Walking the Way of the Cross
Reflections on Colossians 1.15-28
RCL Proper 16C
21 July 2019
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
Colossians 1.15-28
1.15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; 16for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers — all things have been created through him and for him. 17He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
21And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him — 23provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel.
24I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. 25I became its servant according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, 26the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. 27To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. 28It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ.
When I was in seminary, I used to babysit for Jim Dunkley, who was the Librarian and my Faculty Advisor, when he and his wife drove into Milwaukee for their weekly choir practice. As a couple they had an eclectic library and I loved to spend the hours, after the children had gone to bed, just browsing through the titles. One of the books attracted my eye and Jim let me borrow it.
The book is entitled Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. It tells the story of James Murray, a self-educated Scot, who eventually convinced Oxford University to allow him to create the first Oxford English Dictionary, still one of the ‘go to’ reference works in our own time. If you think that the subject might be a bit dull, you’ll be surprised, especially when you learn that one of Murray’s best researchers was a criminally-insane murderer who spend his life seeking the first literary use of words and then would send the information along to Murray.
I was ensnared by the title of the book itself: Caught in the Web of Words. When I consider our life of worship, I think that we too are caught in the web of words that is the liturgy of the church. Worship weaves webs of words through the prayers, the hymns, the readings from the Scriptures and the sermons that fill the time we gather together in this place. Some of the webs are easy for us to brush off, just as we brush off old spider webs when we accidentally walk into them. But other webs are no so easily brushed aside. They achieve their purpose by sticking to us and forcing us to pay attention.
One such web is our reading from the Letter to the Colossians. Who wrote it? I grew up thinking that it was written by the apostle Paul, but my later studies introduced me to the view of many, if not most, scholars that the apostle Paul didn’t write it. I could go on with the traditional questions we were taught to use to guide our explorations --- What? Where? When? Why? I’m not going to do so, because I want us, in the week following General Synod, to spend some time on one sentence: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” (Colossians 1.24).
We’ve been taught that Christ died and was raised from the dead, ‘a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” (The Book of Common Prayer1962, 82) There’s nothing that’s lacking in ‘Christ’s afflictions’. Everything that needed to be done has been done.
Whoever wrote this letter to the Christian community in Colossae knew this as well. He knew that the whole gospel rests on our faith that in Jesus God has reconciled the world to God’s very self and that there is a new creation. But he also knew that what God had accomplished in Jesus of Nazareth is continued in what God has asked the Christian people to do.
We have been called by God from the pursuits of our daily lives to belong to a beloved community that has a purpose. We are gathered to undertake voluntarily a public work for the common good of the whole creation. That public work is not limited to what happens in worship; it extends into our service and our pastoral care of our neighbours as well as our Christian friends.
The public work we are engaged in doing is called marturia. You may recognize it as the root of the word for ‘martyr’, but its original meaning is ‘witness’. We are called to be witnesses to what God has accomplished in Jesus of Nazareth and what God is continuing to accomplish through the Holy Spirit. We often think of martyrs as witnessing to God by their deaths, but they actually witnessed to God and to the good news of God in Jesus by their lives.
Being a witness to the good news is not without cost. It often means opening oneself up to the criticisms of others, to ridicule by so-called ‘reasonable people’, to charges of being unfaithful to the ‘tradition’, to the struggle to make a go of this rag-tag bunch of folk we call Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral. It means suffering, not suffering in place of Christ, but suffering with Christ for on-going work of reconciliation and renewal begun so long ago.
This General Synod has publicly suffered with Christ for the on-going work of reconciliation and renewal. It has set the Anglican Church of Canada on a path towards the creation of an autonomous indigenous ‘church within the Church’. This General Synod has set the Anglican Church of Canada on a path towards the marriage of same-sex couples in those dioceses of the country who wish to move past old debates. This General Synod has set the Anglican Church of Canada on a path of self-examination about how we govern ourselves and whether the time has come for a radical re-visioning of time-worn structures.
Already voices have been raised to question all three of these decisions. Perhaps our most difficult act of witness will be in the compassion we extend to each other and our willingness to walk with one another even when we are uncertain about the direction the path is taking. Perhaps, in a world where people who disagree with one another loudly threaten to leave, our witness to compassion is to proclaim lovingly that we plan to stay in order that the reconciling and renewing love of God in Christ bursts into full view.
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