september 16, 2007 [pm]
"The Big If"
Colossians 1:15–23
(To read the Scripture, click here.)
All of New England, assuaged by yesterday’s Red Sox romp, was nevertheless traumatized following last week’s stunning revelation of ignominious patriotism. The heretofore unquestionable gridiron genius Bill Belichick is in fact Belicheat. The New England Patriots had enjoyed an unprecedented run of success, including three Super Bowl victories, a stellar reputation, long season ticket waiting lists and a Superman of a quarterback who only dates supermodels. Not only that, but this year’s team is predicted to win it all again. So how does a guy with ostensibly everything feel the need to blow it all on a stupid, needless, ploy?
Ah, we Christians know the answer to that one, don’t we? In tonight’s passage from Colossians, Paul labels believers as holy, blameless and above reproach. We’ve won our own victories in Jesus, we possess a stellar standing before God, we have tickets to heaven and super-human capacities due to the Holy Spirit in our lives. We have everything we need in Christ. And yet we too feel the need to blow it all on a daily basis with our own stupid, needless ploys. Though reconciled we hone sharp hatchets of resentment. Though righteous and without blemish we deface ourselves, cheating on God and each other all the while rationalizing and deflecting our bad behavior with so many hackneyed excuses. We deliberately do the things we hate—why? Because we really don’t hate them that much. Righteousness can be so, well, frankly, boring. Like the review I read this week regarding a new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. People enjoy reading the Inferno part due to its delectably tantalizing details of sin; while passing over the Paradise part because it reads like some never-ending sermon. (Which is bad depending on who’s preaching.) Christopher Hitchens, in his New York Times best-selling, sanctimonious screed against all things religious, disdainfully asserts how unlike Islam, “Christianity is too repressed to offer [a good time] in paradise—indeed it has never been able to offer a tempting heaven at all.”
Of course such truncated views of eternity are hardly Biblical. The Biblical promise of Paradise is a promise of redeemed creation, one remade of the best stuff the earth has to offer now. It’s no stretch to imagine heaven as a sun-splashed cloud nine on the Cape, one without any of the traffic or mosquitoes. In those moments when glory breaks through and your soul feels revived—whether a stunning sunset, a wedding banquet, the joy a child’s birth (any minute in our case), a restored friendship, satisfaction from a job well done—these can all be construed as tastes of eternity. In Colossians 1, Paul poetically portrays the entire cosmos as the arena of Christ, the one in whom and through whom all existence exists, in heaven and on earth. This same exalted Jesus inhabits the church, redeeming us into the vanguard of new creation, the intersection of eternity and time, a taste of righteousness, justice and peace for all nations even now. As far as we’re concerned, heaven has already started.
This is not some optimistic pipe dream. The Colossians had experienced it already. Once alienated and enemies because of their wicked works; God mercifully reconciled them to himself in Christ. Your Bible clarifies the alienation by inserting God as the estranged party; but because Paul does not name God explicitly, it’s safe to assume that the enmity extended to neighbors, communities and to the entire creation. If all things exist in Christ, then enmity with Christ puts us at odds with all things. Yet God set all things aright through Christ’s body of flesh crucified. The unusual language of fleshly body underscores both the audacity and awesomeness of the atonement. More than the mere substitution of his Son for our sin, which if we’re not careful can read like Biblical sanction for child abuse, God himself fully dwells in Christ to the extent we can boldly assert that it was God who took the hit for our sins. In Christ, holiness and evil collide with devastating force sufficient to annihilate evil for good.
Which is how Paul can pronounce Christians as free from blemish and blame. We have been crucified in Christ, Paul wrote to the Galatians. His death is our death. We died in him and have been raised in him, even as we still walk here on earth. Grace abolishes who you were so to remake you into who you are in Christ. “You are dead to sin,” Paul declares to the Romans, “how can you still live in it?” To which we respond: No problem! We got an easy button. Like the Bible says, the more you sin the more grace you get. Given the unrelenting mercy of God, it’s always easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, right? Like in that famous parable Jesus told about the tax-collector and the Pharisee saying their prayers in the Temple. Remember, it was the corrupt tax-collector bewailing his corruptness who went home righteous, not the well-behaved Pharisee.
Of course throughout the Old Testament, it was precisely such presumptuousness toward grace that always got the chosen people in trouble. They confused God’s favor with favoritism, forgetting that grace is not just some proverbial get-out-of-jail-free card. Mercy carries obligations. It’s the reason we pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Like he does throughout the New Testament, Paul follows up his pronouncement of God’s unconditional grace with a condition. A Big If. Verse 22: “God has reconciled you in Christ’s fleshly body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation—if, so long as, provided that, on the condition that you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moving from the hope of the gospel you heard.”
At first this condition on grace seems sensible: you have to believe it to receive it. God coerces no one into trusting in Jesus. But the subsequent injunction to remain stable and steadfast in your faith proves worrisome. We all have our doubts. As Gordon mentioned this morning, Mother Teresa spent most of her missionary life feeling God’s absence. If Mother Teresa had doubts, we’re toast. On NPR’s This American Life a couple weeks back, Ira Glass featured the story of a man who grew up a Christian, only to go to college and confront freshman biology and religious studies classes. What did it mean that science could adequately explain the origins of life without any assistance from Genesis? And what did it mean that Paul was not the author of Hebrews and that the last paragraph of Mark was added on by somebody later? If the Bible could be ambiguous in Genesis, Hebrews and Mark, who’s to say that there wasn’t wiggle room throughout? Throw in a profusion of college fraternity parties and the lack of paternal restraints, and suddenly “seek and ye shall find” offered a whole new range of possibilities.
Sadly it’s not unusual for freshmen, seniors and the rest of us, confronted with contrary claims of science and scholarship, to have what we thought was stable faith wobble. David Dickerson, whose story he tells on This American Life, went on to describe taking a class called “Paranormal Anthropology” where each week featured a guest who actually believed in the paranormal subjects they studied—alleged clairvoyants, UFO abductees and infomercial salesmen. When the professor announced that next week’s guest would be a medium who would allow herself to be possessed by a spirit in class, David panicked. He had his doubts about Genesis and Paul, but he’d yet to give up on demons. “Suddenly I was terrified,” David said. “I’d seen The Exorcist. I knew what was at stake. As a Christian I knew I was the only one who could save the class from being corrupted by evil. What was a simple academic pursuit turned into the most serious spiritual test of my life. I was not up to the task. My faith had wandered, I had said skeptical things about the authorship of Hebrews. But now God was calling me back to the battlefield.”
David spent the next week fasting and praying. No TV, no computer. “I’d been groomed for this battle since I was a little kid,” he said, “I was going to slay this giant just like my namesake: King David.” On the appointed day, David wore a cross to class and hauled his big leather NIV study Bible. To his surprise, the medium was an overweight, frumpy, middle-aged hippie woman. But David knew better than to be derailed by appearances. “If the devil doesn’t want us to believe in him, this is a perfect disguise,” he reasoned, “but then how would I know the difference?” The medium went into a trance and channeled not the spirit of some patently sinister fiend, but the counterfeit spirit of the Bible’s King David. King David? What sort of demonic conniving was this? David the student quickly flipped to the book of Psalms (many of which King David wrote). This was his turf. He readied to pounce.
The professor asked, “Does anyone have a question for King David?” Student David’s hand shot up. Shaking, he stood and said, “Uh, King David? Looking at my Bible, I notice that some of your Psalms are called maskils ands some are called miktams and according to my notes, these are musical terms but scholars do not really know what they mean. Could you explain the difference?’” There was a brief pause. David was too afraid to look at her face. Finally she said, “Yes, I could explain, but the answer is very technical and I don’t think it would interest anybody. Next question?” The demon, David thought, who clearly would have known the answer, obviously didn’t blurt it out for fear of having to battle with a real Christian. The second the bell rang, the woman left the class without a word. David thanked God for the victory and went to grab some pizza.
But as he ate his pizza, it struck David that the woman had really just been a pathetic pretender. She had come into his class only to be beaten, not by prayer, but by scholarship. There had been no demon. To have believed so now seemed rather silly. But then he thought, if there were no demons, then what about angels? What about God? A door kicked open and suddenly the day devoted to heavenly victory became the day his faith ebbed away. “You can’t make yourself believe something if the doubts seem more likely,” David said. “Naturally my family would say that Satan won that day. He couldn’t have chosen a better answer to make the whole idea of demons seem ridiculous and kill my faith forever.”
A sad story, it seems; though I’d argue that the faith that got killed that was a kind of faith worth killing. The kind of faith that segregates scholarship and prayer into non-overlapping categories suggests a faith more akin than opposed to paranormal superstition and magic. It’s the kind of faith easily threatened by science since to rationally explain something implies God’s not involved—as if Biblical creation has nothing to do with actual nature. It’s the kind of faith easily shaken by textual criticism since for inspired yet fallible humans to write the Bible must mean that the Bible is untrustworthy too—as if God could never accomplish anything good through mere mortals. It’s the kind of faith that considers the mind a wonderful thing to waste, since to think too much only weakens your faith. Such a faith crumbles when storm waters surge; like a beach house constructed on sand.
Paul uses construction terms to depict faith here in Colossians: “established and firm.” But your NIV translation does you a disservice in verse 23. The adjectives “established and firm” are not depictions of your faith, your ability to believe, but rather the object of your belief; that is, the faith. Paul uses the definite article: the faith, the hope, the gospel. Christian faith is not some weird ability to believe a set of unbelievable propositions. Nor is it an intentional gullibility that renders you out of touch with genuine reality. While ironic, Christian faith is not idiotic. Christian faith is the faith, the gospel, the story of Jesus that actually happened, including the announcement that Christ is the world’s true Lord. To believe is to respond to that story from the heart with a swell of grateful love that says, “Yes, Jesus is Lord. He died for my sins. God raised him from the dead. This is the meaning of life.”
Such a faith does have obligations. To believe something is true means you have to do something about it. If the parabolic tax-collector who went away righteous was anything like the actual tax-collector named Zacchaeus, then his encounter with grace flipped his life. You’ll remember when Jesus came into the corrupt Zacchaeus’ life, he responded not by freely cheating some more, but with a swell of grateful love that totally changed him and move him to act. He said, “Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” “Everyone who hears my words and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock,” Jesus said, “the rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.
Christian faith and hope is not some optimistic pipe dream that looks on the bright side and hopes for the best. If anything, Christian faith is essentially pessimistic. It understands that real hope cannot found itself upon human potential or wishful thinking. Biblical hope refuses to naively minimize life’s tragedies and troubles with dismissive assurances along the lines of “don’t worry, it’ll be all right.” Instead, Biblical hope sees the effects of evil and sin for what they are, but then translates them into what they really are by the power of the cross. Thus suffering, rather than meaningless pain or just desserts, translates through the cross into meaningful redemption and reinforced character. And evil, rather than the perpetual source of inhumanity and injustice, becomes the already vanquished foe, its energy exhausted at Easter. Our own fallible selves, doubtful and devious at times, are nevertheless becoming what they already are: houses built on firm rock.
In the end it’s never the amount of faith that matters as much as the direction in which it is pointed. Even weak faith is strong as long as it is faith in Christ. The faith that says that Jesus is Lord. That He died for your sins. That God raised him from the dead. That you are reconciled to God and to each other and to the entire creation through his body. Christ presents you to God without blemish or blame—if you’ll continue to believe it and gratefully receive it, that is. And that’s really not a very big if—given how much we need it.
