Christ UMC Jackson Weblog

Colossians 2:6–23

October 19, 2008

 

A popular monk in the Middle Ages announced that in the cathedral that evening, he would preach a sermon on the love of God.  The people gathered and stood in silence waiting for the service while the sunlight streamed through the beautiful windows.  When the last sparkle of color had faded from the windows, the old monk took a candle from the altar.  Walking to the life-size figure of Christ on the cross, he held the light beneath the wounds of the feet, then his hands, then his side.  Still without a word, he let the light shine on the thorn-crowned brow.

That was his sermon.  The people stood in silence and wept.  They knew they were at the center of mystery beyond their understanding, that they were looking at the love of God, the image of the invisible God, giving God’s self for us—a love so deep, so inclusive, so expansive, so powerful, so complete that the mind could not comprehend nor measure it, or words express it.

Paul knew that, too.  He comes back to it again and again: the purpose and power of the cross.

Let me urge you to try to look at it with fresh eyes.  Hear the message as though you were hearing it for the first time.  Maybe we can do that best by beginning at the point of our deep needs, and look at the cross as the answer to those needs.

When we probe to the core depths of our being, when we get down to the base level of our identity, we discover four absolute needs apart from physical survival needs.  There are burning emotional, spiritual, and relational needs which, when unmet, leave us less than whole.  The needs are common to all persons.  Even though we may not use the same words to label them, the reality is the same.  The needs are:

1. To receive forgiveness;

2. To love and be loved;

3. To experience community; and

4. To have a cause for which to live.

Other descriptions of our needs—acceptance, affirmation, security, freedom, purposefulness, and self-esteem—are rooted in these four.  The cross meets us at the point of these deepest needs.

Let’s explore these.

First, our need for forgiveness.  There are all sorts of ways to talk about us humans, about what and who we are.  G. K. Chesterton was right, “Whatever else man is, he is not what he was meant to be.”

We’re sinners.  We may not mean to be, but we are.  There is within us the same conflict that terrorized Paul—the battle between the “good that I would, and the evil that I would not.”  In our times of introspection and self-examination, we are often driven to cry out with him, “O wretched being that I am!”

Ever since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden, sin has been the factor of human life that has ravaged our beings, torn us to pieces, set us at odds with God, and at opposition with each other.

We can’t explain it.  But when we are most perceptive about ourselves, we come to realize that somehow a wedge has been driven into our life, a wedge that threatens to undermine us, or at least preventing us from being whole in intention and direction.  That’s what Paul was moaning about, in Romans 7: “For the good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not, that I do . . . O wretched man that I am!” (KJV).  Sin prevents us from being what God intended us to be.  It separates us from God and from each other.  So our great need is for forgiveness.

In this passage from Colossians, Paul paints a graphic picture of Christ’s work of forgiveness.  He says that Christ nailed our sins to the cross.  But not only that.  He adds, “He disarmed the principalities and powers” (v. 15 RSV), triumphing over them.

We have been forgiven, set free—and, if we will accept it, we have the power to live as victors over sin.

Paul says that’s our first need—the need of forgiveness, and the cross meets us at that point.  In an earlier verse, Paul paints a beautiful picture of what the cross does for us.  The Revised Standard Version translates it, “He has now reconciled [you] in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.”

The Message says, You yourselves are a case study of what he does. At one time you all had your backs turned to God, thinking rebellious thoughts of him, giving him trouble every chance you got. But now, by giving himself completely at the Cross, actually dying for you, Christ brought you over to God’s side and put your lives together, whole and holy in his presence. You don’t walk away from a gift like that!  

The Living Bible paraphrases it: “And now as a result, Christ has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are standing there before him with nothing left against you…”

The cross has ushered us out of separation into intimate fellowship with God. We are forgiven.  The blame for our sins has been taken by Christ and suffered for by him on the cross. 

So the force of the whole idea for us is that because of the cross, God accepts us as cleansed, forgiven, and completely reconciled. 

What a powerful, powerful work—our need for forgiveness is met in the cross.

But not only do we need forgiveness, we need love; and the cross meets us at that point of our need.  More than anything else, the cross is love at its deepest and purest.  I think this is the most powerful image of the cross and salvation.  

No picture of love is more powerful than the cross: Charles Wesley felt it deeply and sang: 

O Love divine, what has thou done! 

Th’incarnate God hath died for me! 

The Father’s co-eternal Son 

Bore all my sins upon the tree! 

The Son of God for me hath died: 

My Lord, my Love, is crucified. 

Here in the cross, our need to love is met in the deepest and purest response possible.  Think about it: for you, for me . . . Christ’s love is so great that he willingly dies for us.

Our third need is a companion to our need for love.  In fact, it’s the other side of the same coin—our need for community.  We need to belong.  In fact, this may be our most desperate need in the twenty-first century.  All sorts of forces have combined to destroy community and unity.  Where in the current American scene is the local neighborhood?  We are isolated in our mad thirst for wealth, security, pleasure, success, identity.  People have had experiences in their life that have isolated them.  They feel cut off.  We need community.  

Keith Miller told the story of an outgoing forty-year-old woman who was a part of a sharing group he led.  When she was a tiny little girl, her parents died and she was put in an orphanage.  She was not pretty at all and no one seemed to want her, but she said that as far back as she could remember, she longed to be adopted and loved by a family.  She thought about it day and night, but everything she did seemed to go wrong.  She must have tried too hard to please the people who came to meet her, and in doing so, would drive them away.  But then one day the head of the orphanage told her that a family was coming to take her home with them.  She was so excited that she jumped up and down and cried.  The matron reminded her that she was on trial and that this might not be a permanent arrangement.  Overwhelmed with joy, the little girl just knew that it would be.  So she went with this family and started school.  Listen to the woman’s words as she concluded her story.  “I was the happiest little girl you can imagine, and life began to open for me just a little.  But then one day a few months later, I skipped home from school and ran into the front door of the big old house we lived in.  No one was at home, but there in the middle of the front hall was my battered old suitcase with my little coat thrown across it.  As I stood there and looked at my suitcase, it slowly dawned on me what it meant.  I did not belong here anymore.”

Miller said that when the woman stopped speaking, there was hardly a dry eye in the group.  But then she cleared her throat and said almost matter-of-factly, “This happened to me seven times before I was thirteen years old, but wait, don’t cry.  It was experiences like these that ultimately brought me to God.  When I was having so much trouble finding a sense of belonging, I was driven to God, and there I found what I had always longed for—a place.”

Perhaps not that dramatically, but I have an idea that all of us have come to that place when we felt that we did not have a place.  We felt we didn’t belong—not even to our spouse, not even at our job, not even with our friends who seemed to be getting ahead of us.  Maybe we have even felt our church was leaving us behind or our family was leaving us out.  That’s when the cross speaks its most dramatic word to us.

The ground around the cross is level.  We all stand there stripped of pride, knowing that we are powerless to save ourselves, and we are drawn into an experience of love which is the dynamic for community.  When we experience belonging to Christ, when lifted up from the earth on the cross He draws us to Himself, we discover that we belong also to each other.

Paul talked about our mutual identity, our community of belonging, with the image of circumcision. The sign of belonging for the Jews was circumcision.  This was their badge of identity, what showed they belonged to Abraham’s lineage.  Paul gave that image a spiritual meaning which creates an unbreakable bond of community.  Listen to verses 11 and 12:

“In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ” (Col. 2:11–12 NKJV).

Our community at Christ UMC is an in-Christ community into which we are initiated by baptism—a death-and-resurrection community empowered and bound together by Christ (v. 12).  That community is the church, though we must never restrict it to the church building.  It is that fellowship, local and visible, but also universal and invisible, of which Christ is the Head.  He nourishes the community and joins every part of it together (v. 19).

All our needs to belong are met in Christ and the fellowship of his people.

Our need for forgiveness, our need for love, and our need for community—all met in the cross.  Now all these needs focus on ourselves, our identity, and enhancement as individual persons.  We are so created, however, that we must move out of ourselves to find meaning in a purpose beyond ourselves for which to live; therefore, we must speak of this next need.

Paul’s confession of it came earlier, in Colossians 1:24: “I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church.”

In Philippians, Paul stated his purpose, the cause for which he lived and died, even more completely: “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10–11, RSV).  The more he knew Christ, the more he realized his true self and the more he experienced fulfillment.  The more he knew Christ, the more he realized his needs and limitations and the more he had to press on to the high calling in Christ Jesus.  The more he centered himself in Christ and pursued this high calling, the more he became sensitive to the needs of people around him and the more he realized that cross-motivated love had to be the foundation of his life.

No wonder Paul could sing, “I rejoice in my sufferings” (v. 24).  Because of the love he had received from the cross, his purpose was to love, even if that called for suffering.  The cross was the driving force of his life.  His burning desire was for all persons to experience the love of Jesus Christ which he had experienced.  The cross gave him meaning, for it gave him the cause for which to live.  So it is with each of our lives and our church together.  That all persons may know Jesus and become disciples who are transforming the world through a cross-powered life is our existence.

Dr. Parker Palmer, one of the creative leaders in spiritual formation and Christian community, told a group of YMCA workers about a good friend of his who labors in an especially difficult assignment at the New York Catholic Worker House. One day, Dr. Palmer said to her, “All the facts that I can gather and all the feelings I have tell me this work you’re trying to do is just impossible.  There’s no success in it. There’s no gratification.  The tide keeps rolling over you.  Why do you keep doing it?”

Looking earnestly at him, the woman answered, “Parker, the thing you don’t understand is this: just because a thing is impossible, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it” (Discovery YMCA, July/August 1985, p. 15).

The woman was right.  Listen to Jesus: “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me” (Luke 9:23 NKJV).

He’s talking about nothing less than the kingdom. When we pray, “Thy Kingdom come”, we are taking on an apparently impossible task.

J. Ellsworth Kalas has this to say: 

We are called therefore to be some small part of this kingdom of God on earth. We claim our moments of victory for Christ, here in the midst of a world which so much of the time seems so far from Him.  The people of God love, laugh, and weep back.  We save a soul here and teach a young person there.  We work like Christians on our jobs and talk like Christians in our neighborhood.  We are resolved to out-think, out-care, out-live, and out-die the kingdom of evil, until God’s purposes are fulfilled in this earth.

What do our efforts matter? I think Jesus would answer, “It is like a little leaven which a woman puts in a lump of dough.  In time, it changes the whole lump.

The cross calls us to take up our own cross, to pray and live the petition “Thy Kingdom come.”  This meets our need for a cause for which to live.

And how will we respond?  Let’s determine to do so with hymn writer Isaac Watts, in total commitment:

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were an offering far too small;

Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all. (“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”)