Colossians 3:1-17 "Whatever" Scott Hoezee

In his book The Divine Conspiracy Dallas Willard claims we live in a strange time when trite slogans fill our lives. We live in a world where one of the best-known jingles of the last quarter-century was "Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener. That is what I really want to be. For if I were an Oscar Meyer wiener, everyone would be in love with me." But, Dallas Willard asks, just think of what it means to want to be a weenie. Think of what it means that we all regard this as cute. Reflect on the fact that years ago, throngs of parents lined up to let their children audition to sing just this song in TV commercials and that furthermore, most of those same parents went home deeply disappointed that their son or daughter would not get to croon this weenie wish in front of millions of people.

But in our trite society of shrunken horizons, we scarcely bat an eye at such a slogan. Similarly, we don't pay much mind to other phrases. "Everything I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten. Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty." Even slogans that try to do something noble are sometimes as hollow as wishing you were a weenie. It's all pretty much the same drivel. In such a time as this, can we even conceive of what ought to be the real slogan of our lives: "Set your minds on things above where Christ is, not on earthly things."

Is that the goal of our lives? And how do we know? After all in Colossians 3 Paul draws a contrast for his readers between how they used to live without Jesus and how they now live in Christ. It's your typical "before and after" portrait--the kind of testimonies heard at AA meetings: "Once I started out every morning with a tumbler of scotch and ended the day with a fifth of Wild Turkey, but now I'm happy with coffee and Diet 7-Up."

And so also Paul says, "My friends at Colosse, once you talked dirty, went to sexual orgies, drank yourself into stupors, and shook your fists in fury at people in the marketplace. But now you know Jesus and so you don't do any of that anymore." Before and after. It obviously applied vividly to the Colossians in that pagan Greco-Roman environment.

But it doesn't always apply so neatly to many of us, does it? If we all had to line up at a microphone to share our Christian story, it would not take long before most of us would start to sound like echoes of each another. When a group of young people makes their professions of faith before the elders, their testimonies are always sincere and lovely. But if there are more than 3 or 4 people in the group, it doesn't take long before most of the kids begin by saying something like, "Well, my story is pretty much just like what Jill and Chip already said . . . . I was born in a Christian home, baptized, went to Christian schools," and so forth. And, of course, that is beautiful. We want our children to grow up as Christians right from the start. Ironically, however, without a vivid "before and after" contrast that shows what a difference our Christian faith now makes on how we live, we may sometimes find it difficult to define what does make our lives Christian.

Think of it this way: if someone came up to you tomorrow and asked how your being a Christian affects your life, what would you say? "Well," you might reply, "I go to church every Sunday. I was a deacon a couple of years ago and now I'm on the building committee. I contribute to the general fund and make sure my kids go to Sunday school and cadets." But suppose this other person said, "No, no, no: I don't mean church stuff. What does being a Christian mean the rest of the week? What do you do that makes you different from some of our other neighbors who don't claim to be Christians?"

What would you say? Could you find things in your work, the way you do your work, in your supermarket interactions, in how you act when behind the wheel that would be different? Tonight we came to celebrate the cosmic Lordship of Jesus Christ. Last year on Ascension Day when we met at Fuller Avenue, we observed together the glaring fact that this world does not look like it is being ruled by any good and loving Lord. And so we said that we need to make Jesus' cosmic Lordship more credible, more believable, by how we live. If the Lordship of Christ is going to be visible anywhere, it has to start with us.

Little did we know how much more chaotic and frightening our world would start to look just four months later after a day now called 9/11. I preached on Psalm 47 last Ascension Day but a few months later it was the previous poem, Psalm 46, that we huddled around. Psalm 47 talks about how our God has ascended amid shouts of triumph, but last fall it was Psalm 46's words about God as our refuge and strength that we all felt we needed.

But if recent events make it harder to believe that this world is ruled by a good Lord, those same events make it all the more imperative that we continue to proclaim the ascension's truth and then also live it. This world, this life, needs to be our focus in living as though we really believe Jesus is Lord. If so, however, how does that square with the idea that we are to set our minds on things above, and not on earthly things, as Paul says? What is supposed to be our focus as people of the ascension: earthly things or heavenly things?

If you were paying attention to the reading earlier from Acts 1, and then if you hook that up in your mind with Colossians 3, you may notice something funny. In Acts 1, after Jesus is lifted up, the disciples are standing around, mouths agape, staring up into heaven. Suddenly they discover some angels, but these angels are not up in the sky but at their backs, standing right behind them! "Why are you staring off into the heavens?" the angels ask. Apparently this was not supposed to be the focus for the disciples. Jesus would come back from heaven one day, but in the meanwhile there was work to do right here on earth.

On the surface, you could almost conclude that Acts 1 and Colossians 3 are working at cross-purposes. Colossians 3 says to bend our minds toward heaven, but Acts 1 says to stop staring off into the skies when there is work to be done on earth. So which is it? Heaven or earth? Well, of course, it's both. We set our minds on heaven where Christ is seated as the Lord of life. But we set our eyes on the things around us on this earth. Our eyes see the needs of this life, our minds in Christ tell us how to minister to those needs.

And how badly we need to have minds set on Christ because if we don't have that, then the information that comes in through our eyeballs will lead us sooner or later (and probably sooner) to some pretty serious despair. Having our minds set on heaven where Jesus rules as Lord helps us to read the newspaper, watch Tom Brokaw, and observe the innercity the right way.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has written engaging accounts of a good many malfunctions of the human brain. One such vignette was about a hapless man who had a kind of visual agnosia. Jerry's eyes worked perfectly well--he had 20/20 vision. But an accident once damaged the small section of Jerry's brain that sorts out and makes sense of visual data. So Jerry could look you full in the face but he couldn't really see your face. He could never recognize anyone because his mind could not assemble the raw visual data. So what Jerry saw when looking at you was like one of those crazy Picasso paintings in which the nose is where the ear is supposed to be and the ear is stuck on a chin and the eyes are floating who knows where! Jerry's eyes saw all the pieces but his mind could not assemble them.

In this world, most everyone sees the same things, reads the same papers, watches the same events unfold live on CNN. Without the framework of heaven to help make some kind of sense of it all, most folks see a booming, buzzing confusion. There is no way to assemble all this data into a meaningful picture (much less one that suggests a better way to live in the face of it all). But if our minds are set in heaven where Christ is seated, then although we hardly have all the answers (and surely still feel mighty confused ourselves at times), we do have a major advantage in tracing out a better, more meaningful way to live, to minister, and to witness than would be true if we could not see Jesus as Lord in the first place.

Maybe that's why, despite his opening call to focus on heavenly things, before Colossians 3 is finished Paul ends up talking about matters that are very earthly, very practical, very everyday in their nature. In Colossians 3:17 Paul even invokes what may well be the single most explosive word in the New Testament: Whatever.

Of course, these days that word sounds rather different in our ears. Today this is a key word in a morally sloppy vocabulary. Someone delivers a stern lecture on the need for sexual sanity, and some people just roll their eyes and sneer, "Whatever." We see a young woman with a pierced nose, a pierced navel, a pierced upper lip sporting green-tinted hair, and we suppress an incredulous grin even as we say, "Whatever!" A couple walks past in a public park, groping and fondling one another's backsides, and people shrug it off with, "Whatever." In contemporary discourse "Whatever" has come to mean the same thing as "to each his own" or "who cares" or "live and let live."

But in the mouth of Paul as we find this word in Colossians 3:17, "whatever" takes on a devastatingly powerful force. "Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it in the name of the Lord Jesus." That phrase is breathtaking in its sweep. Because what that means is that the horizons of Jesus' Lordship are limitless.

But it also means we cannot overstate what parts of life need to be Christian. They all do. For instance, the Christian life is a never-ending exercise in gratitude. And so when the bagger at D&W carries your groceries out to your car, say thank you and (provided you can see his or her name badge) use the name. Just watch how people's heads snap. The same goes for the kid who refills your water glass at a restaurant: get in the habit of saying "Thank you" every time he fills it up. Is this idea of saying thanks scandalously simple, so much so that some of you are wondering why I'm not coming up with something more dramatic? Yes, it is simple. But in an increasingly slovenly, ungrateful society of entitlement it also may make a difference. Remember: whatever.

Or, suppose someone wanted to see what makes you different as a Christian and suppose you were able to point to your decidedly non-modern point of view on the weekend. It was only about 60 years ago that anyone ever conceived of this entity called the weekend as a separate and different unit of time. But to put it mildly, the idea has caught on rather well--so much so that now even many Christians have subordinated the centuries-old concept of the Lord's Day. For some folks, Sunday has become just one-half of that larger (and actually more important) time-block known as "Weekend."

And I suspect here's a place we can all squirm a bit. We all sense that in the last few decades worship has become little more than just one tiny sliver of the weekend--a sliver that gets squeezed out sometimes. We all know that there are now only about three, maybe four, months out of the year when our congregations are mostly all together on Sundays. The rest of the year sizeable numbers of us are off doing something else--you know, weekend stuff. Not the stuff that's in Saturday's religion section but all the stuff that is in that special section of the Press now known simply as "The Weekend."

As followers of the Lord, are we willing to monitor our attitudes toward the Lord's Day to ensure that it does not simply become the sequel to Saturday? This is by no means a call to return to the time when Sunday was such a shut-down day that kids came to hate it for its sheer inactivity. But it is a call for thoughtfulness in terms of how comfortably we fit, or don't fit, into cultural patterns. Remember: whatever.

Or, how about something else Paul talks about in Colossians 3: the nurturing of patience, which leads also to our ability to be kind and gentle with other people. Our society, of course, has a conspiracy against patience, and we buy right into it mostly without even realizing it. We're a people on the move and we've more or less come to expect that we deserve to press on without delays of any kind. We've got microwaves to heat up our coffee in a flash, but even still we pace in front of the microwave, checking the digital display repeatedly during that interminable 45 seconds. For the last few years we've sped up our gas station stops by being able to swipe our own credit cards at the pump. But that's not fast enough anymore and so now Mobil will give you a little wand to attach to your key chain: wave it in front of a little sensor on the pump and in less than a second you're all set.

On the highways road rage boils for even the slightest of slowdowns. Observe most any intersection on 28^th Street and you will see one, two, three, sometimes four cars and trucks speeding through the first part of the red light, greatly endangering lives (and you can be well-assured that very few of those vehicles sneaking under the red light are on their way to the hospital with a woman in active labor. Mostly they're just on their way to Home Depot or Benny's Bagel & Latté Emporium).

Can the ascended Lord Jesus be the goal of our lives on the highway, on 28^th Street, at the gas pump or in the express lane at D&W? Can we slow down long enough to be considerate and loving, gentle and kind to those around us? Do we even realize those things have something to do with Jesus? Remember: whatever.

Or suppose you determine to let the reality of Jesus as Lord shape the way you think about even Al Qaeda, Osama, the Taliban, and the like. Suppose you try to pray for these people despite the fact that they have declared themselves our enemies (and act accordingly). Suppose your mind's resting place in heaven where Christ is seated causes you to resist the rhetoric of revenge and hatred that has become the staple of conversation at who knows how many restaurants, truck stops, bars, and cable talk shows these past eight months. That doesn't mean you give up on the pursuit of justice or that you don't also pray that we can stop future acts of terror. But it means that you're going to let your Lord in heaven shape your thinking in also this area. Remember: whatever.

Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, whether in making video selections at Blockbuster or deciding whether or not to have another martini, whether interacting with a bag boy or dealing with a slowpoke driver, whether mapping out your weekend or calculating your taxes--whatever you do, find a way to do it in the name of the ascended Lord.

The little choices of life matter, because in the long run they're not so little. It is in the mundane that people sense the eternal, in the quiet acts of life that the holy shines through. The irony and tension of the Christian life, as also Paul recognized, is that although our focus is to be on the ascended Lord Jesus and not on "earthly things," whether or not we have that proper focus will show precisely in how we make use of earthly things. Few challenges could be greater.

But then few applications of what Christianity is all about are as practical as all this. Is there anything particularly holy about trudging off to work or school tomorrow, about driving to the store or playing with your child, about greeting your co-workers or smiling at strangers? Well, those are holy things if God's Spirit is in all of it. And if the Spirit of the Lord of the cosmos really is there, then everything you do has a shot at being at least a little different, a little better, and maybe sometimes a lot better. That's true of everything. Everything. Remember: whatever. Amen.