L.D. 11, Colossians 1:15-23 "Scandalously Particular" Scott Hoezee

Once again this morning we have done something that many people in society deem totally inappropriate, and we did it without batting an eye. Just a little while ago we watched several sets of parents bring their infants in front of us all. They did this not to enter some "Beautiful Baby" contest or to audition the tots to become the next Gerber Baby, whose face will get used on magazine covers. These parents brought their children here not to pre-enroll them in some speciality school that would require mom and dad to start showing the tykes arithmetic flash cards already at the age of six months or some other such nonsense.

No, these mothers and fathers brought these babies before our eyes for just one reason: because they believe that the Savior we call Christ Jesus is the only ultimate hope these children have now or will ever have. But precisely because we believe that, the parents vowed that from this day forward, they will teach their children about Jesus and Jesus alone as the only true Lord to worship. And the rest of us were co-conspirators in this determination to make of these infants disciples of the one Savior whose name is Jesus.

And that is precisely the line that many in society refuse to cross and it is the same line that many would scorn us for having this day crossed so blithely yet again. Just talk to your coworkers or unchurched neighbors. Listen to what people say on "Larry King Live" or the "Today" show or any number of other shows on TV and radio. If you do, you will hear parent after parent saying that there is no way they would ever force-feed their children to believe in anything. Good parenting, to the minds of many, consists of presenting the array of choices that exist when it comes to religion, faith, and other such spiritual matters. And so it is considered a violation of the child's rights not only to present just one faith option but, worse, to do all you can to make the child take that one option.

If you take your kid to Jersey Junction for some ice cream and he chooses the Blue Moon flavor, you are a sorry excuse for a parent if, in the face of all that delicious and intriguing variety, you nevertheless order vanilla for the child every single time. So also with faith matters: the child must be able finally to choose for him- or herself. It's just plain wrong to pretend as though options do not abound in this world.

Hence this morning we are all in violation of the sacrosanct unwritten rules governing a pluralistic and tolerant culture. And although we may shake our heads over such attitudes, all of us who are parents of baptized children need to face up to the bracing fact that in the twenty-first century, the children we want to raise as Christ's disciples will face enormous pressure and difficult questions as to how and why any well-informed person could insist that there is only one true faith, only one way to be saved.

Read the newspapers any given week and sooner or later you will run across sentiments that equate the kind of promises we all made here this morning with something like Islamic fundamentalism. Telling a child there is only one way to believe is right up there with jihad, terrorism, and the seeds that breed intolerant abuses of others. So if when you walked in here today you didn't realize how radical baptism is, then I am here to tell you that it is just so radical. What happened here today for Evelyn, Eleanor, Benjamin, and Calista is most certainly not some polite rite of passage on a par with getting a six-month portrait taken at WalMart. Nestled within the words we spoke and the vows the parents took is a distillate of what the entire Christian faith has always been about.

And what is that nugget of the faith? That this entire universe is ruled by a loving Creator God who, when things somehow went off the rails in the world he had made, opened up one path, and one path only, for making things right again. It is a path that winds its way straight through a cross. It is a path that leads to and through an empty tomb. It is a path that is being blazed by the pioneer of our salvation, and his name is Jesus. This Jesus is not just one spiritual sage among many. You don't put a picture of Jesus on a shelf along with portraits of Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, Hare Krishna, and Shirley MacClaine and then say that this array represents the very best of all that is spiritual about the human race, and so it's up to the individual to decide which one "works" best for him or her.

As Christians, we can't put Jesus in that league because Jesus is the one who we claim to be the one, unique Son of the Living God. The moment you say that Jesus is just one path among many paths that all lead to the same end-destination before the face of whatever God exists, then you are forced to gut the Christian faith of most of its content.

Colossians 1 shows us this in the boldest, most fantastic terms. Paul could not be more exuberant. As we noted before, the nine verses we read this morning are remarkable for their verve. When you read the NIV's English translation, you see about eight sentences from verse 15 to verse 23. But in the original Greek, this morning's entire passage contains exactly two sentences, the first of which contains a whopping 112 words and runs all the way from verse 15 to verse 20. Some actually think that sentence began back in verse 9, and if that is so, then the whole thing has 218 words spanning eleven verses. Then verses 21-23 constitute just one more Greek sentence of about an additional 70 words.

This is breathless prose! This is the kind of verbal pace set by an over-excited seven-year-old who can't get the words out fast enough to describe what an awesome day she had at the amusement park. The sentences never end, they just get strung out on a long series of "ands" and "buts." "First we rode the corkscrew, which is really awesome because you go right upside down and I was kind of scared at first but not really because it was so cool and anyway after that then we went to, you know, that really big coaster that goes through a dark tunnel, and that was so awesome, too, and then, and and and . . . ." You get the idea!

Paul in Colossians 1 is riding the crest of a most amazing wave of enthusiasm. But just what is it that excites Paul's passion here? It is Jesus. It is Jesus as the Christ of God. And the things Paul says about this person are nothing short of startling, scandalous even. Paul's claims here are so sweeping that there is absolutely no choice: you have to conclude that either this is the most sublime truth in the world or it is the most insane blather any person ever put down on paper anytime, anywhere. There really is no middle ground. Paul cannot here convey what he does as the result of a little mistake. As we have noted before, mistakes can only be so big. If you get out of bed some morning and walk down the steps to the kitchen thinking it is a Thursday only to realize a little later that it is actually just Wednesday, that's a mistake. But if you come down the steps to the kitchen in the morning thinking your name is George Bush and you've got a meeting in the Oval Office in fifteen minutes, that's not a mistake, that's schizophrenia! Mistakes can only be so big!

Really to sense the impact of the scandal Paul here details, we need to do what we can to remove our mindset from this time so as to see things from a first-century perspective. That's not easy. After all, we live in a time when recently a single movie was enough to make the whole world talk about Jesus. Last Saturday I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which is not exactly a religious institution. Yet currently they have a sprawling display of Byzantine art with a couple acres of museum space devoted to nothing but hundreds of mosaics and paintings of Jesus. And people in that rather secular city line up to spend hours viewing the exhibit. Jesus is also the subject of best-selling books and is proclaimed day and night on TV and radio.

Jesus is everywhere these days. But if you had been living in the region of Colosse long about 55 A.D., just think of how you might have been affected by Paul's rhetoric. After all, if at that time you had been about thirty or forty years old, then Paul was talking about someone who had been alive at the same time you had been--in other words, this would have been recent history. At the time Paul penned this epistle, Jesus' birth was still as relatively recent then as someone today who had been born in 1950.

So just imagine, tough though it is to do, that in the year 2004 I talk to you about someone named Floyd who had been born in 1950, who had grown up in Fargo, North Dakota, during the Eisenhower years. Floyd had come of age in the Vietnam War era and had started a family right about the same time the Watergate scandal broke. Let's say Floyd had been a construction worker but he had a midlife change-of-career long about the same time Reagan was elected, leaving construction behind to open up an innercity soup kitchen and Christian homeless shelter. In other words, imagine I am talking to you about Floyd: a seemingly ordinary Midwesterner who was your twentieth century contemporary.

And then imagine that I tell you that that man, Floyd from Fargo, is the cosmic centerpoint. Everything that exists in every far-flung corner of the universe can trace its origin back to Floyd. Every truth that exists comes together in the heart of this construction worker turned urban evangelist. Suppose I tell you that the past, the present, and most certainly the future of the world is in that man's hands, and that when the cosmic day is done and history's curtain rings down, it will be this man from Fargo before whom every person and every creature will bow the knee in eternal devotion and worship.

Do you get it? A blue collar fellow from Fargo who quixotically ended his career ministering to society's disenfranchised is held up as The One in whom, through whom, by whom everything exists, everything has been salvaged, and everything will endure. Surely you would deem such claims astounding. Yet in that first-century context, this is precisely what Paul is saying about Jesus--a man who had been born fifty years earlier and who had died shamefully two decades ago already. And yet Paul says this is The One. Over and over in verses 15-23 Paul uses the two little Greek words, ta panta, which means "all things." All things and every thing, the whole kit-n-kaboodle, intersects with Christ Jesus.

Why? Because he reconciled a wayward world with its holy Creator God and he did it, shockingly enough, through the rather odd avenue of death on a cross. And so if by faith you are located "in Christ"--if that has become your spiritual address in the grander scheme of things--then you are all set in a way that defies description. But if you are outside of Jesus' sphere of influence, then you are out in the cosmic cold. Jesus is where the action is, and you're either in on that holy action or you're not.

Paul picks up all the threads of reality as we know it--as a matter of fact, he picks up even the threads of invisible realities we don't perceive most of the time--he picks up every thread there is, braids it into a strong, thick cord, and then lashes the entire spiritual rope to the heart of Christ Jesus alone. That is the rope we now pick up and follow all the way until we find our true life hidden with God in Christ.

This is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ as Paul sums it up in Colossians 1. It does not brook compromises. It is too radically sensational and sweeping to be chalked up as a mistake on Paul's part. And it is too absolute in its universal dimensions for anyone to be allowed to claim that even given what Paul wrote, maybe Jesus is still just one spiritual option among many. You cannot say the things about Jesus that Paul did but then turn right around and say to someone, "But, even so, if you know of some other good ways to become one with God, by all means pursue them!" No, if Paul was wrong about any of this, he was not just a little wrong--he was so completely off-the-beam that we would have no choice but to conclude that Christianity has been a bogus fraud from the beginning. But if he was right . . . then this is the truth about everything.

This, then, brings us full circle to the baptisms we celebrated and in which we all participated through promising to teach these little ones the gospel. We teach the gospel not because it works the best for us or because of all the spiritual games in town, this is the one we find most appealing. We teach it because we believe it is the core truth about everything. Ta panta! The whole thing and all things somehow or another make sense in the context of Jesus. Conversely, most of life cannot make sense in either the short-run or the long-run outside of the context of Jesus as God's only Son who is now our Lord and Savior.

But earlier I said that the same children whom we vow to raise as disciples are going to face great challenges holding to such particular viewpoints in a pluralistic world where more and more dogmatism of most any kind is a no-no. And this is a challenge that, I believe, we cannot simply shrug off. We cannot look at those who worry that this narrow view will lead to intolerant violence but then dismiss them by saying, "That's their problem!" Near as I can tell, the challenge for the eight parents who stood before us this morning, but also for every one of us in the church today, is this: we need to find a way to stick to what Lord's Day 11 and Colossians 1 convey about the nature of Jesus while at the same time nurturing enough Christ-like gentleness, love, and compassion that we will never use our faith as a bludgeon with which to beat those who disagree with us.

We cannot merely say that our faith will not make us violent, abusive, or cruel, we need to show this in our conduct and in the Christian behavior we nurture in our children. And let us not underestimate the challenges here. We as a Church have, collectively, a history that is not always pretty, filled as it is with Crusades, Inquisitions, witch hunts, and other strong-arm tactics. History's earliest jihads were launched not by Muslims but Christians. We also have to this day fellow believers who turn their moral certitude into the anger unleashed in something described as a "culture war"--a battle that now and then erupts into real violence against dissenters.

So the challenge is a dual one: first, we want our children to believe in the one Savior named Jesus in a world that doubts there even is such a thing as absolute truth. But second, we need to help our children and youth to witness to that gospel in so Christ-like a fashion that the same grace of God that is our fondest hope will shine with intense brightness even when we say things others may deem intolerant. But as a matter of fact, isn't that always the test of our Christ-likeness? It is not how we talk about the gospel in the Fellowship Hall of Calvin Church that counts but how forthrightly, and yet gently, we can do that when we are at Rivertown Crossings, when we are writing letters to the newspaper, when we are sitting in the lunchroom at work surrounded by people who think Christianity is for fogies.

In Word and sacrament this morning, we affirmed the scandal of the gospel and of its very particular claims concerning who is the Lord of all creatures. It is the same scandalous message first heard 2,000 years ago but especially in our present day we need to take to heart the last word Paul wrote in this passage. In verse 23 Paul's last word is diakonos, deacon, servant. It is a humble word. Even after all his exuberance, Paul ends quietly and humbly.

In Greek a diakonos or "deacon" was literally someone who waited on tables, a busboy, one who works for others. That is a fine image to instill into both our baptized children and into every one of us. When it comes to the uncompromising gospel and our witness to it in this world, we are finally not warriors, crusaders, or soldiers, we are humble servants, whose very demeanor should display the joyous goodness and grace of that Savior in whom it all comes together in perfect peace. Amen.