november 18, 2007 [pm]
"Mortified"
Colossians 3:1–11
(To read the Scripture, click here.)
When last we were in the book of Colossians (the night the Red Sox won the World Series again) Paul was telling the church “do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival or a Sabbath day.” Throw in Paul’s previous concerns over the divisiveness of circumcision, and it seems that somehow Jewish legalism had wormed its way into the Colossian community. Perhaps Jewish Christians were ticked that Gentile converts didn’t have to keep kosher and heed the law of Moses as they had—much like lifelong churchgoers get ticked when new Christians come late to the game without having had to put up with all the restrictions that come with growing up in church. Paul viewed Jesus Christ as having fulfilled Jewish law, just like Jesus said he would. His righteous obedience covered all our failures and refusals to abide by the book. There was no reason to keep score anymore.
However, that being the case, why does Paul then proceed here in chapter 3 by reiterating the Bible’s thou shalt nots? No sexual immorality, no impurity, no lust, no greed, no anger, no rage or revenge, no malice, slander, or filthy language from your lips. If Jesus indeed fulfills the law and covers all our shortcomings and sins, doesn’t he cover these too? If we no longer have to keep kosher and keep Sabbath because of Jesus and his grace, why do we have to bother with keeping our libidos, tempers and tongues in check? A silly question, but not illogical Paul addressed it back in the book of Romans. There he argued that God’s law was given to Moses so that God’s people could see how sinful they were and turn to God for remedy. Given God’s love for sinners and the generosity of His grace through Christ, Paul rightly asserted that “wherever sin increased, grace increased all the more.” Like with that famous parable Jesus told about the Pharisee and the tax-collector: The well-behaved Pharisee thanked God that he was such a good person; but it was the corrupt tax-collector bewailing his corruptness who went home righteous. When you stop and think about it, since the bad guy gets righteous rather the good guy, wouldn’t it make more sense to be the bad guy? Shouldn’t we go on sinning that grace may increase?
The problem with this logic is that it presumes grace to be merely the response to sin, rather than its bitter opponent. As the great 20th century theologian Karl Barth once wrote, grace is to sin what possibility is to impossibility, what sense is to nonsense. As far as sin is concerned, grace is a foreign language, a strange country, another planet. When Dawn and I traveled to Mozambique a couple years back, we described to some rural villagers the 25-inch snowfall we had left behind in Boston, demonstrating with a hand to our thigh the depth of the snow in our neighborhood. The Mozambicans looked at us as if we’d lost our minds. How was it possible that we’d survived? Since all they knew of frozen precipitation was the occasional hail storm, they could only imagine destruction of disastrous proportions. We explained that no, water crystallizes into small flakes and drifts to the ground a flake at a time, eventually piling up into something we also call drifts. They shook their heads in utter perplexity. “You come from a very strange place,” they said.
In the Old Testament book of Isaiah, the Lord famously announced to his people how “though your sins are blood-stained like scarlet, they shall be white as snow.” I actually think the simile works better for Mozambicans than for New Englanders. While for us, “white as snow” may signify purity and cleanness (at least until the plows roll in), for Mozambicans, snow is a completely foreign concept, alien and outlandish. For them, for God to render sin “as white as snow” would be to blot it completely out of their conceptual consciousness.
Likewise in Romans and here in Colossians too. As far as sin is concerned, you’re dead. You have died with Christ, you’ve been set free from the spiritual powers of this world. How can you live as if you still belonged to it? Why would you want to? Why even ask? You have been raised with Christ, Paul writes, therefore set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God—and where you’ll be seated someday too. That’s where your real life is: hidden with Christ in God. Or better: stored away for safe keeping until the day Jesus comes back and shines the light on everything. In the meantime, since your seat is already saved, since your future is already set, you might as well go ahead and live like it now. Live like the new person you already are: No lust, no greed, no anger, no revenge—no guilt no shame, no bitterness, no regrets. Jesus said, “blessed are those who hear the word of God and do what it says.”
But wait a minute: if keeping those parts of the law that prohibit lust and anger are good and right, why not keep kosher and keep Sabbath too? If obeying some of the law is blessed, wouldn’t obeying all of it be even better? Why does Paul draw any distinction between proper behavior and a proper way to eat and worship? Sure, you have to watch out for legalism and self-righteousness, but people can get as sanctimonious about their pure behavior as they do about perfect attendance in church.
You’ve probably heard a sermon of two on the differences between the ceremonial law from the moral law. The ceremonial law refers to those rules on the Old Testament books governing rituals formerly tied to the demolished Jewish Temple, while the moral law supersedes those rituals. A fine distinction, but not always one that’s easy to make. For instance, open up the book of Leviticus and you’ll find one verse forbidding cross-fertilization and wearing cotton blends right beside the ones against spreading slander and perverting justice. Why obey one verse but not the next? What makes slander more sinister than a poly-cotton T-shirt? God says in Leviticus, “Keep all my decrees and all my laws and follow them. I am the LORD.”
I’ve just finished a interesting book by A. J. Jacobs, an editor for Esquire magazine entitled, The Year of Living Biblically. In it, Jacobs, a self-described agnostic Jew, determines to abide by all the strictures of Scripture for an entire year, taking it as plainly as warranted, just to see what happens. Surrounded by a cloud of Bible scholars and a whole library of books, Jacobs embarks on as faithful a reading (and living) of the Bible as he can muster. He naturally bumps up against difficult interpretive dilemmas aplenty, but chooses to err on the side of literalness to be safe.
For instance, Leviticus teaches that “if a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death,” ostensibly by stoning since that was the preferred Levitical method of capital punishment. Clearly Jacobs couldn’t carry out an execution, but shouldn’t he do something? “I figured my loophole would be this,” he writes: “the Bible doesn’t specify the size of the stones. So… pebbles.” He’s sitting in Central Park one day when this old guy walks up and barks out: “Why are you dressed like that?” In keeping with the Bible, Jacobs hasn’t trimmed his beard all year, wears only white clothes with tassels attached and sandals on his feet. He says to the old man, “I’m trying to live by the rules of the Bible. The Ten Commandments, stoning adulterers…”
“You’re stoning adulterers?” the old man scowls. “Yeah, I’m stoning adulterers.” “I’m an adulterer.” “You’re currently an adulterer?” “Yeah, you gonna stone me?” “If I could, yes, that’d be great!” Jacobs says. “You do it and I’ll punch you in the face.” The old man was serious. He was not some cutesy grumpy old man. This was an angry old man with seven decades of hostility behind him. Jacobs fished the pebbles out of his back pocket. “I wouldn’t stone you with big stones,” he said, “just these little guys.” He opened his palm to show him the pebbles and the old man lunged at him, grabbed a pebble and flung it at his face. So Jacobs takes one of the remaining pebbles and whips it at the old man’s chest. Eye for an eye. It bounces off. “I’ll punch you right in the kisser,” the old man says. “You shouldn’t commit adultery,” Jacobs says back. And then thy just stare at each other until the old man finally stomps off.
OK, so if Jacobs had read the gospels he’d know that Jesus addressed the issue of stoning sinners when he famously said, “Let whoever is without sin cast the first stone.” So then what about the command in Leviticus? My plan is to address this after the New Year with a sermon series on Leviticus. However, inspired by Jacobs’ book, I’d like to do this sermon series as more of a congregational conversation. I’d like to invite ten of you to join Walter Kim and myself as Levitical guinea pigs for a one month public experiment of living Leviticus—trying to put the Old Testament law into practice at work, at school, in your family and in your neighborhood—sort of a reality sermon series.. We’re going to keep a daily blog and record some video of the experience and publish it online so that the rest of the congregation can participate and comment as we go. If you’re interested in being one of the guinea pigs, see me or Walter or check out the church website and blog. The hope is that together we’ll all discover afresh how to interpret and obey the Bible.
Of course Paul does some of that interpreting for us here in Colossians. “Since you have been raised with Christ, set your minds on things above, not on earthly things,” he writes. Inasmuch as the Temple was a earthly model of heaven, there’s no need for the model now that you have the real thing. In Christ, you’ve already died and gone to heaven, even as you still live and breathe on earth. Your real life is kept safe in Christ, until the day when Christ who is your life, verse 4, appears in glory. Jesus’ life is your life now, Paul asserts, therefore live the life of Jesus now. And not just you by yourself—but all of us together. God intends Christian behavior to be reinforced and upheld by the friendship, company and loving support of other Christians. Remember, Jesus didn’t die to make us into a bunch of individual little Jesuses, but to craft us into one collective body of Christ, each member helping the other. This is why church membership matters. We can only live as Jesus on earth together.
As for what this Jesus life looks like, Paul presents both the positive and the negative aspects. We’ll look at the positives next week. As for the negations in verse 5, sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, it is curious that his list of sexual sins ends with the economic sin of greed, which he calls idolatry (Biblical code for serious commandment breaking). What’s the connection? First off, remember that sexual sin is not sin because it is sexual. There’s nothing wrong with sex within marriage. Likewise with economics. As Tony Campolo puts it, “There’s nothing wrong with making a million dollars. There is something wrong with keeping it all for yourself.” Both economic and sexual sin are fundamentally matters of covetousness—that insatiable, self-serving desire for consumption and control. Covetousness turns loving your neighbor on its head. Love as self-sacrifice gives way to love as self-gratification, bereft of any responsibility or respect for the other person. In a culture governed by consumption, multiple partners is just good capitalism.
Similarly with anger, revenge, malice, slander, abusive language and lying in verses 8 and 9. These too derive from covetousness. We crave and do not get, so we get angry and get even, we lie to make ourselves seem better than we are. We get blinded by our own sense of personal justice. I ran across a story this past week about a Christian guy who kept golf balls in the glove compartment of his car, and whenever somebody would make him mad or cut him off in traffic, he’d pull in front of the person and throw a golf ball out of his sun roof, hoping it would dent the car that had cut him off. We’ve all done crazy things like that because we were so bent on evening the score. It’s an insane way to live and we’ve all done it. But have you ever done it and felt good about yourself afterwards? No, because it doesn’t work.
In his book about living Biblically, A. J. Jacobs describes how he kept a running list on his PDA of things to use as ammo when his wife accused him having a bad memory. She’d get on him for forgetting to do something, but rather than apologize, make peace and do better, he’d just get all offended. Once, during some unpleasant, petty argument about who left the microwave door open, an angry Jacobs sneaked into the bathroom, clicked on his PDA, and reemerged with an example from his list about the time she left the keys in the rental car and they had to call Avis to come bail them out. But then, feeling bad (Paul says that love does not keep a record of wrongs), Jacobs confesses the list to his wife. She laughs. “You’re not angry?” he asks. “How could I be angry?” she says. “It’s just so heartbreaking that you need this.” And it is.
But how do we stop it? You don’t stop it, Paul says. You kill it. “Put to death whatever is worldly in you,” he writes. End the affair. Shut down the computer. Give away your money. Delete the scorecards. As Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery (and would have said to the man had he been there too): “Go and sin no more.” In Christ, by grace, you’ve put off your old sinful humanity, verse 9, with all of its bad behavior. Grace is to sin what possibility is to impossibility, what sense is to nonsense. As far as sin is concerned, grace is a foreign language, a strange country, another planet, snow in Mozambique. White as snow, you’ve put on your new humanity, which is being renewed according to the image of the one who created it. It’s the difference between being only human—a lame excuse we roll out when we do the crap we do—and being truly human—people redeemed into the likeness of Jesus. Here, in this redeemed space, verse 11, there is no Greek or Jew, no circumcised or uncircumcised, no barbarian, angry old men, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Because Jesus is everything, the things that divided us no longer matter. Because Jesus as everything, the things that caused us to covet no longer exist. Christ is all and in all, therefore there’s nothing left to want. Because Jesus is everything, we have everything we need.
