Acorn People--January 5, 2021

Acorn People--January 5, 2021

"...so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God." [Colossians 1:10]

Scientifically speaking, an acorn belongs to the category of oak trees.  Sure, it's a seed, but all the DNA, all the instructions and blueprints for making an oak tree instead of, say, an orangutan, are there in the acorn already.  An acorn doesn't "earn" the status of "oak-ness"--it already has it, before it's done a thing.  In fact, to be precise, it is the already-given "oak-ness" in the acorn's DNA that enables it to take raw materials like oxygen, nitrogen, soil, and water, and to become a giant of a tree in the forest.  It's all right there, waiting to become fully, in a sense, what it already is.

You could also say that the acorn seems to be more fully itself when it finally sprouts leaves puts down roots, and grows into a tree (which in turn puts forth acorns), but it's not a matter of earning or achieving.  It is a matter of becoming.

I want to suggest that this is what the Christian life looks like.  It is a matter of becoming, not of earning.  We aren't used to thinking like that, in a time and culture like ours that seems obsessed with how you impress, accomplish, and win things like status or belonging or some title or another.  We have been taught to strive and struggle (and if necessary, step on people along the way) to get ourselves to the position of "winning," no matter the cost or what we have to do to get there, in order to achieve this elusive thing called success.  And frankly, that impulse we have learned is destroying us--the terrible things we'll do to get that status of being seen as "winners," the ways folks will sell out their convictions or stoop to all sorts of crookedness rather than risk not "winning," they all reveal how deeply terrible that mindset really is.  It is slowly killing us all, the more we give in to it.  But it isn't the way the letter to the Colossians sees things.  No--it's not about climbing and clawing our way up to the top, no matter how crooked that makes us.  No, from the vantage point of Colossians, our life in Christ is about becoming what God says we already are.  It is about being made more fully ourselves, not vying for a lone spot on the top of the heap.  

We are, you could say, acorn people.

So when the apostle calls his readers to lead lives that are "worthy of the Lord," it's not like we have to drum up votes to win a religious popularity contest, or impress God into accepting us, or earn our way into a status of being "worthy" by pretending to be the winners we really aren't.  No, it's about becoming more fully what God says we already are.  And in Christ (who is God's Beloved), God says you are beloved, too.  In Christ (to whom we belong) God says you belong as well, forever.  In Christ, who is God's Word through whom all the world was created, God says that you are good--just as God declared creation "good" in the beginning.  We are acorns--given the "status" (if you can call it that) of belonging-to-the-oaks in our innermost selves.  What we are called to is to become.  Nothing more, and nothing less.  We are called to become fully ourselves, to become what God has intended us to be, like an acorn becoming an oak tree patterned on the very same oak tree which produced it.  We are called to become the embodied love that first embraced us in Christ himself.

That, of course, is very very different from the rat race our culture has tried to teach us, where we have to constantly impress, constantly try to convince others we are successful or acceptable or "winners," and constantly pretend to be something we are not, in the hopes of fooling someone into thinking we're the real deal.  I mean, honestly, how embarrassing to get stuck in that mode of operating!  How deeply sad, how truly pathetic we are when we try and earn the world's approval and and strive to make ourselves look like winners to do it. That is exhausting, and it never succeeds for very long. The truth eventually does come out, and the charlatans and fakers are revealed for what they really are, even if the trick worked for a bit.  Eventually, if we have been playing that game, it will suck the life right out of us.  It isn't worth playing.

But to live a life of becoming?  Well, just the opposite--we actually become more fully alive the more it happens.  When we can be done with pretending and preening and trying to impress--anybody--then we are free to come fully alive and to discover the good news that God has already said we are worthy, beloved, and accepted.  The question is whether we will dare to believe these things are already given to us by grace--like an acorn is given DNA as a gift in its own creation--and whether we will let God's grace in Christ enable us to become what we are made to be.  See how different that is?  It's not play-acting at being a winner in the hopes of fooling the judge; it's growing to maturity with the gifts that are already in you, and trusting the status of belonging you already have.

That's the invitation in this day: not to try and force or pressure or cajole or fool or trick anybody into any particular impression of you, but simply let yourself believe what God says about you already in Christ... and to let that move you from acorn-oak-ness to full-grown-tree-oak-ness.

That's the adventure all of us disciples are on.  We are, after all, acorn people.

Lord God, bring us to maturity and help us to become fully what you say we already are in you.