Sermon Text

Many of you are familiar with the WB Yeats poem that is most well known by its famous third line, but its title is “Second Coming:”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. It seemed that way in Colossae, the recipient of this letter, and it can seem that way for us as well. Why else would Paul open this letter with such a powerful statement of centrality of Christ? And note as well that the centrality that Paul passionately proposes is not an ecclesiological centrality, that Christ is the most important thing in the community, therefore get along. Nor is Paul saying that Christ is some sort of ethical exemplar, that Jesus said “love one another,” therefore, start loving one another. There is a particular centrality that Paul is pressing upon the Colossian community. Paul must have been responding to something, something that was happening in Colossae that deserved his, and our, attention. The center that was falling apart in Colossae was not internal division nor warring factions. It was neither an earth-shattering schism nor some complete deconstruction of belief, but something was happening in this church that called upon Paul to boldly and passionately re-assert a spiritual truth. What was happening was a pernicious and pervasive idea that people needed something additional to access what Christ promised to us. In Chapter 2, we read Paul telling the community not to listen to those who say that you need to eat certain foods or drink certain drinks or observe certain festivals or worshiping extra entities or dwell on certain visions. This is akin to Gnosticism, which basically proposed that there was a “secret knowledge” that only a few possessed, a knowledge that was needed to unlock the magic of Christ. Paul chooses to respond in this first chapter with a fundamental prologue, almost a re-telling of the creation story with a Christological twist, a treatise on what, and who, undergirds not only our Christian belief but the very fabric of the universe.

It is difficult to try and make contemporary analogues to this Colossian conundrum. What should cause us to return to the center? There is much that has been built upon this center that is of value. I personally see many of the liturgies and theologies that have developed over the centuries as having made significant contributions to the Christian life. Many of the layers that have been placed upon the foundation, the rafters, joists, and studs that have been built upon the solid beams, as making the structure more sound and more beautiful. And the cosmology in this passage may also have trouble fitting into our modern scientific discoveries. How do we synchronize, if it is at all possible, Christ’s cosmic centrality with modern scientific cosmologies? Or are they talking about different notions of “cosmic?” Perhaps this is akin to the well-known scientist who once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!” Are we going to get laughed at as well by saying, “well it’s Jesus all the way to the down?”

Is there something to this passage that speaks to us today, this affirmation of the glorious center we behold in Christ that is both a spiritual center and a cosmological center? I say yes, and I say yes in three specific ways.

First, the text affirms mystery. John Barclay says this about this letter: “Colossians offers a comprehensive vision of the truth—cosmic and human, spiritual and material, divine and mundane.” This is the biggest of big pictures. It claims that Christ is not just the center of our lives, but the center of all existence.

I would contend that Presbyterians can be good mystics, but that ability is often clouded by our desire to be decent, in good order, and sound smart. Therefore, we like so solve puzzles and resolve problems. And it’s not just due to our good Calvinistic heritage, but a good Calvinistic heritage honed by a scientific revolution and a culture that seems to like living at the extremes. It’s either this, or it’s that, you’re either this, or that. Middle ground is often seen as the realm for fence-sitters and wafflers. This is not good. Such an outlook means we overlook passages such as this as a lovely preamble, but merely an introduction as we await Paul’s excoriation of the hapless Colossians, when he says “be this! Don’t do that!”

I don’t see how you can approach these opening lines, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together without a sense of embracing a mystery, and this responding with wonder. I find it difficult to consider how to parse this passage without first basking in the glory of the imagery. I wish that we would approach Scripture in this way more often.

Second, if we can embrace the existential reality of this passage, we can then approach the ethic of this passage, and that ethic is reconciliation. Unlike other Scriptural passages that are far more focused on Jesus’ death being means of justification, this passage is more interested in the reconciliation that is not just part of what Christ does, but who Christ is. This is an invitation to be part of the center. And, as I mentioned above, this reconciliation is for all. This passage reminds us that we live in God’s world, and it’s not God that lives in our world. Christ reconciles all things to him, not just people, but all things.

From 2004-2007, I was part of a Lilly Foundation funded national pastor theologian group that met four times a year for three years, and one of those years we examined this passage carefully and asked some key questions: how does this passage fit in with scientific cosmologies? Can we liken Christ to a “big bang” moment, or perhaps to the singularity in cosmic physics? Does the natural order need to be reconciled or forgiven? And perhaps on a more whimsical topic: if there is life on other worlds, did Christ die for them as well? Before you start snickering and wondering if the money you are overpaying for your Lilly pharmaceutical prescriptions is going to fund some theological nonsense, these are important questions, mostly because they get us out of our provincial thinking that it’s all about us. That Jesus is for me, but certainly Jesus is not for him, or for her, or for this or for that. This thinking of Christ beyond ourselves moves us beyond the pious sentimentality that treats Jesus more like a boyfriend that’s really good at paying attention to me, and more towards the Christ event that moves beyond ourselves.

Finally, the text affirms Christ not in raising him highest above the highs, but first among firsts and deepest among the deeps. His very being is the thread of our tapestry, the warp and woof of our weaving, his very life and existence, beyond even the idea of him being a “him,” flings wide open the door of our parochial perceptions and gives us the chance to say the great “oh, my God!” and not have it be taking the Lord’s name in vain. Not just an ethical model, but an existential reality. Existence drives ethics, not the other way around. And it’s an ethic not of judgment but of reconciliation. Absent from this passage is a focus on the substitutionary atonement, that Christ died for our sins. What is present is an ethic of reconciliation through the very substance of Christ’s existence.

Yeats’ poem continues:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:

Yeats’ Spiritus Mundi is upon us on Colossians. The second coming is upon us, but not in some eschatological sense that means that Jesus comes back, laser beams coming out of his eyes, plundering and pillaging all the heathens while we smug Christians sit back with that “I told you so” look on our faces. Every time we affirm what Paul affirms, we return anew to the center, bring forth the core of our being into the present, and hope for the future. When we live as if Christ is at the center, we are made fresh and new.

Of all the journeys to the center, I especially enjoy Jules Verne’s journey to the center, in this case, a “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” In Chapter 4, the narrator is speaking with a few professors about this great discovery of a map to the center of the earth. The group goes through a host of impossibilities, most of which are proposed by the skeptical young narrator. The volcano must be choked with lava, it must be far too hot at the center of the earth to survive. But the narrator’s uncle is unperturbed by these potential pitfalls:

“I accept all your explanations,” I [the narrator] said “and Saknussemm is right. He found out the entrance to the bowels of the earth, he has indicated correctly, but that he or anyone else ever followed up the discovery is madness to suppose.”

“Why so, young man?”

“All scientific teaching, theoretical and practical, shows it to be impossible.”

“I care nothing for theories,” retorted my uncle.

“But is it not well-known that heat increases one degree for every seventy feet you descend into the earth? Which gives a fine idea of the central heat. All the matters which compose the globe are in a state of incandescence; even gold, platinum, and the hardest rocks are in a state of fusion.

What would become of us?”

“Don’t be alarmed at the heat, my boy.”

“How so?”

“Neither you nor anybody else know anything about the real state of the earth’s interior. All modern experiments tend to explode the older theories. Were any such heat to exist, the upper crust of the earth would be shattered to atoms, and the world would be at an end.”

A long, learned and not uninteresting discussion followed, which ended in this wise:

“I do not believe in the dangers and difficulties which you, Henry, seem to multiply; and the only way to learn, is like Arne Saknussemm, to go and see.”

“Well,” cried I, overcome at last, “let us go and see. Though how we can do that in the dark is another mystery.”

“Fear nothing. We shall overcome these, and many other difficulties. Besides, as we approach the center, I expect to find it luminous—”

The only way to learn is to go and see. And, like these intrepid travelers who journeyed towards the center, I guess as well, that as we gaze and ponder and live in the center of our faith, we should, as well, expect to find it luminous, filled with the splendor of God’s love, a glory that is at once, too much to bear , too wondrous to ignore, and too beautiful to imagine.