Colossians 1:12-20 (International Commission on English in the Liturgy)
Give thanks to the Father,
who made us fit
for the holy community of light
and rescued us from darkness,
bringing us into the realm
of his beloved Son
who redeemed us,
forgiving our sins.
Christ is an image
of the God we cannot see.
Christ is firstborn in all creation.
Through Christ the universe was made,
things seen and unseen,
thrones, authorities, forces, powers.
Everything was created
through Christ and for Christ.
Before anything came to be, Christ was,
and the universe is held together by Christ.
Christ is also head of the body, the church,
its beginning as firstborn from the dead
to become in all things first.
For by God’s good pleasure
Christ encompasses
the full measure of power,
reconciling creation with its source
and making peace by the blood of the cross.
Every week I attempt to shape my address to you with as much artistry and graphic image as my own life experience and inner urgency will allow. This is a moment of integrity when we each reach into the secret places of our lives and lay them bare – and, for the merest instant, sense an awakening to fresh possibility.
The written words are for another time. This is the moment to look each other in the eye, and to take a journey inward and across the barriers and defences till we come to see each other differently and to face our world with fresh hope.
The address one Sunday short of Easter was on themes from Isaiah chapter 53. As now, the written words lay on the lectern and we engaged each other eye to eye. I have now no recollection of what I said – the written text eventually joined many others in the dustbin – but one of the music team was scribbling intently on the spaces in the bulletin. As I finished preaching he stepped forward and handed me a hymn – words and tune – an earlier hymn he had written that had again engaged his imagination. We learnt and sang his hymn and it became like a creed for us
Let the beauty of God’s intent.
Rest in my heart and in my will.
And may the vision, the truth of God,
be in my eyes and in my heart.
The words encapsulated the people we wanted to become and the community we wanted to serve. They allowed is to re-imagine our world.
I think that something like that must have happened in ancient Colossae. What we read as our second lesson was an ancient hymn. It fits the context of the Epistle to the Colossians but also stands alone. As you read the opening stanza you sense the teacher captivating the audience with his own inner urgency, then suddenly overwhelmed in mind and spirit by the beauty of a creation reconciled to its source.
When you and I lift our eyes from the drab media presentations of life’s savagery and look more deeply at each other and the world around us we see hints of life’s possibilities. Don’t hear me disregarding or minimising the tragedies we and others experience, but see life with its immense potential. Next Sunday we will rejoice at the birth of child and in celebrating his baptism will affirm the hope that he will ‘respond with love rather than fear, embrace discovery rather than a limiting belief system, and explore life’s possibilities and opportunities with an open heart and mind’.
Today’s text grows out of the teacher’s sense of his audience’s empowerment – take hold of verse 11, ‘made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power’. ‘Empowerment’ is not about an ideal for living; it is energy for action. ‘To love another is to allow them to explore choices and to acknowledge the consequences that flow from choices. Choices demonstrate faith. Despite damage, suffering or loss, [all of us] still make choices … There is no absolute ‘Jesus … ethic’ to guide our future – just courteous, other-person centred, common-sense decisions taken to shape today and to offer hope for tomorrow. It means working in a world where, as Jesus said, wheat and weeds live together, and not always perceiving the difference. And this is where we face our most difficult ethical decisions (Bill Lawton, Actions Speak, page 15).
If all we do is extract verses 11-14, the opening stanzas of this hymn, and focus on being rescued from the power of darkness and being transferred to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son we have bypassed the drama and potential of the Christian life. Too much of contemporary theology is about sin and too little is about possibility. The central text is about our partnership in a transformed creation. The heart of verses 15-20 is that all creation belongs to Christ.
Before you dismiss this as a cliché, pause to consider what the text intends. The universe, the world around us, demands our creative response to its transformation. Christianity is not some passive cult; Jesus was not the founder of an esoteric religion. If he is said here to ‘reconcile creation with its source and make peace by the blood of the cross’, the intention is to draw his struggle and ours into the common task of bringing hope and opportunity to others.
Jesus is the pattern of our life and his humanity is the model for our actions. Who he was and what he did is the mark in him of God’s image. The language of this whole text is rich with Old Testament imagery; we are at once flooded with ideas from the Exodus to the Wisdom literature of Proverbs. The intensity of the text is too great for a single sermon and so here I have chosen a single word redemption to underscore my theme.
If Jesus’ ministry was to redeem or place himself in the firing line for others, to give them space to breathe and recover their destiny, then we too as members of his church find ourselves in the same space. If you read the text closely you will see that this is one of the very few instances in the New Testament, which is universal in scope. Christ’s redemption knows no limitations. No-one is so far gone that they are eternally lost. And redemption as ‘the full measure of power’ is a universal challenge.
The hymn at verse 17 praises Christ in whom all things consist or hold together. The verb used here shows the extent of the author’s knowledge of Old Testament and Classical themes. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Hebrew Wisdom literature (Sirach 43:26) unitedly celebrate the ‘mind expanding concept … that all things are from God and are held together by God’.
In this we reflect the image of God. Plato concluded his Timaeus with these words that capture the same sense as the Colossians’ hymn:
Our Cosmos [is] itself a visible Living Creature embracing the visible creatures, a perceptible God made in the image of the Intelligible, most great and good and fair and perfect in its generation – even this one Heaven sole of its kind … (Timaeus, 92c).
Here is the celebration of difference where each is filled and motivated by the same image or spirit of God. This crosses our barriers of religion, cult and ethnicity. It engages the disadvantaged, the physically and intellectually impaired, the religious and non-religious other. The imago dei in all of us, and in all things, is our hope and goal for serving others and bettering our world.
Imagine the impact of this if we were to translate its teaching into daily practice. Everyone we meet would be accorded dignity and opportunity. We would not condescend to others nor assume that they were incapable of making their own choices. If each has been created by the same divine presence then each has the potential, however limited by circumstance, to respond creatively. Yes, the limitations are real and opportunities may be constrained, but within these we all make our life choices. A belief like this would enable us to live and work with each other without condescension. Our very differences would be our empowerment.
And so the text, this grand hymn of creation, draws the church into its climax. This is the community where difference can be celebrated. Here we affirm Trinity, not just as a focus on orthodoxy, but in the fundamental belief that in the Godhead equality is expressed through difference. This is the pattern of our social outreach. It is the model of what we mean by compassion where the uniqueness of the other can be celebrated.
Here is our religious, social and political identity. We look each other in the eye and take a journey inward, across the barriers and defences, till we come to see each other differently and to face our world with fresh hope. Whatever our personal inconsistencies, we look forward to wholeness and coherence. We take this attitude into the classroom and the market place and with us at the ballot box. In each situation our whole aim is ‘to give people in our communities space to breathe and recover their destiny’. I wonder how you might translate that at morning tea, tomorrow in the office or in the upcoming election?
Let me say all this again in a single sentence:
the church re-imagines the world
in the human image of the unseen God.
BLESSING (ICEL translation)
Be present O God, to your servants who call upon you,
and bless us with your unfailing kindness.
Since we glory to have you as our maker,
restore in us the beauty of your creation
and keep intact the gifts you have given us.
Prayer for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
A Meditation Homily based on the Epistle reading for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Colossians chapter 1 verses 12-20.
21 July 2013