Sermon Text: Colossians 3:1-17
5 Feb 06
One evening last week James came home with an assignment from his science class. He was to return to school the next day, transformed from a 14 year old 8th grader into a travel agent, capable of convincing his class that they should go on a time machine journey back to the age of the dinosaurs to see for themselves the wonder of the dinosaur age. So James had to work up an outfit that would show his class that he was indeed a credible travel agent.
Because this is a boy who doesn't yet own a tie -- his choice -- he went to his brothers' closets. Pretty soon he was trying on things. Rose colored shirt? Yes. Beige pants or black pants? Beige. Maroon tie or blue tie? Maroon. (His dad showed him how to tie the tie, and he told me he felt like he was wearing a dog leash). Tan jacket or rose jacket. Tan. Finally, he was wearing a set of clothes where even I was convinced that a trip to the dinosaur age might be something to consider for next summer.
The clothes we wear tell the world who we are. Doctors wear a lab coat and stethoscope. Carpenters wear work boots and jeans. Police officers wear uniforms.
Today's scripture uses this same idea of the clothes we wear to get across what the new life in Christ should look like. The scripture is packed with these images. Changing clothes was a widely used metaphor in the ancient world for initiation and spiritual change. For Christians, it has always come down to one question: How will they know we are Christians?
Over the millennia, Christians have stood out -- even stuck out -- from the rest of the culture. Around AD 200, the early church father, Tertullian, quoted pagans as saying about Christians: "See how they love one another . . . see how they are ready even to die for one another." He saw this agape love as a great factor in causing people to believe in Jesus Christ. Being a disciple of Jesus looked different from the rest of the world.
If you had to choose one piece of scripture that summarizes the new life in Christ, this could be it. We are going to work through this scripture today.
I hope some of you have brought your Bibles, because if we are trying to let scripture guide our lives, we need to keep them handy. The scripture today speaks for itself and it applies to each and every one of us.
The first thing to notice in the first 3 verses is this tremendous baptismal imagery. "So if you have been raised with Christ," chapter 3 begins. This is a direct reference back to the previous chapter 2, v. 12. "When you were buried with him in baptism you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead." In baptism, we die to an old way of being and are born again into new life in Christ.
Baptism embraces two big ideas: -- God's Yes to us -- and our Yes back to God.
Unfortunately, some people look at baptism or a confession of faith, or being saved as a cheap ticket to heaven. Once saved, always saved. Some Christians see baptism as a kind of Christian cure-all. You know, "Good. I can cross baptism off my list and get back to living the way I want."
But when we say yes to God, it's a way of life. Baptism is a sign of God's grace, but it also asks something of us. Baptism represents a dying to the old, egocentric person and transformation into a new creation -- marked by the new clothes of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience and love. Baptism is both God's grace and our response.
But it's easy to distort the idea of grace. I remember a conversation with someone in the youth group a couple of years ago when we were working together on a youth worship service. I was explaining communion and God's grace and forgiveness of us. "You mean," he said, "God forgives me, so I can do whatever I want?" "No," I replied, "Because God forgives you, then you begin to want -- and do -- what God wants."
Remember those little green ribbons we passed out one Sunday last June that said "Grace is free"? Well grace IS free. But there IS a cost to discipleship. Grace without discipleship is cheap grace. We were reminded of that by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian and martyr of the 20th century, who wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship.
It was first published nearly 70 years ago, but his words may be even more true today than in 1937. Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church, he wrote. Grace is represented as the Church's inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. . . . In such a church, the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God; in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God, [Jesus Christ]. . . . Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship. . .
He continues: "The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that."
Not only that, Bonhoeffer adds, we've secularized Christianity so much, that being a disciple doesn't look any different from being in the world (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1995, p. 43-51). And he wrote this in 1937!
Something different than the rest of the world has to happen when we say we are disciples of Christ, when we come to the Lord's Table, when we step out of the baptismal waters. We are to wear and become the love of Christ. That's what this scripture is teaching us. The transformed life means something. It needs to look different than the rest of the world. "Put to death, put off," the author writes, and then he lists all these vices. Lists of vices and virtues were a common literary technique used in the ancient Greek and Roman world. Don't do this. Do this. These lists were simple ways of providing moral standards.
The scriptures speak for themselves here, and in case you think we're looking at this scripture so that we can point fingers at any one in particular, I assure you we are not. There are plenty of sins in this passage to go around for every one of us.
The new life in Christ needs to look different than our old lives. We need to put to death, get rid of, strip off the old self with its practices. The first five vices are in v. 5. Fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed. And they seem to be about sex. But this list of sins or vices is more than about sex. It's about unchecked desires or greed. Sins of the heart.
And we're all guilty at one time or another. The sin of covetousness is what the Roman moralists called it. The sin of thinking we never have enough -- enough stuff, enough attention, enough love, enough cars, enough money, enough time, enough success. Enough. It's idolatry because we think that something else besides God can really give us the security we crave. We want to put our trust in everything BUT God. And so we go after it. And it consumes our lives. The story of manna in the wilderness for the Hebrew people was God's way of teaching his people that there was enough. But we still haven't learned the lesson of trusting God to give us what we need when we need it.
Then the other sins listed in v. 8 are about attitudes and words. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, abusive language, lying. Sins of the mouth. And we are all guilty here too. These are the attitudes and words that tear us apart -- the angry positions we defend, the slanderous words we exchange, the abusive language we use with each other, the lies we tell. I can't help but think of the passage in James letter -- chapter 3, beginning with v. 5 -- about taming the tongue. "The tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity. . . . For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue -- a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God."
We are to strip off the old self, with its attachment to these sins of the heart and sins of the mouth.
The reason the author of the letter to Colossians is so insistent about throwing off these old practices is because these are the things that put the body of Christ -- the church -- at risk. These are the kinds of things that threaten to tear apart the Body of Christ. One of the dominant ideas of this letter is that Christ is the head and the church is the body of Christ. We are to hold fast to the head and be the body, the church. All the old self cares about is the self. The new self puts the care of the Body of Christ ahead of selfish desires and wants.
So where does this leave us? How can we possibly throw off these old clothes -- to which we are so attached -- and put on new clothes? What gives us the power to do this?
This letter to the Colossians, probably written by a disciple of Paul, was a reminder to the churches there that Christ was all they needed to live life in Christ. These were Christians who wanted to do the right thing. Earnest Christians, but restless, spiritually uncertain, tempted by the world around them to believe there was a better way. But the letter reminds them that Christ is in you and you are in Christ. "Christ is all and in all" says v. 11. And that is all we need to live the transformed life now and forever.
But life in Christ has a cost. One of the best explanations I've ever read about just what the new life in Christ means came from a missionary to India in the early 20th century, E. Stanley Jones. He called conversion to the new life in Christ both a gift and an achievement. He said "It is the act of a moment and the work of a lifetime. You cannot attain salvation by disciplines -- it is the gift of God. But you cannot retain it without disciplines. If you try to attain salvation by disciplines, you will be trying to discipline an unsurrendered self. . . The result will be tenseness instead of trust. You will wrestle instead of nestle" (Richard J. Foster & James B. Smith, editors, Devotional Classics, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, p. 301).
When we surrender to Christ, then we understand that Christ is all we need and that Christ is in all of us. Then these disciplines -- these clothes we wear as Christians are more than some dress-up clothes that we put on and take off whenever we feel like it. These clothes transform us:
We become what we do. And if enough of us wear these clothes -- and if we wear them long enough -- we won't be wearing the world's uniform. People will look at us and see something different, something that stands out from the rest of the world.
How will they know we are Christians? By our love. Amen
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