october 28, 2007 [pm]
"Do's and Don'ts"
Colossians 2:16–23
(To read the Scripture, click here.)
In my previous sermon from Colossians a couple weeks back, I employed a number of analogies from my and Dawn’s experience with labor and delivery, as well as analogies from the perils of new parenthood. I know some of you wanted to gag. But what, was I supposed to come back to church after my daughter was born and say nothing? It’s not totally my fault. Blame the apostle Paul. He’s the one who came up with the idea of comparing the pain and resultant joys of childbirth to the pain and resultant joys of following Jesus. Still, like many of you, I formerly sat in pews for years wanting to puke every time the preacher starting talking about his or her cute kids. I mean really, they’re not as cute as you think. But then again, they also weren’t my adorable little Violet!
Kudos to the creative among you who came up with ideas on how to manage new parent ad nauseum. One friend, Thomas, informed me how he and some others embarked on a bit of a drinking game two weeks back—the rules being that whenever I mentioned new fatherhood, he and his fellow gamers were to imbibe of their chosen libation. Assuming such games occurred only in after-church establishments, I imagined that my incessant mention of Violet rendered the gamers quite snookered—clearly leaving this preacher aghast at having been an accomplice to the demonic powers of drink. However upon further review, it turned out that the intake occurred not in some den of alcoholic iniquity, but right here in this sanctuary—as I preached! Horrors! However, for Thomas and his cohorts (being the fine Christian people they are) the beverage of choice was hydraulic rather than alcoholic; water and not firewater. What a relief! Only bladders, not livers, were strained to capacity.
Nevertheless, news of this game no doubt concerns those for whom any such playfulness in church crosses a line. The fact is, prohibitions against eating and drinking in this sanctuary (communion notwithstanding) have been in effect since, well, Prohibition. There was a day when young Thomas may have been summarily escorted out of the church and brought to the elders on charges of conduct unbecoming a Christian. Had that happened, Thomas could have whipped out his Bible in defense and turned to our passage from tonight. Right here in verse 16 Paul writes: “Do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink.”
Easier said than done. There are some of you who grew up in Christian circles where what you drank determined everything. I remember being involved in one campus fellowship where the sum total of Christian obedience amounted to no alcohol and no sex with your girlfriend. Avoid those two things, and you were basically free to do whatever else you wanted to do—all with God’s blessing. Now don’t get me wrong: the Bible plainly opposes both drunkenness and sex outside of marriage for reasons that have to do with honoring, and not abusing, the good things God gives. But the Bible also opposes greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, folly, selfish ambition, chasing after money, ignoring the poor and withholding forgiveness. You don’t get to pick and choose your ethics. Yet at the same time, good ethics don’t make you a good Christian. They’re the fruit, not the root, of a righteous life.
This is basically Paul’s point here in the latter part of chapter 2. You’ll remember that Paul spent the first verses establishing the roots of Christian faith. He used verbs like forgiven and filled, rooted, built up and strengthened, triumphed and resurrected—all notably past tense and passive, meaning that these realities have already been done by God for us through Christ. Salvation is God’s thing, his gift of grace. Not that grace is always easy—Paul’s made that point too. Like the hardships of childbirth, pain is part of following Christ. Yet Paul asserts that in some weird way, our struggles are Jesus’ struggles just as our victory is his victory. Remember, as the body of Christ we are the body of Christ. The church is Jesus on earth. And as Jesus on earth, the church lives as Jesus did on earth. Our life is his life in constant replay. Not only do we live for truth and for justice and for righteousness and for reconciliation as Christ did, but we suffer for it as Christ did too. Which is why Jesus said “rejoice and be glad” when troubles come. Trouble means you’re living the Jesus life.
All New Testament writers agree on this point. “Consider it pure joy,” we read in James, “whenever you face hardship of any kind, because you know that such testing of your faith produces endurance.” This verse was cited in The New York Times this morning by Aaron Cook. If you don’t know Aaron Cook, his name should be familiar to you in just a few hours. He takes the mound tonight for the Colorado Rockies. If hardship is to be counted as joy, Rockies fans should be ecstatic by now. Though true Red Sox fans know better than to gloat. Our own century’s worth of suffering has taught us to beware ever getting cocky. This is a good thing. The Red Sox drove us crazy all those painfully losing years, but in doing so they kept us humble. We learned how to suffer well. In addition to endurance, we discovered compassion for others who mourned and perspective with which to negotiate the difficulties of sport.
True for baseball, true for faith. We all know how easily people saved from condemnation can become condemnatory. How easily gratitude can warp into entitlement, how easily humility can deform into a twisted kind of pride. The righteousness I received by grace becomes the righteousness I earned by effort. Such disgraceful arrogance is the domain of Yankee fans and Pharisees, the latter based on the portrait painted in the gospels of those religious folks for whom grace reduced down to noting more than a required performance before meals.
In Mark’s gospel, the Pharisees criticized Jesus’ disciples for eating food without first ceremonially washing their hands, the Jewish equivalent of forgetting to say grace. Jesus, knowing that the Pharisees’ real concern was for a piety performance, pulled a prophet on them and said, “Isaiah was right when he spoke about you hypocrites; as it is written: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Same thing here in Colossians. Circumcision, kosher eating and drinking, festivals, new moons and Sabbaths, these are all code for the Judaism that existed in Jesus’ day. Paul’s concern is that somehow some Christians have been hoodwinked into thinking that being a Christian meant adhering to Jewish code. Now understand that Paul is not coming down on Judaism itself here. Paul and Jesus and basically all of the earliest Christians were Jewish themselves. The difference was that Paul viewed Jesus as the fulfillment of Judaism’s promises. Christ is the Messiah who ushered in the age for which all good Jews eagerly hoped. Jesus himself said he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. The law and the prophets were signposts for Christ, shadows of what was to come. Jesus as “the one to come” stands at the end of time, his reality casting his beckoning silhouette backwards, drawing all things toward their reconciliation in him.
Granted, believing that a two-bit, homeless carpenter out of Nazareth could be the Messiah was a huge issue for many, especially after Jesus got executed as a criminal. Even after he rose from the dead folks struggled to believe, including Jesus’ own disciples who eyewitnessed the whole thing! Dead people just don’t get up from the dead. Tack on the pain and endurance parts, and it’s no surprise that folks preferred to stick with their Judaism, and even tweak it a bit to make obedience more personally advantageous and self-fulfilling. Pour on some false humility and angel worship. Admittedly, nobody is exactly sure what Paul is talking about in verse 18. False humility befits the Pharisees, but what’s up with the worship of angels? The Torah expressly forbid that. Some commentators suggest that worship of angels be substituted with worship by angels, the reference being to the heavenly throne room of God where angels worship God day and night. Tie it together with the mention of “going into great detail about what you have seen” and you might have somebody on some sort of spiritual head trip here—imagining somehow that he has seen the Lord or heard God speak or has had something akin to an exclusive mystical experience ironically humbling him into somebody arrogantly superior to everybody else.
The best example I can come up with is being coaxed by a friend to attend one of those churches where speaking in tongues is judged to be a higher plane of Christian awareness. For those of you unfamiliar with the lingo, speaking in tongues derives from 1 Corinthians 12 and refers to a gift of God whereby a person speaks in a language known only to the Lord, and in most cases, to someone with a corresponding gift of interpretation. It’s purpose is to encourage the gathered church and never the individual. It sounds bizarre, I know, which is why the practice has been generally considered optional if not obsolete within many churches. However, in this particular church I attended, speaking in tongues was practically the price of admission and before I knew it, people were surrounding me and laying hands all over me and begging God that I might start speaking unintelligibly and become a real Christian too. Best I remember, I finally mumbled a few made-up syllables so that they could praise the Lord and leave me alone. I was scared.
Paul taught that charismatic expression is a fine thing, but like river-dancing in your underwear and swim goggles when you win, it’s probably not something you should ever flaunt or force on others. “In church,” Paul wrote, “I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in tongues.” Why? Because Paul’s goal is persuading others, not freaking them out; loving others, not showing off; living an honest faith, not performing a pretend one. “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love,” Paul famously wrote, “I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”
Or as he writes to the Colossians: “an unspiritual head-case puffed up with idle notions.” The problem is that such a person has “lost connection with their head,” verse 19, the head being Jesus. Christ is the head of his body the church. The picture here is of some headless torso flailing around with no idea what they’re doing. A headless body is the church without Jesus—which of course is no church at all. Nor is the body the body without all its parts, its joints and ligaments. We need Jesus and we need each other. It’s a point we make when we do baptisms. You made promises to support Xin/Violet (take a drink) on her journey of faith because spiritual growth does not happen in solitude. The growth that God gives he gives in community. Hands and feet grow at the same pace. We’re all in this together by grace, meaning that nobody is better than anybody else no matter how fabulous your worship experience or how pure your ethics. Experiences, like ethics, are the fruits not the root of God’s presence in our lives. The result and not the cause of your salvation.
For final emphasis Paul returns to another favorite theme: that of being resurrected in Christ already. As Christians we are baptized dead and buried to the world. We are new creations in Christ now—why would we ever want to live as if we weren’t? Paul gets onto the Colossians in verse 21 for their ludicrous submission to the pettiness of performance-based religion, mocking the injunctions to not “taste, touch or handle.” Paul writes that such rules “may seem wise because they require strong devotion, pious self-denial, and severe bodily discipline. But they provide no help in conquering a person’s evil desires.” This is one way to read verse 23. These spiritual disciplines failed to do the very thing for which they were designed. But again, running the risk that to interpret it this way infers that obedience and discipline are needless, what if instead Paul is referring not to the futility of obedience, but its perversion? I like the way some other translations render verse 23: “these rules have the appearance of piety but are in effect nothing but self-indulgence.” In other words, the disciplines designed to promote righteousness get twisted to feed one’s sense of self-righteousness.
We all know how easily people saved from condemnation can become condemnatory. How easily gratitude can warp into entitlement, how easily humility can deform into a twisted kind of pride. The righteousness I received by grace becomes the righteousness I earned by effort. In the Mark episode, Jesus scolds the hand-washing Pharisees for sidestepping the commands of God to maintain their own reputation. “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this,” Jesus said. “Nothing outside a person can defile him by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of your heart that makes you unclean. For out of your hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.” Good ethics don’t make you a good Christian. The Pharisees would have insisted that, no, no, it was their circumcision as Jews that made them clean, their ethics only kept them clean. But as Paul wrote a few verses back, echoing what Judaism actually taught, true circumcision is not the physical elimination of foreskin, but the circumcision of the heart. The “putting off” or the “stripping off” of the old, stubborn self that makes genuine righteousness possible.
And only God can do this. Our relationship with God has always been based on God’s work and not our own. “In Christ you were circumcised,” Paul wrote in verse 11, “with a circumcision done without human hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ (that is, a circumcision of the heart).” Therefore (one of Paul’s favorite theological words), as sinners crucified with Christ, forgiven, rooted and resurrected by grace, “do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink.” You’ve already been judged and found guilty. You’ve already been redeemed and set free too. “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies because of your evil behavior,” Paul wrote in chapter 1, “but now God has reconciled you by Christ's own body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.” Free from accusation: which I suggest we always take both ways. Free from being accused by others, but free from accusing others too. We’re all in this together by grace.
