God's Unapologetic Agenda--January 21, 2021

God's Unapologetic Agenda--January 21, 2021

"It is he [Christ] whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil and struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me." [Colossians 1:28-29]

Time to lay some cards on the table: God has an agenda.

Not only that, but God's agenda may or may not be what we (even we Respectable Religious folks) thought it was, and God doesn't need to get my permission before enacting that agenda in the world.  And while we're being completely honest here (the truth matters, after all), in the end it's God's agenda that matters more than mine.  Ultimately God's agenda turns out to be the most deeply, genuinely good for all of us, beyond my narrow self-interested perspective, too--but even before I can come to recognize that, God's agenda is more definitive than my own.

And here is God's agenda, according to the letter to the Colossians--God has it in mind to make all of us more fully like Christ.  Myself included, and also everybody else.  The goal--the whole point of our lives, of our religion, of two thousand-odd years of Christianity, but also of all of human history and indeed of all the universe, is that we would be made more fully like Christ.  Christ is the goal, the meaning, the purpose, of our being.  And that also means that the more fully we become like Christ, the more fully we will truly be alive.

Now, let me offer a word of clarification here.  When I say, following Colossians' lead here, that the goal is to become more fully like Christ, or "mature in Christ," as these verses put it, it doesn't mean becoming carbon-copies of Jesus of Nazareth.  No beard and sandals are required.  No prerequisite knowledge of Aramaic, and no requirement of a Y chromosome or biological ancestry in the family of Abraham.  Becoming mature in Christ isn't about copying the stories from the Gospels, or trying to get back to some hypothetical first-century way of living in the name of saying, "This is how Jesus would have done it."  Instead, it's about the way of Jesus--the way of life, the way of seeing, the way of acting, the way of loving, that reflects the character of Christ.  That's the goal--both for me, and for everybody else I will ever meet.  God is forming us into love... for love... through love.

And while I believe that is deeply good news, I want us to be clear that it's not always how Christians talk or think.  Sometimes we turn the Gospel into a sales-pitch for heavenly real-estate, and that the sole goal of the Christian faith is to answer, "How can I reserve a spot in the afterlife for myself?"  Sometimes we allow shallow (and shady) hucksters to turn the Christians message into a scheme to get rich, as though the point of believing in Jesus is so he'll bless you with a better car, a bigger house, and better quarterly profits on your portfolio.  And sometimes we just let the name of Christ get hijacked by political hacks who seem to have very little interest in being like Christ but instead want to get folks riled up to support their policies on the capital-gains tax or deregulating their preferred industries.  Anytime we fall for those, we are falling for less than God has in mind to make of us.  God has it in mind, not just transport us to heaven while we remain selfish jerks, nor to make our houses more full of stuff while our souls get emptier and more hollowed out.  God has it in mind to make us like Christ--in other words, to change the kind of people we are, to become more fully formed in love.

So while it is absolutely true that God loves me even in my selfish, childish, petty "Me-and-My-Group-First" mentality (wherever it still lurks in my soul), God is also not satisfied to leave me as that way, as a self-absorbed jerk.  And while God's love accepts me even for all the ways I am still entangled in old patterns of greed, of childish egotism, of prejudice, of bitterness, and of just plain meanness, God knows that we are all made for undiluted love.  After all, God is the One who made us that way!  

So part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is to surrender our whole selves and let God reshape us wholly.  And wherever there are places in me that run counter to Christ's own perfect love, I need to be prepared to have God take the power sander to my soul to remove my roughest, most jagged edges.  Where I am bent inward on myself, I should be prepared for God to take the tools to me again and put me on the anvil, so to speak, until I am made true and square again.  Where I am resentful inside and nursing old grudges because I am afraid of letting them go, I will need to get ready for God to help me to unclench those charley-horses of the soul to let go.  Where I am too fearful and cowardly to act or speak in love, I'll need to start preparing for God to fashion courage in me.  And where I am still captive to hatred and the need to intimidate others or rattle my saber at them, God is going to be disarming me--to teach us all "to lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another," to borrow the phrasing from Amanda Gorman's poem, "The Hill We Climb" spoken during the inauguration ceremony.  All of this is to say that God is forming me--and you, and all of us--to become more fully like Christ, because that has been God's goal, God's agenda, all along.

Today is a day then to let that happen--and maybe to ask in every situation, "How could God use this moment to shape me and grow me into more Christ-like maturity?"  Maybe then instead of just feeding the meanness and bitterness that seems to be rotting the edges of our souls like gangrene, and instead of seeing everything in a day as a battle to be won or a fight that has to be picked, we will see God forming love... and decency... and truthfulness... and grace... and selflessness... and kindness in each of us.  In other words, maybe we'll see, as God sees with perfect clarity, that our deepest need is not to be richer or have more political power or make things "like they used to be in the good old days," but rather for us to be more fully like Christ.

Today, let's allow that every moment, every conversation, and every choice, is an opportunity to be made more like the One who loved us all the way to a cross.  And maybe becoming like him has been God's design all along.

Lord God, make of us what you will--make us to be more fully like Christ.