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. 

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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.

Prayers and Peace

Proper 20 | Pentecost 17C
(also the text for Thanksgiving B)

1 Timothy 2:1-7

Compromises in Paul's Later Letters?

One of the common criticisms of the pastoral epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus) is that they domesticate the gospel we know from Paul’s earlier letters. Paul had preached that a whole new age had begun in Jesus Christ and as a result, not just humanity’s relationship with God, but also the most basic relationships among human beings—those between slaves and free people, between men and women, between Jews and everyone else—had been reconfigured. Standard ways of imagining human beings to be ranked or separated from each other were no longer valid. While Galatians 3:27-29 is the Pauline text most quoted to demonstrate how Paul’s message wiped out the usual “us/them” categories, one can find language throughout the letters about how God’s impartiality and God’s grace for all have eliminated distinctions previously taken for granted.

With that news in mind, it is possible to read the pastoral epistles and come to the conclusion that someone—either an older Paul or one of his disciples—has given up on the gospel Paul preached. In place of a whole new way of understanding ourselves in relation to our neighbors, the pastorals seem to give us back many of the old rules: they commend hierarchy as a way to order life within the Christian fellowship; they call for men and women to have separate, tightly circumscribed roles within the community of faith; they give advice to slaves and masters that leaves completely unchallenged the ownership of one Christian by another (not to mention the ownership of one human by another). In crucial ways, the argument goes, the later Pauline letters abandon the grand, alternative, egalitarian present and future that Paul had previously associated so closely with the work of God in Christ. In place of Paul’s former vision is a picture of the church well on its way to making a habit of compromising with its surrounding culture. 

Prayers for Everyone

Is 1 Timothy 2:1-7 an example of that kind of compromise? Here the author urges that “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Timothy 2:1-2, NRSV). Do we have here the beginning of the ‘Go along to get along’ accommodation to culture that has plagued the Christian church for centuries? Does this letter encourage us to trade speaking truth to power for living in peace and quiet?

If we stopped at verse 2, these conclusions might fit with the text. When we read on through verse 7, a different picture emerges. It turns out that “a quiet and peaceable life” is only one of two reasons to pray for everyone, and alongside the second reason, “quiet and peaceable” looks less accommodating than we might have thought.

From the remaining verses of the text, we find out that we pray for everyone because God welcomes such prayer, and God welcomes such prayer because God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4 NRSV). 

Really, Everyone

“Everyone” is a lot of people, some of whom could hurt us, some of whom may even want to destroy our way of life. (Often I really want God to be more discerning.) 

Remember how Ananias, a follower of Jesus, heard in prayer that he was supposed to go to Saul, who had traveled to Damascus for the express purpose of arresting followers of Jesus? In prayer, Ananias updates Jesus, “‘Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.’ But the Lord said to him, ‘Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name’” (Acts 9:13-16, NRSV).

Is what Ananias went through the kind of peace and quiet God has in mind for us?

In 1 Timothy 1, when Paul (or a later writer describing Paul’s experience) had spoken of being saved, he described the experience in terms of his having been changed from a persecutor of the church to one strengthened by Christ for ministry. Elsewhere I have likened this re-purposing—this salvation—to the work of fashioning swords into plowshares. 1 Timothy testifies that God wants that kind of transformation to take place not just in Paul’s life, not just in the lives of other Christians, but in everyone’s life.

By mentioning “kings and others in authority,” the author makes it clear that “everyone” for whom we offer “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings” includes people powerful enough to hurt us and those we love. Imagine offering an intercession for the Taliban next Sunday. What might people say after church? Could you give thanks for the current president of the United States? For those in the Tea Party movement? What would happen if you offered supplication for drug dealers in your town? You don’t have to pray that God prospers their work, but you do have to pray for them. What would you say? And if you cannot pray for all these people, out loud, in church, why not?

Sometimes “everyone” is even harder as it moves closer to home: the guy who fired you, the friend who dumped you, the lover who, you see now, never cared about you at all. Intercede for that boss whose true, double-dealing colors no one else seems able to see. Pray for all of them. Pray any way you like, knowing that the One to whom you are praying desires them (even them) “to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”

From a text in one of the pastoral epistles, a risky, subversive way of being Christian starts to come into focus: we do not pray for the powerful in order to be left alone by them. We pray so that our paths may cross with these people—in Christ. If our prayers for them result in God’s deepest desire, the distinction between “we” who are saved and “they” who are not saved will disappear. 

Peace and Quiet Remixed

And what of that first reason the lesson gives for why we pray, “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Timothy 2:2)? This particular quiet and peaceable life is not a life in which Christians blend so well into the surrounding culture that our lives threaten none of its values. God’s desire is (and has been for some time) bigger than that. In Hebrew, the quiet, peaceable life about which 1 Timothy speaks is called shalom. It is peace, and also safety, wholeness, even friendship—for everyone. In our world this sort of thing often appears to be a long way off. That is, of course, all the more reason to pray.

On Christ Saving Sinners

Proper 19 | Pentecost 16C
1 Timothy 1:12-17

Making Friends with Paul

In 1 Timothy, at that place in a letter where we would expect thanksgiving for the letter’s recipients, we get something else. In this letter, thanksgiving is offered for the way that Christ has called Paul and made his own ministry possible. To those of us who are pretty sure that a follower of Paul, rather than the apostle himself, wrote 1 Timothy, this beginning brings a smile. One of Paul’s students sets out to construct a letter in the apostle’s voice. How shall he begin? Why not begin with content that can be heard as arrogant and self-absorbed? That’s it! Of course. I imagine the disciple reviewing his first paragraph and saying to himself, “Nailed it!”

(Most of us have had remarkable teachers who were like Paul in at least this respect: they were odd combinations of brilliance, arrogance, self-doubt, and foolishness. It may help when we spend time with Paul’s letters to offer Paul the same level of charity that we would give to the great, flawed, beloved teachers we have known.)

Mercy

So Paul, or someone trying to get Paul’s voice right, begins with thanksgiving for the mercy shown to him. Mercy is getting something good just at a time when it would make more sense if you got nothing, or getting something good at a time when you should have received punishment. To understand the gift of mercy that Paul talks about, we have to have at least a sketch of what Paul was doing when he got what he did not deserve. So Paul fills in some back story: in short, he was “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” (1 Timothy 1:13).

For more detail, one can look at the story of a mob-killing of Stephen in Acts. Luke reports that witnesses to the stoning “laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul” (Acts 7:58), also known as Paul. A couple of chapters later in Acts, Saul is “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9:1a). He requests letters from the high priest to the synagogues at Damascus, “so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:2). Paul himself describes his former life by saying, “I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it” (Galatians 1:13).

This is the one who receives mercy: one who was so sure of himself that he could claim to practice violence in defense of justice. In 1 Timothy, Paul says he acted in ignorance, as if he imagines that ignorance offers an excuse. It doesn’t, but Paul is not the only one to marvel at the contrast between the good we thought our actions would have and the harm we actually did. “I didn’t know it would turn out that way.” “I was trying to help.” “I didn’t think anyone would get hurt.” No matter what we intended, still, there we are, standing in the need of mercy.

Salvation: Swords to Plowshares

Having described his past, Paul goes on, “This saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15). Paul’s claim to be “chief of sinners” may strike many hearers as one more bit of evidence of his life-long arrogance. Yet it would be a mistake to get stuck in analyzing the flaws in a personality here. The thanksgiving emphasizes Paul’s sinfulness only insofar as it demonstrates the surpassing greatness of Christ’s work to save Paul, to strengthen him, and to call him to something better (cf. 1 Timothy 1:12). The words point beyond Paul, and beyond sinfulness, to the work of Christ to exercise “the utmost patience” in order to save blasphemers, persecutors, people of violence, and other sinners. Christ makes Paul an example to show that if Paul can be saved, anyone can be saved.

To figure out what it means for Christ to “save sinners,” we have to look back to the first verse of this lesson. There, we see that Christ strengthened Paul, judged him faithful and appointed Paul to Christ’s service. “Saving,” as Paul describes what happens to him, is not moving a name from one column to another. Saving is certainly not ignoring sin and the harm it does. Saving is re-commissioning someone for new work. It is taking a persecutor of the church and turning him into an ambassador of Christ. Saving is the human equivalent of fashioning swords into plowshares. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Paul should know. He is Exhibit A.

The fact that Paul is Exhibit A tells us one more thing about salvation in Christ. From Galatians 1-2, we know that before his experience of the risen Jesus, Paul was bright, zealous, ambitious, and quite sure he was right about things. From the rest of his letters as well as the testimony of Luke in the book of Acts, we know that after his experience of the risen Jesus, Paul was bright, zealous, ambitious, and quite sure he was right about things.

In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called, “Tapestry,” Captain Picard has an experience of seeing what his life would have been like if one particularly embarrassing chapter had been removed from it. Afterward, he confides to his first officer, "There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of. There were... loose threads—untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads, I unraveled the tapestry of my life."

Paul is genuinely remorseful about having persecuted the church, yet he cannot remove that thread and still tell the story of his life and his new life in Christ. In the end he comes to see Christ as having re-commissioned even this chapter along with all of the elements of his character that led him to do such a thing. At least part of the miracle of salvation in Jesus Christ, as testified to by the apostle Paul’s life, is that Christ does not unravel the tapestry of those whose lives he saves. He does not unravel anything, but out of that mess of threads and stitching, he creates something for the neighbor’s good.

Talking about "Paul" in the Later Pauline Letters

A. K. M. Adam, writing for Working Preacher, counsels against discussing theories of authorship in sermons on Pauline texts: "If you trust that Paul wrote the letter, just go ahead and preach; if you doubt it, do not make a point of that within the sermon (instead of saying 'Paul says,' you can say 'The epistle says' or 'Our lesson says,' or avoid using constructions that would require identifying personal authorship). Then, schedule a series of educational events to explore the reasons and counterarguments about Pauline authorship at some other time."

I agree with AKMA's reasons for this advice. He points out that often preachers use this topic in order to take a swipe at those who disagree with them about authorship questions, or in order just to demonstrate that they went to seminary while most of the people listening to them did not. It is also true that if the comment about authorship is offhand, one may only communicate to one's hearers, "Our preacher doesn't believe the Bible," and if the comment is extended, it can be really difficult to find one's way back from such an excursus to a sermon that has something to do with the content of a text rather than the identity of its author.

Yet the advice to say just "The epistle says," or "Our lesson says," when preaching a text from the letters whose Pauline authorship one doubts is harder to follow than it sounds. I find such language hopelessly awkward, especially when Pauline autobiography is part of the text. When in 1 Timothy, for example, the author speaks of being the foremost of sinners, it is not quite right to say, "Our lesson speaks of Paul as foremost among sinners." It is rather the case that Paul speaks of himself this way, according to 1 Timothy, just as he had, according to 1 Corinthians, referred to himself as one "untimely born" (1 Corinthians 15:8). I do not know a preacher who would hesitate to say, "Paul speaks of himself..." when preaching on the 1 Corinthians text, yet many in my circle would hesitate to speak that way when preaching a text from 1 Timothy.

I think it is right for preachers not to labor over issues of authorship in a sermon, but my practice is slightly different from AKMA's. One time within a sermon, I will say something like this: "Here Paul, or someone writing in Paul's name, offers counsel to Timothy, a young leader in the still very young Christian church." After that, I will say "Paul" when I am speaking of the author. I present authorship options, then I move on in such a way that people are invited into the text on its own terms—even if the terms on which the text constructs authorship are, in my judgment, fictional.

I'm not claiming that this practice is any better than those AKMA suggests, only that it is less awkward for me. My guess is that answers to questions like this one are highly contextual. That is, as preachers and congregations get to know each other, various approaches to teaching and "wondering aloud" on topics like authorship within a sermon surface. Avoid sounding like Dr. Science ("He knows more than you do."). Avoid saying things you do not believe. Do what you can to invite people into a text rather than distancing them from it. Within these general guidelines, a good practice for your community will likely take shape.

Rescue, Transfer, Daily Life

Proper 10 | Pentecost 7C

Colossians 1:1-14

With help from Luke 10:25-37

I almost always recommend against trying to preach two biblical texts in one sermon, especially when the two have not been chosen to coordinate with each other, which is the case with these texts even though the Revised Common Lectionary assigns them to be read the same day. Alas, a connection between Col. 1:13-14 and the parable of the Good Samaritan occurred to me, and after I thought of it, I couldn't refrain from working with it. So here I break one of my own rules. —Mary

"Where are we now in life?"

In his book, At a Journal Workshop, Jungian therapist Ira Progoff directs readers to begin to bring their lives into focus by asking, "Where am I now in life?"¹ He notes that "now" will mean different things to different people.

"For one person this present period in his life may reach back three years since he had a car accident and was hospitalized. Because of the changes it brought about, the period of time since that event is the Now in which he is living. For another person this present period may be merely a few weeks since he met a new friend, moved to a different city, began a new job, or underwent some other significant change in his circumstances. Since that time his life has borne the imprint of that event, and it, therefore, is the definitive factor in his present period" (65).

Rescue & Transfer

The sentence that ends the scripture reading from Colossians 1 can be seen as the way the apostle Paul or someone writing in his name attempts to bring the lives of the Colossians into focus. Where are they now in life? The last verses of the reading offer an answer: "God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins" (Colossians 1:13-14). "Now" for the Colossians began with rescue and transfer.

That man who fell among thieves could tell his story that way too: rescue and transfer. "I was traveling, and well... I don't remember much; they took everything; I must have passed out. I woke up in the ditch; the pain—I was out again; then I wasn't in the ditch anymore. Someone had brought me to an inn." Using theological language to imagine that same movement from ditch to inn, the letter to the Colossians says God "has rescued us from the power of darkness and has transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son."

Rescue and transfer stories are often quite dramatic. Colossians uses the language of power, and it fits: something had hold of us, and then it didn't anymore. Imagine the rage and shame that take hold after a company or a person dumps you. Everyone is sympathetic at first. Everyone expects you to need time. And then, after a while your friends find gentle ways to tell you it is time to move on. Still, you seem to be owned by the anger. This sort of thing can go on for years. When finding a new "now" is easy, we do not need rescue because we can transfer ourselves to a new time or place in our lives. If the man who fell among thieves had not been really hurt, he could have found his own way out of the ditch.

In contrast to "shaking it off," rescue is waking up in bed, in an inn, when the last thing you remember is wondering if you would die in the ditch. Colossians talks about that experience. You come to a new place. From there you see that as bad as the old place was, it is not any longer where you live; it is your past. That realization itself can be incredibly freeing. In fact, some people define the Christian life in terms of this kind of freedom. "I once was lost but now am found," the hymn says, "was blind, but now I see."²

In the text from Colossians, however, the transfer is not the end of the story; it is the beginning. The transfer marks the boundary between past and present. So what about the present? The present features intercession.

Now What?

The prayer here at the beginning of Colossians confirms that the Christian life is not just one dramatic rescue experience after another. Sometimes the Christian life is just daily life, and we need daily help for that. Just as the man who fell among thieves continued to need attention after arriving at the inn, so Christians on the other side of a great rescue need "daily bread." And just as the Samaritan not only paid for the wounded man's first night in the inn but also promised to continue to provide or his healing, so God continues to provide for God's people on the other side of the dramatic transfer from one realm to another.

Paul prays that the Colossians' daily life may be "worthy of the Lord" (Colossians 1:10). The "-ing" words in the New English Translation summarize what such a life looks like. As God answers the prayer, those to whom the letter is written will be:

• "bearing fruit in every good deed,
• growing in the knowledge of God,
• being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for the display of all patience and steadfastness,
• joyfully giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the saints' inheritance in the light" (Colossians 1:10b-12, NET).

Over and over again, Colossians will blur the boundary between Christ and members of the church. That kind of blurring is happening here. This prayer is not a "to do" list for individual Christians or congregations. Instead, it is a prayer that God will shape our daily life—at home, at work, at play, at church—so that it will be characterized by those things that characterized the life of Christ: good works on behalf of others, interest in the character of God, power from God (love) that "endures all things" (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:7), and enough awareness of what we've been given that we offer thanksgiving and experience joy.

What would it be like to pray this prayer for your congregation? Is one of the petitions currently more important for the "now" in which you all find yourselves? How might the people in your congregation—or the group of you together—be different as the prayer is answered? A sermon could spend time with questions like these. In whatever way it is proclaimed, this prayer testifies to the fact that on the other side of rescue, even something as mundane as "where we are now in life," can bear witness to the risen life of Jesus Christ.

¹Ira Progoff, At a Journal Workshop (New York: Dialogue House Library, 1975), 65. BACK TO POST

²John Newton, "Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound," in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 779. BACK TO POST

Colossians, Paul