The Cosmic Christ

Mark 8:22-26

Colossians 1:15-20

If I had to categorize my faith commitments in the relationship terms of Facebook, I’d say, “I’m in a relationship with Jesus Christ . . . but also seeing other people.”  That is, I’m committed to organizing my life around Jesus Christ . . . but I continue to flirt with other figures, and to be attracted to other ideas, and other ways of life.

So who are these others I’m seeing?  I’m not sure I can name them all.  But it happens pretty frequently.  It happens whenever I find my deepest joy in some other source.  Sometimes my joy is grounded in optimism about the economy, or excitement about fancy gadgets and software or scientific breakthroughs; or in the dream every parent has of the pleasure of simply being left alone; or in the energy I get from travel or reading. 

 

I also flirt with others when I drift towards organizing my life, my energy, and my commitments around something other than Jesus Christ – around novels and art that move me and speak to me, or around native American spirituality and ecology, or Buddhist compassion, or Marxist critiques of the way religion can deaden people, or most often, around envious and jealous glances at what others have and I don’t.

The letter to the Colossians was written to a congregation already gathered around Jesus Christ.  They had made a start.  They had a foundation.

But there were cultural pressures – forces at play in their surroundings – that bent them in other directions.  Their community had gathered people who brought clusters of ideas and practices from their wider host culture.  Some of them fit, but some of them sat a little awkwardly with the congregation’s loyalty to the good news of Jesus Christ.

And in their struggles to worship, pray, and care for one another – without really realizing it – they had allowed their lives to take on commitments and loyalties and symbols and metaphors that blocked important features of the good news as Paul and his associates understood it.  This happens to every congregation, including us.  You travel through life, you do your best to adapt, to learn and grow and cope.  But we pick up stray habits.  We develop tics.  We forget whole regions of what we once valued.  We misprioritize things and get out of balance.

Our reading today is directed to people like us.  It aims to call before us the living Christ in all his splendor and majesty.  It attempts to call us away from our slumber, away from our blind spots, and our treasured half-truths into the full light of the good news.  If you get Jesus Christ into focus, all else falls into place.

Our reading today is likely a hymn or poem that has been incorporated into the letter.  It is praise for the risen Christ that confesses that in him we have all we need.

Because all things have been created in him, through him, and for him – we are freed from living as if Jesus Christ were just one power among many.  He has no serious rivals.  And even though we now belong to him, we are not cut off from the world around us.  Absolutely everything has Jesus Christ as Lord and ultimate goal.

Because in him all things hold together – JC comes to us as the secret and mysterious source of all the world’s energy and all the world’s joy.  He comes not as something alien, something from the outside, or something tacked on – but rather as the One who makes sense of our lives together.

Because the Son is the image of the invisible God, and because in him God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell – there is no need for us to supplement, to add something to him, or to hedge our bets.  There is no need to seek a wider range of experience, or to find more depth.  Jesus Christ isn’t just one ingredient in our lives.  He is the organizing center around which all else is gathered.

Because God has reconciled all things through him, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross – we are those who have been freed to walk new paths together.  We are no longer defined by the damage we’ve done to ourselves and others.  We are no longer held captive by the distorting and harmful powers that surround us.  We have been reconciled to God through Christ.  And not just us, the insiders.  But absolutely everyone, and everything.  There can no longer be an “us” and a “them.”  We are simply those who have received the gift of being awake to the good news that is also true for everyone else as well. 

To put all this another way, the risen Christ is bigger than we imagined.   In our lives so far, we’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg that suggests the enormous mass hidden below the surface.  We thought him a loose string, but actually he is the thread that weaves the whole sweater.  We are children watching the magician slowly begin to pull the colorful cloth from his sleeve.  There is more to it than we had guessed.

And yet we’re very much like the Colossians.  Rather than keep our eyes fixed on the unsurpassable depths of our Lord Jesus Christ, we often find our joy, our security, and our energy elsewhere.

I am very comforted by the fact that our Mexican restaurants here in town have menus that exclusively offer Mexican food.  I ate at a Mexican place in Springfield this week that had a section of the menu labeled, “American food.”   And there you could get a hamburger and fries, or a grilled cheese.  But suppose that one of our local restaurants lost faith in their menu.  Business was falling off, and in a moment of weakness, they decided to diversify their menu.  Rather than being a Mexican restaurant serving Mexican food, they started rounding out the menu by adding a few other things.  Now there is a section offering Vietnamese, and another offering Scandanavian, and yet another Indian food.  If this happened, I’d just stop going there.  I’d have the sense that they’d lost track of their heritage, and lost touch with what makes them distinctive.

And yet when others look at our lives together, our work, and worship, and ministry, they might see a jumbled mess of mixed up priorities, a chaotic intermingling of competing values.  A little Jesus, yes, but a little of this and a little of that as well.

Colossians is a letter written to a congregation of people who had already heard the good news about Jesus Christ.  They had already responded in faith, hope, and love.  And yet over time it became clear that they were missing out on its fullness.  They belonged to Christ, but they were missing much of the depth, the richness, the mystery, and the blessing of that belonging.  It was time to grow.  It was time to open themselves to an ongoing healing of their loyalties. 

The gospel reading today is in a category all by itself.  Only here does Jesus’ healing happen in stages.  Only here is it an extended process.  He attempts a first healing, and the blind man can see.  But he can’t see very clearly.  He sees indistinct people that look like trees.  But then comes another healing event, another level of depth, and now the man can see clearly.

All the other stories of Jesus’ healing are one-shot events.  Jesus heals, and heals completely, in one stroke.  It happens immediately.  There’s a good reason for this.  His calling was to announce and embody the arrival of God’s rule.  And his powerful signs and miracles were pointers to this in-breaking rule of God.

But Mark includes this two-stage healing for our benefit.  It’s here for us – to suggest that most of us will experience God’s healing in our lives as a process.  It will come in stages.  And there may be more than two stages.  It might even take longer than 5 minutes.  It might take 5 years or fifteen.  So when you experience what feels like stagnation, or back-tracking, or even failure – it very well might be that you are in the process of leaving behind something small for something bigger. 

This is why we all reaffirm our baptisms within the liturgy of baptism.  In your baptism, you get wet.  But all your life long you live into that baptism by swimming out deeper and deeper into the grace of God.

This is why we don’t require that everyone tell their faith story as a story that hinges on one big, specific and dramatic conversion experience.  Now some of you may have experienced one major pivot point where everything shifted in a new direction.  But for many of us, life has felt more like a gradual unfolding, with occasional periods of illumination and deepening.  For most of us, life doesn’t just have one pivot point.  It has lots of them.  And so it’s more helpful to think of our lives as a series of conversions.  These pivot points can be simple development and maturation, they can be related to marriage and family changes, periods of illness, or occasions of loss, failure and disappointment.  Or they can result simply from God speaking to us powerfully through Scripture.

I recently came across an interview with the astronomer Guy Consolmagno.  He has a Ph.D.  in planetary science.  He runs the Vatican’s observatory.  He was asked to reflect on connections between the life of faith and his work as a scientist.  Here’s what he said:

“When you grow up, you don’t learn that everything that you were taught as a child was wrong; rather, you see that you didn’t have a very complete picture.  It was right, but not in the way you thought it was.  Any religious person has this experience over and over again. . . . We need the humility to say that we don’t understand it all.  I know my science is true, but I also know it is not completely true, so I have to keep improving it.  I think my faith is completely true, but I know I don’t understand all of it – my understanding is in constant need of revision” (Christian Century, June 10, 2015, 26).

Remy has a raquet that’s designed for smaller hands, weight, shorter.  Even has special balls made to fly more slowly and to have less bounce.  The raquet isn’t wrong or false.  It’s just right for who he is and where he is.  But he’ll leave it behind.  It’s made to be left behind as he grows into something else.  He’ll trade in his smaller raquet for another at each stage of development.

Reading Colossian together for the next several weeks will be challenging.  It will invite us to move past where we are into a larger loyalty to the risen Christ.  At first, this might seem off-putting, like work, like you can never rest or be still, like where we are is never good enough.  But it’s actually a feature of the good news - it is God’s invitation to keep unfolding, finding new layers, descending down deeper towards some kind of fundamental mystery.

While respecting the paths we've traveled, Colossians invites us to trade in our smaller ways of imagining Jesus for an awareness of his presence and power that is more expansive and life-giving.  He is all we need.  He is the light that illumines every single corner of the universe, and of our lives as well.   Praise be to the living Christ in our midst, who is our life and joy.  Amen.