Rooted Richmond s First Baptist Church, July 24, 2016 The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost Colossians 2:6-15 (16-19) As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. I ve heard it said that some young people stay away from church because they don t care for organized religion, to which I usually reply (tongue in cheek), Well, they should give First Baptist a try; we ve been at it for 236 years and we still haven t figured it out! But what they mean, apparently, is this: they don t want some preacher standing in a pulpit telling them how to live their lives. And I can understand that. If I were seventeen years old, sitting in a church service, and the preacher was giving a lecture about the evils of, say, rock and roll, I might sink down in the pew, pull out my ipod, put in my earbuds, find my collection of Bon Jovi music, and play It s My Life, as loudly as possible without getting caught. Does everybody know that song? Does anybody know that song? It s kind of an anthem of youthful rebellion. It goes: I ain't gonna be just a face in the crowd, you're gonna hear my voice when I shout it out loud: It's my life. It's now or never. I ain't gonna live forever. I just want to live while I'm alive. It s my life. Even if you ve never heard it you get the idea: it s my life. Mine. Nobody else is going to tell me how to live it. It s the kind of thing you shout over your shoulder as you climb into the cockpit of your new fire engine red Kia Rio a graduation gift and peel out of the driveway as your parents stand on the front porch wringing their hands. It feels good, so good! You roll down the windows and crank up the music and fly down the 1
highway going much too fast, singing along with Jon Bon Jovi, It s my life. It s now or never. I ain t gonna live forever. I just want to live while I m alive. It s my life! And that s when you see the flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror and feel your heart leap into your throat. That s when you pull to the side of the road slowly and carefully and try to turn the music off before the policeman is standing there beside the car. But it s too late. He heard it when you blew past his squad car at 85 miles an hour. He leans down and looks at you through his aviator sunglasses, asks for your license and registration, and then he clicks his ball point pen and writes the biggest speeding ticket you ve ever seen. He rips it out of the book and hands it over, and as he does he says, It s my life, huh? How s that working out for you? In that question is the implication that how we live our lives matters, that our choices have consequences, and that it is possible for us to make choices with disastrous consequences. What if that preacher in the pulpit up there is not trying to make your life miserable, but trying to make your life beautiful, trying to set your feet on the path that will lead to life abundant, overflowing, and everlasting? And what if you can t hear him because you ve got your earbuds in and your music cranked up, because it s your life not his and you just want to live while you re alive? Ten years from now, twenty years from now, thirty years from now that preacher might stop you on the street and say, How s that working out for you? And you would want to have a good answer. You would want to be able to say, Better than I ever dreamed. So, how do you get to that place? Whether you do it your way or the preacher s way, how do you get to that place where your life has never been better? Let s take our earbuds out and see what the 2
Apostle Paul has to say. Yes, he s a preacher. And yes, he seems to be standing in the pulpit today telling us how to live our lives. But let s give him a chance. He s writing to a group of people in Colossae, a little town in Asia Minor not all that far from Ephesus. In fact, Paul may have been in prison in Ephesus when he wrote this letter, and some of you might be tempted to ask, How s that working out for you, Paul? But again, let s give him a chance. He hasn t been to Colossae, but Epaphras, one of his fellow missionaries, has. Epaphras has told the Colossians about Jesus, apparently, and some of them have received that good news with great joy. They have been baptized into the new life in Christ and come up out of the water shouting, Hallelujah! It s the best life they ve ever lived. But now there is a new religion in town, some early form of Gnosticism, and some of them are turning to that, hoping it will provide them with an even better life. Do you know anything about Gnosticism? I had to look it up, just to refresh my memory, but according to reliable sources i the adherents of Gnosticism were convinced that the material world was evil, that it was made by some lesser god, possibly even Satan. And so they shunned the material world, down here, and reached up toward the spiritual world through extreme ascetic practices. They believed that the flesh was bad and the spirit was good, and that by fasting and meditating and mortifying the flesh, by following certain rituals and keeping certain festivals, they would discover the secret of life a special kind of knowledge (or in Greek, gnosis) that would set their souls free from the prison house of the flesh and transport them to an entirely spiritual plane. I must confess that when I read that definition I had a little trouble seeing the appeal. I m wondering what the street corner Gnostic evangelists would have to say to make me want 3
to give up my faith in Jesus and start practicing extreme asceticism. Except. Except that on some level I agree with them about that whole flesh and spirit thing. When I was seventeen I wanted to be a good Christian. I believed it was the best of all possible lives. But if you had asked me when I was seventeen what was keeping me from living that life I would have said it was my flesh. It was like walking a really big dog, a dog that was stronger than I was. My spirit wanted me to be a good Christian boy but my flesh did not. It would go running off after every temptation that crossed its path, and I would be dragged along behind shouting, Bad dog! Bad dog! Paul talks about this in Romans 7 where he says, For we know that the Law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate (Rom. 7:14-15). I could have written those words myself when I was seventeen, and if there had been some Gnostic evangelist standing on a street corner telling me that there was a way to overpower the flesh, to bend it toward my will, I might have listened. But Paul says, No, Jesus is enough. And even in that passage from Romans, where he says, I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate, he ends by saying, Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? and then he answers his own question: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom. 7:24-25). He is enough, Paul says, enough to give us victory over the flesh, and in today s reading from Colossians he makes that crystal clear. But before we go any further let s agree that the sins of the flesh are not only those I was struggling with at seventeen. In Galatians 5 Paul catalogues at least 15 4
works of the flesh : fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and just to make sure he hasn t left anything out he concludes by saying, and things like these (Gal. 5:19-21). Something for everyone, right? And everyone is guilty of sins of the flesh. But will these fleshly sins continue to enslave us and keep us from living the good and beautiful life? No! Paul says. In chapter 2, verse 11, he writes: You were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ. Whatever else that means it seems to mean that you have been cut off from your sinful nature, and your sinful nature has been cut off from you. It no longer has power over you. It has been cut off and cast away. In verse 12 he writes: When you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And again, what he seems to mean is that the sinful body the old you is dead and buried. You don t have to worry about it anymore. It no longer has power over you. In verses 13 and 14 he writes: And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him (that is, with Jesus), when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. So, the record of your sin, along with all its guilt and shame, has been nailed to the cross crucified! there is nothing it can do to you anymore. These are very powerful, very visceral images. Paul claims that the sinful nature 5
is cut off and thrown away. The body of sin is dead and buried. The record of sin is nailed to the cross. And all of this in Christ, who is enough. He, himself, has become a metaphor of this new reality. He was circumcised, he was crucified, he was buried, he was raised, and now in him you have been, too. It is no longer you who live but Christ in you, the hope of glory! All of which sounds wonderful, but very little of which rings true with my experience. When I was baptized as a teenager I was counting on something Paul said in Romans 6: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3-4). I wanted to bury the old me in the waters of baptism. I needed to come up to a whole new life. But walking home from my river baptism someone asked me if I felt any different and I surprised myself by saying no. And then later, when I discovered I was still capable of sin, I was horrified. They didn t hold me down long enough! I thought. My old self didn t die! But here s what I ve learned since then. My flesh is not evil. I can do evil things with my flesh, but my flesh, itself, is not evil. The Incarnation is proof enough of that. Jesus Christ came in the flesh. In his flesh the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, which sanctifies the flesh, and turns the body into a temple. I love what Frederick Buechner says about it. He says the Greeks thought of the body as the prison house of the soul. The suggestion was that to escape it altogether was something less than a disaster. The Bible, on the other hand, sees the body in particular and the material world in general as a good and glorious 6
invention. How could it be otherwise when it was invented by a good and glorious God? The Old Testament rings loud with the praises of trees and birds and rain and mountains, of wine that gladdens the heart of man and oil that makes his face shine and bread that strengthens him. ii And so, contrary to the teaching of the Gnostics, the material world is not evil; the material world is good. But we can use it in evil ways, just as we can use our bodies to do evil things. When I was thinking about this passage last week I thought about the spirit and flesh as two people in one car. And I thought about how it sometimes seems as if the flesh drags the spirit out of the car, and beats it up, and ties it up, and throws it in the trunk, and slams the lid, and drives off down the highway at 85 miles an hour, laughing like a maniac, with Bon Jovi blasting through the speakers, It s My Life. But I also thought that it doesn t have to be like that. The spirit could let the flesh ride in the passenger seat, but it couldn t let it drive. It might even ask the flesh from time to time, Are you hungry? Do you need a rest stop? We don t have to mortify the flesh like the Gnostics. We don t have to tie it up and lock it in the trunk. We can be kind to our flesh, and we should be. But we don t need to let it drive the car. And I think that s what Paul is saying here, that the flesh is no longer in control of our lives: Christ is. Paul has used so many different images to help his hearers understand this new reality, but at the beginning of today s passage he uses an image that is simply beautiful, and I want to leave you with that one. In Colossians 2:6 he says, As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. 7
Live your lives rooted in him, Paul says. After the sinful nature has been cut off and thrown away, after the sinful body is dead and buried, after the record of sin has been nailed to the cross, let him take what is left and plant it in the soil of his love and forgiveness, let your roots grow deep, lift your leaves up high, and live your lives in him, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. And when someone asks you years from now, How s that working out for you? you can say, Better than I ever dreamed. Jim Somerville 2016 i I started with Wikipedia (for shame!), but then checked my answers against The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), pp. 226-230. They checked out. ii Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: a Seeker s ABC (HarperSanFrancisco, 1973, 1993), p. 50. 8