the main point of the novel, but in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens does vividly contrast the order of London with the disorder of
Paris during the French revolution. In Paris, the intelligentsia lived in danger of losing their heads on the guillotine. In London, the same persons could live in peaceful stability.
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, in effect, postulates a tale of two cities and says to Jewish Christians that they must choose to live in one or the other. We may think of the first possibility presented to us as the city of fear. We can, if we choose, go on our spiritual journey to life’s end in fear and dread.
This letter is not easy for us to understand because we have never been Jews, and this letter was written to people whose lifelong religious heritage had been Judaism. It was very hard for many of them to embrace the newfound freedom offered by their Christian churches. One of my best friends in the service, and for years afterward was a good ol’ boy named Luke. We used to say of him that the Marine Corps took Luke out of the country, but it couldn’t take the country out of Luke. So it was with these Jewish Christians. Being converted to belief and faith in Jesus Christ did not mean that they had cast off all the ties of their Jewishness.
To them, Jerusalem, which means “city of peace,” was the religious capital of the world. It may be the most inappropriately named city in the world. Except for brief periods, it has never known peace socially, politically, or religiously. Jerusalem for hundreds of years was the seat of a fear-ridden religion.
The “Hebrews,” the Jewish Christians to whom this letter was addressed, would have been quite familiar with the story of Moses and the people at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Recall from our Old Testament readings that the people were so frightened of God that they implored Moses not to make them listen to the voice of God directly or they would die. Even Moses himself trembled with fear at having to come so close to this terrible God. In their later history, continuous sacrifice at the great temple in Jerusalem was an ongoing attempt to placate this God of whom they were so terrified.
Even in the temple of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, the presence of God was experienced only by the high priest and only in that small inner sanctum sanctorum area of the temple known as the holy of holies, and then only once a year at Yom Kippur. When the high priest entered the holy of holies, he did so with a rope tied around his ankle. If the bells on his robe fell silent, meaning that he had died or fainted, the other priests could use the rope to drag his body out.
First-century Jews, by and large, experienced God as the God of Mt. Sinai. But this letter says to the Jews, “Come away from Mt. Sinai in the desert; come to Mt. Zion.” Zion, to the Jews, meant the larger concept of the promised land.
II.
Before Jesus, no Jew had ever thought of calling God, “Our Father.” This was an utterly stunning, dumbfounding thought--a shockingly personal idea of God that was so strange as to be incomprehensible. God was a god of sheer, unapproachable majesty to them. Their God was so far exalted above mere humanity that they dared not even speak God’s name, Yahweh, as it was written in the scriptures Instead, they used the euphemism “my Lord” when reading aloud in their synagogues. They feared rather than loved this God.
It is quite possible for Christians today, just as it was for the Jewish Christians to whom this letter was addressed, to continue worshipping this awesome and terrible god of fear. And many do. Some believers and some churches are much more at home in the Old Testament than in the New. Their god is a god who hates sinners as well as sin, a god of vengeance and retribution bent on punishment rather than guidance and fastened on laws rather than love. They would consider the notion that God ever smiles as a blasphemous thought, because God is too great, too fearsome, too awesome ever to smile--especially at human beings who make mistakes. They are the enthusiastic members of the churches that post such signs as, “Where will you spend eternity? Smoking or nonsmoking?”
Religiously, they dwell in the city of fear. I don’t like it. It is an unhappy place, a bad place. I don’t want to live there. I don’t even want to visit there out of curiosity. And I don’t think you could drag Jesus there with a team of horses. Jesus had a different idea, and he wants us to have one with him.
III.
The Letter to the Hebrews suggests an alternative to dwelling religiously in a state of fear. What Jesus has in mind for our spiritual dwelling place is what we may call the city of love. It’s where Jesus lives. And it is where I choose to live.
Jesus came preaching a new idea: the Kingdom of God. The principle tenets of this kingdom are the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and Jesus’ commandment of love. We are all the children of God and God’s love for us is the accepting, forgiving love of a parent. Since we are all children of God, it follows that all men and women are our brothers and sisters. The proper relationship of parents and children and brothers and sisters is mutual love, respect and assistance.
We are all citizens of the city of love and Jesus is the Lord Mayor, sharing in the fatherhood of God with us. It is where we may dwell in this very moment, if we only say “Yes” to it. It is a happy place, a glad place. Every day is a celebration day in the city of love.
It is a happy place not least because Jesus dwells with us in this city of love. It was Jesus who made possible the new understanding of God that replaces the old images of the terrible, punishing God. It is Jesus who reminds us to call God our Father, and to turn from being people filled with fear and to be happy, thankful people. Jesus takes away from the world the terrible, shuddering fear of the religion of Mt. Sinai. Jesus calls us to come out of the city of fear, to come and live with him in the city of love. It is a good place to live. Amen.
Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, August 22, 2010
At the top of the list was the volcanic island of Oshima, off the coast of mainland Japan. Oshima, surprisingly enough, has a web site, complete with a cheery message from the mayor of the island’s town. What the mayor’s message does not mention is the constant and pervasive stench throughout the island of sulfur dioxide gas coming from the island’s volcano. Sulfur dioxide is the stuff that smells like rotten eggs. Levels of the gas rose so dangerously high in the year 2000 that the entire island had to be evacuated for five years. The people returned in 2005, but both residents and visitors are now required to carry gas masks at all times, in case the gas levels rise again unexpectedly.
You can go there if you want to; I don’t. This, in effect, is what the writer of the letter to the Hebrews said to Jewish Christians in the New Testament letter before us. The choice is yours: you can retreat into the religious enslavement of darkness and fear that your ancestors experienced at Mt. Sinai, or you can live bravely without fear in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In the sense of a bad place versus a glad place, the writer contrasts two different religious states of mind, two different spiritual cities. In the sense of taking a spiritual journey, rather than a vacation visit, our lesson presents one frightening and forbidding destination, and on the other hand, a city filled with happy celebration.
I.
It is not the main point of the novel, but in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens does vividly contrast the order of London with the disorder of
Paris during the French revolution. In Paris, the intelligentsia lived in danger of losing their heads on the guillotine. In London, the same persons could live in peaceful stability.
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, in effect, postulates a tale of two cities and says to Jewish Christians that they must choose to live in one or the other. We may think of the first possibility presented to us as the city of fear. We can, if we choose, go on our spiritual journey to life’s end in fear and dread.
This letter is not easy for us to understand because we have never been Jews, and this letter was written to people whose lifelong religious heritage had been Judaism. It was very hard for many of them to embrace the newfound freedom offered by their Christian churches. One of my best friends in the service, and for years afterward was a good ol’ boy named Luke. We used to say of him that the Marine Corps took Luke out of the country, but it couldn’t take the country out of Luke. So it was with these Jewish Christians. Being converted to belief and faith in Jesus Christ did not mean that they had cast off all the ties of their Jewishness.
To them, Jerusalem, which means “city of peace,” was the religious capital of the world. It may be the most inappropriately named city in the world. Except for brief periods, it has never known peace socially, politically, or religiously. Jerusalem for hundreds of years was the seat of a fear-ridden religion.
The “Hebrews,” the Jewish Christians to whom this letter was addressed, would have been quite familiar with the story of Moses and the people at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Recall from our Old Testament readings that the people were so frightened of God that they implored Moses not to make them listen to the voice of God directly or they would die. Even Moses himself trembled with fear at having to come so close to this terrible God. In their later history, continuous sacrifice at the great temple in Jerusalem was an ongoing attempt to placate this God of whom they were so terrified.
Even in the temple of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, the presence of God was experienced only by the high priest and only in that small inner sanctum sanctorum area of the temple known as the holy of holies, and then only once a year at Yom Kippur. When the high priest entered the holy of holies, he did so with a rope tied around his ankle. If the bells on his robe fell silent, meaning that he had died or fainted, the other priests could use the rope to drag his body out.
First-century Jews, by and large, experienced God as the God of Mt. Sinai. But this letter says to the Jews, “Come away from Mt. Sinai in the desert; come to Mt. Zion.” Zion, to the Jews, meant the larger concept of the promised land.
II.
Before Jesus, no Jew had ever thought of calling God, “Our Father.” This was an utterly stunning, dumbfounding thought--a shockingly personal idea of God that was so strange as to be incomprehensible. God was a god of sheer, unapproachable majesty to them. Their God was so far exalted above mere humanity that they dared not even speak God’s name, Yahweh, as it was written in the scriptures Instead, they used the euphemism “my Lord” when reading aloud in their synagogues. They feared rather than loved this God.
It is quite possible for Christians today, just as it was for the Jewish Christians to whom this letter was addressed, to continue worshipping this awesome and terrible god of fear. And many do. Some believers and some churches are much more at home in the Old Testament than in the New. Their god is a god who hates sinners as well as sin, a god of vengeance and retribution bent on punishment rather than guidance and fastened on laws rather than love. They would consider the notion that God ever smiles as a blasphemous thought, because God is too great, too fearsome, too awesome ever to smile--especially at human beings who make mistakes. They are the enthusiastic members of the churches that post such signs as, “Where will you spend eternity? Smoking or nonsmoking?”
Religiously, they dwell in the city of fear. I don’t like it. It is an unhappy place, a bad place. I don’t want to live there. I don’t even want to visit there out of curiosity. And I don’t think you could drag Jesus there with a team of horses. Jesus had a different idea, and he wants us to have one with him.
III.
The Letter to the Hebrews suggests an alternative to dwelling religiously in a state of fear. What Jesus has in mind for our spiritual dwelling place is what we may call the city of love. It’s where Jesus lives. And it is where I choose to live.
Jesus came preaching a new idea: the Kingdom of God. The principle tenets of this kingdom are the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and Jesus’ commandment of love. We are all the children of God and God’s love for us is the accepting, forgiving love of a parent. Since we are all children of God, it follows that all men and women are our brothers and sisters. The proper relationship of parents and children and brothers and sisters is mutual love, respect and assistance.
We are all citizens of the city of love and Jesus is the Lord Mayor, sharing in the fatherhood of God with us. It is where we may dwell in this very moment, if we only say “Yes” to it. It is a happy place, a glad place. Every day is a celebration day in the city of love.
It is a happy place not least because Jesus dwells with us in this city of love. It was Jesus who made possible the new understanding of God that replaces the old images of the terrible, punishing God. It is Jesus who reminds us to call God our Father, and to turn from being people filled with fear and to be happy, thankful people. Jesus takes away from the world the terrible, shuddering fear of the religion of Mt. Sinai. Jesus calls us to come out of the city of fear, to come and live with him in the city of love. It is a good place to live. Amen.
Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, August 22, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The Assurance of What We Hope For (Hebrews 11:1-3, 6)
I have never known anyone who departed from the faith in an hour of trial. There are, of course, people who have been so troubled or angered by what they interpreted as the silence or absence of God that they gave up on the Christian faith. But I have only heard or read about them; I have never known such folks. But there are many others who have given up, not on the faith, but on the church.
In a recent newspaper column, Leonard Pitts quoted the famous author Anne Rice, who said, “Today I quit being a Christian. I remain committed to Christ as always, but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome , hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous group.” Rice once called herself an atheist, but returned a decade ago to the Roman Catholic church of her youth. She continued, “ For 10 years I have tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.” Ms. Rice, whose books about vampires have sold over 100 million copies worldwide, posted her manifesto on the Facebook site on the Internet, where more than 101,000 people have responded positively to her declaration. She also was interviewed on the ABC Evening News program last Wednesday evening.
Rice says she has not lost her faith, but she has simply “had it up to here” with organized religion. “In the name of Christ,” she wrote, “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science.” Pitts observed in his column that Rice is hardly the only one who feels as she does.
He notes a 2008 study by Trinity College that shows that religiosity is trending down sharply in this country. The American Religious Identification Survey found that the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has fallen by 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86% to 76%, while the percentage of those who claim no religious affiliation has almost doubled, from 8% to 15%.
Closer to home, Presbyterians lament the steady loss of membership in our denomination and cry aloud that we must be doing something wrong--if not everything. Those who cry the loudest usually ignore the fact that membership decline is afflicting every--every--mainline denomination in America. They do not recognize the fact that religion in America has always experienced cyclicality, right from the arrival of the Mayflower. And they don’t want even to talk about a peculiar Presbyterian problem, and that is that we don’t produce enough babies to replace ourselves numerically when we die.
Still closer to home, there are those Presbyterians who simply drift away from their churches. Where do they go? They don’t go anywhere. Careful research has established that the great majority of people who quietly leave Presbyterian churches do not go to other denominations. There are exceptions, of course, but generally we lose people to nothingness, not to other denominations. They just stop going to church. Surveys for years have found that more than five million people in the USA identify themselves as Presbyterians. Church rolls add up to only half that many members. What happened to the other half who call themselves Presbyterians?
Most of the departed whom I have known simply wandered away from faithful participation in the church. They slipped way gradually, without ever consciously deciding to do so. But just as unused body muscles will gradually become smaller and weaker, so it is with spiritual muscles. A faith that is not regularly exercised will become atrophied, like the biceps on an old preacher man. We live in Lake Arrowhead, where I notice that the great majority of the plentiful automobiles are never moved on Sunday morning. When faith becomes atrophied, it becomes easy to stay home on Sunday morning.
A condition of spiritual atrophy prompted the writing of the Letter to the Hebrews. The danger that aroused the writer of this letter was not such definite and grave heresies as imperiled the churches at Galatia and Colossae, nor such vices as imperiled the church at Corinth. Rather it was a gradual, unconscious, growth of doubt and weakening of faith that dulled hopes and slackened energies. This was happening everywhere among the young churches, since the second coming of Christ had obviously been delayed, and the Letter to the Hebrews was not written to one particular congregation, but to all Jewish Christians everywhere in the world of the pre-adolescent church.
Many of the people in the young churches had been in them long enough to grow out of the first flush of enthusiasm. They had begun lapsing into the mental and spiritual condition of many people in every age of the Christian church, including our own: a condition of languor and weariness, of disappointed expectations, deferred hopes, and conscious failure. They had begun to experience a practical unbelief that relegated the active practice of Christianity to the background of their lives and put many other things ahead of it.
I.
All pastors brood about those members of the flock who just don’t seem to care. They wish they could restore in those members the boldness of hope and the intensity of faith that should characterize their calling as Christians. Pastors long to have all their people see that there is another dimension to life that is more than working hard to achieve material goals and taking recreation breaks on weekends. They long to help them see that a life lived with little or no consciousness of the spiritual dimension is only half a life. They want to see people draw nearer to God and stop giving to the appearance and shadow of a materialistic culture the value that really belongs only to the great reality of God in Christ.
And so we pastors exhort our flocks to have done with lesser things and draw nearer to God, believing that God exists and that he rewards those who seek him, as we read in one our text verses.
It sounds like a simple thing. For who among us does not believe that God exists? But that is not the rub, Christians. The problem for all of us--all of us--is to believe that God is what the Bible says God is: one who loves us and wants very much to be included in our lives. The problem is to believe not only that God was explained to us in Jesus of Nazareth, but to believe wholeheartedly and enthusiastically that this can make a difference in our lives.
I believe a lot of things. I believe, with my brain, that when I flip the switch the light will come on. But whether it does or does not has no real, lasting effect on my life. The problem of faith is not merely to believe with our heads, but to believe with our hearts, to the point where our lives are changed by this belief.
I have encountered several responses to the challenge to believe in this heartfelt manner. The first and most often heard response is simply, “Of course, I believe.” But this quick answer is often followed by one of several additional responses.
One says, “Of course, I believe,” but that may be followed with a quick, usually unspoken, “Now leave me alone.”
Another says, “Of course, I believe, but…. The “buts” are several. “But what has that got to do with my life?” Or my career, or my business, or the problems I am experiencing?
Another says, “Of course, I believe. And I’m certainly going to do something about it, very soon.”
But teaching and preaching the faith is not always disappointing. We still encounter some people who respond, “Yes, I believe--and thanks for reminding me.” These are the ones who minister to the minister by making him feel that perhaps his task is not such a thankless one after all.
And there is still another response that touches the heart in a different way. This is the response of the one who says, “I believe; help my unbelief!” Recall the story, in the ninth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, of the father who brought his epileptic son to Jesus and said, “Help me if you can!” In one breath, he confessed both his belief and his doubts. His honest confession of doubt was perfectly acceptable to Jesus and he did help the man. The lesson in this story is for all of us who may be inclined to think that faith must be in perfect, apple-pie order to get the attention and sympathy of God. It does not.
I would be remiss if I did not speak of the plaintive voice of those who cry out, “I believe, Lord! Why won’t you help me out of this trouble?” To this question, I can only quote the answer in the letter to the Hebrews: in this, too, God’s love will be revealed. In this, too, God’s love will be revealed.
II.
There was a time in my life when some of my very real questions and wonderment seemed always to be answered by the admonition to “have faith.” I thought it was a little silly on the part of some people who ought to have known better to tell me to do the very thing I was asking how to do. But it wasn’t silly; they were just doing the best they could to help a perplexed young man. Although neither they nor I understood it at the time, the biblical admonition to “have faith” means quite simply, “Accept the gifts of God.” John Calvin, bless his stern old heart, said that faith is “…a steady and certain knowledge of (God’s love for us). Faith is a steady and certain knowledge of God’s love for us!
Faith is not an act of the will in which you decide to believe and act in a certain way. Faith is something God gives to those who simply admit to God that they don’t have enough. (REPEAT)
To the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, faith is a hope that is certain that what it believes is true and that what it expects will come. It is not the hope that looks forward with wistful longing. It is not the hope that is pinned on a perhaps. It is the hope that is founded on a solid conviction.
Your beloved old KJV says that faith is the substance of things hoped for. The RSV uses the word assurance, rather than substance. Both of these words are attempts at the translation of a Greek word, “hypostasis,” that had a technical meaning in the business world of the first century. It was used to refer to documents that were evidence of ownership.
About 2,000 years ago, a woman named Dionysia lost in a local court a dispute about the ownership of a piece of land. She appealed the case to a higher court in Alexandria and sent her slave to that city with all the pertinent documents in a strong box. On the way, the slave was killed in a fire that destroyed the inn in which he had stopped for the night. For about 2,000 years, the sands of the desert covered the ruins of the inn, the charred bones of the slave and the strongbox. In our time, archaeologists uncovered the ruins and the remains. In the box, they found the legal documents. The letter to the judge in Alexandria said, “In order that my lord, the judge, may know that my appeal is just, I attach my hypostasis. It was the title deed to the piece of land, the evidence of her ownership.
This throws a bright light on this teaching regarding faith. Faith is the title deed of things hoped for. It is the substantial reality by which we Christians live. The act of exercising faith--as one prays or as one leans on the resources of God--is itself the title deed or evidence that we already posses the things we hope for.
When I bought my car and drove it away from the dealership seven years ago, I believed and felt that it was my car. In actuality, the legal title to it was held by the bank to which I made payments. When I made the final payment, the bank gave me the title document. Just so, some things we may hope for may be still in God’s hands, awaiting the proper time of delivery, but they are ours. We may be absolutely certain that God will honor this title deed--this guarantee of his love for us.
III.
This faith does not just pop up full-grown in our lives one day. It is something we grow into. Certainty may elude us--all of us--at times. Paul and John Calvin and whoever wrote the Letter to the Hebrews do not seem to have had any uncertainty. Rather, I think it more likely that in their role as teachers, they just never put any uncertainties down on paper. They and a million preachers who have followed them have felt that they had to write and preach and teach with authority and assurance and they could never, ever express anything less than total certainty.
But I am not like them. I will not tell you that I have gone through my spiritual pilgrimage or my ministry completely untroubled by any doubt or uncertainty. I don’t think anybody does--or can. (There are in the religious world some deluded people and some people who lie to themselves, of course.)
Our spiritual lives are, I think, like the pendulum in my grandmother’s clock that sits on the mantle over our fireplace. The pendulum swings from one extreme of its arc to the other. But it is always trying to come to rest at the center of its arc. My spiritual arc has a center, a still point that is God, the ground of my being. But I am not still. My life swings back and forth from perplexity to peace, from joy to sadness, from boredom to excitement, from belief to unbelief. And there are days when I must pray, “O God…if there is a God.”
And so will you, if you are honest. And I am here to tell you that the God I proclaim finds this honest admission completely acceptable. The ultimate gift of God is that God is just as sympathetic to our doubts and our confusion as to our faith, so great is God‘s love for us. (REPEAT)
God’s great gift to us is to accept us and love us as we are, not as we hope to be someday. To grow in faith is to grow in this understanding of God. Amen.
Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, August 15, 2020
In a recent newspaper column, Leonard Pitts quoted the famous author Anne Rice, who said, “Today I quit being a Christian. I remain committed to Christ as always, but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome , hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous group.” Rice once called herself an atheist, but returned a decade ago to the Roman Catholic church of her youth. She continued, “ For 10 years I have tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.” Ms. Rice, whose books about vampires have sold over 100 million copies worldwide, posted her manifesto on the Facebook site on the Internet, where more than 101,000 people have responded positively to her declaration. She also was interviewed on the ABC Evening News program last Wednesday evening.
Rice says she has not lost her faith, but she has simply “had it up to here” with organized religion. “In the name of Christ,” she wrote, “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science.” Pitts observed in his column that Rice is hardly the only one who feels as she does.
He notes a 2008 study by Trinity College that shows that religiosity is trending down sharply in this country. The American Religious Identification Survey found that the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has fallen by 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86% to 76%, while the percentage of those who claim no religious affiliation has almost doubled, from 8% to 15%.
Closer to home, Presbyterians lament the steady loss of membership in our denomination and cry aloud that we must be doing something wrong--if not everything. Those who cry the loudest usually ignore the fact that membership decline is afflicting every--every--mainline denomination in America. They do not recognize the fact that religion in America has always experienced cyclicality, right from the arrival of the Mayflower. And they don’t want even to talk about a peculiar Presbyterian problem, and that is that we don’t produce enough babies to replace ourselves numerically when we die.
Still closer to home, there are those Presbyterians who simply drift away from their churches. Where do they go? They don’t go anywhere. Careful research has established that the great majority of people who quietly leave Presbyterian churches do not go to other denominations. There are exceptions, of course, but generally we lose people to nothingness, not to other denominations. They just stop going to church. Surveys for years have found that more than five million people in the USA identify themselves as Presbyterians. Church rolls add up to only half that many members. What happened to the other half who call themselves Presbyterians?
Most of the departed whom I have known simply wandered away from faithful participation in the church. They slipped way gradually, without ever consciously deciding to do so. But just as unused body muscles will gradually become smaller and weaker, so it is with spiritual muscles. A faith that is not regularly exercised will become atrophied, like the biceps on an old preacher man. We live in Lake Arrowhead, where I notice that the great majority of the plentiful automobiles are never moved on Sunday morning. When faith becomes atrophied, it becomes easy to stay home on Sunday morning.
A condition of spiritual atrophy prompted the writing of the Letter to the Hebrews. The danger that aroused the writer of this letter was not such definite and grave heresies as imperiled the churches at Galatia and Colossae, nor such vices as imperiled the church at Corinth. Rather it was a gradual, unconscious, growth of doubt and weakening of faith that dulled hopes and slackened energies. This was happening everywhere among the young churches, since the second coming of Christ had obviously been delayed, and the Letter to the Hebrews was not written to one particular congregation, but to all Jewish Christians everywhere in the world of the pre-adolescent church.
Many of the people in the young churches had been in them long enough to grow out of the first flush of enthusiasm. They had begun lapsing into the mental and spiritual condition of many people in every age of the Christian church, including our own: a condition of languor and weariness, of disappointed expectations, deferred hopes, and conscious failure. They had begun to experience a practical unbelief that relegated the active practice of Christianity to the background of their lives and put many other things ahead of it.
I.
All pastors brood about those members of the flock who just don’t seem to care. They wish they could restore in those members the boldness of hope and the intensity of faith that should characterize their calling as Christians. Pastors long to have all their people see that there is another dimension to life that is more than working hard to achieve material goals and taking recreation breaks on weekends. They long to help them see that a life lived with little or no consciousness of the spiritual dimension is only half a life. They want to see people draw nearer to God and stop giving to the appearance and shadow of a materialistic culture the value that really belongs only to the great reality of God in Christ.
And so we pastors exhort our flocks to have done with lesser things and draw nearer to God, believing that God exists and that he rewards those who seek him, as we read in one our text verses.
It sounds like a simple thing. For who among us does not believe that God exists? But that is not the rub, Christians. The problem for all of us--all of us--is to believe that God is what the Bible says God is: one who loves us and wants very much to be included in our lives. The problem is to believe not only that God was explained to us in Jesus of Nazareth, but to believe wholeheartedly and enthusiastically that this can make a difference in our lives.
I believe a lot of things. I believe, with my brain, that when I flip the switch the light will come on. But whether it does or does not has no real, lasting effect on my life. The problem of faith is not merely to believe with our heads, but to believe with our hearts, to the point where our lives are changed by this belief.
I have encountered several responses to the challenge to believe in this heartfelt manner. The first and most often heard response is simply, “Of course, I believe.” But this quick answer is often followed by one of several additional responses.
One says, “Of course, I believe,” but that may be followed with a quick, usually unspoken, “Now leave me alone.”
Another says, “Of course, I believe, but…. The “buts” are several. “But what has that got to do with my life?” Or my career, or my business, or the problems I am experiencing?
Another says, “Of course, I believe. And I’m certainly going to do something about it, very soon.”
But teaching and preaching the faith is not always disappointing. We still encounter some people who respond, “Yes, I believe--and thanks for reminding me.” These are the ones who minister to the minister by making him feel that perhaps his task is not such a thankless one after all.
And there is still another response that touches the heart in a different way. This is the response of the one who says, “I believe; help my unbelief!” Recall the story, in the ninth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, of the father who brought his epileptic son to Jesus and said, “Help me if you can!” In one breath, he confessed both his belief and his doubts. His honest confession of doubt was perfectly acceptable to Jesus and he did help the man. The lesson in this story is for all of us who may be inclined to think that faith must be in perfect, apple-pie order to get the attention and sympathy of God. It does not.
I would be remiss if I did not speak of the plaintive voice of those who cry out, “I believe, Lord! Why won’t you help me out of this trouble?” To this question, I can only quote the answer in the letter to the Hebrews: in this, too, God’s love will be revealed. In this, too, God’s love will be revealed.
II.
There was a time in my life when some of my very real questions and wonderment seemed always to be answered by the admonition to “have faith.” I thought it was a little silly on the part of some people who ought to have known better to tell me to do the very thing I was asking how to do. But it wasn’t silly; they were just doing the best they could to help a perplexed young man. Although neither they nor I understood it at the time, the biblical admonition to “have faith” means quite simply, “Accept the gifts of God.” John Calvin, bless his stern old heart, said that faith is “…a steady and certain knowledge of (God’s love for us). Faith is a steady and certain knowledge of God’s love for us!
Faith is not an act of the will in which you decide to believe and act in a certain way. Faith is something God gives to those who simply admit to God that they don’t have enough. (REPEAT)
To the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, faith is a hope that is certain that what it believes is true and that what it expects will come. It is not the hope that looks forward with wistful longing. It is not the hope that is pinned on a perhaps. It is the hope that is founded on a solid conviction.
Your beloved old KJV says that faith is the substance of things hoped for. The RSV uses the word assurance, rather than substance. Both of these words are attempts at the translation of a Greek word, “hypostasis,” that had a technical meaning in the business world of the first century. It was used to refer to documents that were evidence of ownership.
About 2,000 years ago, a woman named Dionysia lost in a local court a dispute about the ownership of a piece of land. She appealed the case to a higher court in Alexandria and sent her slave to that city with all the pertinent documents in a strong box. On the way, the slave was killed in a fire that destroyed the inn in which he had stopped for the night. For about 2,000 years, the sands of the desert covered the ruins of the inn, the charred bones of the slave and the strongbox. In our time, archaeologists uncovered the ruins and the remains. In the box, they found the legal documents. The letter to the judge in Alexandria said, “In order that my lord, the judge, may know that my appeal is just, I attach my hypostasis. It was the title deed to the piece of land, the evidence of her ownership.
This throws a bright light on this teaching regarding faith. Faith is the title deed of things hoped for. It is the substantial reality by which we Christians live. The act of exercising faith--as one prays or as one leans on the resources of God--is itself the title deed or evidence that we already posses the things we hope for.
When I bought my car and drove it away from the dealership seven years ago, I believed and felt that it was my car. In actuality, the legal title to it was held by the bank to which I made payments. When I made the final payment, the bank gave me the title document. Just so, some things we may hope for may be still in God’s hands, awaiting the proper time of delivery, but they are ours. We may be absolutely certain that God will honor this title deed--this guarantee of his love for us.
III.
This faith does not just pop up full-grown in our lives one day. It is something we grow into. Certainty may elude us--all of us--at times. Paul and John Calvin and whoever wrote the Letter to the Hebrews do not seem to have had any uncertainty. Rather, I think it more likely that in their role as teachers, they just never put any uncertainties down on paper. They and a million preachers who have followed them have felt that they had to write and preach and teach with authority and assurance and they could never, ever express anything less than total certainty.
But I am not like them. I will not tell you that I have gone through my spiritual pilgrimage or my ministry completely untroubled by any doubt or uncertainty. I don’t think anybody does--or can. (There are in the religious world some deluded people and some people who lie to themselves, of course.)
Our spiritual lives are, I think, like the pendulum in my grandmother’s clock that sits on the mantle over our fireplace. The pendulum swings from one extreme of its arc to the other. But it is always trying to come to rest at the center of its arc. My spiritual arc has a center, a still point that is God, the ground of my being. But I am not still. My life swings back and forth from perplexity to peace, from joy to sadness, from boredom to excitement, from belief to unbelief. And there are days when I must pray, “O God…if there is a God.”
And so will you, if you are honest. And I am here to tell you that the God I proclaim finds this honest admission completely acceptable. The ultimate gift of God is that God is just as sympathetic to our doubts and our confusion as to our faith, so great is God‘s love for us. (REPEAT)
God’s great gift to us is to accept us and love us as we are, not as we hope to be someday. To grow in faith is to grow in this understanding of God. Amen.
Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, August 15, 2020
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Some Basics of the Christian Life, Colossians 3: 1-17 by Rev. Charles Swann
I was taught English grammar in elementary school by a severe lady named Otley Pippin who took no guff from any student. After I grew past the elementary stage, I realized that I was indebted to her for drumming the rules of English grammar into my head, for she laid much of the foundation of my education that later enabled me to become a minister and writer and editor. But while I was in elementary school, I joined all the other kids in reciting, “I’d rather have a whippin’ than a class from Otley Pippin.”]
Miss Pippin taught me that there were three kinds of English sentences.
Imperative: “Charles, wash your hands.”
Declarative: “I did wash my hands.”
Interrogative: “Did you use soap?”
What does this have to do with the Christian religion? I hope to explain that these three categories have a lot to do with how people understand and/or misunderstand what the Christian religion is all about. I have encountered in my time a great many people who have, at best, only a hazy understanding of the Christian religion. And not all of them were outside the church! It is all right for people to be quietly religious and not get too deeply into theology. But all too often, a lack of understanding leads to misunderstanding.
It leads people to define religion in terms of imperatives--orders or commands: thou shalt; thou shalt not. Do this or don’t do that, although it seems impossible for you to obey the imperatives, the commands you think you hear from religion and you certainly don’t know anybody who gets it right. And be a certain way, you think you hear from religion, although it is altogether unlike the way you are and you don’t know anybody who gets it right.
A religious understanding--or misunderstanding--that is couched only in terms of imperatives, commands, inevitably leads to frustration and a sense of personal futility…because you can never pull it off…you can never get it right. So what happens? Many, many times it causes people simply to leave religion alone, to stay away from it.
A better understanding recognizes that, yes, there are imperatives in the Gospel. But they rest on declaratives, on statements about what has been done for us. The Bible is not just a collection of imperatives, things for us to do. It is first and foremost a presentation of declaratives, things God has done.
I.
To understand all that Paul had to say to the Colossians, and all that this passage has to say to us today, requires examining and understanding the declaratives as well as the imperatives in this letter. For it is what God has done for us that makes it possible for us to live the life that is envisioned in the imperatives--the kind of life that the Apostle Paul calls the risen and redeemed life.
Why is it called that? Because it is a life of participation. The word participation implies doing something along with other people, or entering into an experience that someone else has prepared for you. In our case, it means that we participate in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is basic Christian belief.
In our profession of faith and baptism, we participate vicariously in the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the inextinguishable life of Christ. The symbolism in baptism is that we die with him, we are buried with him, we are raised and made alive with him. On and over my mortal life and my lack of merit has been superimposed the life and merit of Christ. This understanding was so real to Paul that he could say, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” This was much more vivid in the minds of the ancients to whom Paul wrote this letter than it is in our minds, unfortunately.
Now, we can insist that we are just as bad and useless and disappointing as we ever were, but God does not think so, because he sees us joined to Jesus and participating in his life.
The wonderful results of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are passed on to us at our profession of faith, our baptism and when we celebrate Holy Communion. In these sacraments, God reminds us the reminder that we are his people. We belong to him; we are members of his family.
The Christian faith demands awareness of my life not as my own invention, but a gift of God. And as an historical faith rooted in a specific place and a specific people, this faith means that I am to embrace my own particular life, the place where God has set me down and the people God has placed me among, also as gifts of God. God has put his chosen, forgiven people together in the one holy Christian Church made up of congregations like this one.
If we participate in the life of Christ, we do so together. The church is the physical manifestation of the body of Christ. As part of the body of Christ, we are part of each other. As members of the body of Christ we participate in a common life of sharing and mutual help. No Christian can be a tight little island. I have reminded you before of the Simon and Garfunkel song that says, “I am a rock. I am an island.” This is not and cannot be true of a believing Christian. We are not and cannot be apart from each other. The people to the right of you and to the left of you are your brothers and sisters, your siblings in the household of God. We have true fellowship with one another because we have all been united with Christ.
II.
When we understand the declaratives of the Gospel, we can deal with the imperatives. Because through our baptism we have participated in the death and the risen life of Jesus Christ, with all that involves, Paul can charge us to put to death that which is earthly in us. He gives us a list.
At the top of the list, are moral failures related to sex, that most basic of human urges that is second in our drives only to meeting our survival needs. Nothing pervades our whole nature--physical, mental and emotional--more than sex. There is no man in this room who has not taken a second look at a pretty young lady. And there is no woman in this room who has not taken a second look at a handsome man with beautiful blue eyes. This is because God created us as sexual beings. God intends for us to use and enjoy this powerful drive--chastely and rightly and properly, keeping our sexuality controlled and directed only in the proper channels.
But it is hard to keep sexuality in its proper place when our whole culture is shot through, saturated, with sexual license--when our culture constantly throws at us all the things Paul lists: fornication, impurity, lust, evil desire. The opposite of chastity and purity is thrown at us in every newspaper, magazine, TV show and movie. But the constant awareness that we are participants in the life of Christ and of each other can enable us to put these sins off from us.
Next on Paul’s list is greed, the inordinate desire for money, for things, things and more things. But be reminded that just as there are right and proper sexual urges, so there are rightful desires and uses for things for things. W3e need a certain amount of material--as I call it--”stuff.” Even monkish old John Calvin could say, in writing about the right use of this world’s goods, that clothing, for example, is not merely to cover us and keep us warm, but also to give us a pleasing appearance that delights the eye. Looking good makes you feel good!
But in our time, we have gone far beyond necessity, convenience and even beauty. Our world runs on the desire for more, more, more. Dr. Al Winn, a past president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, observed that the worst danger of television is not the soft porn that besmirches so many programs; it is the hard sell of the commercials between program segments. What we are being told dozens of times a day is the by buying and owning things, we can receive the peace, joy and blessedness that, truly, only God can give. The hunger for things is pure idolatry.
Dr. Gilbert Bowen has observed that our secularist consumerist society is almost inevitably a society that breeds envy of what others have, which is by definition restlessness and discontent with who we are and what we possess. It rarely occurs to the folks who fill up the parking lots of the malls that happiness may consist more in what we do without, the willingness to be content with less than having what everybody else seems to think important or necessary. If we are truly to live happily and fulfilled, rather than always empty and hungry for more “stuff,” it will be as we learn to treasure the life given to us now, this day, rather than continually longing to be someone else or to live out some other story.
Next, Paul moves on to another list of things we must put away from ourselves. I call them sins of the tongue. They include anger: the unrestrained outburst of temper. Wrath: the slow-burning grudge. Malice: a frame of mind that wishes bad things, not good ones, for another person or group of people. Slander: the urge to belittle or defame others, to build one’s self up by cutting someone else down. Abusive language that says to or about other people things we would not want said to or about ourselves. And Paul caps the list of the sins of the tongue with “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self and clothed yourself with the new self.”
III.
That last is an important point. When we put off the old self, we must take the positive step of putting on the new. I have a lot of old clothes. In fact, some of my clothes may be older than some of you. I wear them around the house and Janell lives in the constant fear that I will wear some of them outside the house, that I will go somewhere in them. Well, as casual as I am about clothes, I do recognize the need now and then to put on something that was actually acquired in this decade. But there is no now-and-then in clothing ourselves with the new self. We have to remember to wear the new self every day. Clothing ourselves in the new self every day, to borrow some of Father Calvin’s words, gives us a pleasing appearance that delights the eyes, both of God and our neighbors and ourselves. Looking good makes you feel good! And we never look better than when we wear the new nature that Christ provides us.
Reminding us of our new natures, Paul then shifts from things we are to turn away from to list some things for us to turn to. (I know, I am ending a sentence with a preposition.) Things to turn to. So there.
Compassion: not pity, not merely feeling sorry for others from a position of comfort and safety, but stepping down from the position of comfort and safety and entering into the sufferings of others.
Kindness and gentleness: Did you ever stop to think that kindness and gentleness are only good manners?
Humility: not thinking of ourselves more highly than we should.
Meekness: being honest with myself about myself, in the light of God’s mercy.
Patience: having a long temper instead of a short one. And patiently saying I am sorry when I have been short-tempered.
Paul says that we should use these virtues in order to be able to put up with each other…in order to forgive one another. And he goes on to speak more about love and peace and thankfulness, the very hallmarks of the church.
And finally he says, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
This is a beautiful picture: to be able to live and work and play, to earn our daily bread, to keep our house, to grow our tomatoes, to cook a meal, to hammer a nail, to play a game of bridge or a round of golf, or even to mow the lawn--to do all these things giving thanks to God. Though we may not be able to achieve perfectly this ideal way of being, it nevertheless is a noble goal to keep in sight, because we live risen lives…risen with Jesus Christ.
Miss Pippin taught me that there were three kinds of English sentences.
Imperative: “Charles, wash your hands.”
Declarative: “I did wash my hands.”
Interrogative: “Did you use soap?”
What does this have to do with the Christian religion? I hope to explain that these three categories have a lot to do with how people understand and/or misunderstand what the Christian religion is all about. I have encountered in my time a great many people who have, at best, only a hazy understanding of the Christian religion. And not all of them were outside the church! It is all right for people to be quietly religious and not get too deeply into theology. But all too often, a lack of understanding leads to misunderstanding.
It leads people to define religion in terms of imperatives--orders or commands: thou shalt; thou shalt not. Do this or don’t do that, although it seems impossible for you to obey the imperatives, the commands you think you hear from religion and you certainly don’t know anybody who gets it right. And be a certain way, you think you hear from religion, although it is altogether unlike the way you are and you don’t know anybody who gets it right.
A religious understanding--or misunderstanding--that is couched only in terms of imperatives, commands, inevitably leads to frustration and a sense of personal futility…because you can never pull it off…you can never get it right. So what happens? Many, many times it causes people simply to leave religion alone, to stay away from it.
A better understanding recognizes that, yes, there are imperatives in the Gospel. But they rest on declaratives, on statements about what has been done for us. The Bible is not just a collection of imperatives, things for us to do. It is first and foremost a presentation of declaratives, things God has done.
I.
To understand all that Paul had to say to the Colossians, and all that this passage has to say to us today, requires examining and understanding the declaratives as well as the imperatives in this letter. For it is what God has done for us that makes it possible for us to live the life that is envisioned in the imperatives--the kind of life that the Apostle Paul calls the risen and redeemed life.
Why is it called that? Because it is a life of participation. The word participation implies doing something along with other people, or entering into an experience that someone else has prepared for you. In our case, it means that we participate in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is basic Christian belief.
In our profession of faith and baptism, we participate vicariously in the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the inextinguishable life of Christ. The symbolism in baptism is that we die with him, we are buried with him, we are raised and made alive with him. On and over my mortal life and my lack of merit has been superimposed the life and merit of Christ. This understanding was so real to Paul that he could say, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” This was much more vivid in the minds of the ancients to whom Paul wrote this letter than it is in our minds, unfortunately.
Now, we can insist that we are just as bad and useless and disappointing as we ever were, but God does not think so, because he sees us joined to Jesus and participating in his life.
The wonderful results of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are passed on to us at our profession of faith, our baptism and when we celebrate Holy Communion. In these sacraments, God reminds us the reminder that we are his people. We belong to him; we are members of his family.
The Christian faith demands awareness of my life not as my own invention, but a gift of God. And as an historical faith rooted in a specific place and a specific people, this faith means that I am to embrace my own particular life, the place where God has set me down and the people God has placed me among, also as gifts of God. God has put his chosen, forgiven people together in the one holy Christian Church made up of congregations like this one.
If we participate in the life of Christ, we do so together. The church is the physical manifestation of the body of Christ. As part of the body of Christ, we are part of each other. As members of the body of Christ we participate in a common life of sharing and mutual help. No Christian can be a tight little island. I have reminded you before of the Simon and Garfunkel song that says, “I am a rock. I am an island.” This is not and cannot be true of a believing Christian. We are not and cannot be apart from each other. The people to the right of you and to the left of you are your brothers and sisters, your siblings in the household of God. We have true fellowship with one another because we have all been united with Christ.
II.
When we understand the declaratives of the Gospel, we can deal with the imperatives. Because through our baptism we have participated in the death and the risen life of Jesus Christ, with all that involves, Paul can charge us to put to death that which is earthly in us. He gives us a list.
At the top of the list, are moral failures related to sex, that most basic of human urges that is second in our drives only to meeting our survival needs. Nothing pervades our whole nature--physical, mental and emotional--more than sex. There is no man in this room who has not taken a second look at a pretty young lady. And there is no woman in this room who has not taken a second look at a handsome man with beautiful blue eyes. This is because God created us as sexual beings. God intends for us to use and enjoy this powerful drive--chastely and rightly and properly, keeping our sexuality controlled and directed only in the proper channels.
But it is hard to keep sexuality in its proper place when our whole culture is shot through, saturated, with sexual license--when our culture constantly throws at us all the things Paul lists: fornication, impurity, lust, evil desire. The opposite of chastity and purity is thrown at us in every newspaper, magazine, TV show and movie. But the constant awareness that we are participants in the life of Christ and of each other can enable us to put these sins off from us.
Next on Paul’s list is greed, the inordinate desire for money, for things, things and more things. But be reminded that just as there are right and proper sexual urges, so there are rightful desires and uses for things for things. W3e need a certain amount of material--as I call it--”stuff.” Even monkish old John Calvin could say, in writing about the right use of this world’s goods, that clothing, for example, is not merely to cover us and keep us warm, but also to give us a pleasing appearance that delights the eye. Looking good makes you feel good!
But in our time, we have gone far beyond necessity, convenience and even beauty. Our world runs on the desire for more, more, more. Dr. Al Winn, a past president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, observed that the worst danger of television is not the soft porn that besmirches so many programs; it is the hard sell of the commercials between program segments. What we are being told dozens of times a day is the by buying and owning things, we can receive the peace, joy and blessedness that, truly, only God can give. The hunger for things is pure idolatry.
Dr. Gilbert Bowen has observed that our secularist consumerist society is almost inevitably a society that breeds envy of what others have, which is by definition restlessness and discontent with who we are and what we possess. It rarely occurs to the folks who fill up the parking lots of the malls that happiness may consist more in what we do without, the willingness to be content with less than having what everybody else seems to think important or necessary. If we are truly to live happily and fulfilled, rather than always empty and hungry for more “stuff,” it will be as we learn to treasure the life given to us now, this day, rather than continually longing to be someone else or to live out some other story.
Next, Paul moves on to another list of things we must put away from ourselves. I call them sins of the tongue. They include anger: the unrestrained outburst of temper. Wrath: the slow-burning grudge. Malice: a frame of mind that wishes bad things, not good ones, for another person or group of people. Slander: the urge to belittle or defame others, to build one’s self up by cutting someone else down. Abusive language that says to or about other people things we would not want said to or about ourselves. And Paul caps the list of the sins of the tongue with “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self and clothed yourself with the new self.”
III.
That last is an important point. When we put off the old self, we must take the positive step of putting on the new. I have a lot of old clothes. In fact, some of my clothes may be older than some of you. I wear them around the house and Janell lives in the constant fear that I will wear some of them outside the house, that I will go somewhere in them. Well, as casual as I am about clothes, I do recognize the need now and then to put on something that was actually acquired in this decade. But there is no now-and-then in clothing ourselves with the new self. We have to remember to wear the new self every day. Clothing ourselves in the new self every day, to borrow some of Father Calvin’s words, gives us a pleasing appearance that delights the eyes, both of God and our neighbors and ourselves. Looking good makes you feel good! And we never look better than when we wear the new nature that Christ provides us.
Reminding us of our new natures, Paul then shifts from things we are to turn away from to list some things for us to turn to. (I know, I am ending a sentence with a preposition.) Things to turn to. So there.
Compassion: not pity, not merely feeling sorry for others from a position of comfort and safety, but stepping down from the position of comfort and safety and entering into the sufferings of others.
Kindness and gentleness: Did you ever stop to think that kindness and gentleness are only good manners?
Humility: not thinking of ourselves more highly than we should.
Meekness: being honest with myself about myself, in the light of God’s mercy.
Patience: having a long temper instead of a short one. And patiently saying I am sorry when I have been short-tempered.
Paul says that we should use these virtues in order to be able to put up with each other…in order to forgive one another. And he goes on to speak more about love and peace and thankfulness, the very hallmarks of the church.
And finally he says, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
This is a beautiful picture: to be able to live and work and play, to earn our daily bread, to keep our house, to grow our tomatoes, to cook a meal, to hammer a nail, to play a game of bridge or a round of golf, or even to mow the lawn--to do all these things giving thanks to God. Though we may not be able to achieve perfectly this ideal way of being, it nevertheless is a noble goal to keep in sight, because we live risen lives…risen with Jesus Christ.
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