Through the Gray--March 15, 2021

Through the Gray--March 15, 2021

"And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea." [Colossians 4:16]

Maybe it's enough to say we don't have all the answers, and just let that put up a guard-rail around our path for the day... and a gate over our mouths.

There's a bit of a head-scratcher in this verse.  Maybe you've spotted it already.  If not, then go ahead and turn in your Bible to the Letter to the Laodiceans.  Go ahead, I'll wait.

Are you done looking?  

Did you give it a second try?  A third, just to make sure you weren't skipping it or misreading it in the table of contents?

Are we done searching for what's not there?  Are we ready to say it out loud?  Okay, here goes:  there is no letter to the Laodiceans in our Bibles.  Hmm.  Well.... hmmm.  What does that mean?  And what are we supposed to do about it... or think about it?

Let's start here again with the verse itself.  In these closing remarks before the letter we know as "the Epistle to the Colossians" concludes, the apostle references a neighboring congregation in the nearby town of Laodicea.  Paul's instructions are clear:  "When you're done reading this, pass it along to your neighbors, since there's stuff in here that would be helpful for them as well, even if I wrote this first for you."  And a second part follows, "In fact, why don't you trade letters, and then you can read what I wrote to them, too.  There's good stuff in there for you all, too."  So, that all suggests that by the time the letter we've been working our way through for these last few months was written, Paul had also already written to their neighbors in the next town over.

The trouble is... we don't have it.

Well, we might not have it.... or probably don't have it... or maybe only have it by the wrong name.  Confused yet?

Like your survey of your Bible's table of contents has shown you by now, our New Testaments don't have an Epistle to the Laodiceans in there.  Some scholars think that the book we call "Ephesians" has been misnamed, and that it's really the letter written to "the Laodiceans" but we have all been mistaken in our title.  Other think that a pretty suspiciously late-appearing and derivative writing that calls itself the Letter the Laodiceans (which emerged about fifty years after Paul would have died and was circulated by an early heretical sect called the Marcionites) is the real thing, even though it is basically just a cutting and pasting of other verses from Paul's letters into a bad mixtape.  And then there are a lot of folks who just come to the conclusion, even if it's a little uncomfortable to think about, that we just don't have this letter.   This, in all probability, is most likely the case.

So let's think about this for a moment, and just let it sit with us for a moment.  It means that there are other words that the apostle Paul wrote... that didn't make it into our Bibles.  (Honestly, there are other places where the same is evident--reading 1 and 2 Corinthians makes it clear that there are other missing letters of Paul's that haven't survived.)  And if we are going to go down this rabbit-hole, then we should also recall that even the writer of the Fourth Gospel pointed out that there are a lot more stories and sayings of Jesus that aren't written down for us (see John 21:25).  

That means, dear ones, that there's more that could be said--about God, about Jesus, about faith, about the inner workings of the universe, etc.--but we don't have it all in the covers of our Bibles.  Now, that doesn't mean necessarily that we are "lacking."  The theologians of an earlier generation used to talk about the "sufficiency" of Scripture, meaning that we have all that we need in its words and stories.  No one needs to be worried that some long-lost letter of Paul will turn out to say, "Turns out you really are saved by your works after all--my mistake about all that grace stuff."  And nobody needs to worry that in some missing account of Jesus, the Messiah ends up saying, "Forget that love your enemies stuff--go kill your enemies before they kill you!  And by the way, Hail Caesar--he surely knows how to make the Empire great!"  We can rest assured that whatever is in the missing letter to the Laodiceans is in concert with what he has already written to the Colossians--that's why he invites them to just trade letters.  And the Gospels give us a plenty clear picture of who Jesus is and what matters to him, too, that we don't have to worry that in a lost story he would turn out to be someone completely different from what we've come to know from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

But we are going to have to live with the realization that we don't have all the words of Paul. And we're going to have to face the truth that we don't have all the answers, either.  That's the fact we have to own if we are going to take the New Testament on its own terms:  the Bible itself tells us that there are more parts of the conversation that we just don't have anymore, for whatever reason.  Pretending that this verse isn't here isn't honest.  And pretending that the Bible all fell down from the sky as a finished book (bound in faux-letter with faux-gold lettering, too, no less) isn't honest, either.  What we call our Scriptures is a compendium of writings in many styles, by many authors, over a long time, and it took time to gather it all together.  Unlike when you buy a board game at the store and the full set of instructions comes with the box, all ready to go and printed out for you first, the New Testament took a while to come together, and there was even a fair amount of debate about what should be included in it or not.  Knowing that doesn't have to shake our faith or make us doubt God's reality--it just means the picture is more nuanced than, "God sent us the instruction manual for life--we just need to follow it."

Our faith emerged from the real lives of real people, who lived in real time and space.  That means letters were written, and sometimes they were saved, and sometimes they were lost in the mists of history.  We have some stories about the central people in our faith story, but not all the ones we might wish for.  We have some of Jesus' opinions on some of the issues of his day, but we don't have a policy paper from him on every question we might bring to him now--there's no dissertation of Jesus on the subject of how to use social media, for example, or what the capital gains tax rate should be.  Sometimes we have to take what we have and figure out, as well as we can, the trajectory of how to be faithful in our situations based on the direction of the arc we can trace from the stories and sayings we do have. That means the Christian life is less like a test in which there are always correct and incorrect answers, which are all deducible from plugging Bible verses into a sort of moral calculus, and more like a journey we are on, in which we don't always see very far down the road.  It means being okay with not always having the answers in black and white, but being okay with following Jesus through the gray, through the uncertain, and through the unknown.

I get it--that can be scary.  But we are going with Jesus.  And if he is with us, then we can bear the truth that we don't have all the answers.  And we can just put one foot in front of the next, and go where he leads us.

Lord Jesus, give us humble minds that can admit when we don't know something... and then to trust that you'll give us enough clarity for the day.