Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, dear friends!

In a lot of ways I do look at theStory as my joy and crown. I believe that in this room exists a community that has the potential to really be a force for good in this city. In fact, I don’t know if there is any other hope that small communities who are dedicated to the task of the Kingdom of God for this world. It’s why I love the church, it’s why I love this community. I love all the individuals here, I love the families, I take pride when you succeed and I get excited when you thrive.

The word crown that Paul here is using is like a trophy of sorts. He’s not talking about a hat that a king would wear but that of a runner that would wear it after winning a big race that he’s been preparing for all of his life. This is where Paul finds his trophy. Nowadays you ask someone what their pride and joy are in life, the one thing that they brag about and it is usually their house, their car, their new church building, their jobs, their kids. For Paul, it is his community. It makes me wonder, who are we so deeply invested in and connected with in this community that we could call them our pride and joy? Who else in this community do we wear like a trophy and we get excited about them when they thrive and succeed in the world? Are we the kind of community that holds each other as our joy and crown? This is why we called this series “Friends to Swear By.” To Paul, the church is to create an environment of friends to swear by, the kind of friends that you wear as a crown.

Remember, Paul is trying to help shape the perspective of the Philippian church in a specific way, in a way that can we can rejoice through hardship, make sense of suffering, and love our brother. He tells us over and over again that followers of Christ look a certain way, they think a certain way and he’s been trying to help us look and think like they do. Paul uses the word mindset a number of times in Philippians because that is what he is trying to shape. If he can shape their outlook and mind about the world and Jesus then everything else will follow. This was a quote from a few weeks ago.

To perceive this, however, the Philippians and we will need to become practiced at reading the drama of salvation properly. They also need to act in specific ways, as outlined before in Philippians. Thus, a proper reading of the economy of salvation will enable them to situate themselves within that drama in the appropriate ways so that they will live, and continue to live, as “friends” of the cross…Paul’s attention and affections are redirected so that he comes to understand God and God’s ways with the world in profoundly different ways.
- Stephen Fowl

Paul is attempting to help us fit ourselves into God’s plan of salvation and the world and help us see where we fit. He hopes that his joy and crown will do the same, and that together as friends they can become friends of the cross. Philippians is a book dedicated to that task. So as we here at theStory finish unpacking Philippians and we also have just spent a considerable amount of time deciding on some of the direction of this church, may we keep what we have learned in mind. Our decisions should reflect God’s ongoing drama of salvation and not simply be symptoms of our love of self. Quarrels that are unresolved. Judgmental attitudes toward people we don’t understand. The refusal to forgive. The apathy toward change. These are all signs that we do not understand what God is doing and why we are here. But as we begin to make each other our joy and crown and start to care about each other to a point where we actually take pride in one another, then we will begin to understand what Paul is doing. Paul seemed to have run into a few people as well like this as well as we come to the end of letter Paul speaks directly to them.

I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.

There has been falling outs in this community before. Someone hurts someone else. It happens. It can’t not happen. Nevertheless, I think Paul has set the record pretty straight that he sees the community in unity as central to our stance before God. How we stand before God is directly related to how we stand in relation to others, especially in our community. So Paul here is obviously addressing some sort of broken relationship in the community and he doesn’t want to just ignore it. He refers back to what he mentioned in chapter 2 and tells them to be like-minded. He’s not just telling them to be friends again and want to like each other, rather he’s trying to get them to listen to what he’s been saying all along and change their perspective on what is important. That is, he wants them to start acting like Christians act. He wants them to start displaying the virtues and habits that Christians should display. They should do this because they both at least agree that they have a connection in Christ. If they can’t let go of their pride long enough to fix what is broken in their relationship then it flows over into their relationship with Christ, and eventually the entire communities relationship with Christ.

Notice how Paul doesn’t take sides. This isn’t about helping someone win, this is again, about seeing the entire perspective of the gospel. For Paul, everything is connected. He’s pleading that this relationship be reconciled because everything effects everything. He says earlier, that in Christ all things hold together. There is no way that this community can keep on living, can keep on rejoicing if there is this kind of dissension in a community. Everything is connected. This means that they can’t talk behind each other’s back. This means they find pride in putting someone else down. It’s all connected. It’s not just about a disagreement, it’s about all things. So Paul pleads that it stops and is sorted out.

I like what Paul is doing here because he isn’t simply asking people to be perfect. He hasn’t said to stop sinning. This hasn’t been his aim at all in Philippians. Rather he is encouraging characteristics of what Jesus’ followers look like. The commitment to the hard work of confession, seeking and offering forgiveness and reconciliation. This is what Christians do everywhere. If we can’t do it amongst ourselves than we cannot do it with God or the world. Again, Paul isn’t reprimanding them because they didn’t get along. He doesn’t even really care about the reason as to why they have fallen apart. He doesn’t care. They must be reconciled. He must expect that these people know how to forgive and reconcile, he seems to have a ‘guy’ there that will help them sort out their differences and he is letting them know that the health of a community rests on their reconciliation.

Paul then goes from this very specific circumstance into a more broad encouragement to the entire community.

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Of course Paul keeps telling us to rejoice, he hasn’t stopped telling us to rejoice, he’s a never ending broken record of repeating the same thing over and over again. But there is something more going on than simply Paul telling us how to act. He’s told us already that our wealth and joy is found by being part of a community that are ruled by a different Lord than that of Caesar. So when Paul is speaking of rejoicing he certainly isn’t talking about the kind of happiness that the world celebrates. He doesn’t mean do whatever it takes so you can be happy. He’s not talking about this random emotional response because you’ve set your life up to take care of yourself. He’s talking about joy as a

…response formed only in those who can read the economy of God’s activity in particular ways and act in conformity with that unfolding story. Joy is the appropriate response when one rightly perceives the unfolding of God’s drama of salvation even in the midst of suffering and opposition.
- Stephen Fowl

The word rejoice throughout Philippians is the Greek word that means ‘gift.’ This isn’t a forced emotion that you make yourself feel when bad things happen. To rejoice literally means to be aware of gift. The gift of breath. Gift of life. Gift of love. Gift of getting up. Life is a gift. To rejoice means to be aware of this gift. It’s about waking up to the reality around us. The reality is life is good because Jesus has reconciled us to the Father and he is making all things new. With all this rejoice talk we begin to think that Paul just wants us to fake being happy. So because some dude died on a cross a few thousand years ago I’m supposed to suck up all sorrow in my life and put a fake smile on my face. This isn’t what Paul is talking about. When Paul tells the Philippians to rejoice he is saying “WAKE UP,” look at the world around you, stop sleeping, everything is a gift, see what God has done and is up to. This type of rejoicing is a disciplined alertness not a fleeting emotion. You learn to perceive things differently that run counter to the way the world thinks. The world tells us that when things don’t go our way (and they weren’t for Paul, remember he’s an apostle, in prison, doing the opposite of what he should have been doing) that we should whine and complain until that isn’t so. Paul on the other hand has gone through a kind of formation that allows him to see the world through a different lens. This is the kind of joy that has been forged in the furnace of suffering. Wake Up and Be Aware of the Gifts All Around!

To be a Christian, you must perceive things in very specific ways. Where you don’t already look at the world this way, you must discipline yourself so you do. This is what it means to follow Christ. Paul is not talking about happiness. The things that Paul has told us to rejoice in are the sorts of things that would make most people miserable and possibly ruin relationships. This means that rejoicing isn’t just an emotional response to a situation, rather it is a disciplined formation of our ways of thinking and acting in the world. Remember when we spoke about the disciplines? We discipline ourselves to we can actually live in the freedom that Christ promises. Just like a professional musician needs to discipline themselves so they can experience the freedom of their instrument, we need to discipline ourselves to experience the freedom of our lives. Joy is a by product of us being able to recognize what God is up to around us even in the worst of circumstances. Our joy won’t be an achievement but rather re-aligning our perspective so that we can recognize God’s purposes and presence around us. Rejoicing isn’t just an emotion, rejoicing is a decision that we have made of a specific kind of attitude we have towards life by being formed in the way of Christ.

Q: What kind of things can you do to discipline yourself so that you become more capable of rejoicing?

Then Paul tells us not to be anxious, but rather, as an alternative to being anxious, be in prayer. This is an interesting contrast because prayer is an act of submission, not an act of control. Rather than telling them to get their act together and stop being anxious, he again is trying to help them realign their perspective to point their minds to someone who can give them freedom. Prayer puts us in our place. Anxiety can only be freed by giving up on yourself as a way to be able to remove anxiety. So you pray. You pray because prayer is an act of dependence on God and not yourself. You don’t pray to get rid of anxiety, but by praying and depending on God for everything, anxiety disappears. It’s the peace of God that is an alternative to anxiety. It surpasses our understanding and our control of a situation. They aren’t called simply to have peace, they are offered peace and they can accept it. Peace is not something that comes easy. We end up having a dependence on ourselves, our own successes and our own ability to give ourselves freedom, but it create anxiety. The peace of God comes to those that receive it, and that allow their dependence on God to be great than their dependence on themselves. You accept and experience this peace through prayer, an acknowledgment that you need God and you depend on him, because you can’t do it yourself.

Throughout the epistle Paul’s aim has been to form the Philippians’ habits of thinking, perceiving, and acting in a particular way, a way appropriate to those who are in Christ. Having one’s thoughts and hearts in Christ will generate a pattern of thought and action that will be distinctly different from (and often opposed to) the lives, expectations, and perceptions of those whose political allegiance is not to Christ. Paul’s assertion here at the end of the epistle that the peace of God will protect their thoughts and hearts stands in sharp contrast to the coercive force which guards the citizens of Philippi in the name of the Rome. That peace can never be a true peace because it is not founded in the God of peace.
- Stephen Fowl

There is something that we need to be careful in what Paul is doing with his last line. Paul says this

And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

I find this problematic because Paul sounds like he is saying that the things we know and understand through the Peace of God, others will not know and understand. This peace will also guard our hearts and minds from incompatible ways of thinking. This becomes an issue because this almost seems like brainwashing to me. Think about this. If we have a peace that surpasses understanding, how will we have discussions or converse with those that don’t have this peace? When I was in Aruba, I was constantly running into these people that would consider themselves Conservative republicans. They were not the smartest people, in fact I would have called them quite ignorant. Yet everything they spoke about anything politics, they would speak about the liberal democrat world as a bunch of lunatics. Now to other Republicans these people I ran into would be perfect exemplary people in what is right and truthful. They think democrats are crazy. Then go and talk to some democrats and very quickly you will start to hear how annoyed and how much they hate conservatives. They both think each other is wrong. They both think each other is crazy. They both think the other side is stubborn or deceived or unreasonable and that the way they think and act in the world is the right way. So is Paul just saying that this reality is going to exist? That there will be people that think you are crazy but it doesn’t really matter? How are we ever to know that we are the crazy ones? Let me show you a video of someone that I think is completely crazy, ignorant and deceived. It’s also pretty hilarious.

Now I can assure you, if you sit down with Kirk Cameron or Ray Comfort, they have come to some terms with some kind of peace that obviously surpasses human understanding. I have no idea how anything he is saying makes any sense. Yet they believe this whole-hearted. In fact they have dedicated their entire lives to this kind of evangelism in trying to win people over to the Christian faith through these kinds of one-off logical explanations of how God works.  I think they are nuts. I also think though that they have some sort of peace in their hearts. I do not think that this is the kind of peace that Paul is talking about. The peace that Paul is talking about here is not the kind of peace that assures you that you are right and everyone else is wrong. That isn’t peace, that is arrogance and pride. Paul has been setting us up all along to understand the kind of peace that God offers. And Paul continues to explain..,

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

In the video, these guys have created an entire life of trying to convince other people that they are right. Their peace is found in being right, and convincing other people that they are right. Paul uses his language carefully. He isn’t telling us what is true, and what is noble and what is right. He just says whatever these things are. He recognizes that these adjectives are very subjective. He acknowledged this before when he referred to the dissension between the two women before. He obviously thinks there is a different between truth and falsity, and right and wrong, he’s just not telling us what they are, or what he thinks they are in this case. Peace from God isn’t found in being right and everyone else being wrong. The book of Philippians, what we have spent learning and reading over the last few months, provides us with a system in which we can make these kind of discerning decisions together as a community. Paul has told us to pray, in an act of showing our dependence on God. We are to act on the things we have learned, in other words actually live what we have seen and learned. We learn to rejoice. We discipline our perspective to keep God’s entire story in reach. We learn to rejoice while suffering. When your life becomes Christ-focused unto his death and resurrection, then we begin to have a proper perspective and ability on making judgments on what these pure, truthful, noble and right things are. And which we will soon find out, these things are not the same things as the dominant culture in which we find ourselves.

Q: What does the peace of God look like for you?

Paul is also not giving us a list of things not to do. This is not an attempt to rid us all of moral corruption and all the bad behaviours that we have. Rather, he is taking a different approach. He wants us to be morally excellent. He wants us to be a community that stands as an alternative to the culture around us. Not just a community that toots the horn of whatever our culture thinks is excellent, but a community that determines what is excellent for a world that is Christs.

This implies that if Christians order their common life in a manner worthy of the gospel, if they master the convictions and practices appropriate to life in Christ, they will be able to discern what is truly excellent. Thus, it would appear that the ability to make sustained discriminations between excellence and its simulacra depends on the presence and good working of a community whose common life is appropriate to the gospel of Christ.
- Stephen Fowl

I want to be this kind of community whose common life is appropriate to the gospel of Christ. I think we here this morning are capable of this. I think that as we start to be shaped by this kind of perspective that Paul encourages us to have we can get closer to learning what it means to rejoice. We can start to better understand what it means to see each other as our joy and crown. We can start to learn to dwell on these true, good and just things. We can start to truly experience the peace of God. Let’s pray together.

We’ve spent this entire year in Philippians and it’s been a pretty fun ride.  We have a better understanding of the kind of letter that Paul is writing, who he writing to, what kind of world it was when this letter was written and we are only half way through the letter.  We’ll just jump right into it this morning because I want to spend less time talking this week and more time trying to better apply what Paul is doing in this section.

We are going to do the first half of Philippians 3 this morning.  Paul is starting to sound like a broken record.  He keeps telling us to rejoice.

Further, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you.

We get it already.  We get that Paul is happier than us and that we aren’t as happy.  We get that he just wants us to look at everything differently so we can keep rejoicing.  He says he is doing it to safeguard us.  I don’t know about you, but when someone keeps telling me to be happy over and over again it makes me more angry.  Maybe there is something to his persistence?  What we do know is that a big part of this letter is about how Paul is trying to explain his way through his perspective on the world and encourage the Philippian church to do the same.  We talked about this last month a bit.  Remember, Paul has changed his entire perspective so that even when the worst things are happening to him, he is able to rejoice.  He has shifted his perspective from seeing all the bad stuff that is happening to him and everything now goes through the filter of the gospel.  He now cares about the gospel.  He cares about how people find themselves in the story of God’s good news.  Outside of that, nothing else matters.  Paul almost seems giddy about it.  Of course it is no problem for him to keep mentioning it, it’s all he can think about, it’s all he cares about.  Let’s keep going.

Watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh.   For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh— though I myself have reasons for such confidence.

So let me tell you a story about my life that might help give some context to what is happening here.  Back in about grade ten I started spending a lot of time with a guy who was nothing like me.  He was one of those non-Christian kids who didn’t observe any of my morals or rituals and my way of life.  I was a church kid.  I didn’t drink, swear or sleep around.  I went to church every single week.  This guy drank, swore, and slept around.  He didn’t go to church every week.  Then something happened though.  Over time this guy started getting more into this Jesus guy and eventually a year later decided that he wanted to follow Jesus.  He did the whole go up to the front thing and say a dedication prayer and he committed his life to following Jesus.  So here we were, one year later, and he is now following Jesus.

Over time as this guy started coming to church he started having all sorts of people coming up to him and telling him different things.  Hey man, great that your a Christian and all, but listen, if you really want to be a Christian, if you want to be close with God, you have to stop swearing, drinking on weekends, sleeping around, doing drugs, being loud and annoying, and you have to start reading your bible, praying every day and coming to church a bit earlier.  He was volunteering at a drop-in center and he got asked to leave because he was swearing around the kids.  I remember the skepticism of people in looking at him and telling me that he wasn’t a Christian because he still did these wrong things.  I remember being told about all the hoops he had to jump through if he really wanted to have a relationship with God.  They kept telling him that he had to do this, stop doing that if he ever wanted to be a true Christian.  According to them, this guy needed to act exactly like them, have the same morals as them for his faith in Christ to be complete.  One place even told him that unless he spoke in tongues than he couldn’t be in leadership.  There was this sense that there was another level of spirituality he needed to reach before he was truly who he said he was.

So let’s give some background on what Paul is doing here.  Paul is in a similar situation.  There is two types of people that would be good to highlight.  There were good Jewish Christians.  They were familiar with the scriptures, and they were familiar with the idea of a messiah coming to bring salvation to Israel.  They saw Jesus as that Messiah and they were from Philippi.  Then there was Gentile Christians.  They hadn’t grown up with all the stories from the Torah like Noah, David and Moses.  They follow Jesus now, but they didn’t come to know him through the Jewish story.  So what had happened is there was this group of Jewish Christians who would go around to all these churches everywhere and find the Gentile Christians and say: “Oh it is great that you are following Jesus, welcome on board, it’s good to have you here.  Have you been circumcised yet?” The obvious response is that they haven’t, because it’s not something that Gentiles did.  So these Jewish Christians would tell them that they had to get snipped and after that then they would be able to be with God.  So you have this group of Christians telling other Christians what more steps they have to take so that they can be true Christians.  So in a way, they’ve created two tiers of Christians.  There are the Jewish Christians who have done all the right things, right rituals so that they can be with God.  Then there is also the Gentile Christians who have no idea about any of that stuff, all they know is that they like this Jesus guy and they want to follow him.  So the Jewish Christians wanted the Gentiles to basically become Jews in order for them to complete their faith in Christ.  Paul addresses this issue elsewhere, such as in the book of Galatians, where he basically tells them to back off and stop making following Jesus into a cultural change because Jesus transcends cultural boundaries.

So when Paul says to watch out for these dogs, the evildoers, the mutilators of the flesh, these are the people he is talking about.  He is talking about those who have hidden rules on those that want to follow Jesus.  Jesus came to free people, not bind them up with better morals.  The evildoers he is talking about are not the the people doing morally wrong acts.  The evildoers are those that heep burdens of guilt on people.  The evildoers are ones that make it seem like salvation can only be had through their ability to perform good morals, and not through Jesus alone.  They thought salvation was still through following the Torah, obeying the rules of the law.  We are used to this flipping of language by now after reading the parables.  So here we are again.  The evildoers aren’t so much the ones that we think are evil because of all the bad things they do.  The evildoers are the ones who tell people that they have to be good to know God.  To Paul, that is evil.  What Pharisees used to call unclean people was the greek word for dogs.  What does Paul call them? Dogs.  Paul is playing with the same words that Jesus did.  He takes words that religious people would use to call them wrong, evil or unclean and then flips them and says “whatever you say bounces off them and sticks on you.”

Though I myself have reasons for such confidence. If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

So back to my friend from earlier.  I think I literally had this conversation with him.  If my friend is the Gentile in this story, then I am the Jew.  I was a perfect Christian kid.  My morals were outstanding.  I didn’t do any of the things he did.  I was generally a nice person, I helped people.  I didn’t drink, I was still a virgin, I didn’t use bad language.  Everything that was expected of a Christian; I was.  I was so sure about my morals and my life that I would argue my teachers in high school over all sorts of things, trying to show how they were wrong in what they were teaching.  I remember one class and we were supposed to write an essay on one of the first situations that arose when a gay couple was going to go to prom.  I ripped into it pretty hard.  I told her, in front of the whole class, that it was ridiculous that she would make us write about such horrible things and that homosexuality was wrong and she had no right to accept that way of living.  I was hardcore and shameless.  I loved the debate and putting people on the spot to show them how their morals were wrong and how if they wanted to live right, or proper, then they would believe in my morals.

So Paul gets to this point in his conversation and basically gives the same rigmarole as me.  He says listen, in every single moral standard there is, I win.  He’s not saying this to be prideful, he’s saying it to make a point.  This guy in terms of decisions to be holy and set apart and in terms of luck of the draw in how he was born, was perfect in every sense.  Paul had it together.  If anyone was going to take pride in who he was, or how moral he was, it would be Paul.  Paul was so hardcore that he actually used to kill Christians because he thought they were wrong.  He’s not telling this because he felt bad about killing people, he telling us because he needs to show us how hardcore he really was.  He believed in what he believed so much that he gave up his entire life and dedicated it to making sure people knew and believed how he understood God’s story.  Paul was under the impression, like all Pharisees, that the law could be fully kept.  So that’s what he did; he kept it.

Now Paul is referring to some things in this passage that might not make a lot of sense.  So let’s get a little refresher shall we, more specifically why are we talking about circumcision.  Circumcision was a Jewish ritual.  Ancient cultures, and still some cultures today, like Israel always had symbolic gestures that they would do to set apart themselves to show the entrance into a community or to show a seriousness to show an identification with a kind of people.  This is a tribal identity that people who had their kids circumcised were basically saying that they were raising them with this tribe.  Their kids were growing up with this kind of identity because as the world was falling apart they were to be part of a tribe that was to help and love all the other tribes.   This is a very significant thing.  It was odd, but this was what happened.   Anyone who didn’t grow up in a culture of circumcision would find this to be a very odd practice.  There are still other very odd initiations, coming of age traditions and right of passages in the world today and from ancient communities from around Israel.

For instance one group South Pacific Vanuatu, the Vanuatu people do this tradition called land diving.

Suicidally brave men jump from makeshift rickety towers as high as 100 feet up in the air with vines tied around their ankles. Land diving is kind of a multipurpose ritual: a rite of passage, a way to appease the gods to ensure a good yam harvest, and now, a tourist attraction.  So it’s like bungee jumping – big deal, you think. Well, actually it’s a little bit more complicated than that. The whole point of land diving is that the jumper’s head touch the ground. But obviously if you’re the jumper, you’d want that to be as briefly done as possible: if your head doesn’t touch the ground, then it’ll be a bad yam harvest. If your head touch too much ground, the yam will be blessed but you’ll die. The difference between a good jump and a fatal one is about 4 inches of vine. It’s no surprise then, that a jumper is allowed to say anything he wants to anyone before the jump and not be held responsible for his words.

Or there is one where these boys take on something called crocodile scars where they are cut hundreds of time up and down their back.  You can see why they call it crocodile scars because it gives them a look of the back of a crocodile.  I won’t show you the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc9dGK8ketg) but it was one of the more disgusting things I’ve seen.  The boy is held down by their uncle and over the course of a day they are cut extremely deep all day long.  Then they are put in these smoke rooms so the get infected and scar up better over a few weeks.

There are lots of others, such as putting your hands in these crazy gloves with ants that sting 100 times worse than a wasp, or cow jumping where if you don’t make it then you never become a man, adolescent circumcision (this gets really gross) or blood letting through their throats, nose and tongue.  I tell you all these stories, because I really do think that circumcision probably fits somewhere in there.  The medical benefits are scarce and it’s much more of a tradition than a moral thing.  Circumcision is a symbol of a certain tribe.

Basically all humans are born with something that physcologist call an egocentric way of life.  In other words.  All they can do is think about themselves.  Life revolves around them.  They need external sources to survive and we coddle and nurture them so they are raised.  Now as parents one of our main jobs is helping them become less ego centric and more ethno centric.  Meaning that they start to not just think about themselves and their own good anymore, but they start to have their lives for the purpose of their tribes (whether that be their family, church, culture etc.).  As parents our goal is to help move children from being ego-centric to ethno-centric.  But then what happens when an entire tribe has gone off in the wrong direction.  What happens when the ethno centric way of living is actually bad for other tribes?  What do we do in Germany 1938 when an entire tribe started taking out other tribes.  So now, as parents, and as the church the goal is to help move people not just from ego-centric to ethno-centric but from ethno-centric to world-centric.  So that the person who was raised in 1938 Germany just doesn’t look out for the good of their own tribe, but the good of the entire world.  This is what the entire Christian story is based on.  We go from Adam to Abraham to Jesus and we see how God eventually brought humans to care about themselves to caring about their families to caring about all the nations.  Eventually Abraham was the beginning of a world-centric worldview.

So what we have in these verses with Paul is that there is a group of Jewish Christians who have taken their tribal and ethno centric symbolic gestures and tried to force them into a story that only has room for a world-centric faith.  They would go around and tell these Gentile Christians that they had do perform certain tribal rituals in order for them to be fully identified with God and the Christian Faith.

Q: What kind of ethno-centric or ego-centric traditions do we have or that are out there that we expect people to do or conform to in order for them to be identified truly as a Christian or as part of our tribe?

(prosperity gospel – ego-centric, story of my friend, ethno-centric)

So these are the kinds of people Paul is talking about.  These are the dogs, the evildoers, these are the ones that we should beware of.  This is not where God’s unfolding plan of salvation for the world happens.  Done are the ways of ethno-centric laws such as the Torah for granting passage for salvation.  Jesus came to bring a new world-centric way of living.  So Paul takes his entire ethno-centric way of life and puts it on display and then throws it out the window.  It is useless to him now, at least in terms of God and salvation is concerned.  Paul continues on this line of thinking.

He says beware of that dog that tells you that your church is better, your right, your more responsible, your more right that everyone else, you care about people more, your way is better than everyone else.  Beware of the evildoer that tells you to put your own tribe, culture and society ahead of everyone else and not worry about the,  Beware of the mutilator of the flesh that let’s you think any moral will save you.  This is a message for me I need to hear on a daily basis.  My inclination is to think that all my stupid ideas are the right ideas and that everyone needs to follow me, or they are wrong, or they can’t really know Christ.  Beware of me when I sound like that.  Let’s listen to Paul here and beware of anyone who tells us that salvation can come from any place, any moral or right choice, any ritual or tradition.

But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.

Paul is on the same kick here.  Remember he is no longer talking from a ego-centric point of view.  He has moved to making his own story, and his tribes story fit into God’s story.  We can believe that because of what we talked about a few weeks ago.  He’s in jail, and nothing is really going well for him, yet he is still telling us to rejoice, because all he really cares about is the gospel advancing to the world.  So it is this perspective.  This shift of thinking that allows him to write words like this.  All these other ways of thinking, and all the things he gained through thinking this way are considered worthless to him now.  He’s looking at the world from a new perspective.  The language he is using here is actually financial terms of ‘assets’ and ‘liabilities.’ What was once an asset, is now seen as a liability to him.  The things haven’t actually changed.  He still has been snipped.  What has changed is his perspective, not his circumstances.  This is what he book of Philippians is about.  It is about changing our perspective to look at the world through God’s grandoise story of salvation for the world rather than looking at it through our short-reaching imaginations of individual happiness.

It depends on learning to perceive things from a perspective in Christ. This is a habit that had to be formed in Paul. Moreover, he wants the Philippians to have similar perceptual habits formed in them. Paul’s account of himself and his circumstances has multiple aims. First and most straightforwardly, he wants the Philippians to see him in a particular way. Second, and more importantly for the long-term health of the Philippian congregation, Paul displays the perceptual habits, skills, and ways of life that allow him to fit himself into the ongoing drama of God’s salvation. These are the habits, skills, and ways of life he desires to see formed in the Philippians. Indeed, this is in large part what he means in 2:5 when he urges the Philippians to adopt the particular pattern of practical reasoning appropriate to those in Christ.  It is not simply the case that Christ has altered Paul’s perceptions about his past achievements.  Rather, Paul is narrating himself into the story of salvation that begins, climaxes, and will end with Christ.
- Stephen Fowl

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

For the last part that we are going to do this morning.  Paul has helped us see how his perspective has shifted and now he says that he wants to know Christ and then tacks on this statement about suffering and becoming like him in his death and resurrection.  This is really what the Christian life is all about.  Participating with Christ in his death.  Paul has been able to shift his perspective so well, that all his suffering and eventual death still fit into the unfolding story that God is up to.  Should we be able to develop similar abilities for doing the same thing with our lives, we too will have the resources for making the suffering that comes our way as the result of our commitments to Christ make sense.

To perceive this, however, the Philippians and we will need to become practiced at reading the drama of salvation properly. They also need to act in specific ways, as outlined before in Philippians.  Thus, a proper reading of the economy of salvation will enable them to situate themselves within that drama in the appropriate ways so that they will live, and continue to live, as “friends” of the cross…Paul’s attention and affections are redirected so that he comes to understand God and God’s ways with the world in profoundly different ways.
- Stephen Fowl

I want to end with this letter.  There is a few guys that looked to find the place in the world that was most desperately in need of God’s love.  They decided that the porn industry was that place.  So they packed up their lives and their families, wives and kids, and moved to the hub of the porn industry and started a church.  It is called XXX Church.  Rob Bell read this letter and I just couldn’t help but share it with you as well.  This letter was written by the organizer of the big gay sex expo that happens every year.  The XXX Church guys go and setup a booth with big signs that say Jesus Loves Porn Stars with an agenda to spread the love of Jesus and God’s story to those that they think haven’t heard it enough or have never heard it.

Your crew was incredibly friendly and welcoming and willing to speak with anyone and everyone. We even gave them stage time in a prime slot to promote your message. Your exposure was at it’s peak with attendees at that time because it was our fashion show time slot. All eyes were on them and I said to your guy, (I can’t remember his name sorry) that I will give them stage time as long as he doesn’t get up and say “God hates gays” or anything. And he quickly assured me that you guys were not there with a message of saving our lost condemned souls, but rather to spread God’s love. That stuck with me because religious organizations preach that only God is the true judge, yet have no problem protesting a funeral of a murdered hate crime victim for being gay. I’d say that is the ultimate form of judgement upon another human being.
Your message that he loves everyone and the fact that your determination to spread that word even in what i’m sure was the craziest and weirdest event and location your crew has witnessed shows me that you guys are doing a great and selfless thing. We would love to have you guys back next year! Please keep doing what you are doing.

I read you this letter because I think that it’s a perfect example of what it looks like to live out intentionally what Paul is talking about here.  The pornography culture while may completely offend us is no match for the love of Christ, so much so that these two family men have set up camp in the middle of their culture with God’s message of salvation, for even them….for even us.  They aren’t knit picking at every single thing that morally offends them, and they aren’t even trying to change their culture.  They are just sharing God’s story in the midst of it.

This is the kind of perspective that Paul sets up for us in this letter.  All the things that we think God cares about, like not swearing, going to church, tithing 10%, and all of our cultural traditions that we have all mean nothing to our salvation.  They mean nothing to the story of God.  All the bad things that happen are nothing when it comes to the good news of what God is doing in the world.  All the good things you have done, I’ll the perfect 10’s you’ve achieved in your good Christian life are nothing more than a pile of shit compared to being found in Christ.  Now that we have some context, let’s read the Message Version to help it sink in a bit deeper, and then we’ll pray.

And that’s about it, friends. Be glad in God! I don’t mind repeating what I have written in earlier letters, and I hope you don’t mind hearing it again. Better safe than sorry—so here goes.
Steer clear of the barking dogs, those religious busybodies, all bark and no bite. All they’re interested in is appearances—knife-happy circumcisers, I call them. The real believers are the ones the Spirit of God leads to work away at this ministry, filling the air with Christ’s praise as we do it. We couldn’t carry this off by our own efforts, and we know it—even though we can list what many might think are impressive credentials. You know my pedigree: a legitimate birth, circumcised on the eighth day; an Israelite from the elite tribe of Benjamin; a strict and devout adherent to God’s law; a fiery defender of the purity of my religion, even to the point of persecuting the church; a meticulous observer of everything set down in God’s law Book.
The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash—along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ. Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant—dog dung. I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by him. I didn’t want some petty, inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ—God’s righteousness.
I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering, and go all the way with him to death itself. If there was any way to get in on the resurrection from the dead, I wanted to do it.

May we have perspective
And count our accomplishments not

May we understand your story
And count our failures not

May we see your unfolding plan
And be found firmly within it

May we participate in your redemption
And be redeemed ourselves

May we rejoice
And keep on rejoicing

May we embrace you
As you embrace us

May we give up everything
And suffer and die with you

Amen.

All right, so here we go again, and its Christmas.  Joe last week talked about the announcement of Christ and what it means for an announcement to come like it did in its form and shape to that kind of audience and what that means for us today.  This announcement was made to be timeless in abandon places and to abandoned people.  This announcement was God’s way of displaying the fact that he has not abandoned the world and it beckons us to RSVP.  This is what this week is about.  What does an RSVP look like to the greatest announcement of all time?

This is a different kind of RSVP, it’s not just a form you fill out to let him know your coming.  Generally maybe we have thought to RSVP to God’s birth announcement of Christ it was just a decision card that we filled out when we were a kid to follow Christ?  Or maybe the RSVP is making sure that you show up at church every Sunday?  Maybe it’s just re-dedicating your life verbally and confessing with your mouth?  God makes an announcement, he is sending his son in the form of a vulnerable baby child and that child is going to be the hope of the nations.  He is going to inaugurate a new way of living, a new kingdom that has different values, and he wants to invite everyone.  So we are left with the announcement of what is going to happen.  Two thousand years later we are still left with the invitation, but we’ve reduced the RSVP to a prayer that we say that we think gets us into heaven.  Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that.  It’s been two thousand years for starters, and Jesus has come and gone, and there is really no sign of this promise and announcement coming to complete fulfillment.  We’ve been waiting and waiting, and in the meantime we’ve done a lot of stupid things.  The church however has setup this time in our calendar to celebrate the birth of Jesus.  It’s not just one day that we celebrate, its an entire month leading up to the birth of Jesus.

“… the [liturgical] year opens with Advent, the season that teaches us to wait for what is beyond the obvious. It trains us to see what is behind the apparent. Advent makes us look for God in all those places we have, until now, ignored.”
- Joan Chittister

The church has set us up to experience symbolically the wait that we are all waiting for, for Christ’s second coming and the final restoration of all things.   Advent means waiting, so its kind of easy to talk about waiting and what waiting looks like and how we should wait, which we will get to.  How though is only part of what is happening.  The other half is asking the question, which we will do first, why are we waiting or what are we waiting for?

Q: What are we waiting for?  Why are we waiting?

The way we answer these questions drastically shapes the way that we live and how we act day to day.  Let’s say, like for a majority of my teenage years, we were waiting for the rapture to happen.  So we were waiting for the day that God takes away all the Christians to heaven and let’s the earth fall apart and disintegrate and destroy itself while we sit safely in heaven with Jesus.  If this is our ultimate hope, then that ends up meaning a lot for how we live our life now.  We don’t really care about anything presently, do we?  We don’t care if the earth is ravaged because it’s going to anyway, we don’t care about helping those in need because God is going to do it later anyway.  We just don’t care about violence, because the world is ending in violence when God destroys everything with his wrath on all those bad people.  So if we are waiting for God to come, take away all the Christians and destroy the earth with fire, then we are going to live in a way that supports all those assumptions.  The way we wait will be dictated by the violence, exclusivity and wrath of God.   So its important that we know what we are waiting for.

So what is advent and what is all this waiting about?  Advent for me for a long time has been the waiting for Christ’s return and setting all things to right.  It’s trusting in his promise that he is going to do what he said.  It is receiving the grace to know that I cannot save the world but I can participate with God in his salvation of all things.  After talking with Chris this week, I think my understanding of Advent is growing.  I see advent as more of a solidarity with the church over the last two thousands years in living in the tension of the kingdom being now and not yet.  We live knowing that the kingdom is alive here and now.  We know its spreading.  We see it integrated with everything.  We desperately try to live as part of this kingdom because it helps us feel human and helps us be who we were created to be.  This kingdom came when Jesus was born, when the announcement was made.  In the same breath though, we live in this awkward tension of the kingdom still not being fully realized.  We still see hate and violence everywhere.  We still see such obvious examples that the world is not right.  So there is tension there.  The world is supposed to be one way, but it isn’t.  The way the world should be is out there and its making ground, but so is the way the world shouldn’t be.  We live in the uneasy tension of the kingdom being fully present and nowhere to be found.  So we wait.  We wait for the kingdom to be fully realized, we wait for the kingdom to be fully here.

We wait.  We learn what it looks like to wait.  We learn to wait.  Here is what Jesus says about waiting…

Luke 12:35-48
“Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like servants waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the middle of the night or toward daybreak. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
Peter asked, “Lord, are you telling this parable to us, or to everyone?”
The Lord answered, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns. Truly I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose the servant says to himself, ‘My master is taking a long time in coming,’ and he then begins to beat the other servants, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk. The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers.

The story of Jesus, and the announcement of Jesus demands an RSVP.  It’s an invite and its still calling us to answer.  Many of us have mistaken the RSVP as some passive thing you do once and say yes I am in.  Jesus had something else in mind though.  Jesus compares the RSVP process to servants waiting for their master to come home.  Jesus takes waiting seriously. These servants respond by their waiting and waiting seems to be synonymous with watching and preparing for the arrival.  Waiting in this case, with Jesus, is not some passive understanding that something is going to happen one day.  This is an aggressive waiting that takes over our entire life, preparing ourselves and preparing our environment for the coming of our Master.  Let me give you some perspective on what this waiting looks like.

My friend, who most of you know, Charity, ever since I have known her has been wanting a family.  She finally married the man of her dreams and got pregnant soon after.  So now she has nine months and she finally gets what she has been waiting for.  Charity was the most active waiter I have ever seen in my life.  The day she found out she was pregnant she was at the midwives office booking appointments.  She was taking prenatal yoga three times a week.  She was reading books. She was making decisions and planning how things were going to happen on the day of her birth and for the future once her life would change.  Her entire life for nine months revolved around her waiting.  She was the most active person I knew at the time, and oddly enough, it was all because she was waiting.  Her idea of waiting had nothing to do with a one time decision to have a baby, it had nothing to do with deciding she actually wanted the baby.  Her idea was waiting was full of action, preparing and getting ready for the baby.  Her idea was hoping that while she didn’t even know the gender, that the baby would be healthy and beautiful.  A lot of her plans had to do with the day of the birth, but really this was more about being prepared for how her life was going to change, priorities were going to change and life was going to be a lot different.

There is two things that happened while she waited that I think we can learn from as Christians while we wait, especially during this season of Advent.
1. Active Waiting
2. Hopeful Waiting

“Our waiting is always shaped by alertness to the Word. It is waiting in the knowledge that someone wants to address us. The question is, are we home? Are we at our address, ready to respond to the doorbell? We need to wait together, to keep each other at home spiritually, so that when the Word comes it can become flesh in us. That is why the Book of God is always in the midst of those who gather. We read the Word so that the Word can become flesh and have a whole new life in us.”
- Henri Nouwen

Are we ready?  Is our house ready?  What are we doing?  The scriptures are full of this language of waiting, and it doesn’t mean to just sit around and impatiently wait for something.   This isn’t just about being aware, this is about ordering our lives so its consistent with what is coming and what is real.  This is why we spend so much time explaining and helping you imagine what the kingdom looks like.  We are to be actively participating and bringing this kingdom to earth while we wait.  If we don’t know what it looks like, then we will think waiting just means going somewhere on a Sunday and doing the good religious thing until something like the rapture happens.  Our waiting now has become a waiting of something to happen so we can get out of here.  It’s an escapist theology of rapture or of leaving this earth.  When that happens we end up being devoid of responsibility or action while we sit around and “wait” for something to happen.

Waiting this way is about waiting as a community.  Creating the right environment for our waiting to manifest itself into active participation.

The second type of waiting that this is is hopeful waiting.  This isn’t wishful waiting.  Wishes are when you wait for something specific and then when you don’t get it you get depressed.  Wishful waiting is like trying to control the future.  Rather, the kind of waiting doing is a hopeful waiting.  Hopeful waiting is open-ended and its left in the control of the one who made the promise.  Hopeful waiting is not concrete.  Its why we have such a hard time waiting.  We tie our waiting in with our wishes for how things should happen, rather than tying it into the promises that tell what will happen.  Hope is always open ended.
Wishful waiting is about getting your way and what you can get out of it.  Hopeful waiting is allowing your life to be shaped by promises that are soon to be fulfilled.  Wishful waiting gets you real impatient real fast because you are getting what you expect.  Hopeful waiting is patiently living as if it already happened because one day, it will happen.

“Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.”
- Simon Weil

Q: How do we actively wait for Christ now?

We are waiting with a hopeful expectation.  Yet, there is something unique about hopeful waiting rather than wishful waiting.  Many times when we wait in hopeful expectation, we are handed what we did not expect.  We expect Christ to come, and we expect God to move, but he often does this in very unexpected ways.  They expected a messiah, and a ruler, and a king, and they got one but he came as a baby and then got crucified.  Opening ourselves up to this type of unexpected delight is the kind of waiting that we are engaged in.  When a pregnant women waits in expectation for her birth, she starts to grow outwardly large.  Her body starts to change and prepare itself, while the promise inside of her starts to press up against her belly push up against it revealing its anticipation to the world.  It’s this something new that we are waiting for.  In the same kind of expectation.

We wait alongside of Israel, we wait alongside of the Prophets, and we wait alongside of the church as we wait for God to do something new in us and bring about fully his new creation all the while living out these values now.  Advent is about forcing our individual selfish schedules into the larger schedule of God’s plan.  It forces us to acknowledge what we are actually waiting and longing for.  The same longing we have for things to be set right is the same longing that Israel had for Jesus to show up.  It came unexpectedly, it came as a baby, but it came.  Now we wait again, longing for the second coming.  For the kingdom to come fully.

Blessed is the slave whom his master will find working when he arrives.  Let’s not be idle.  Let’s be active.  Already about the masters work.  Constantly advancing the his kingdom while we wait for him to make the final move.  Let us be a pregnant community just bursting forth preparing every possible way for promise to be fulfilled.  We aren’t preparing because the promise won’t happen if we don’t.  We are preparing because we want to be prepared. We prepare for the same reasons a mother prepares to have her child.   We want to be ready.  we want to fully experience everything there is about it.   We don’t want to be asleep.  While we wait let us be sensitive to the signs and the movements of the promise.  Jesus’ followers had to change and be shaped by the promise because no one was ever expecting the promise to come as a baby to a random women in a manger with a bunch of animals around and then who eventually gets crucified on the cross.  They were attentive to the movements and what was happening around them so they could change their understanding to see where God was moving and what he was doing.   Their waiting consisted of them listening and being aware of how they should live.

The same message is found amongst John the Baptist and Jesus in waiting for their Messiah.  “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.”  This is how we wait.  We repent.  This isn’t a call for all those who have said some prayer of repentance to tell everyone else who hasn’t to say they are sorry for all they’ve done wrong.  Its a call to join in with the church in waiting for Christ to make all things new.  It’s a call to radically shift the focus of life and start living as if you were already a new creation.  This isn’t just a guilt thing.  It’s not even a thing we say.  Repentance is a way of waiting actively with our lives and turning into a direction that fulfills the kingdom that is spoken of.  Repentance happens when communities of people take what was once a negative, hateful and death-dealing way to live and turn it around so they are positive, loving and life-giving.  When Jesus says repent, he is saying that our entire lives should match up to this kingdom that is here and now.  Everything, every single part of it.  Waiting is about living a life in line with the kingdom, otherwise known as a repentant life.

So while we live in this tension of restoration being now and not yet, we live as if it is already now, while we wait for it to be fully realized.  We live in hope not wishful thinking, that Christ will come back and make all things right.  In the meantime, we wait and live as if it was already right.  I realize that is a contradiction if you analyze this too deeply, but this is the tension and paradox that we are called into as Christians.  We wait, but live as if it’s already happened.

“Advent asks us to deal with the basics of our relationship to God through Jesus Christ.  Do I really believe in Christ?  Have I put my hope and trust in Him?  Do I see the future through the eyes of the one who came to redeem the world from the power of evil?  Is there a longing within me for him to be formed within, to take up residence in my personal life, in my home, and in my vocation?  These are not easy questions to answer.  They require meditation, intention, and above all, a commitment that remains steadfast.  But if we would break away from a spiritual life growing cold and a Christ who is becoming distant, we must be attentive to our spiritual discipline and long for God to break in on us with new life.  When we do this, we experience the true meaning of Advent Spirituality.”
- Robert Webber

God, Let us wait well
While we wait, we will restore with you
While we wait, we will redeem with you
While we wait, we are transformed by you

Jesus, Let us wait well
While we wait, we hope for your presence
While we wait, we pray for peace in tension
While we wait, we hope for change around and in us

God, Let us wait well
While we wait, let us remember your promise
While we wait, let us remember those who have waited before
While we wait, let us remember you wait with us

Jesus, Let us wait well
While we wait, may we beat swords into plowshares
While we wait, may we love where there is hate
While we wait, may we live as if the wait is over

We have now spent a month and a half inside of Colossians and we’ve pretty much been going in the same direction all along. Paul was writing to a church in Colossi and helping them see the lies of the empire and see the truths of the kingdom. Paul is writing a letter to a church who is struggling between the demands of the empire and the demands of Christ. Where the empire has robbed its people of being able to dream and makes all the decisions for them. Where the empire has decided the future of its people and controls and manipulates almost all outcomes, how ought the church be present? Where the empire keeps pushing for more and telling us that we can have anything at any moment, how does the church learn to live and say that it has enough?

The argument Paul has been formulating thus far has been very broad thus far. He’s been tackling major issues and hasn’t really narrowed anything down. This week, in the second half of chapter 3, Paul gets extremely specific. There is some weird stuff going on though. Most people will read the next verses completely out of context of the rest of the letter and just go on and make a bunch of moral assumptions about what Paul is doing here. Instead though, what I want to do, is try to follow Paul’s train of thought and why he would jump what he did. First though, let’s read our section for today.

Colossians 3:18-4:1
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.
Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism.
Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

I’ve seen this verse used (along with a similar verse in Ephesians 5) multiple times to try and argue why women need to submit to their husbands and do what they say. More recently there has been a resurgence of well-known speakers who continue to belabour the point of gendered roles in marriage to the point where one speaker said that a stay at home dad was “worse than an unbeliever.” It really gets ridiculous after a while if we start to look at the Bible as a moral code book where we can just take any individual verse that we find and tack on all of our assumptions about what it must mean. Then verses start to be used as proof texts for arguments that have no consistency with what God’s story is even remotely about and become more about proving what we think it says, and we only think it says that because we’ve been told that’s what it means or we’ve bailed on the responsibility to actually understand what we are reading.

However, let’s give ourselves some background before we can understand why Paul would say something like this. The Christian story is a remarkable story of God using the most unlikely characters to bring about salvation to the entire world. Through thousands of years of culture where women we’re barely seen as human, slaves were treated as animals and depending on your class would determine your rites the story we find in the Bible was written. The difference being, the Bible is drastically different. In all other material in the time that is covered through the scriptures from my understanding we have nothing that even comes close to the story of Israel and Jesus. The Hebrew Scriptures, which were written during these times, are the most tolerant, life-giving and radical words to be written, putting time in perspective. Remember, slaves were like animals in this culture, they literally served no other purpose in life than to work for the demands of their masters. So killing them was no bigger of a deal than killing a chicken for dinner. They were pawns of whatever their master could come up with.

Then the Torah comes into play with all sorts of rules and regulations helping curb some of the ridiculous laws that were in place, they are at least worth mentioning. Now, I do know that anywhere and everywhere, even in religious writings, slaves were regarded as absolutely worthless, except by the Hebrews. But I’m not going to lie to you, I really don’t know what to do with some of these laws. There are laws in there for slaves that state that you can rape a women, but not if she’s engaged. Or if you beat your slave, you will only be punished if the slave dies. These are not exactly highlights. So I admit, there is way more going on here that need to be dealt with on a theological level that we can’t really jump into today. However, the more amazing part is how the scriptures include these nobodies into their stories. The Bible though does something that stories don’t usually do. It takes a slave, someone who is not considered anything worthwhile, someone who even the Hebrew Scriptures don’t give a lot of hope for, and then all of sudden puts her in the lineage of Jesus. Remember Ruth? She was just a lonely slave girl, someone who was at risk of being treated poorly who was vulnerable to whatever her master wanted. Then her Master died so she’s at risk of getting tossed around from master to master. She’s a puppet to other people. She has no humanity. Then, by a miracle, someone takes pity on her, marries her, cares of her and gives her a child and her child has a child and that child has a child and their name is David. King David. Ruth, an animal, a nobody, becomes a direct descendant to Jesus.

I don’t know about you, but if I was writing this story, I’d probably skip that part. Besides you don’t put the woman’s name in the genealogy at all anyway. She should have been cut out from the get go, not had an entire story written about her. Speaking of women, don’t even get me started about how women were treated in these times. They were impure, men had to clean themselves when they were with them. They were subject to the wishes of their husbands or their fathers. Again, the Hebrew Scriptures are better, but compared to the standards we would expect today, they are still appalling. But the story of Jesus incorporates women too. Remember Rahab? She’s a prostitute. Yup, she’s in the lineage as well. It also incorporates children in a way that even his own disciples couldn’t understand. At no point are we able to come up with any argument that makes slaves, or women, or children inferior to anyone else. In God’s story, everyone, of any class or gender, any sinful background. They are all included.

God’s story incorporates those that are rejected by society and culture. It’s slow, and its extremely indirect. But God’s story is for them and has not forgot about them in any kind of way. The culture that Paul is writing in though, the Roman empire, has forgotten. They had their own way of doing things. There was a hierarchical order of how relationships worked.

Man -> Wife
Master -> Slave
Parent -> Children

This is just how it is. These hierarchies denoted rites, and submission. The husbands will rules. The master’s will prevails. This is how society interacted, this is how the world worked. You didn’t ask questions, you kept quiet and let them men do the talking.

This however poses a problem to these new found Christian communities. As Paul has been saying all along in Colossians, the church is to be caught up in modelling alternative ways of being in the empire, and this most certainly includes relationships. The church models new creation and new creation is completely different then the way of the empire. Paul since the beginning of this letter has been rooted in an argument that puts Christ central. Just a few verses before Paul says

Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

In his letter to Galatians he take this a bit further

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Paul is unapologetic. He claims over and over again, the kingdom of God works different. It wrecks havoc on the regular way of doing relationships. Enough of this hierarchy based strictly on human categories. How about this, we are human and we are in Christ and that is it. The rest of these hierarchical structures, leave it to the empire, they are empty and will only lead to more destruction as they are not in Christ.

“This is not a narrative that imposes a series of absolutes to oppress us; it is a story of liberation from an empire that would take captive our imagination while it rapes and plunders the earth….this is a story of restored relationships, a love story that calls forth an alternative community characterized by compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, love, peace, gratitude and wisdom.”
- Walsh and Keesmaat

Up until this point in the letter, according to the Kingdom, according to Jesus there is no difference between man and wife, Jew or Greek, Slave or Master…all are free and all are one in Christ. All. So when we get to the second half of Colossians, Paul isn’t just throwing out everything he said before. He isn’t re-instituting a hierarchy of unhealthy relationships and contradicting all this one in Christ talk. So let’s throw out that idea right off the get go. There is still no male or female, no slave or master. Paul is an egalitarian. All are equal. There is no law that states that because of some class or gender that you were born into it somehow changes your inherent value as a human. So with all this in mind, let’s revisit our passage for today.

Colossians 3:18-4:1
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.
Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism.
Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

What has happened, as I mentioned before is with verses like this and the verse about the male being the priest of the home we very quickly can come up with an argument for male kingship. So what ends up happening is we end up getting into arguments about authority and control, and then eventually we start making broad statements like “well I’m the man, and this is the way it is.” As soon as a label is presented…we have a problem. There is nothing to form a belief like that rather than imparting that into the scriptures and not understanding the context of what Paul is doing whatsoever. This verse was never meant to give anyone power over anyone else. In fact, it’s meant to do the opposite, its meant to encourage each person to give power to the other. The way a relationships should work.

There is a few things we need to realize about what Paul is doing here. The first line that should pop out to us is “as is fitting to the Lord.” We know now what is fitting to the Lord. That line should debunk all ideas of control and forceful power by itself. We know that giving up power and not taking it is always fitting to the Lord. What is fitting is that men and women are created equal and their relationships are a reflection of Christ’s love for the church. We know that power, oppression and control in relationships is not the God given direction. We know that God has redeemed relationships through Christ and that the church is to model this new way of living in these relationships. So with this in mind, wives submit to your husbands, and husbands love your wives. This is what we call a parallel passage. They are saying the same things. Paul is not giving men power and telling the women to do whatever he says. This isn’t saying that the husbands will is the prevailing will. This is just reinstating how relationships work. Love and submit, that’s how it goes. We are to be a community of people whose relationships are marked by love and submission.

As soon as you try and separate the two verses and use them to empower one side over the other side we’ve completely missed what Paul is doing and what God has been doing and leading up to all throughout the scriptures. This new way of doing relationships though doesn’t stop with the husband and wives, it flows down into how children and parents interact. There is another parallel verse happening here. Since the beginning, parents were the bosses, they tell their kids to do something and they do it. Children we’re seen as lesser beings, just waiting to grow up and be meaningful contributors to society and actually become fully human. But then it looks like Paul is saying that even these relationships are being subverted. No longer is one the boss over another, but it looks like there is a mutual submission going on here. There is actually a relationship that is happening that both sides need to be mindful of as opposed to one person just telling the other what to do.

Paul’s on a role now and he just keeps going. Masters and slaves, two more parallel verses. Masters be fair, servants kick so much butt. Paul is not just advocating for people to get along, he’s advocating for people who were once in oppressive, authoritative relationships to actually think about the other when they make a decision. Can you imagine?

We recognize why this divisive system is in place in the empire. Why does it not work in the Kingdom of God?  In this train of thought, what other questions come to your mind?

We are not a community who simply has stricter rules about how certain people should act with certain people. Rather, we should be a community that puts all people on the same page in all cases. There is no hierarchy, there is no control, there is no power. The bottom gives power through submission rather than the top taking it through control. We find all of those things in Christ, so we refuse to let them seep through into our relationships. So in a world where the homeless and disabled are not listened to and our patted on the back, we subvert that by having relationships with them and listening to them. In a world where the guy at the pulpit tells you how you should behave and what you should do with your money, we have a community where the guy at the front has a relationship with you and struggles alongside of you to make sense of the scriptures.

This passage is not creating rules for how marriages and parents should setup their power structures. This passage is saying that those patterns of hierarchy don’t work in the kingdom, so no matter what “title” you have in the world (male, female, slave, master, parent, child) that doesn’t automatically make you powerful, respected or worth being submitted to. Rather, the kingdom, this church, works completely different, we refuse to see labels and rather see people. We aren’t going to play power games, and we certainly are not going to acknowledge the labels of power that already exist.

Just because you have more money, and can tithe more, does not mean that you will have any extra say or pull. Just because you are a parent of thirteen kids doesn’t mean that the single who walks in the door doesn’t get a say. Just because you’ve grown up middle class and you follow certain social standards about how to conduct yourself, doesn’t mean that someone from an impoverished class will be looked down upon. Just because you’re an adult, will not make your will play out before our kids. Just because I’m a pastor, doesn’t mean I have the corner on the Bible or God.

Instead, we are in a relationship with humans, no matter what status symbol they have. All this talk about empire and how its all around us and trying to figure out how to interact with it and subvert it. Paul gives us a heads up. He says it starts in the home. It starts in your marriages. It starts with your employer. It starts in your relationships.

However, we can’t just stop there anymore. Because we live in a global economy. We are connected to people we have never met. And Paul talks about slaves. So yes, none of us have a slave that lives in our house, well most of us don’t. So we would think a lot of what Paul is saying here doesn’t apply to us at all. However, let us not forget that there is over 32 million slaves in the world today. Listen to the working conditions in factories around the world.

“Regardless of where these factories are located, the workers’ stories have a certain mesmerizing samness: the workday is long–fourteen hours in Sri Lanka, twelve hours in Indonesia, sixteen in Southern China, twelve in the Philippines. The vast majority of the workers are women, always young, always working for subcontractors from Korea, Taiwan, or Hong Kong. The contractors are usually filling orders for companies based in the U.S., Britain, Japan, Germany or Canada. The management is military style, the supervisors often abusive, the wages below subsistence, the work low skill and tedious. “
Naomi Klein

All of us are part of this slavery. Just think about any product you’ve bought in the last little while, especially coffee, tea, t-shirts, electronics, chocolate, vegetables, fruit and meat. If you purchased it from a larger store, odds are that it came from a slave trader. The corporations themselves that offer us these products admit that the moves to these countries where there are no labour or environmental laws is to increase their profit and stay competitive. We are involved. We are responsible. And unfortunately there is nothing innocent at all about this kind of slavery even though we try to justify our way out of it. Every time we step into a store and buy their products that come from these slave houses, and we are excited about the price or how great it looks, we’ve then joined the cycle and have made these sweatshop workers our slaves. Every time we buy coffee, or tea or chocolate that isn’t fairly traded, we’ve made those workers are slaves.

For the kids first, then adults:  With Christmas on its way, why will we still buy (and want) products that we know are made by slaves?

Brian Walsh, in his book about Colossians helps us understand how the position we find ourselves in is exactly where the empire wants us. It’s this language of helplessness, and inevitability that should make us aware that our imaginations have been captivated by the empire. Remember we talked about this a few weeks ago, and how the empire looks to crush and imagine for us, and then the only things and life we can imagine, the only problems we can solve are through spending more money. Our imaginations have been captivated by the empire. Because the truth is, we have many, many choices. We just don’t want to do the work, or spend the money to use them. There is fair trade, and there is products made in co-ops all over the world. The very least you could do is buy your clothes from a used clothing store so that your locally poor will benefit from your purchase. We could make different decisions, that are less oppressive, but we are lazy, and our imaginations and energies are drained by money and the dreams of the empire….you know like looking good, and having more things.

It is overwhelming. It is overwhelming to treat our slaves right and fair, because we don’t know them. But this is why we’ve spent the last two months talking about how this place needs to be different. The church needs to act as an alternative community who can imagine and dream together about what living differently means. Imagine if we had our kids in the other room imagining ways that we can learn to function that doesn’t oppress people?

We talked about this a few weeks ago, but when children start getting targeted as consumers, to buy more of these products that are made in slaveshops, then no wonder Paul is concerned with the relationships between parents and children. When parents spend on average 4 minutes a week talking to their children and children 1350 minutes a week in front of a television, well obviously there is something wrong going on, and this community needs to face into that and start offering alternatives. Handing over our children to the captivity of media, food, television, the education system of the empire provokes them to become dutiful citizens, obedient consumers of the empire who have no imaginations left and certainly do not learn how to resist. Have we handed our kids over to the empire’s wishes for them? We have slaves. We’ve handed our kids over to the wishes of the empire. Our marriages are falling apart as each spouse tries to get what they deserve.

It is all connected. This all works together, and we as the church must work together to create a community that is actively creating alternatives so that our kids thrive and have imaginations and have real relationships with people. Our kids will learn, like Paul, to treat the distinction between slave and the free person as irrelevant in this new community, in the new creation. They know they wouldn’t have a slave now that they treated poorly and they will question and they will dream up new alternatives so that we don’t have slaves over seas either. We can’t just hand them over to dream the same dreams of the empire, to have more and nicer things. Slaves won’t make sense because they are no different than ourselves.

So this is heavy passage by Paul, because it demands that we no longer see separation by labels for anyone. The person in the sweatshop making your latest fashionable sweatshirt is no different than your brother or sister. The husband is no different than the wife. The kid is no different than the parent. We are all in this together, all one in Christ, all have value in Christ. When we actually believe that and start living that practically, everything has to change. Everything you do will go through that filter. Everything you buy you will have to be mindful that you aren’t oppressing someone. Everything you say will be in love toward people and not hate or bitterness or ignorance.

So may be this kind of community. I wrote this prayer, that I hope we can read together.

May we be the kind of community where
Wives love their husbands and
Husbands love their wives
and where
Husbands and Wives mutually sacrifice and submit to one another

May we be the kind of community where
Parents listen to their children
Children obey their parents
and where
Children and Parents seek understanding and not manipulation or control

May we be the kind of community where
Others become important to us
Our Lives don’t oppress any other
and where
We seek justice and peace rather than excess and luxury

May we be the kind of community where
Children are given opportunity to dream
Children are given freedom to be different
and where
We create environments for selflessness instead of selfishness

May we be the kind of community where
Those we don’t understand are welcomed
Those we don’t see are sought
and where
We consciously create an alternatives where there seems to be none

Amen.

Above is my presentation, and below is the transcript from my message this week.

Last week Joe convinced us that our culture is much like that of Rome’s. The first part of chapter one in Colossians helped us evaluate what was going on and set us up to see how Paul was facing directly into the systems of life in Rome in his letter. Their story was one of a so-called peace that came because of the good news of the gospel of Caesar. Caesar brought forgiveness of sins, he was the controller of destiny, he was the “son of God.” Rome spoke a language of hierarchy where Roman citizens were elevated and treated better. It was a system of getting and not giving, it was a system of climbing ladders and constantly trying to be at the top. Everything depending on Caesar and Rome. This is where your happiness came from.

Images of the emperor were as ubiquitous in the first century as corporate logos are in the twenty-first century. The image of Caesar and other symbols of Roman power were literally everywhere – in the market, on coins, in the gymnasium, at the gladiatorial games, on jewelry, goblets, lamps and paintings. The sovereign rule of Caesar was simply assumed to be the divine plan for the peace and order of the cosmos. Of course this is the way the world works. Under such conditions it becomes hard to imagine any life alternative to the empire.
- Walsh and Keesmat

Rome is now. The culture that permeated Rome and these distorted ideas of justice and peace has also permeated the culture that we live in. If you don’t believe me, or if you need to be reminded, let’s just go through some facts about today.

• 1.2 billion people live on 23 cents a day
• The wealthiest 1 billion people in the world have an average income of approx. $70 a day- 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day, 1-2 billion people live on less than $2 a day
• The 3 wealthiest people in the world are American. Their combined wealth exceeds the GNP of all the world’s least developed countries (over 600 million people).
• 12% of the world’s population uses 85% of its water
• 40% of the world lacks basic sanitation facilitation
• 1 billion people are without safe drinking water, Americans consume 26 billion liters of Bottle water annually
• Every 16 seconds somewhere in the world someone dies of hunger, 2 out of every 3 Americans are considered overweight
• Americans spend more annually on trash bags than nearly half the world does on ALL goods.
• 2 billion people in the world have no electricity
• 1 billion people in the world cannot sign their name
• 1% of the people in the world own a computer
• 1% of people in the world have a college education
• An estimated 22 million people died from preventable disease in 2001, 10 million were children
• 4 out of 5 American adults are high school graduates: 1 out of 4 children worldwide have to go to work every day instead of school
• U.S. hold 42.8% of weapons worldwide, in 2002 the U.S. spent more on defense than the next 19 biggest spenders combined

Consumerism, purchasing, buying, money is where we find out peace.

“The fact that consumerism has become the dominant world faith is largely invisible to us….The image of the ideal human is…deeply set in our minds by the unending preachments of the ad. The ideal is not Jesus or Socrates..In the propaganda of the ad of the idea people, the fully human humans, are relaxed and carefree-drinking Pepsi around a pool-uncumbered by powerful ideas concerning the nature of goodness, undisturbed by visions of suffering that could be alleviated if humans were committed to justice…In the religion of the ad the task of civilization is much simpler. The ultimate meaning for human existence is getting all this stuff. That’s paradise. And the meaning of the Earth? Premanufactured consumer stuff.”
- Brian Swimme

These are just a few of the disgusting statistics that plagues our world right now. I could go on for hours about how messed up of a world that we live in. Everything is so unequally distributed and wealth is created on the backs of the poor. But here is the kicker. The problems exist and really no one is denying that. Christians or not, I think we all know that this is super messed. The problem though that we are addressing this morning isn’t that all these problems exist, it is where we put our hope to address these problems. We have chosen to either ignore them or think that something else will solve them.

Light a $20 bill on fire and let it go to flames.

Q: How do you all feel right now? What kind of thoughts are going through your head?

Here is what we are facing into. At some point, we bought into the lie that money fixes things. We all serve the God of money, our church is consumed by it. We can’t even wrap our heads around the thought of burning it. Deep down, we think that money/paper addresses these statistics. The first thought that ran through my head when I burnt that $20 is that I should just give it to Mike when he walks in here. At some point we allowed Money to rule our imagination and pretend that it had all the answers. The only thing we can think of to bring justice to all thes problems is to spend more money. It is the language of our empire. It tears us up inside to see it be mistreated. In Mark, Jesus found himself in a similar circumstance.

Mark 14:3-9

While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages[a] and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

Jesus mocked the idea of wasting money as a negative thing as if it was some important god that must be treated properly. This isn’t a message about shirking responsibility. This is about defining and realizing how much money has infected our imagination. The answer to the problems in the world is not money. This piece of paper that I just burned, when given a place of authority in our lives, only perpetuates a system and leaves people powerless and oppressed so we can be powerful and wealthy. Money has completely captured our imagination so we can’t imagine a life without it. Money has completely captured our hearts because we can’t stand to see it destroyed and we actually think it provides the answers. We think money grants us security, happiness, value and forgiveness. I’m not even trying to say money has no use and we should get rid of it all. I am just pointing out our sheer love and dependency on money to solve everything.

So we know that our culture is like this, but unfortunately, we in this room, in our churches are the same. We are saturated by money, power, fame and security. We think our security comes from the economic system, and forgiveness doesn’t happen, instead we ignore it. Our lives are filled with consumerism, materialism, greed and a false salvation. We’ve bought into the lies of the empire. We look no different. We mirror the systems of our culture. As Wendell Berry puts it:

“The church has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. It has assumed with the economists that “economic forces” automatically work for good and has assumed with the industrialists and militarists that technology determines history. It has assumed with almost everybody that “progress” is good, that it is good to be modern and up with the times. It has admired Caesar and comforted him in his depredations and defaults. But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation.”
- Wendell Berry

So now that we’ve established that we are very much in fact in a culture that believes in an empire and a systematic way of living that is about money and power. The world’s problems are our problems. We know that we in this building, in this church, in all our churches still cling to hopes of money and power offering salvation. Now we can better understand what Paul was up to. Paul found himself in a similar world with similar images, similar dreams and pursuits. He saw the church in Colossae at risk of listening and living the dreams of the empire a life completely separate than what Jesus had in mind. Instead of allowing them to fall into the trap of which Wendell Berry states above, he offers an alternative.

Christ is the image
of the invisible God
the firstborn of all creation
for in him were created all things
in heaven and earth
things visible and invisible
whether thrones or dominions
whether rulers or powers
all things have been created through him and for him
And he is before all things
and in him all things hold together
And he is the head
of the body, the church
He is the beginning
the firstborn from the dead
so that he might come to have first place in everything
for in him all the fullness
was pleased to dwell
and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself
all things
whether on earth or in heaven
by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Poetry. Now I’m not one that understands poetry at all. But there is something about poetry that I think I’m missing that I need to reclaim in my own life. Paul uses poetry to combat the images and messages of the empire. In a world that has it’s imaginations captured by power, wealth and progress; Paul confronts it with poetic language saying that it’s not true and rather, Jesus is the start and the finish. Everything happens because of him, everything holds together because of him. Caesar is no more. He doesn’t have a spot. This is about Jesus. It always has been and it will end that way. He wasn’t just throw in as a last minute fix to the problem of sin, but he’s been around since day one. This message in an empire that is all about Caesar is nothing less than treason.

Look at all the imagery he uses that is basically taking the names, and images of it’s time and making them all subject to Christ.

“image of God,” “firstborn,” “first place,” “equal to the beginning of all things,” “restored order,” “beginning of life and vitality,” “savior,” “put an end to war and set all things in order,” god-manifest,” “head,” “body,”

All of these words and phrases would conjure up both Hellenistic ideas of Zeus as the sovereign head of the body of the cosmos and images of Caesar as the head of the body politic of the empire. Caesar is the head of the world, the son of God, he restored order and is the beginning of true life. Paul takes these cultural conditions, exposes them, and puts them in their rightful place. He replaces Zeus, Caesar and Rome with Christ and then replaces the body, cosmos or empire with the church.

In the same way that Paul is confronting the empire with his poetry, Christians are called to confront our empire. This isn’t to just make nice words and put them together so they sound nice and rhyme, this is a language that imagines a new way to see the world; a new way which has Christ at its head. It’s a language that confronts injustice and offers an alternative way of life. Recently I heard a modern day style of poetry that did this for me. It confronted the systems of oppression and named the darkness. It was a Pauline experience for me, so we brought this poetry group to our conference a few months later and I was able to record them. So I want to play for you this spoken word piece, and see if you can pick up on the language.

This is a Christian message, it’s the message that Paul gives us in Colossians. Its a poem that imagines a new reality. This is what the church is called to be and represent. We are to model and proclaim an alternative story to that of the empire. So while hundreds of thousands of TV ads and corporate and political images flood through our lives every day, like Paul and the prophets before him, can we find the imagination to sing a different song, to promote a different image, to imagine a different reality? We must! Money does not rule us. Jesus does. Security in retirement is not what we live for. Jesus is. Luxury is not what keeps us happy, Jesus is. Our calling of the church requires that we sing different songs, that we offer different stories that mock and confront the stories and images of the empire. Our imagination has been kidnapped by the empire around us, and we need to reclaim it.

To do this we must seek the kingdom, and proclaim the true song that is all around us in creation. This is about God, not us. We are loved by God. We were created by him and all this is for him. Once we pick up on the right notes that this true song is singing than we can start to fully grasp what the lost and found parables are all about. It will be worth selling everything else to buy the land that the treasure is in, because it’s the only story now that makes sense. We will have found this story that echoes through the scriptures and through the church for ages. We will confront the stories that offer anything less. The church will rise up and sing a new song, and present new images that tell the story of Christ.

We desperately need Christians who can dream and imagine this new way of living. This is one of the reasons that we came downtown, because downtown is full of artists and we need artists to help us dream. They dream differently and they dream counter-empire.

“We will need to open ourselves up to scripture, but in particular, to the role of the artist. In the 21st century the artists will lead us. They are the ones who dream. Dreams and pragmatism are always in tension. Unless we learn how to make this tension more creative we will never be able to see the future for our region. We will always be buying it from someone else. And this is the greatest tragedy of the local church in Canada; when we sing a new song, we have bought it from someone else. When we dream a new dream, we have bought it from another church in another country. God is always doing a new work. Even in Canada. The artists help us to see it.”
Donald Goertz

We live in this world and we are unable to dream and imagine any longer. We have been accosted by the empire’s luxurious and tempting way of life with lies of money, power and fame. And it’s all bull shit. It’s empty and it’s just not true. The empire is full out opposed to a way of life with Christ at the center and it will go to any lengths to prevent us from imagining a life outside of it. I’m not talking about conspiracy theories or specific individuals that are out to get you. I’m talking about that the entire system is built on making us dependant on how the empire functions so that we cannot exist outside of it. This is how it works, just look at these stats:

• In 1983, companies spent $100 million marketing to kids. Today, they’re spending nearly $17 billion annually.
• 8- to 12-year-olds spend $30 billion of their own money each year and influence another $150 billion of their parents’ spending.
• By the time a college student has graduated, changes are that he or she will have more than $3,000 in credit card debt — and have four or more credit cards
• The average amount of time that a child spends in front of a TV is almost 1500 hours a year, where the average amount of time they will spend in school is only 900 hours a year.
• Before a child enters first grade science class, and before entering in any real way into our religious ceremonies, a child will have soaked in 30,000 advertisements.
• The time our teenagers spend absorbing ads is more than their total stay in high school.
• The number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children is less than four minutes but the number of minutes per week that the average child watches television is 1,680.
• Young people view more than 40 000 ads per year on television alone
• The average young person views more than 3000 ads per day on television (TV), on the Internet, on billboards, and in magazines.
• More than 200 school districts nationwide have signed exclusive contracts with soft drink companies.
• 4500 Pizza Hut chains and 3000 Taco Bell chains in school cafeterias aroundthe country.

Our children along with us are inundated with image after image after image after story after story of our culture and empire. It is a complete onslaught of a way of life that is separate from God and Christ. Imagine how different we would feel if we heard about a country that programmed its citizens in religion like we do with ads? It was this kind of indoctrinating of children that made us upset about how the Soviet Union raised their kids. They removed their natural feelings for God, truth and their parents and replaced them worldviews that would help continue on their oppressive dictatorship. Since however, we are all immersed in consumerism, we just ignore it. We tell ourselves that ads are harmless and just trying to get us interested in products.

It is just too horrible to think that we live in a culture that has replaced authentic spiritual development with the advertisement’s crass materialism. And yet when one compares the pitiful efforts we employ for moral development with the colossal and frenzied energies we pour into advertising, it is like comparing a high school football game with World War II. Nothing that happens in one hour on the weekend makes the slightest dent in the strategic bombing taking place day and night fifty-two weeks of the year.
- Brian Swimme

We don’t think of ads as shaping our worldviews because we don’t want to sit in front of a TV while we are relaxing on the couch and think about the philosophy behind the ad. So we just take it all in and it sets itself deeper and deeper into the way we think and act. If this takes place in an adult, how much more damage do you think is done to our children and advertisers know this, which is why the stats above are as bad as they are. We just don’t care and don’t want to know. We think that a weekly ritual of taking them to church on a Sunday and a prayer before bed is going to fix it and make our kids be Jesus lovers when they grow up, but it won’t.

To prevent this, we need to start re-imagining a new way of life, a way of life that promotes Christ and his Kingdom. A life that isn’t dependant on being fed what to think and believe but that frees us to imagine and be creative about what a world apart from this empire would look like. This is what Paul did, and yet we seem helpless to do so.

Whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life.
Albert Einstein

Imagine for a minute with me. What are some of the new ways of living and counter-cultural stories that we see?

This next quote is from a guy who just wrote an article about kids and consumerism, but really it speaks directly to us. This guy has exposed and is now asking about what kind of world we want to live in and how do we raise our children in that world.

If we come to an awareness of the way in which the materialism of the advertisement is our culture’s primary way for shaping our children, and if we find this unacceptable, we are left with the task of inventing new ways of introducing our children and our teenagers and our young adults and our middle-aged adults and our older adults to the universe. These notes on the new cosmology are grounded in our contemporary understanding of the universe and nourished by our more ancient spiritual convictions concerning its meaning. These notes then are a first step out of the religion of consumerism and into a way of life based upon the conviction that we live within a sacred universe.
- Brian Swimme

Now, just because they are counter-cultural doesn’t make them good. However, they must be counter-cultural for them to be good. We can no longer lie to ourselves and pretend that the systems of economics and politics actually have pure and good kingdom motives behind them and are working for us. They do not acknowledge Jesus at the head. The goal cannot be to try and force Jesus to the head of these systems but rather start telling an alternative tale where he is at the head. If Jesus is at the head, the our world should look radically different. The church needs to start telling stories and offering up alternative realities where Jesus is at the head.

“Jesus is the story that forms the church. This means that the church first serves the world by helping the world to know what it means to be the world. For without a “contrast model” the world has no way to know or feel the oddness of its dependence on power for survival. Because the church the world can feel the strangeness of trying to build a politics that is inherently untruthful; the world lacks the basis to demand truth from its people. Because of a community formed by the story of Christ the world can know what it means to be a society committed to the growth of individual gifts and differences. In a community that has no fear of truth, the otherness of the other can be welcomed as a gift rather than a threat.”
Stanley Hauerwas

The church offers a contrast model to the world. A different way of living. A way of living that isn’t afraid of the powerless and doesn’t need to oppress people to succeed.

Yet what was most original about the first Christians was not the peculiarity of their beliefs, even beliefs abut Jesus, but their social inventiveness in creating a community whose like had not been seen before. To say they believed in God is true but uninteresting. What is interesting is that their very understanding that the God they encountered in Jesus required the formation of a community distinct from the world, exactly because of the kind of God he was. From a Christian perspective, the atheist cannot understand the kind of God he or she does not believe in apart from understanding the kind of community necessary across time to faithfully worship such a God. The flabbiness and banality of contemporary atheism is, thus, a judgment on the church’s unwillingness to be a distinctive people.
Stanley Hauerwas

Paul’s words in Colossians are not a theological debate trying to put people in their place. It is a poem. It is a declaration of how the world really is, which will be backed up by the community of Christ putting actions into these words. As Hauerwas puts it, this is not about whether or not God exists, this is a community of people living and acting in the world as if he does exist and is already ruling. This moves us away from debates and more into declarations and action. To spread the word that God is love, you don’t need to keep pointing back to the bible, you just need to love people. The title for this month is the campaign for real humanity. This is because this is what we are doing. We are to model a humanity that is true and good and bring in as many people as possible into this way of life. This is the role and duty of the church.

‘The church is the campaign for real humanity’ – Rowan Williams

The empire around us seeks to crush imagination. It seeks to monopolize us from an early age to make us people that will keep us in their grip, further their plan and never make us question or think outside the box. The empire establishes a monopoly on our thoughts and our passions and especially our imagination. So they use forces like military, marketing, propaganda and repetition to control everyone. However, as long as people have memories of what it used to be like and have imaginations for the future then the empire cannot function. Their liberated imagination keeps them trucking along against anything that comes in their path because they know that this is not the way it should be. Israel always had these people with liberated imaginations. They were called prophets and they spoke using vivid imagery and with wild references that we can barely even comprehend now. It is these men that break the cycle of the empire. It is these imaginative dreamers who bring hope and sight of a different kind of reality.

I realize that under such onslaught and pressure that it becomes hard to imagine any life alternative to the way of the empire. However this is what Paul was doing, this is what the prophets were doing and this is what Christians are called to do while we live in a home that is not ours. It is imperative that we start modelling different ways to eat, sleep, live, be in relationships, go to school, raise our kids. Imagine what could happen when communities of people start living if Jesus was actually at the head of their lives. Imagine what would happen? Imagine! May we live lives that reflect a kingdom with Jesus at the head. May our church model a way of life that is so radical and so counter-cultural that the world looks at us and sees how empty their endless cycle really is. May we remember that this is about Christ, and always has been and as soon as it becomes about us and we can get out of this, we no longer represent his kingdom. As the onslaught of the empire is all around us, may we not look to money, or power, or fame to fix it, but may we live in the truth that only Christ can make things and set things right.

To end this morning, I’m going to have Kristine come and read a prayer that was in Colossians Remixed by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat. I think this will be a good prayer for us to leave this morning on.

In an image-saturated world,

A world of ubiquitous corporate logos

Permeating our conscience

A world of dehydrated and captive imaginations

In which we are too numbed, satiated, and co-opted

To be able to dream of a life otherwise

A world in which the empire of global economic affluence

Has achieved the monopoly of our imaginations

In this world

Christ is the image of the invisible God

In this world

Driven by images with a vengeance

Christ is the image par excellence

The image above all other images

The image that is not a façade

The image that is not trying to sell you anything

The image that refuses to co-opt you

Christ is the image of the invisible God

The image of God

A flesh-and-blood

Here-and-now

In time and history

With joys and sorrows

Image of who we are called to be

Image-bearers of this God

He is the source of a liberated imagination

A subversion of the empire

Because it all starts with Him

And it all ends with Him

Everything

All things

Whatever you can imagine

Visible and invisible

Mountains and atoms

Outer space, urban space and cyberspace

Whether it be the Pentagon or the West Wing

Disneyland, Microsoft, Cingular, Enron, or an I-Pod

Whether it be the institutional power structures

Of the state, the academy, or the market

All things have been created in Him and through Him

He is their source, their purpose, their goal,

Even in the rebellion,

Even in their idolatry

He is the Sovereign One

Their power and authority is derived at best

And parasitic at worst

In the face of the empire

In the face of presumptuous claims to sovereignty

In the face of the imperial and idolatrous forces in our lives

Christ is before all things

He is sovereign in life

Not the pimped dreams of the global market

Not the idolatrous forces of nationalism or franchised sports

Not the insatiable desires of a consumerist culture

In the face of a disconnected world

Where home is a domain in cyberspace

Where neighborhood is a MySpace or eHarmony page

Where public space is a shopping mall or retail outlet

Where information technology promises

A tuned-in, reconnected world

All things hold together in Christ

The creation is a deeply personal cosmos

All cohering and interconnected in Jesus

And His sovereignty takes on cultural flesh

And this coherence of all things is socially embedded

In the Church

Against all odds

Against most of the evidence

In a “show me” culture where words alone don’t cut it

The Church is the flesh-and-blood

Here-and-now

In time and history

With joys and sorrows

Embodiment of this Christ

As a body politic

Around a common meal

In alternative economic practices

In radical service to the most vulnerable

In refusal of the empire

In love of this creation

The Church reimagines the world

In the image of the invisible God

In the face of a disappointed world of betrayal

A world in which all fixed points have proven illusory

A world in which we are anchorless and adrift

Christ is the foundation

The origin

The way

The truth

And the life

In the face of a culture of death

A world of killing fields

A world of the walking dead

Christ is at the head of the resurrection parade

Transforming our tears of betrayal into tears of joy

Giving us dancing shoes for the resurrection party

And this glittering joker

Who has, in the words of Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn,

Danced in the dragon’s jaws of death

Now dances with a dance that is full

Of nothing less than the fullness of God

This is the dance of the new creation

This is the dance of life out of death

And in this dance all that was broken

All that was estranged

All that was alienated

All that was dislocated and disconnected

What once was hurt

What once was friction

Is reconciled

Comes home

Is healed

And is made whole

Because Grace, in the words of Bono, makes beauty out of ugly things

Everything

All things

Whatever you can imagine

Visible and invisible

Mountains and atoms

Outer space, urban space, and cyberspace

Every inch of creation

Every dimension of our lives

All things are reconciled in Him

And it happens on a cross

It all happens at a state execution

Where the governor did not commute the sentence

It all happens at the hands of the empire

That has captured our imagination

It all happens through blood

Not through a power grab by the Sovereign One

It all happens in embraced pain

For the sake of others

It all happens on a cross

Arms outstretched in embrace

And this is the image of the invisible God

That is the Body of Christ