You May Be Right

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Colossians 2:20-33

For the Fifth Sunday of Easter, my friend Dr. Ken Sundet Jones continued our lectio continua series through Paul’s Letter to the Colossians.

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Let’s pray. Gracious Lord God, you have chosen to reveal the fullness of creation and of your very being in the small thing that is no thing, for in your little word, the word that took on flesh in Mary’s womb, the word that hung bloodied and dead on a cross, the word spoken in this place for countless Sundays. Use that inconsequential thing today to rouse us and draw our attention away from the elemental spirits of this world that we might look only to you for hope, for security, and for life itself. In Jesus’ name, amen.

I’m under a little pressure here at Annandale United Methodist Church today. I am temporarily occupying the pulpit of my rogue plus-one in all manner of theological raconteuring, the guy whom I regard as one of the brightest lights around. But this dim bulb is also the director of a project designed to help preachers get better at their proclamatory task. I have some kind of ill-founded reputation I feel compelled to maintain. On top of that, weeks ago when I asked what the assigned passage of God’s word for our service today would be, Pastor More-Productive-than-Thou told me it was from Colossians.

I loathe Colossians. Among Paul’s letters, it’s not a brilliant argument like Romans, it’s not a not a vivid look into the lives of early Chrtians like Corinthians, it’s not as winsome and personal as Philemon, and it certainly doesn’t have anything in it for my inner 12-year-old boy like Paul in Galatians saying his opponents should cut off their junk. What Colossians does have is a lot of stuff about the fullness of things and elemental spirits, and sensual indulgence that for a preacher means taking pew-sitters into an ancient system of thought and doing a lot of pastor-splaining that nobody came here for.

Riding the train to New York on Thursday, we found ourselves trapped on the quiet car, and as I respectfully refrained from witty banter with my traveling companions, I took the opportunity to do a first run at this bit of homiletical horror you have before you now. By the time we were passing Hoboken, I’d given up. All I’d done was write a disquisition on first century ancient near East Gnosticism’s cosmology and its elaborate creation myth about the Bathos, the source of all being, and the pleroma — the fullness that surrounded it, and the Demiurge that created the evil material world. Yada, yada, yada. All of which students in my Ancient and Medieval Philosophers course need to know about, but none of which actually does the divine deed of saving you from yourself.So let’s begin again. I shall instead tell you a tale of my own penchant for falling prey to my inner elemental spirits. This story of my former foolishness will have the additional benefits of endearing me to you and of making your pastor look good for inviting me to preach.

You need to know two things before I tell my anecdote. First, my son Topher, my beloved gay kid and lover of Sondheim and politically astute urban planner in Toronto, is a roller coaster enthusiast. It’s perhaps more accurate to say he’s been a fanatic since he was four. Because of it we there were several summers when we did family vacations going to CoasterCons around the country. He and I once did thirteen parks in fourteen days, and because of him I’ve ridden 235 different coasters. Second, you need to know that in my years of doctoral study I worked as an apprentice in early modern imprints in the Reformation Research program of my school’s library. We had an MDiv student working with us who was a bodybuilder and was unabashed about the fact that thongs were his preferred undergarment. We gave him constant grief about his whale tail and his butt floss.

So now into the endearment phase of the sermon in which I will show how my elemental spirits got me not what they purported to provide but instead did me in. One bitter cold January day in Minnesota, my doctoral classmate Mary and I headed to Target for a couple purchases: Mary for a new kitchen timer and me for the Dad-of-the-Year birthday gift — the brand new Roller Coaster Tycoon board game for my coaster-lovin’ kid. Mary went off to housewares, and I headed to the back of the store to snag proof of my love for my progeny.

There I stood with my red Target cart looking at the shelves of games, deflated because Target didn’t have it. Mary, timer in hand, had found me, and I noticed that in our once empty cart now lay a hanger with three small clips on it. I picked it up, and from each clip there dangled a lovely pastel display of skimpiness, a less-is-more example of intimate apparel, a thong. In sum, three of them to adorn someone’s gluteal cleft. I declared, “Eww. Butt floss! Who would wear these?” As a nearby woman gave me the stink eye for being so craven in a temple of conspicuous consumption, Mary’s face went ashen, and she spoke the words that sparked my need self-loathing and and branded me as a carrier of foot-in-mouth disease. “That’s not our cart.”

I gently placed the illustrious tangle of threads back in the cart of the stink-eyed shopper, abandoned our cart to the store’s wearers of red, and left the store shame-faced and fully aware that my clever attempt at banter that I always hope will prove my mastery over the world had ended with several apparent truths: I am not as clever as I imagine. I am a loathsome worm a la Psalm 22 who is better off digging a hole to live in. And finally, thongs are an instrument of the devil.

Now I hope I’m properly endeared to you. But now I also face another predicament. Jim Nestingen, who preached on the Magnificat, Mary’s prayer, told me in that sermon, “Kenny, Mary begins her sermon by talking about herself. Don’t you ever do that. Preachers who start with themselves as the topic never get on to other matters.” And look at what I’ve done. I’ve followed the world’s wisdom to trust my instincts and follow my bliss. The score is elemental spirits two, Ken Jones one. So let’s begin again and see if we can’t let the word do its own work and avoid the traps set by our reasoning, morals, psychological need, and entertainment value.

In Colossians Paul sees his correspondents as the battlefield that Martin Luther described poetically in “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Paul would have liked Luther’s picture of us being in the crossfire between good and evil, between the crucified and risen Jesus and the Prince of lies. And Paul’s point in our passage from the letter is this: no more than I can apparently avoid craptastic preaching, you can’t be trusted to know what is right and meet and good. What you think of as wisdom is to him a compost pile at best and more likely a stinking pile of bad dog ownership. Paul is drawing those Colossians back to the one true thing: everything revolves around the fact that in Jesus Christ the cosmos has changed. Morality is different from what all you utilitarians and deontologists and demanders of right behavior think it is. Your perceived wins are to be counted as dross. The battlements and crenellations you construct against your enemies in defense of God are really prisons. Sermons that aim to make you successful suburbanites with kids that turn out and a healthy 401-k simply suck and will never achieve what they purport.

I know that your denomination is fracturing in the same way mine did fifteen years ago as we fought a losing war over sexuality that diminished all parties. I have no wisdom as to what should happen at the General Conference. I don’t understand my own Lutheran polity let alone how Methodists do business. But if Paul is right, tain’t nobody who knows anything, because all anyone has to go on is rules and structure and policies and personal preferences that are tainted by sin, and that are, for Paul, anti-Christ.

I’m a church historian. I can’t trot out my erudition and give you a quote from blazing theologians like Barth or Bonhoeffer or Billy Bob Jenson for you that’ll clarify things. But I can tell you about Luther. When he was holed up at the Wartburg castle because he was wanted dead-or-alive across the Holy Roman Empire, what finally drew him out of hiding was that things back home in Wittenberg had come undone. In Luther’s absence a small war had broken out between the traditionalists who sought to maintain what they were comfortable with and those who felt compelled by Luther’s teaching to free themselves of the old order. A university colleague had led worship not in priests’ vestments but in professor’s robes. Worship was led not in the dulcet tones of Latin, the language of angels, but in the guttural utterances of Frühneuhochdeutsch (early new high German). People were being given both bread and wine in the sacrament. And while the partisans on each side were duking it out, innocent people had their consciences torn asunder. People were worried their everlasting salvation was jeopardized, their consciences were troubled, and the sure and certain hope of God’s beneficence in Jesus had been lost.

Luther came home and preached a series of right sermons on consecutive days, which make great reading and give insight into the Reformer’s mind. But the first is the best. Luther drew his hearers to a simple earthy thing that everyone understood: feeding babies. No one, he reminded them, gives an infant a forkful of kale salad or a piece of ribeye steak or even mashed potatoes to eat. That would be neglect and abuse. Instead babies are brought to the breast for their mothers’ milk. Later they eat pap and Gerber strained beets. Eventually comes Cap’n Crunch, sliders, and if you’re lucky Korean corn dogs. Or to spin it another way, like spelunkers crawling through caves, the watchword is not “keep up” but “watch out for those behind you, so they’re not lost.”

Luther’s point, of course, is that, even though you’re in the right on an issue, advancing your cause holds the distinct possibility of destroying another’s faith.

Paul spoke of this when he warned us not to devour ourselves or elsewhere to avoid the works of the flesh and still elsewhere to love your freedom but only in the context of love for your neighbor. Besides, what both Paul and Luther knew is that nobody really knows right from wrong, good from evil, this decision from that one, or whether holding one’s tongue or spouting a clever bon mot about thongs is advisable. Such knowledge is only gained with future hindsight and in the moment is only known in the inaccessible mind of God.

All we’re left to in our contention with our own elemental spirits and their claims of making the world a better place is this: God as sovereign demands that the future, the way forward, is his sole domain, not ours. We might cheer him on, thinking he’ll bring the gavel down as we would. But we’ll only go so far in allowing him to do his job, never fully letting go. Because, when it comes down to it, not only are we impatient with God’s timeframe for bringing in our hoped-for version of the peaceable kingdom, we’ll reject his methods and him altogether.

That’s because this is a God who who pulls the rug out from under our self-righteous legalism by going against his own law: “Jacob will I love. Esau will I hate.” Add to that the Lord’s affection for tax collectors like Matthew and Zacchaeus, the triple threat of women (one caught in adultery, another slathering nard on his feet, and still another begging for crumbs), Paul the coat-check girl at Stephen’s stoning, and having this old South Dakotan as your preacher of an April morning. All are indications that in this kingdom the  last are first, and the first are last. It’s all Jesus in some divine psychotropic wonderland you could never plan as even a fiction.

The problem has never been what people do with their or others’ junk. That’s small-fry sin that the elemental powers want you to concentrate on. The real danger is the pious moralizing in place of compassion, the hypocrisy of parading our rectitude and ignoring the reality that the judge’s banc from which our decrees are rendered is smack dab in the middle of the lake of fire where we’re under even worse judgment.

The only way forward is to turn from hubris to confession: I got nothin’. As Rock of Ages says, “naked come to thee for dress.” The only solution is to be reminded by Paul in Galatians that you have put on Christ. Like Joseph at the end of Genesis, we’re unable to render judgment, not knowing good from evil.

But being dressed in Christ is to be clothed in his grave clothes.It is to identify with the least, the last, the lost, the lame, and I might add the LGBTQ+.

What’s required here (and indeed, is always required) is not Robert’s Rules of Order, church constitutions, moral theories, or a political figure or strongman telling us what's what. No, what’s needed is God coming to us, revealing himself to us, as is his want, on the lips of a preacher who speaks the words on which all our decisions, all our history, and all our future hinge. You Methodists and we Lutherans and every bit of churchianity around us, along with desperate and dubious wonderers, and devoted pagans, and out-and-out atheists, need to hear this one thing.

There’s only one vehicle getting you into the kingdom, and that is the cross of Jesus Christ.Everything else is penultimate.

Everything else is penultimate and more than likely is either an expensive add-on that lines the dealer’s pockets or is something that’ll keep the vehicle from performing as intended.

Human beings plan, and the evil one snickers. But a church and its people who do not have their eyes stayed on Jesus are no church. We sinners always get it wrong. Our witness is always corrupted by it, and it reveals a hollowness at the core of our message. But the truth that will set you and me free is this glorious good news: Everything — every last single thing, every sorrow, every worry, every grief, every election vote that cancels yours, every cancer cell, every adolescent eye roll and monosyllabic answer, every tearful sigh — everything will be alright. Every. Thing. In fact, it’s not only a future tense thing. It’s all resolved right now, because the one who is the word spoken at the beginning, who spoke through the prophets, who died on Calvary and broke the bonds of death, has claimed you and made you his own. Relax already. He’s got this in hand. He’s got our churches in hand. He’s got you in mind and in hand. Amen.

And now May the peace which far surpasses all our human wisdom and understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

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