Pilgrim Preaching

Imagining the Invisible God

Christ the King (or The Reign of Christ) | Colossians 1:11-20

"He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15, NET).

Image-Saturated Lives

Think for a moment about the images that surround us every day. How much red, white, and blue did you see on campaign signs in the last few months? How many images of happy and energetic-looking family men and women pictured, ready to go to work for you in Washington? Consumer images may be even more a part of daily life than political images. How many times a day do we see the Target bull’s-eye, the Nike swoosh, or that unmistakable Apple apple? Images are all around us. Each of these pictures plays a role in shaping our imaginations and our actions. We think, feel, and act differently on account of them. 

Colossians says Christ “is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). While an image of God would sound strange to Jewish ears, Romans would take that part of the Christian witness, at least, in stride. Images of the gods abounded both in Roman religion as a whole and in the cult of the emperor. In the Roman empire, Caesar’s image was bigger even than the script Coca Cola is for us. In Colossians Remixed, Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat write that “The image of Caesar and other symbols of Roman power were literally everywhere—in the market, on coins, in the gymnasium, at the gladitorial games, on jewelry, goblets, lamps and paintings."¹ In hundreds of ways every day, images of Caesar reminded people within the Roman empire of where power resided and who was responsible for peace. Harry Maier comments that in Nero’s time, the emperor was at least “the vice-regent of the gods, if not incarnate deity.” To look on the image of Caesar, then, was to have a window to the divine. And what does this divine or near-divine one do for the people? Maier says that he “holds all things together in the body of his Empire of which he is the head, and which he maintains in health and security” (328).²

That is Caesar’s job—except, according to Paul in Colossians, that job has long since been filled. Caesar need not apply. As far back as the beginning of creation, God’s Son has been prior to and more powerful than Caesar and all things, whether visible or invisible, thrones, dominions, principalities or powers. 

This has to sound like a grandiose claim for a little upstart off-shoot of the tiny, provincial religion of the Jews to make in the Roman empire. It stands in direct contrast to Roman claims that the political wisdom, military might, and physical presence of the emperor constituted the image of the divine. Paul says here that all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell not in Caesar, but in Jesus of Nazareth. 

What should we make of this? Is it a branding campaign for the new religion? Is it simply part of a contest for bragging rights? When the former professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura, became governor of Minnesota, cars with Minnesota license plates began showing up with the bumper sticker, “My governor can beat up your governor.” Sometimes the Christ Hymn of Colossians (1:15-20) can sound something like that, like boasting intended to offer the rhetorical equivalent of a kick in the shins to Caesar.  

Images of Jesus

Yet when we put the claim that the Son is the image of the invisible God next to actual images of Jesus’ life, we see that Paul is doing something far different from just claiming superior fire power. The hymn claims that the true nature of power and peace is fundamentally different from what we usually see.

Look, for instance, at the images in the gospel reading assigned alongside this text from Colossians. What does the image of the invisible God look like there? In the gospel reading for this Sunday, Jesus is being crucified under the charge, “King of the Jews.” The firstborn over all creation is not just “above all things” in general. When we catch up to him in the gospel reading, he is specifically above the soldiers who have fixed him to a cross with nails and rope. From that perspective, he says, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23:34). The one who is before all things is also here between two thieves. When one of them asks to be remembered, Jesus finds the breath to say, “I tell you the truth; today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Luke shows us a picture in which Jesus brings peace by interceding for his torturers. Jesus brings peace by promising a blessed future to one who is dying beside him. Jesus brings peace not by exercising superior fire power but by absorbing the violence and making peace in the midst of violence.

Christ the King

One of the criticisms of a Christian festival named, “Christ the King” Sunday, is that it is too triumphalistic. The concern is that naming Christ as “king” buys into hierarchical ways of imagining good order that can finally only be maintained by force. To guard against that, the Scriptures almost never call Jesus “king,” or speak of his “kingdom” (cf. Col. 1:13), except in the context of his trial and crucifixion.³

Colossians is no exception to this rule. The empire sustained the Roman pax (peace), such as it was, with rhetoric about the emperor’s benevolence and wisdom combined with brute force to punish enemies of the state and squelch unrest. By contrast, Colossians says that the peace that Jesus brings is “peace through the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). Pax Romana required the killing of tens of thousands, including Jesus, for various infractions of Roman order. Jesus, as he is being murdered, does the work of true reconciliation. 

The Christ Hymn does not offer a kick in the shins to Caesar, and it does not try to beat Caesar at his own game of winning through intimidation. It declares that Caesar’s claims are false, and it gives us an alternative image of God’s own benevolence, wisdom, power, and peace.

Notes

¹Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed : Subverting the Empire (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 83. BACK TO POST

²Harry O. Maier, "A Sly Civility: Colossians and Empire," Journal for the Study of the New Testament 27, no. 3 (2005) : 323-49. BACK TO POST

³Exceptions to this rule are Nathaniel’s confession upon meeting Jesus, “You are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel” (John 1:49), and references in 1 Timothy 6:15, Revelation 17:14, and Revelation 19:16 to Jesus as “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.” BACK TO POST

Related Posts

On Colossians 1:1-14, see also “Rescue, Transfer, Daily Life.”

Redemption, Reformation

Reformation, Years ABC | Romans 3:19-28

“They are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). 

Paul has just spent two chapters making sure that all the Gentiles among his hearers and all the Jews alike will recognize themselves to be pretty much out of wiggle room. Gentiles, he argues, might not have had the law to guide them, but they had revelation from God in the natural world, and they did not follow what they knew. Jews have even less of an excuse. They had the law and yet did not remain faithful to the covenant God made with them. Quoting Psalm 14, Paul concludes, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10). 

While all the religious language in Paul’s argument might not speak to you, you don’t have to be a particularly religious person to look around the world and see that it’s a mess. And it doesn’t take much for most of us to admit that at least some of the mess has our fingerprints on it. Sometimes we can draw a straight line from something we did to some harm that happened to another. Most of the time, the lines are messier than that. We are part of systems that are broken, so we are not the only ones responsible. Or it’s not that we did something; it’s that we failed to act when an action might have helped someone else, or we tried to help and we made things worse. 

I remember the preacher, Will Campbell, somewhere telling the story of his grandfather taking him to see a public execution, a hanging. Reflecting on the experience as an adult, Campbell commented that he thought the old man was trying to show him, “The world is this way, and it should not be.” We kill each other, legally and illegally.  We kill each other, locally and globally. We kill each other, literally and metaphorically. The world is this way, and it should not be. 

The Righteousness of God

So Paul sets up this scenario where everyone listening to his letter is staring at their shoes and wishing it would just be over soon, and then he says, “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed” (Romans 3:21). 

Of course, it is not immediately good news that the righteousness of God has been revealed. In Luke, “the righteousness of God” is pictured this way: 

51 He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the 
thoughts of their hearts. 

52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly; 

53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:51-53).

When Old Testament prophets speak of the God’s righteousness, they are pointing to God setting things right for God’s people. The little people will be vindicated, and Israel will know justice, peace, and prosperity. 

Paul has just spent those opening chapters of Romans documenting how far we all are from that vision. Now, when he says the righteousness of God has been revealed, you have to wonder, is this good news or bad news? If no one is righteous, not even one, then a righteous God might just give up on the human project altogether. 

Redemption

Paul continues, “For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23f). When you redeem something, you recapture its value. Think of a coupon or a returnable bottle. The store or the manufacturer buys them back from you. They are worth cash. 

In Christ Jesus, God redeems not coupons or bottles, but people. Paul would not have had to look far for a case in point. He himself had tried to do the right thing and ended up persecuting the church. The book of Acts tells us that when the deacon, Stephen, was martyred, the men doing the killing laid their cloaks at the feet of the young man we know as Paul, and he “approved of their killing him” (Acts 8:1). The world is this way, and it should not be. Paul had been on the wrong side of God’s righteousness. And God’s response? The Lord Jesus had found him on the road to Damascus and redeemed him for something better.

The whole ministry of Jesus was dedicated to this kind of buying back. He healed people—a few he even raised the dead—and he gave them back to their families. He ate with tax collectors and other sinners, people everyone else had already written off as a loss. He bought them back. The justice he embodied in his life and his death was not content to rail against sin. The justice of God that Christ lived out so faithfully aimed to break the power of sin, to restore sinners so that they could love God and those among whom God has placed them. 

Reformation

The Protestant tradition speaks of God as always reforming the church. Not just individually, but also together, in the body of Christ, we drift away from the righteousness of God as Jesus lived it out and made it available to all. Sometimes we abandon it altogether. Part of what we observe with Reformation Day is this movement of God, in Christ and through the Spirit, to redeem not just individuals, but also the church. 

One of the stories of Protestant Reformation is the story of God buying back a church whose creative ways of keeping the budget balanced (that is, through the selling of indulgences) had effectively put a price on “the free gift,” as Paul describes being right with God (cf. Romans 5:15f). The reformers rejected the idea that anyone could buy or sell the righteousness that God bestowed. 

It is easier to recognize the compromises of the church in a previous century than it is to see such failures in our own time. Yet just as it is always true in our individual lives and in our societies that “there is no one righteous, not even one,” the same is true of our individual congregations and of the church as a whole. (Those who have spent any time at all in the church are likely to find that illustrations of the way, “The church is this way, and it should not be,” come rather too easily to mind.) The people of God lose our way. To say that the church is always being reformed is to say that God is still paying attention, and paying the price, to redeem our communities from all the ways we sell out to sin, death, and the power of the devil. God is still buying us back for something better.

Welcome to Pilgrim Preaching

Welcome

I started this blog in 2003 on my first sabbatical from my teaching post at Luther Seminary. I'm Lutheran, with a Ph. D. from Duke University. I have taught at Luther Seminary since 1997.

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You can find postings listed by text in the Scripture Index or by the Sunday of the church year a text is assigned in the Lectionary Index. The search box at the left is also a good way to see if I've written on a particular text or theme. 

Bible Translations

Quotations designated (NET) are from THE NET BIBLE®. Copyright © 2005 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. http://www.bible.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Quotations designated (NRSV) are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. Copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Muddling Through

Proper 28C | 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15

Note on Adding vv. 14-15

The Revised Common Lectionary assigns 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13. Yet the topic of faithful waiting in community actually extends to v. 15. Reading through verse 15, we see that the letter offers two reasons for avoiding a community member who is idle: the rationale in verse 6 has to do with the harmful effect such association may have on the hearers of the letter. The rationale in v. 14 is that avoiding such a one may serve as a “wake-up call” to that one and, it is implied at least, result in changed behavior and the return of the shunned into the community. Verse 15 also makes it clear that the undisciplined are not enemies of the community; rather, they are brothers and sisters.  

From the text as a whole (with vv. 14-15 added), one gets the sense that separation from the idle and busybodies is an interim gesture. While relationships in the community are strained in the near term by this behavior, the text offers an alternative both to “just living with it,” and to dismissing the undisciplined. The response urged on the Thessalonians aims not so much at purifying the community from such influences as at holding each other accountable in a way that makes an authentic common life possible for everyone.¹

Life in a Small Group

I often assign group work in the seminary classes I teach. I do it to foster the kind of collaboration that people working in the church will eventually practice in ministry as they work with committees in a congregation, staff members, and other community leaders. I do it also because almost any project worth doing requires help from lots of different kind of people, so why not incorporate that kind of working together into learning?

For the most part, this group work goes pretty well. A group of people almost always has more resources to draw on for an assignment than any one person alone. People learn to trust a little of their grade to others, and they learn that their fellow students are often smarter and more interesting than they thought. 

But it is not all roses. Every class has at least a couple of slackers. A few people each year just coast along. They miss group meetings; they hang back while others volunteer; they promise work and then fail to deliver. People who are working steadily start to feel as if the slackers are just taking advantage of them.

Once in a while, a group will have the opposite problem. A micromanager emerges. This person is always emailing reminders to others about what they are supposed to be doing, always editing the group’s written work, always posting messages on discussion threads that imply others could or should be doing more for the team. People on the receiving end of this kind of attention start to feel as if the micromanager has no confidence at all in them. 

Imagine what a mess you could have if this kind of group process went on throughout a whole semester. 

Waiting and Working 

Now imagine what a mess this could be if it were not happening in a semester-long class, but in a congregation of Christians in a life together whose end was nowhere in sight. Something like this seems to be happening in Thessalonica. In his first letter to the church there, Paul had described a remarkable end to the present age, complete with an archangel, a trumpet, the appearance of the Lord Jesus on the clouds, and the resurrection of those who had died before the end (cf. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). 

Different people in the church seem to have responded to this news in different ways. Some in the group pasted those “Jesus is coming soon. Look busy!” bumper stickers onto their cars, and began getting busily into everyone else’s business. 

Others saw no point in work at all. Like a second-semester senior in school, they could not see how, in light of the future that awaited them, the work in front of them mattered. If this present world is passing away, what difference does daily work make?

In a new letter to the Thessalonians, Paul, or someone writing in his name, brings up the topic of the end again. He reassures everyone that God chose them from the beginning and called them through the gospel, and he urges them to hold on to the traditions they learned from him while they wait for an end that has not yet come (cf. 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17). 

One of those traditions has to do with not freeloading in the community. If you are part of a small group (like a family, or a church, or a seminar in graduate school) you show up for work. It’s that simple. 

Counting on Each Other

A few years ago, after the first day of a course, a student approached me to say that he was dropping the class. The requirement of group work was a deal breaker for him. “I just will not trust a third of my grade to other people,” he said to me. Whether that student was right to assume that his grade would be better, or at least safer, if he worked alone, his decision not to risk it illustrates the problem. We usually think we have two choices where relationships with other people are concerned: (1) we can do our best to ignore and/or pick up after people who make our work harder, or (2) we can go it alone. 

Paul imagines a third way: he describes relationships in which people hold themselves and one another accountable to each other’s good. Before we dismiss this as some big, utopian dream of the new community only possible at the End, notice its context. Paul is articulating an interim ethic. He is talking to a bunch of people who know they are waiting for something better and who are, like the rest of us, muddling through in the meantime. What to do when problems arise? We could start by being truthful about the consequences that actions have and calling one another to something better. People who are “not doing their own work and meddling in the work of others” (2 Thessalonians 3:11, NET) should “work quietly and so provide their own food to eat” (v. 12, NET). 

Some Christian churches get enthralled with all this holding each other to account. They call for public repentance of public sins and they make much of the holiness and purity of their community. 

Lutherans tend to slide into the opposite ditch. With our emphasis on the way Christians never stop being simultaneously justified and sinners, and our emphasis on the unmerited grace of God for sinners, Lutherans are particularly susceptible to the heresy that it is unchristian to have any rules at all. But “no rules” (or antinomianism) leaves us not with authentic, grace-filled Christian community but just a lot of unspoken resentment about how some of us are working harder than others and it just isn’t fair. Pretty soon “authentic Christian community” is too big a dream, and we find ourselves back to the two choices of that student who dropped the class. We can either ignore or pick up after people who make our lives harder, or we can go it alone.

Muddling Through

At some point in classrooms, families, and congregations, it becomes clear that we will only have authentic common work and life together if we can count on each other. 2 Thessalonians equips us in two ways for such common work and life. First, the opening chapters of this letter testify to God’s power for good as greater than all sorts of evil. The future we wait for belongs to God, so we wait not with anxiety or inactivity, but just by doing what needs to be done in the present.

In the context of community life whose future belongs to God, the text also tells us that being Christian does not mean never saying a hard word to a brother or sister in Christ, nor does it mean never hearing such a word directed to us. We will only have authentic common work and life together if we can count on each other, and one of the things we count on each other for is this kind of truth-telling. It will not be perfect. We will muddle through in this work as justified sinners muddle whenever we attempt to do what is right (cf. 2 Thessalonians 3:13). Nonetheless, part of our commitment to each other is a commitment to speak as honestly as possible about everyday things, things like working and food. As we do, we will find that there is enough of each for everyone. 

     ¹As Judy Skeen, “Not as Enemies, but Kin: Discipline in the Family of God--2 Thessalonians 3:6-10," Review & Expositor 96/2 (1999): 287-94, writes, “This distance created is intended to bring the rebellious family members back to the disciplined way of life” (293). BACK TO POST

Light Switches & the Obedience of Faith

Advent 4A | Romans 1:1-7

Other Texts for the Day

Isaiah 7:10-16
Matthew 1:18-25 (See also "Do Not Be Afraid")

"Through him we have received grace and our apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles on behalf of his name" (Romans 1:5, NET)

Trusting the Switch

Do you know that experience, during a power outage, of going into a room and flicking the light switch on? What amazes me about it is how I never learn. I know the power is out. I may even have a flashlight in one hand, and still, with the other, I’m feeling for the switch. I find it. I snap it on, and nothing. Power outage or not, I do it, and every time I do, I expect the lights to come on.  It is second nature when you walk into a dark room to turn on the light.

When Paul talks about “the obedience of faith” in Romans, he is getting at the relationship between what we believe and what we do. We flick a light switch with total trust that light will flood the room. The fact that we flick light switches even after we know that the power is out is a testimony to a trust so embedded in us that it shows up in our actions even when we should know better. The simplest of actions bears witness to faith, that is, faith in the way lights and light switches work. 

Part of what “the obedience of faith” means is that our faith, that is, our trust in God, becomes observable, just the way your trust in a light switch is observable in your action to change its position. Trust in God comes out through our hands and feet, as it were, not by some force of will and not by some resolution to turn over a new, more trusting, leaf. The obedience of faith is just faith made manifest in actions, and all of us are always acting on the basis of what we believe. 

But here a problem presents itself. You know this problem well if you have ever confessed anxiety to a well-meaning friend and heard in reply, “Don’t worry,” or “You just have to have a little faith.” Hearing that the obedience of faith flows naturally from one’s trust in God is great. You can stop worrying about the “obedience” part of the obedience of faith. But that news does not make the “faith” part actually happen. Trust in the future is related to performance in the past. I trust that light switch so much because it has so often demonstrated its trustworthiness to me.

God's Obedience of Faith

God demonstrates trustworthiness too, but not quite on the same terms as the light switch. 

In the first lesson for today, the prophet Isaiah is the king’s well-meaning friend telling him not to worry so much. The Lord has told Isaiah to tell King Ahaz, “Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint” (Isaiah 7:4). Ahaz is not easily quieted. He has heard that two different kings are joining forces to come against him in battle, and he is worried. 

On the theory that it would be easier for Ahaz to trust in something he can see, Isaiah tells him to ask for a sign of God’s faithfulness, and when Ahaz will not do that, Isaiah says, “OK, the Lord will give you sign anyway. A young woman will conceive and bear a son. Before he is old enough to make decisions for himself, the two kings you are so worried about will have been assigned to the dustbin of history” (cf. Isaiah 7:14-16).  

Joseph is worried too. In the gospel reading, Joseph is on the verge of dismissing Mary quietly. He has found out Mary is pregnant, and he knows the child is not his. In a dream an angel tells him, “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:20-21).

Signs?

A young woman, a little child, and several years to see how it will all work out…. These hardly seem like elements of a sign from God; they seem more like the “wait-and-see” of everyday life, along with a little something unbelievable thrown in: powerful kings overthrown, a virgin bearing a son, a child growing up to save his people from their sins. Even so, after a few millennia of watching God’s redemptive work playing out in the arena of everyday life, it does come to look like something you can count on. 

Paul offers his own version of the story. He tells the Romans that Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh. That is the ordinary part: like tens of thousands before him and millions after him, Jesus was a Jew. Paul also tells the Romans that Jesus was raised from the dead. Not so ordinary. Again, the ordinary bumps up against the unbelievable, and again, the grace of God bursts forth. 

Trusting the saving activity of God to be manifest in daily life is never as mechanistic as the exchange between me and my light switch. Real relationships are involved in trusting God. When Paul talks about the obedience of faith, he is talking about life with God and with other human beings. The news of what God has done in Jesus Christ inspires an obedience of faith that is faith in God’s saving, redeeming righteousness and obedience that we live out with a whole lot of other people of God who are, like us, sometimes obedient and sometimes disobedient. Relationships have more variables, and a greater margin for error, than your standard human-to-light-switch equation. 

Nonetheless, God proves trustworthy. We watch God’s redemptive work playing out in the arena of everyday life, this insistence God has on redeeming people to love God and one another (cf. Romans 13:10), and we realize it is something we can count on, something we can trust. The obedience of faith is that trust made manifest in our own ordinary lives. It is also, Paul says, what God intends for all.