Imprinting and Other Impersonations Colossians 1:15-28

Transcription

1 Garrett Vickrey Pentecost +8 Imprinting and Other Impersonations Colossians 1:15-28 Woodland Baptist Church San Antonio, TX A college friend gave a toast at my wedding. He glowingly boasted that I was a great example of someone who personified the peace of Christ. I always kept calm even when everything was going wrong. That I always tried to imitate Jesus in being a peaceful presence in the midst of craziness. My brother leaned over to me and said, If he really knew you he would know you ve been following a towering figure who might as well have walked on water. But, you grew up in Dallas in the 1990s. You haven t been imitating Jesus you ve been trying to be like Troy Aikman. I wish I could say I was trying to be like Jesus, but my brother was probably right. I probably looked to the head of America s team as much as the head of the Church, the first born of all creation. Who could really be like either? Both seem so unattainable. But, maybe that s our problem. Paul isn t trying to emphasize the cosmic place of Christ to put Jesus so far above us that he seems untouchable. Just the opposite. He is saying that in following him, and being like him our lives have greater effect than we could ever imagine. Colossians 1 places great emphasis on the divinity of the Christ. Jesus is the first born of all creation. Paul is expounding upon the universal implications of Jesus. The Son is the face which looked out upon creation in the beginning; the face who responded in thanksgiving for the fruit of all creation. But, Jesus is cosmic precisely because he makes God so particularly local. He is the image of the invisible God. In him all the fullness of God came to dwell. And it came to dwell among us in our skin. I saw Jesus on the cover of a magazine at HEB this week. Between US Weekly, People, and Soap Opera Digest was a small magazine with a depiction of Jesus on the cover. The title article was Have you thought of Jesus today? The image of Jesus on this magazine was of a light-skinned man with light brown hair and striking green eyes. He actually looked a little like Troy Aikman. He was one handsome savior; he 1

2 could have been on the cover of Soap Opera Digest. But, the General Hospital Jesus is not the one who saves. It may be the one we imagine, but that s a far cry from Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was a Jew from the middle east. He might stick out in our congregation. Unfortunately, we prefer to make him like our ideals instead of letting his ideals imprint upon us and change our vision of him and our neighbors. What images of Jesus need to be cut out so that we can see the God who meets us in the face of our neighbor? Can we, after a week like this, come to faith that the moral imperatives of Jesus and his neighbor ethic might be more than a quaint word for us? His message of love your neighbor as yourself might just be the cure we need. From the looks of the Jesus on the magazine it appears we prefer the image of God in Troy Aikman to Jesus. We are tempted by power or what Paul calls thrones. Thrones are the concentrations of power good and bad. The thrones of this world take their cue from Caesar. Power imitates the best known power. But, Paul is subverting this imitation game. In the midst of a time and place where Rome and Caesar are known to be all powerful and all knowing the head of the entire world Caesar s head was in every pocket on their coins Busts of his face welcomed people home to Rome into this world Paul proclaimed Christ the first born, the head, the one in whom all things hold together. In his cross, everything changed. The victim has become the victor. In the weakness of his failed ministry that led to the murder of the Son, the love of God overcame the world. In Jesus life, his death and his resurrection have recast thrones and powers. The powers of Rome can only lead to death. And we know that all too well. The fear and intimidation game Rome perfected plays out today in our own streets. We are conflicted among ourselves between the powers. We are conflicted between choosing the neighbor ethic of Jesus and the domination of Rome. We see it this week in the ambush attack upon police carried out at the end of a peaceful protest in Dallas. The perpetrator of the ambush against the police in Dallas believed that the only answer to his grievance with policing in this country was 2

3 more death. There was no hope beyond the thrones of Caesar and the powers of death that keep the seat of power. Somehow, this man missed the message. Somehow he must not have looked upon what was playing out underneath his sniper s perch. Men and women, young and old, of many races were marching together for justice. They were marching with the Dallas police. In fact, officers were posing with protestors in pictures. DPD officers posted pictures on social media with protesters holding signs that say, We want justice now. That s a shared dream it s not just the dream of black or white. It s the dream of God for this world shared by people of goodwill on our streets, in malls, in government, in churches, and in law enforcement. Now, our African American brothers and sisters have long been telling us that there is a race problem in our society. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s won many victories but there is still work to be done. As a white male, I don t always see it. That doesn t mean it isn t there. There is still peace that needs to be won. There is still justice that needs to be shared. And that can t happen without moving beyond the categories that blind us from the depth of interaction and witness at the heart of human relationship. We have to move beyond dualistic thinking that says you are antipolice just because you say all black live matters, or that you are anti-black lives because you back the blue. This either/or mentality is tearing us apart. It isn t comprehensive of the complexity of any of our actual beliefs whether you re more conservative or liberal. We need a both/and vision. The church should excel at both/and thinking, but instead many even in Christian communities are bound to either/ or. We worship a Lord we claim is wholly God and wholly man. Divine and human Jesus is both/and; which is probably why all things hold together in him. And why all things fall apart in us when we try to be either/or. We are a paradoxical people. None of us are simple. Still, the us vs. them mentality is simple and addictive. It s like a drug to our violent brains. It s feeds our fears, and gives us a rush of adrenaline. It also binds us to a world where we need no savior. Because we know how to win death to whoever we label as the other. 3

4 If we can only make our Jesus look like us if we can make him look like a soap opera star maybe we can get people to believe in him. People are more likely to imitate what they admire right? But, that s not Jesus. We try to make the gospel believable; we try to make it relevant. We make it what we can understand and manipulate. We try to make Christ fit into our world, when in fact, it is we who should be transformed to his. He is the first born of creation, and offers us the opportunity to be the first born of faith. Paul wasn t sure that anyone was going to listen to him when he proclaimed that in Jesus all things hold together or that he is the image of the invisible God. He was writing from prison. He didn t know how his message would be received. but, that didn t stop him. The image of God in the face of Jesus was imprinted upon his being. That face is the one from whom he took his cues. It was a face that was blinding to him at first it was so different from what he knew. But, in that face he found the freedom to stand up to the powers of death in his day. And through Paul s life and through his writing we see and know more of who God is. Paul became an icon of grace. And he invites us as a church, and as followers of Jesus to reflect the image of Jesus too. Consider the Colossians receiving this letter from Paul. This is a church that meets in the home of Philemon, Apphia and Archippus. This is the home from which the slave Onesimus ran away. We read about this in Paul s letter to Philemon. Paul sends Onesimus back to Philemon with a letter. He encourages them to accept Onesimus back as a brother in Christ. We need to read Colossians with both Philemon and Onesimus in the room. And we need to read it today in light of the history of slavery in our country. We need to read it in a post-jim Crow world. We need to read it remembering that Paul s words were used to reinforce the system of slavery. We must be honest. We have not always been positive shapers of culture, bearing Christ s image to the world. But, don t despair. Because people have changed the world through Christ s message of love your neighbor before. And it will happen again. I was at a funeral in Austin yesterday for the step-father of my half brother and sister. Riley Eubanks was the pastor of 4

5 Seventh and James Baptist Church in the 1960s. The church, for the few of you like my wife who didn t go to Baylor, is right on the Baylor campus. In the 1960s it was just about the biggest church in town. They must have had people a Sunday, at least half of whom were students at Baylor. One of the eulogists, Becky, spoke of how she attended Seventh and James while Riley was pastor when she was at Baylor. When Becky came to Baylor in 1960 as far as she knew there were no Black students, and no black people in the sanctuary at Seventh and James Baptist Church there on campus. Her senior year when she and three of her friends decided to get off campus and go across the Brazos River to Paul Quinn College to make some new friends. Paul Quinn College is a historically black college affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). These four Baylor students made four friends at Paul Quinn and they decided they would visit each other s churches. So Becky went to see Riley over at Seventh and said, I m bringing four friends to church this Sunday. I want to make sure that we welcome them. Riley nodded. He knew what she was doing. And when those four white students from Baylor and four black students from Paul Quinn poured out of their ride in the parking lot that Sunday a deacon met them in the parking lot to greet all of them with a smile. Then an usher met them at the door and greeted them and introduced them to people who helped them find their seats. People at the ends of the aisles smiled and shook their hands as they walked toward the front of the church. They were led to the fourth row in the middle of the center pew where there was space reserved. It was This was just three years after four college students in Greensboro, NC staged a lunch counter sit-in which quickly spread across the South. Churches in Birmingham, AL were being bombed. An NAACP field secretary was murdered. In Waco, at least on that day, white and black worshiped God together, held together by the One who holds us all together. The invisible became visible. It was a long way across that Brazos River from Baylor to Paul Quinn. To bridge that gap we 5

6 needed people willing to make that trek across. Now, that s just some college kids going to church together in Waco. So what? What s going to change because of that? Maybe so. Or maybe, its the image of the invisible God coming to life in front of our eyes. We call that incarnation. And we re here today because we believe incarnation once changed everything. 6