More Than the Safety of Silence--August 6, 2025

 

More Than the Safety of Silence--August 6, 2025

"In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, enslaved and free, but Christ is all and in all!" (Colossians 3:11)

It wasn't enough just to avoid saying bad things about "the other." What was necessary was to affirm  positively that Christ was present in them as well. The Gospel itself demanded no less.

Let me say that again: it was not enough for the authoritative voice of the apostle Paul simply to keep quiet while thinking to himself, "I'm not saying anything that is racist against Gentiles myself personally!" But rather the apostle here insists on dismantling the prejudices that were present in the early church where he saw them in other people. It was not sufficient simply to keep his head down and claim he wasn't guilty of perpetuating bigotry against people outside of his own ethnic-religious-cultural group, because staying silent when you know rottenness is happening quite often gives tacit permission for the rottenness to continue. Not speaking up to say, "This is not acceptable. This is not the way of Christ," is going to send the message that it is ok, and that it is compatible with the way of Jesus.  To be a disciple of Jesus, Paul shows us, will mean more than the safety of silence. In the face of bigotry and prejudice, discipleship will mean the risk of speaking up to affirm those rejected as "other" and seeing Christ in those who have been told they don't belong.

We certainly don't have silence here from these verses from Colossians. We don't have permission to say, "As long as I'm not making things worse, I'm in the clear and off the hook." Instead, here from the text of the New Testament itself we have a clear precedent of opposing what we would call today racism and of positively affirming the full presence of Christ in people from every background, nationality, skin color, culture, language, and way of life.

This is actually a really important point to be clear on, especially in a time when many who have been looked down on as "the other" are afraid and uncomfortable.  In a time when making waves to speak against racism or prejudice make you the target of mockery or get you labeled, pejoratively, as "woke," it is tempting to let ourselves off the hook and just keep quiet.  It is easy to tell ourselves it's enough just to avoid bigotry ourselves and just bite our tongues when others speak or act in ways that treat others as "less than," whether because of the color of their skin, the place they were born, the language they first learned, the people they love, or the way their families look. It is appealing to convince ourselves that it's enough simply to say "I'm not racist," rather than going further to actively striving to be anti-racist. 

But this verse from Colossians, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, doesn't stay in that place of tempting safety. No, we are reminded that discipleship calls us beyond comfortable quiet ("I'm not saying anything bad about anyone--isn't that enough?") to active affirmation of those who have been pushed to the margins.  It means actively and positively recognizing Christ in them, which will also mean we have to get to know, talk with, and care about the people who end up being looked down on, ignored, or told they don't belong... and discovering how they show Jesus to us. And it will mean celebrating that Christ has gathered fellow disciples who are different from you or me, and being willing to go on record affirming that they are beloved of God and called by Jesus, too, rather than just maintaining an awkward silence that we think keeps us out of criticism.  

After all, we don't hear Paul letting himself off the hook and saying, "I know that some Christians speak ill of Gentiles, but I don't, and therefore I don't have to speak up to discourage or stop it when it happens." We don't see Paul saying, "Well I have never personally told a joke about those Scythians, so this isn't really a problem." Nor do we see Paul saying, "Look, those uncircumcised Gentiles have already gotten a free pass by being allowed to believe in Jesus at all--now they're demanding I eat with them and celebrate that Christ has welcomed them even with all their non-Jewish, non-kosher practices? You can't make me do that!"

No, as these verses from Colossians illustrate, it's simply not enough--it is not the call of Christ--to be silent in the face of the demeaning of others, or the subtler ways others are left out and marginalized because they are "other." Maybe Paul himself came to learn that as he reflected on his own life, when he had been the one holding people's coats while a lynch-mob stoned the early Christian community organizer Stephen to death. On that day (see the end of Acts 7 for that story), Paul himself wasn't throwing rocks, but his silence gave consent to those who became a violent mob. He could say, honestly, "I didn't throw any rocks myself," but very clearly, Stephen was killed with Paul's approval and with his tacit direction, shown precisely in his silence while the rocks were flying and Stephen was breathing his last.

However many years later after Stephen's death this letter was written, the same lesson hangs in the air: saying your hands are clean because you didn't personally throw any rocks is a lie. And when it comes to the racial, ethnic, and economic divisions that beset both the early church and today's church, the same is true: it is not enough for Christians simply to look away while other people demean and degrade others because of their skin color, background, language, gender, or nationality. Followers of Jesus are called to speak up and insist positively on the abiding presence of Christ in all, and to speak against attitudes, actions and policies that perpetuate that racism, bigotry, and discrimination.

It's not that early Christians forgot their backgrounds or pretended they weren't there. Gentile Christians continued to "be Gentile"--it's not something you can "repent" of. They continued to eat Gentile foods and wear their hair and clothing in Gentile ways. The Jewish Christians continued to worship in the Temple and many kept kosher and circumcised their sons. When the voice in Colossians says the old categories aren't there anymore, he doesn't mean to pretend everybody thought or acted the same--he meant we were no longer allowed to pit one way over the other as supreme while the others were all inferior. It was about stopping any one group from misusing power over against another, and about including people as they were. That's radical--and it's here in the New Testament itself.

For a lot of us who find ourselves, simply by the color of our skin and the position in society were born into, in positions of privilege, it can be really tempting to tell ourselves, "As long as I don't personally say mean things about people whose skin color is darker or whose language is different from mine, that's all anybody can ask of me." It's tempting to say, "Hey, I'm not flying a Confederate flag myself, so I can't be asked to risk losing friendships when someone else flies it or puts it on their vehicle!" But the Bible here itself calls us out and says, "Yes, you can be asked to do those things. You can--and you are. In fact, God insists on that and of more from you. Christ himself calls you to affirm his holy and good presence in those who have been treated as inferior or less-than for generations, and you are called to be a part of the change." The New Testament itself calls us beyond letting ourselves off the hook by claiming, "I don't say racist things (out loud), so I'm not the problem," to see our silence as permission for racism to continue wherever it festers. And the Scriptures themselves call us beyond that silent complicity to actively dismantle the power of racism wherever it is--including in the church itself.

That's hard. I know. It means being honest about things we want to ignore or sweep under the rug. It means being able to recognize that people who are "nice" a lot of the time can also still be capable of perpetuating rotten beliefs and mindsets, which become even more rotten practices and systems. It means loving folks enough to honor what is good and noble in them and also to call out the prejudices in one another when we see them. It means letting other people see our own blind-spots and helping them to excise the cancer of bigotry from ourselves, when we didn't want to admit it was there. It means acknowledging when in our lives we might not have been throwing stones, but we were quietly holding coats and letting the rocks fly with our tacit permission.

And it means we dare to believe the Good News that these verses from Colossians proclaims: in all of us, with whatever background, whatever language, culture, nationality, or ethnicity we have come to Christ, Christ is here, present in all of us. Let us dare to live like it is true.

Lord Jesus, give us the grace to see your presence not only in those who are like us, but also those who are different and those we have too often treated as less-than. Give us, too, the courage to see our failures, our complicity in the past, and the opportunities to start in new ways to honor all people as made in your image.

Honest to God--August 5, 2025

Honest to God--August 5, 2025

"Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. (Colossians 3:9-10)

Let's be honest. We live in a culture that has an increasingly difficult time telling the truth--or even believing that "the truth" is worth the effort to hold onto. We live in the era of spin doctors who take the "bad news" and try to find a way to make it sound like "good news."  We live in a time in which, if you don't like the numbers in the latest report, you fire the person who published them rather than acknowledging that your expenses are way over budget or your revenue isn't what you hoped for, so that you can make course corrections.   We live in a society in which it is possible, when you don't like where the facts lead, simply to find different "alternative facts" that will suit the conclusion you would rather come to. The Scriptures are under no illusions that the world is full of that kind of lying; but we who are disciples of Jesus are called to something different. We are called to be truth-tellers... and to be willing to listen to the truth from one another, as well.

The letter to the Colossians makes no bones about it. This passage, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, puts it succinctly:  "Do not lie to each other."  Presumably, Christians are not to lie to folks outside the church, either.  But there is something vital about knowing we can rely on each other to tell the truth as disciples in community.  It is important to know that I can count on you to be honest with me, and for you to know that I will be truthful with you as well.  That allows you to believe me when the message I have for you is unbelievable (including the gospel itself, which sounds too good to be true to our ears).  It allows you to know that bad news or a difficult message isn't merely a matter of someone trying to hurt your feelings, and reminds you that you can't just ignore a fact you don't like simply because you don't like it.  And it allows me to believe you whether your message for me is what I wanted to hear or not.  When I can trust you, I know you will keep your promises; when you can trust me, you know I will do my utmost to keep my word to you as well.  That's the only way community can function. We can only be supportive of each other in love and face challenges together when we can be honest about what those challenges are and reliable when we say we will show up to face them.

Now, at one level, we could say that every community needs truthfulness to function, whether it is specifically Christian or not.  A family needs to be truthful among its members, regardless of their faith. A business and its employees need to be honest among the staff and with their customers if they want to function, no matter their religious affiliation. And citizens of a country need to be able to trust their governments and elected leaders if the nation is going to survive, even though they may hail from many different religious traditions or have no particular faith at all.  All of these different social groups and communities require a certain basic level of truth-telling, or they will collapse. But the writer of Colossians makes an even stronger case for the Christian community; we are called to be truth-tellers to one another in particular because of the character of the God we have met in Jesus Christ.

As our verses for today note, our vocation to be truth-tellers arises from our "new self" which we have put on in Christ, and which is being renewed in the likeness of the one who created our "new self," which is to say, God.  So the writer of Colossians isn't just wagging a scolding finger at us and saying, "Don't lie, because it's against the rules," or "If you don't tell the truth, you're going to hell."  Rather, the apostle is saying, "We don't lie to each other, because lying was always a regrettable fashion choice that came along with the old selves we used to wear like a bad leisure suit.  But now, you've put on a brand new self--you are clothed with Christ--and now truth-telling is the way we present ourselves to the world, because we are being made more and more to look like and be like the Master Tailor who made these new selves for us to wear." In other words, we are called to be truthful people, even in a world bent on deception, because God is truthful.  It's not about whether the people bloviating from podiums are honest with us (they often won't be), or whether the voices on social media are giving us facts or conspiracy theories (it's frequently the latter). We don't get to say, "Well THOSE people are lying to get people on their side, so WE can do it, too!" We are called to be truth-tellers because we follow Jesus, who is the Truth.  

And that's the other thing we need to acknowledge as we head out into this day: the world around us will not suddenly or automatically decide to stop lying, no matter what we do or say.  We don't tell the truth only if it is a popular thing to do, and we don't insist on integrity only when it's trending on social media.  We are sent out into the world, Jesus says in the gospel, like "sheep into the midst of wolves" and are called to be "innocent as doves" while being as "wise as serpents" (Matthew 10:16).  That means we won't be naive when the world around us is still parading around in the tired old clothes of gaudy deception and dazzling lies; we know to expect as much, and yet we are called to be voices who can say out loud when the emperor is wearing no clothes.  Our presence in the world will be a surprising one, indeed a refreshing one--we'll be known as the people who can tell the truth, both when it puts us in a positive light and when it means owning up to our failures.  We will known as people who don't have an angle to push, an agenda to ram through, or a product to sell--we'll simply be honest, because that's what we've come to see in the character of God through Jesus.  Because Jesus is both reliable (trustworthy) and honest (truthful) we will be shaped more and more in his likeness, no matter whether the world thinks it is savvy or smart or makes us "look good."  And because we know our belonging to Jesus is grounded in his unconditional love rather than how many red pen marks are on our permanent records, we don't have to be afraid of owning our mistakes honestly, confessing our sins openly, and speaking the gospel's good news to one and all freely.  That's what the world most deeply needs from us, even if the world doesn't know it because it's still fooled by its own lies: our capacity to be truthtellers and trustworthy people like Jesus.  

That might just be the way someone else is led to place their trust in Jesus, who is the Truth--by discovering in the lives of us, his disciples, people who are brave enough to be honest in a world full of lies.  May it be so among us.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to be truth-tellers and trustworthy people in this day, so that others might come to see you, truly, through us.

Who We Look Up To--August 4, 2025

Who We Look Up To--August 4, 2025

"So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things--anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth." (Colossians 3:1-8) 

So... what kind of stuff is "above"? 

If we are being advised not to focus on what is "earthly," but rather to focus on what is "above," because, as Colossians puts it, that's "where Christ is," we should probably get clear on which things go in which pile... because it's not really what we might think at first. What direction are disciples supposed to look?  Where are we supposed to focus if we are followers of Jesus?

To get the obvious ones out of the way, it's not merely a matter of altitude. We are not being told to avoid thinking about soil, or grass, or cars and trucks in favor of clouds, rainbows, and hot air balloons. That should go without saying, but to be honest, sometimes religious folks have added confusion there by depicting the afterlife as a bunch of people sitting on clouds or describing God as living "up" in heaven.

And compounding that, an awful lot of the last 2,000 years of Christian history has involved people saying, "Don't make too much of a fuss about the terrible things that happen in this world and in this life, and don't try to make things any better, because one day we'll all just be enjoying the afterlife up in heaven in the sweet by and by." That led to a pattern of telling enslaved people, for example, just to accept their lot as slaves in the American South, despite the fact that they'd been ripped from their families and treated as property, and all the while the master-approved (White) preachers would tell them just to accept being enslaved and instead to think about having a nice time in heaven one day. It led loud religious voices in Germany in the 1930s to persuade the people in their pews just to look the other way as yellow stars were starting to appear on people's clothing... and then as those people started to disappear. And in so many cases, the official response from the church was, "We aren't supposed to get involved in these earthly situations--we're doing what the Bible says and only thinking about 'the things that are above'." That was a rather convenient way of reading the Bible, since it let Christians off the hook for speaking up on behalf of others who were endangered or pushed to the margins. 

Maybe we need to actually listen to what Colossians has to say, though, rather than assuming for ourselves that we know what counts as "the things that are above" versus the "what is earthly." Because the writer hasn't left us to guess--he's given us a whole list. We just don't often take the time to keep reading. If we keep going in Colossians 3, even though many English Bibles make it the start of a new paragraph, we see that the writer keeps on describing what "earthly" things and mindsets he has in mind (this is also a time to note that the verse numbers, chapters, paragraphs, and punctuations are not original to the New Testament text, but have all been added centuries later by scholars, translators, and students of the Bible trying to get at the intent of the originals, which would have all been written in all capital letters with no breaks for sentences, paragraphs, or verses). 

And in the following sentence, the writer says, "Put to death, therefore, whatever is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry)." And then about a sentence later, he rattles off "anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language" along with lying as things we are supposed to leave behind like a set of old dirty clothes, so that we can put on the new life in Christ. 

Well, if that's the situation, then all this business about "what is above, where Christ is" and "what is earthly" doesn't teach us to ignore the present life or the present world--not at all! Just the opposite, rather--Colossians is very much interested in what we do and how we engage people in this life. The idea seems to be that there are two ways of living in the world--one that is focused on getting as much for yourself as you can, even if you have to resort to lying, deception, malice, and manipulation to get it, and the other that is modeled on Christ's way of life, which seeks the good of all with kindness and generosity. The "earthly" mindset treats everybody else as objects simply here for our gratification (so really this business about fornication and impurity are like greed in a sense--they are both about treating others as objects and amassing as much for ourselves as possible). And the Christ-like mindset (what Colossians calls "the things above") is centered on the good of all, just like Christ was willing to lay down his own self-interest and valued others enough to treat them with honesty, integrity, compassion, and love.  In other words, the question is whether we will live as disciples of Christ, orienting our lives on the priorities of Jesus, or whether we will follow the lead of those voices that turn us inward in self-absorption.

The "earthly" mindset says that the ends justify the means, so you can be as crooked, deceptive, and manipulative as you have to be in order to get people to do what you want or give you what you want. And the Christ-like mindset says, NO--because other people matter as much as I matter, I don't have permission to deceive, trick, lie, cover up, scheme, swindle, or trick other people, and I don't have permission to just use them for my own purposes. The creed of the "earthly" mindset is "Me-and-My-Group First!", and the alternative motto of the disciples of Jesus is, "Love like Christ: everybody, everywhere." 

Nowhere does this voice from Scripture say we should just ignore the rottenness around us in this present life and instead distract ourselves with thoughts of floating of puffy clouds after death. Rather, it's about how we live this life now, in light of Christ's resurrection. And maybe that's the key here. If Jesus is still dead and in his grave, well, there's no particular reason to give his voice any more weight or authority than any other dead teacher from the dustbin of history. But if Jesus is alive and risen, then maybe (definitely!) he really knows what he is talking about, and the point of life is not merely to acquire and accumulate more stuff, more pleasure, or more conquests before our final breath! If Jesus is alive, then maybe he really can be trusted to tell us that the "Me-and-My-Group-First!" attitude is a distortion of what we were made for. 

So today, instead of hearing "set your mind on things above" and thinking it lets us off the hook from the hard work of living with integrity in a world of greed and avarice, or gives us permission to ignore when terrible things are being done around us so we can just think about angels on clouds, let's actually listen to the voice of Scripture. And the message there is clear: the choice is whether we will wallow in the kind of self-interest that says "Me-and-My-Group First!" or dare to practice the kind of Christ-like discipleship that says, "I will be good to all, because that is how the risen Christ has shown love to me already."   Maybe this whole conversation about setting our mind on the things that are "above" is really a way of asking, "What--or who--will you look up to?"  Will you aspire to the self-serving mindset that uses people and loves things, or will we look up to Christ Jesus for our way of life? Colossians says that we have already died to that first option--we just have a habit of limping along like zombies in that old way of thinking. What if we dared to believe that it is true--we don't have to keep going back to the old rottenness. What if we trusted that Christ has raised us from the dead-end of treating other people as objects, and instead let him teach us how to live fully in love for all? 

Lord Jesus, since you have raised us with you, teach us how to put away the old way of life, and to walk like you do, in love for all.