Glue, Gravity, Gumption and Guts Based on Colossians 1:15-20 Preached at the Stated Meeting of Peace River Presbytery First Presbyterian Church, Bonita Springs, Florida May 24, 2012 By Rev. Graham P. Hart, General Presbyter Preface - I come with a disclaimer and explanation there are more gifted preachers than I among us today; I know because Sunday by Sunday as I visit congregations I hear you and am grateful for your ministries of the word. There are more gifted Biblical scholars among us today; I know because several of you have helped me look at this text. There are more faithful disciples among us today who as ruling elders work and pray and give witness to their faith both inside and outside the church. I take my hat off to you in gratitude for your faith and witness, the foundation on which every pastor and the entire presbytery depend to do our work. But, having said that, I have a passion to serve the church in a way that celebrates and recognizes that we are the Body of Christ together And I am grateful for the invitation and opportunity to preach today.
The title of my sermon --- Glue, Gravity, Gumption and Guts refers to things or forces that hold stuff (including ourselves) together. I would invite us to think today about what or who ultimately holds life, including the church, together. We are living at a time when to some it appears that everything is coming apart. The economy is recovering for some, but, for the millions out of work, it still feels like it is coming apart. Presidential election year politics will use fear and anger to plant seeds of doubt into our national psyche to get us to believe that, if the other side is elected, the world our country the economy is all going to fall apart. In the church, especially in the West, it may feel that way as well like it is all coming apart. Specifically, o PCUSA lost almost half of its membership since the 60 s. It feels like we are coming apart. o The mainstream Presbyterian family over the past 75 years has had three schisms, with a small group of folks splitting off every 25 years or so. First there was the OPC, then the PCA, then the EPC, and now the ECO. It seems we are coming apart. o Most protestant churches except for one or two Pentecostal variety churches have been in decline it seems we are coming apart.
o Sociologists of religion, students of the culture, and recent surveys of the next generation are telling us that Gen X-er s and the millennial generations (basically those under 40) like Jesus, but the church, not so much. o Again, it seems it is all coming apart. It is in that context that the words of the Apostle Paul to the Colossian church are so powerful for us. The context to Colossians in some ways is similar to ours. There were those who understood Jesus as important, but not central. Jesus for them was in the same category as Buddha, Mohammed, or Socrates. There were those in Colossae who believed a cosmic drama was playing out, and Jesus was just one of many emanations of the divine. To that, Paul lifts up as magnificent a statement on the purpose and work of Christ as there is in the New Testament. Richard Deibert, as many of you know, did his Ph.D. studies in New Testament at Cambridge. When I was talking with him about this passage he said to me: Paul reaches for the sublime in this hymn about Christ s divinity. Christ is the visible Icon of God; Christ is the Source and Goal of all created things; Christ pre-exists all things and in Christ the existence of all things coheres; Champion over death, Christ is the beginning of all life, and therefore the organic Master of those baptized into His resurrection, the Church; Christ defines everything as the singular Point of
Reference; Christ shares the exact Essence of God the Father; and because Christ unites divinity and humanity, Christ unites everything in heaven and earth, transfiguring our murderous violence into eternal peace. This is as grand a doctrinal slam dunk as there is in the New Testament. Upon it everything else depends. Lose sight of it for any reason and the Body will eventually die. The message of Paul to the church at Colossae is simple and direct: When Christ is at the center, everything else will be in its proper place. Why? Paul in this great Christological hymn in verses 15-20 affirms 3 essential points, which are as relevant and applicable to us as a presbytery as they were then: Christ holds creation itself together, even with all its complexity. Christ holds the church together, even with all its divisions and debates. Christ holds us in community together, even when we think we have a better idea or path or direction or answer than anyone else. So what does that mean for us? First, in this passage, this great and early hymn, Paul affirms first and foremost that Christ holds creation itself together, even with all its complexity. The Bible translation The Message says it like this--- 15 We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God's original purpose in
everything created. 16 For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels - everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. 17 He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. Christ is the agent of creation at the beginning as well as the locus of God s activity in the creation even now. Unlike the deist who believes God, like a clock maker, wound up creation and let the created order tick away on its own, Paul is saying the one who made it all continues to be present and at work in and through all. Christ is not just one of many important people, or some emanation of the divine; Christ is the divine force. And it is Christ who is the glue and the gravity, who holds creation itself together. Second, Christ holds the church together, even with our debates. How? Paul says it simply and directly: Christ is head of the church. It is not our theological conversations or some esoteric understanding that holds the church together. It is Christ. It is not Paul s or Apollo s ideas, it is not our systematic theology that saves us or the church. It is Christ. As Protestants of the Presbyterian variety, somehow in our DNA, the DNA that has been there since this reformation project began over 500 years ago, we have gotten it into our heads that we hold the church together. Our belief system, our systematic categories, our explanations, our particular understandings hold it
together. Paul said, wrong answer Christ holds all things together, especially the church. On a personal note: I was not always Presbyterian my religious DNA, at least from my grandparents stock would make me ¼ Quaker, ¼ Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, ¼ German Lutheran or Baptist, and ¼ English Baptist. So the question I might want to ask is what part of my religious DNA got it right? What of those 4 very different traditions do I need to follow? Where in that mix is the way, the truth and the life? Well, the church in which I was raised basically said that my other grandparents got it wrong. I did not get this message from my parents, but in sermons I heard that somehow my Quaker side and my Presbyterian side were in error. The result was there was only one true church in town. My own wrestling match with all of that is a story for another time and another day. The problem with sectarian thinking, the issue with thinking that my interpretation or our hermeneutic is infallible and authoritative, is it creates a church that drives us away from each other. Instead of Christ being the center, our views are at the center, and when that happens we stop being the church. Paul said it clearly: Christ is the head of the church. Not our best ideas, or even our best practices, only Christ. Third, what happens to our sense of fellowship and community when anything or anyone but Christ is put in the center?
Tim Halverson shared a game he does with his youth group. He invites everyone to get in a circle, and then walk toward the center. As they do, he asks - what happens to the space between yourself and the person next to you? We are getting closer. Now back away from the center. What happens? The space between us increases. That is true for us. Come to Christ and we come closer to each other, distance ourselves from Christ and we get farther away from one another. This is the short version of a longer story about how I became Presbyterian. After college, but before I had a sense of call to ministry and went to seminary, I was asked to work with what became my home church and start a ministry to reach out to unchurched kids. Where do you begin? I invited 12 or 15 college-age students to join me for Friday night Bible study, conversation, dinner and prayer. We gathered weekly. Later, that group started a Christian Coffee House that had between 35 and 200 youth every Friday and Saturday night. Of the original group of college students, half of us went on to become pastors, several married pastors, and all became in their adult years active in Presbyterian churches around the country. But the point I want to share is the profound influence that group, that time, and the first book we read together had on my life. The book was Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was killed by the Nazis just days prior to the end of WWII, wrote Life Together for the underground reformed seminary that had emerged in Germany during WWII. He had been asked to
lead it, and risked his life to come out of self-imposed exile and go back to Germany. The book is a kind of a rule for that community, but it became a great influence on my life. In a chapter called A Day Together, Bonhoeffer writes that it is only through Christ that we can have true fellowship with one another. Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or daily fellowship of years, Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ. The unity of the community is in Christ, "Through him alone do we have access to one another, joy in one another, and fellowship with one another." Christ and Christ alone is the way to true fellowship with one another. So back to the beginning, what/who holds together life itself, the church, our fragile relationships with one another? Christ. Again in The Message it says it like this: 18 And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body. 19 So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. 20 Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe - people and things, animals and atoms - get properly fixed and fit together in
vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the Cross. It s all about Christ our center at the center. I think one of our very real issues and challenges as a denomination is we have forgotten Christ risen, glorious, and triumphant. The problem may be the picture or architecture or art that is in the front of the church presbytery denomination. Who or what iconically represents the fullness of the stature of Christ? What is in full display as people come to worship? What is the focus? Is it a lectern or pulpit where a preacher does most of the talking? Is it a picture of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, holding a lamb? Is it an empty cross? Is there a pipe organ where in the Roman Catholic Church there is an altar? And I am not saying any of these are wrong, just that they make a point and point a church in a certain direction. For the past several years, I have been part of a learning community of faith and practice. We gather for a week to talk, present papers, share best practices we have learned in our work and sometimes to share our worst mistakes. The group meets at an ecumenical Benedictine Community, and in their church, the Church of Transformation, there is a 40-foot tile mosaic of a triumphant Christ in the chancel. You will see the same
kind of iconic portrayal and art in many Orthodox churches as well. I have wondered what it would be like for us as Presbyterians to have a 40-foot mosaic of the triumphant Christ peeking over our shoulders when we preach. I have wondered if maybe that is part of the reason the Orthodox tradition has had so few splits and schisms. Jesus, a magnificent, triumphant Christ is front and center in most Orthodox Churches. The challenge (some might even say demon) of the reformation is we have made our words, our intellect, our particular nuance and parsing of scripture a supreme goal we debate and divide and debate some more but why? Because we have made our intellect and reasoning supreme, and not Christ. What was Paul s prayer for the church in Ephesus? that we would grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love. What was Jesus prayer for the church? 20 I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become
completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Jesus in his great and only prayer for the church, for us, prays that the key to this whole enterprise called church, the ecclesia, the ones called out and back into the world, is to know Christ, to be so intertwined with Christ (I in them, and you in me), that they become completely one. Christ must be our center or it all comes apart. Later this morning, we will be looking at a new organizational structure. Let me be clear - that will not save us - but the goal and hope is that we can create space for us to be the Body of Christ together where we can intentionally and actively affirm and know Christ at the center. And when we do, we have a chance to be used by God and useful in the church, but that can only happen if we, like the early church, keep Christ at the Center. to the glory of God.