First Place in Everything

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

November 25, 2007

Text: Colossians 1:11-20 and Second Thessalonians 2:13-17

Imagine you are an ambassador to Germany in the first years of the existence of the United States of America. You have taken along a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In interaction with the German authorities, you discover that they are asking some very basic questions about the core values and beliefs of the USA. Your president has heard that you are being challenged by the Germans to clarify what liberty means and what is meant by inalienable rights. So, the president writes to you to lay out his understanding of these matters. He wants you to get the basic ideas right.

By analogy, this is what was happening to the fragile new churches in Colossae and Thessalonica. The Christian movement was in its infancy. The churches were trying to represent and teach the Christian gospel. And they were being challenged about the heart of the message, especially regarding the identity of Jesus. Paul writes to them to remind them what he taught them and to tell them to “stand firm” and “hold fast” to the gospel as he had delivered it to them. Clarence Jordan, in his Cotton Patch Version of the Letters of Paul translates Second Thessalonians 2: 15 this way: “Stand your ground and sink your teeth into the lessons we taught you….” 

Was Paul simply trying the control the early Christians? Well, Paul was certainly a strong leader who believed he had a clear grasp of the message. But Paul, in his summaries of the core message about the identity and meaning of Jesus, seems to be passing on to others that which he himself had received. Furthermore, Paul’s passion was for the communication of the life-giving gospel so that people would come to faith in God through Christ and be nurtured in this faith. He was certainly not trying to preserve the gospel so it could be placed under glass in a museum.

He wanted the churches to resist being swallowed up by the cultures and religions popularly practiced in their locales. He wanted them to be able, as Luke Timothy Johnson has written, to “distinguish their specific allegiances in the midst of competing claims.” (The Creed) As a devout Jew, he would have known that getting the heart of the matter right was essential to survival of the church. He would have grown up repeating the daily teaching from Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and might.” The people of God were passionate in making sure that the God they worshipped was not confused with the false gods of others.

Bishop N.T. Wright has told of students in his religious classes who would come to him at the beginning of school year, saying, “I want you to know that I do not believe in God.” He would ask them, “Which God is it that you don’t believe in?” Surprised by the question, they would describe a god who was punitive or indifferent to the human situation. Wright would then tell them that he did not believe in that god either---that he believed in the God who was revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. (Source: DVD from the course, “Simply Christian,” from Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C.)

Whether in the days of Paul or our own day, the church is always being challenged at this very basic level: Who is God, and what does Jesus have to do with our belief in God? What is our vision of new life? What do we hope for?

It is in response to these perplexing questions that Paul writes. This is also why we have these lyrical, soaring verses of praise about Jesus. The passage from Colossians was almost surely a hymn, ending with this stunning claim: “In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross.” Or this passage from I Corinthians 4: “It is God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” Paul describes in the language of the battlefield what God in Christ has done for us, “rescuing” us from the powers of darkness and “transferring” us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, Jesus. (Colossians 1:13-14) Paul, or the Pauline author of these letters, borrows “language to deal with the phenomenon before them.” (Johnson) I am reminded of the last verse of the hymn “O Sacred Head Now Wounded:” “What language can I borrow to thank thee dearest friend, for this thy dying sorrow, thy pity without end….”

We are urged by Paul to hold fast to, and stand firm on, this truth: “Jesus of Nazareth is the one in whom God is rescuing the creation from its rebellion, brokenness, corruption and death.” (I am indebted to N.T. Wright for these insights and for all the quotes given below, unless otherwise attributed. See the source listed at the end of this sermon.)

Paul’s claim is breath-taking. In Jesus of Nazareth, the “glory of God turns out to have a human face.” The vision we have of God is lived out in the man Jesus. “The loving God rolls up his sleeves to do in person the job no one else could do….The Creator God gives new life…..The faithful God dwells in the midst of his people….The stern and tender God relentlessly opposed to all that destroys and distorts the good creation, especially human beings, [is alive in Jesus]. The God who recklessly loves all those in need and distress [dwells in Jesus].” In other words, the shepherd God of the 23rd Psalm abides in Jesus in a way that is full and unique.

It has always been the case that the name “Jesus” can come to mean to people whatever people want it to mean. It can become a template on which we can paste almost any hero or super-hero we happen to find attractive at a given time. In my lifetime, I have witnessed the Hollywood Jesus, who is pictured as a divine figure, who, when appearing in the movies, looks like his feet never really touch the ground----and one who certainly never sweats! There was an era in the 1960s and 1970s when Jesus was imagined as a Che Guevera revolutionary, or a counter-culture hippie.
In the movie, “Talledega Nights,” the NASCAR comic hero, at the family holiday meal, insists on offering his thanksgiving to the “baby Jesus,” because he finds this Jesus more to his liking than the adult Jesus!

Truly, Jesus is a figure in the larger cultures of the world, and has been for some time. (In a Google search, I found there were 25,500,000 sites for “Jesus of Nazareth.” Yahoo had 95,100,000 sites!) If Jesus is central to our faith, how do we find the real Jesus in the midst of so many conflicting versions?

Christian scholars, especially since the 19th century, have tried to isolate the “real” Jesus by analyzing the four gospels and other early documents. They look for the earliest strata of the oral and written traditions, and by carefully studying the religious, social and economic contexts, attempt to come up with a more accurate historical “Jesus before Christianity.”(This is the title of a book by Albert Nolan, published in 1976.)

 I have found some of the work of these scholars very helpful. I have also noticed that the Jesus whom they bring forward as the “real” Jesus is a person who looks much like they do---with values and beliefs which they hold dear. We are all subject to the temptation of letting our own pre-judgments influence our scholarship. (This is not the place for a thorough discussion of this literature, though I would be glad to recommend some reading in this field.)

What I have found is that it is beneficial for us to read the Gospels with open minds and hearts, realizing that we can discern in these “faith portraits”---- not photographs or impartial, academic biographies---- a reasonably accurate version of the earthly Jesus. For example, he was one who not only proclaimed the reign of God but lived it; he told parables which evoked new images of God’s nature and activity; he healed the sick and the deranged; he wept over Jerusalem and prayed that the cup of suffering be taken away; he forgave sins; he called the proud religious people into judgment; he welcomed children and the other powerless ones into his friendship circle. He taught us to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth.

We are invited to behold this Jesus and say “with awe and wonder and gratitude, not only [behold the man, but behold, this is God with us!”] N. T. Wright expressed it like this: “Start with the real, historical, earthly Jesus, and your God will come running down the road to meet you, deeply attractive, deeply preachable, deeply challenging in his transforming embrace.”

We can start at either end of the Jesus materials: with the faith portraits of Jesus in Gospels of Matthew, Mark or Luke, or with the hymns of praise of the pre-existent, cosmic Jesus in the letters of Paul or others in the New Testament---or in the earliest creedal statements about Jesus, such as the one from the Colossians reading for today. The truth is that the value these Jesus-materials will often be made evident to us only when they come into our minds during ordinary life experiences.

My friend Reverend Norman Roe is fond of quoting his friend, the late Wes Seeliger, Episcopal priest and author. Wes grew up in Lockhart, Texas. He played the big drum in the band. The football team was playing Hillsboro for Bi-district. It was Hillsboro 28, Lockhart 0 at the half. It was pretty clear that they were going to get clobbered. The band was getting ready to go on the field to perform. They began to march to the tune of “Men of Ohio.” For some reason, the cadence of that music brought to his mind words from Shakespeare’s Macbeth which he had studied in English class the previous week---words that had no meaning to him at that time.

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
    To the last syllable of recorded time,
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
    Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
    And then is heard no more: it is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.”

As they marched and played, he began to understand these words in his own context, on the football field, in Hillsboro, in that cold November evening. The “poor players,” including himself, were strutting and fretting their hours on the stage. Seeliger said that it was the first time he realized that there might be something to this Shakespeare fellow that warranted further examination.

Similarly with the New Testament, the beautiful words of Colossians or a simple parable of Jesus may, in time, intersect with our lives and our paths are illuminated. Sometimes peoples’ lives are dramatically turned around by the Jesus encountered and remembered. We may have learned that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…..And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” (John 1: 1 and 14) It sounds beautiful, we may say, but what does it mean? But one day when we feel very much alone and discouraged, we remember the words “the Word became flesh.” And we begin to believe that God knows and understands our human condition and therefore can give us strength “to walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31) The witness to Jesus in the Bible, the more we read and contemplate, becomes a living book----or the living God meets us there.

This is Christ the King Sunday. When we affirm that Christ Jesus reigns at the “right hand of God,” we are saying that Jesus, the one we depend upon, the one whom we trust and from whom we learn, is alive, persistently working and intervening in our lives and in the life of the Church and the world. This is to say that, when we learn about Jesus, it is more than an arm’s length analysis. It becomes a relationship with a living person, mediated to us by the Holy Spirit. Like any other relationship, we cultivate the relationship with Jesus by trust and openness, respect, attentiveness, silence and patience, and creative fidelity over time. (See Living Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson)

The truth of the claims about Jesus is finally experiential truth. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as the old saying goes. As Christians, we make the bold claim that God is revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. I have been helped by Schubert Ogden’s teaching that we do not necessarily have to claim that God is revealed only in Jesus; but we do make the claim that the only God there is, is revealed in Jesus. (See Schubert Ogden’s Reality of God) This is a courageous claim in itself!  Does it mean that we know everything? No. Does this mean that we lord it over others because we have the truth? No. Jesus specifically warned us about such behavior. But to knowing our limitations and frailty does not require us to deny the truth of what we believe. It is to the Triune God that we hold fast, and in whom we trust our lives. Here we must stand because we can do no other. We will hold fast to this One who brings God to us and for us, not out of stubbornness but out of honesty.

The mission of the Church is “reflected glory.” (Wright) As churches and as individuals, we reflect the glory, the spaciousness, the depth, the weight of truth that we have beheld in the face of Christ. We pray that “the glory of God may shine in and through us to bring light to the world that still waits in darkness and in the shadow of death.” We become “ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.” (II Corinthians 5) We “stand our ground and sink our teeth into the lessons we have been taught” for the sake of this mission.

Sources:
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters, 200; and Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel, 1999.

N. Thomas Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God,” 1998, in Ex Auditu; available on line at the ntwrightpage.com. And “Simply Christian,” a 10 week course produced by Wesley Theology Seminary, Washington, DC.

Wes Seeliger, “Frontier Theology,” a brief version is available at servant.org/pa_htm

Schubert M. Ogden, “Jesus Christ is Lord,” in The Reality of God, 1963.