Oh the silly Colossians. They just keep colossing things. What? That’s totally a word. You don’t think so? Well why don’t you just ….
Luke 11:1-13; Colossians 2:6-19; Psalm 138; Genesis 18:20-32
I must say, our reading out of Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae is one of my favorites. It’s one of those many times when Paul just gets REALLY excited about the things he’s talking about. It really does happen pretty often; he’ll be talking about something else entirely, and then go on a multi-verse tangent talking about how amazing God is – sometimes the Father, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Spirit, sometimes combinations thereof.
But before we get into that, a little background on the town of Colossae. It’s located in the southwestern part of modern Turkey. Currently, it’s called Honaz, if you want to look it up on the internet, but has gone through a few other names as well. Colossae was declining mercantile town, known for its wool. It had once been one of the great merchant cities in Turkey, but was surpassed in importance by Ephesus and Laodicea.
As best we can tell, the church in this city had been planted by a man called Epaphras, who had heard the gospel preached in Ephesus and brought the good news with him when he returned home to Colossae. But all was not candy and roses for the Colossians, because very quickly the church had some issues. Over the course of time, some groups either inside or outside the church started teaching things that didn’t fit with the gospel message. All we know is that it involved worshipping angels and false gods, aggressive implementation of Jewish laws, injuring oneself to show humility, and something called syncretism, where the people would take non-Christian ideas and fit them into Christianity.
These issues are all strongly contested by Paul, and most of them in the section of the letter we read today. He starts on a positive note, “Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught”. Then, he gives a warning, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ”.
Now, the really fun part for me is coming up. Paul gives all of the reasons why we should follow his instructions not the “hollow and deceptive” philosophies of the world: In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form. (Christ is fully God, we talked about this a little bit last week.) We have been given fullness in Christ, (Everything that we are and need is found in Christ.) who is the head over every power and authority. We were set apart in Him, putting off the sinful nature, buried with him in Baptism, and raised with him through Christ who was raised from the dead. When we were dead in sin, God made us alive in Christ. God forgave our sin by voiding the Law by nailing it to the cross. (It’s not about what we do, or if we are “good enough” for God, it’s about what Christ did on the cross for us.) Then he disarmed the powers of evil against us through the same cross. (In short, God won, God is winning, and God will win.)
All this, God did just because he loves us, everything else we do is a response. And conveniently Paul tells us what an appropriate response is: “Don’t let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or [whether or not you celebrate the Jewish festivals]. These are just a shadow of things to come; the reality… is found in Christ.” Don’t follow along when people worship angels, or take joy in their humility, or read too much into visions and dreams. Those people have “lost connection with the Head”, Jesus. Don’t get drawn into the teachings of human traditions and teachings – just because those things look like they’re from God doesn’t mean they are.
Paul kind of goes on a rant here, but it’s also things that have always been a problem for the Church of God. Christians throughout history have a tendency to appropriate things from other belief systems pretty easily. Oftentimes it happens with the best of intentions, and we get things like the Christmas Tree, a pagan symbol that the Church started using in worship and celebration of Christ’s birth. Also, the Celtic symbol of the triquetra, that symbol with the interlocking half-circles, was originally pagan but used by missionaries to Ireland to demonstrate the Trinity.
However, sometimes Christian appropriation of pagan ideas isn’t so great. The cult of the saints seems remarkably like a vestige of pagan polytheistic beliefs. Most of the early Christian heresies came from outside Gnostic influences, trying to reconcile Greek philosophy with Christian Truth. More recently, Christianity has fell prey to something called universalism, based in the idea that “All religions lead to Christ”, something quite a bit different from Biblical teaching.
There are countless other ways that Christianity has been affected by non-Biblical teachings – that was what spawned the Reformation – but it’s also not going away. When I listen to politicians and political commentators anymore, and even some of the things coming out of Christian denominations, Scripture is used as a tool to further their own agendas, and Christians let it happen. To paraphrase Paul, it seeks to make us captive to a hollow and deceptive philosophy dependant on human traditions and not on Christ.
Now don’t think I’m singling out liberal or conservative rhetoric here, each side does it just as much as the other. This is the major reason why I’m a pastor in this kind of Lutheran church – we want to get past human teaching and focus on the Word of God. That’s not to say that all Christians ought to read the bible the same way either, but the important part is to get into the Scripture and find out what God has to say in there. I’m willing to bet that if all of us here read the same passage of Scripture each of us will get a little something different out of it. But the best way to be strengthened in faith is not to listen to the guy on the radio, the woman on TV, the author of whatever book, or even to me – it’s to immerse yourself in God’s Word.