Walking the Way of the Cross: Reflections on Colossians 1.15-28 (RCL Proper 16C, 21 July 2019)

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

Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 Eucharist on the 21st.

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.

            

Faithfulness Not Clinginess: Reflections on General Synod Sunday (14 July 2019)

Faithfulness Not Clinginess

Reflections on General Synod Sunday

John 20.1-18

14 July 2019

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

            For the past few years Holy Trinity has had a small paid staff of a full-time priest in charge, a part-time administrator, a very part-time verger and a paid musician.  Finding office space was relatively easy, an office for the administrator, an office for the priest in charge and music space.  But this past Monday our comfortable arrangements were disrupted by the arrival of our new Assistant Curate, Tasha Carrothers.  Where were we going to put Tasha?

            We finally settled on the Archives and began to carve out space where Tasha can work and meet with folks.  But carving out space was not and is not easy.  We’ve found a number of things, some of them remarkable --- for various reasons --- and a fair number of things that we’ve been clinging to for years with no clear idea why.  I’ve gone through some of the old books in the hopes that they are harbouring $100 bills or stocks or other negotiable securities.  No luck.  I’ve looked through the books thinking that there might some spectacular historic letter or other document that might solve a mystery, but most of the books are simply old books to which one or more people were attached.

            It is a natural human emotion to want to cling to things that remind us of people and events in our lives.  In some cases these objects have a story to tell to other people.  In most cases, however, the stories these objects may played a role in telling is no longer known to those of us who follow.  Because these things have meant something to people we have known and love, we put them on bookshelves or in cabinets as an act of respect.  We know, even as we do this, that they will never play a role in our lives nor in the lives of those who come after us.

            So we need to de-clutter.  We sort through things and make the hard but necessary choice to send them on to their final resting-place --- so long as it is not here.

            Part of the problem is that we confuse clinginess with faithfulness. Clinginess is an attitude that is oriented to an imaginary past and is often accompanied by fear.  Clinginess is not about building on the values and strengths of our past in order to have a firm foundation to move forward into God’s future. It’s more about holding tightly to institutions, ideas and ways of behaving because we are uncertain about the future.  Clinginess can generate feelings of enmity, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissension and partisanship, because we feel threatened.

            Faithfulness to genuine tradition is an entirely different attitude.  When we are faithful to people, to institutions and to values and ideas, we have confidence to ask ourselves hard questions.  How does this relationship challenge me to grow into the full stature of Christ?  How does this institution provide a structure for the proclamation of the good news of God in Christ rather than simply serve itself?  How do the values and ideas that our forerunners in the faith have passed on to me become the energy that fuels my commitment to God’s mission and the ministries God has entrusted me to exercise?  Where clinginess generates fear, faithfulness generates hope

            John captures this tension in today’s gospel.  Mary came to the garden in despair and fear.  Her hope had been nailed to the cross with Jesus.  Now she sees him, not entirely the man she knew before, transfigured, radiant with new life.  Is it any surprise that her initial reaction is to reach out to hold on to him, hoping that this new life so evident in him will somehow fill her own body and soul, strength and mind?

            But Jesus stops her.  I’ve always wondered why and I think that I’m close to understanding.  Jesus recognizes that she is reaching out for the past and for the restoration of the relationship they had before the events of that last week in Jerusalem.  She doesn’t yet understand that God in and through Jesus has brought a beloved community into being and is transforming it in and through the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ work is finished.  The Spirit’s work has begun.  God has revealed and is revealing that eternal life, genuine life, heart-racing, mind-bracing, hope-restoring life has come into the world.  What God began in creation; what God renewed in the life and ministry of Jesus; what God is shaping through the Spirit calls for faithful de-cluttering rather than clinging to the past.

            More than a hundred and fifty years ago, when the American Episcopal Church was contemplating what was necessary to re-unite Christians, they courageously chose values and beliefs that could be put in our carry-on luggage rather than a checked bag in which you could stuff three people.  They looked at the rich heritage of the Anglican way of discipleship and decided what embodied faithfulness rather than clinginess.

            (1) Christians are a community that gathers around the sacred stories, poetry, letters and mystical writings of the Jewish people and the earliest generations of Jesus’ disciples.  In these writings we discern God’s voice and call to us.  In these writings we learn what it means to be fully alive and we need little to nothing more.

            (2) Christians know that there is a great difference between what these writings say and what they mean.  What we need to know is that God created all that is, seen and unseen, out of love, that God seeks life-giving and life-enriching relationships with and between human beings and with the whole creation itself, that God freely gives wisdom to all who seek it.  

            (3) Christians are a people who gather around the font to ‘draw the circle wide’ not to ‘build walls that divide’. Christians gather around the table to share in the bread and the wine of new life, not as the meal of a closed society but as a foretaste of the banquet to which God invites all human beings by going out into the highways and the byways, the alleys and boulevards, the concrete jungles and the wooded suburbs.

            (4) Christians require leaders who are committed to apostolic mission rather than institutional preservation, who gather us into life-giving and life-sustaining communities rather than like-minded gatherings of well-intentioned people, who animate our self-sacrificial service of our neighbours and our courageous advocacy for the needs and wants of the many rather than warm feelings of charity and benevolence.

            We are called to be faithful to the God who comes to us in Jesus and who breathes the Spirit into us.  And faithfulness frightens me.  Faithfulness means letting go of unquestioned assumptions about who is and who is not held within the circle of faith.  Faithfulness means a lifetime commitment to de-cluttering my heart, mind and soul of the trappings of the status quoand imagining what new thing God is doing in and through us as a community of disciples and in and through me as one washed in water and anointed by the Spirit in baptism.

            Sometimes when I’m out and about, I see children holding the hands of adults. I remember what it felt like to hold the hands of my children as we bravely walked out into the unknown, perhaps to school, perhaps shopping, perhaps simply on a walk around the neighbourhood.  It was a magical feeling.  And I also remember the times of clinging when it felt as if my child were trying to fuse herself or himself into my body.  Not so magical.

            Friends, de-cluttering the household of faith is not easy work and we all hesitate sometimes and cling to practices and traditions which no longer serve, if they ever did.  We hesitate and we take two steps forward and one step backwards.  But this General Synod meeting in Vancouver has many faithful people holding each other’s hands and walking bravely into ‘ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown’ because we recognize the Hand that is holding all of ours, coaxing us along. [1]  So let us keep calm.  Let us remember what we really need for our journey.  And let’s not be afraid, when our faithfulness seems overshadowed by clinginess, to de-clutter like mad.

            

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[1]Evangelical Lutheran Worship 2006, 317.