Colossians 1:11-20
November 25, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Almost religiously, I have my haircut every three weeks. I plan to have one this week. Some of you know that I have my hair cut by Maggie just around the corner on Clay Street. Maggie and I speak often about the life of the church and who else recently from the church have been in to get their hair cut. Her husband Charles is the one who tends to the store’s Buddhist house god. He would light some incense when it’s time to do so. He would use one of those long bird feather dusters to dust off the heads of the stature gods. From the mirror reflection, I can see the house gods up high on the wall.
Whether we grew up in a Christian home or not, most of us are familiar with the place of Chinese house gods. I did a quick Wikipedia search and discovered there is many house gods described over 68 pages! The most famous one is the kitchen god made familiar by Amy Tan. Sometimes the gods that govern our lives don’t necessarily have names. After giving birth, the mother should not go outside for a month. Another is white flowers are for funerals and never for a happy occasion. The one I grew up with is to always clean off your plate because if you don’t with all the leftovers, you will marry an ugly wife! I’m sure glad I cleaned off my plate!
These house gods direct our daily living and especially during the Chinese holidays.
Paul’s Letter
Today’s lesson is Paul’s letter to the Christians at Colossae. An earthquake in about 64 CE destroyed this once great port of Colossae and it’s never been rebuilt. For the tiny group of Christians living in this small town, Paul wrote from prison about the victory of Christ the King over “the powers” in their days.
The Colossae Christians lived in a world under the grip of something called “the powers.” Invisible forces quite beyond their control ran their world. In the ancient world, Neptune, the god of the sea determined the success or failure of sea voyages. If you were fighting a war, you had better offer a sacrifice to Mars, the god of war. The principalities and powers were not far away. They were behind, or above every single event in the visible world and controlled the destinies of humanity. Like in Amy Tan’s Kitchen God’s Wife, the kitchen god hid behind the fireplace.
Maggie and Charles’ Buddhist house temple or the invisible house gods determine what to cook and when to eat hiding in the stoves and ovens in our homes. These gods control our daily ways of life.
Our World’s Gods
Now you might say, “Let’s don’t make a big fuss over these rather charming Buddhist house temples since they are more decorative than powerful or that these Chinese house gods are best understood in Amy Tan’s literary creations.” But before you dismiss this talk about principalities and powers, ask the question, “Who runs our world?”
Our first answer to this question might be the politicians that are running our country or running for president. We think about them as powerful people. But if you caught any of the recent presidential debates, they would say that they are victims of “forces beyond their control.” What are these forces that even the powerful politicians can’t control?
“The economy” is to be blamed. Have you ever seen “the economy?” It is the power that determines our well being, pulls our strings, gives us happiness or misery, even though you can’t see it. We can’t touch and see “the economy” or “sub-prime mortgages.” We can’t touch “global oil prices” or the “the national deficit” but these powers call the shots.
This past weekend is a good example of what I’m talking about. We tell ourselves that we are happy to get new things and that if we don’t buy on Black Friday, we can be blamed to cause a recession, so let’s go out and spend the money that we don’t have. We believe in this invisible force called “the economy.”
Our ancestors called them “gods” and named them Mars, Jupiter, and Venus and told wonderful stories about them. We call them “politics,” or “economics,” or “global trends,” and have theories about how they may be manipulated and managed, but I’m not sure that we know much more about how to deal with these “powers” than our ancestors.
It’s like I have a pension plan and I am very thankful for you to help me grow my retirement fund but I have no idea or control over what happens on Wall Street. I just heard that it’s tanking! I just get this quarterly report telling me whether my pension account is growing or shrinking. There’s the “economics” god.
All of us know about the recent oil spill disaster that occurred in the SF Bay. The city authorities are blaming the clean-up company; the clean up company is blaming the Coast Guard; the Coast Guard is blaming the pilot who is supposed to guide the ship into port; the pilot blames the Cosco Busan ship’s captain; the ship’s captain is blaming his ship’s mechanical system and the rest of us feel downright powerless in cleaning up the toxic oil that have killed and will still be killing birds, fish and wildlife for years to come. Ultimately, the god here is “economics.” If it wasn’t for all the imported goods inside those containers on top of the Cosco Busan arriving for Christmas shopping, we wouldn’t have had the oil spill.
We’ve got problems with the powers. We feel powerless and defenseless before forces over which we have no control.
Christ the King
Today we celebrate what is called, “Christ the King” Sunday. In Colossians, Paul writes how thankful he is to see a church in Colossae. Paul tells them that they are to live as if they were all a song of thanksgiving to God, saying, before the letter ends, “whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (3:17).
Paul says that they should be thankful that God has rescued them “from the power of darkness, and has transferred them into the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom we have redemption, for the forgiveness of sins (1:13-14). People everywhere can be transferred from the grip of dark forces and powers into the kingdom of Jesus—the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, as Paul puts it.
Paul is saying something very important to us today. In 1:15-20, Paul is saying that when it comes to powers, there’s only one thing to whom everything else depends on. “All things were made in Christ, through Christ, and for Christ.”
“Al things” includes all powers! The world is not divided into the good part that belongs to God and the bad part that is ruled by powers. The whole world was created by God and belongs to God.
So what went wrong? Paul indicates that what went wrong was that human beings forsook their God-ordained responsibility for God’s world and gave the world over to the powers.
Last week there was an article about the common practice among college students and young adults today of “hooking up.” Hooking up for those who are unfamiliar with this relationship is to have consensual sexual activities without any lifelong commitments and of course before marriage. The writer describes the physical and psychological damages not even speaking about the spiritual and moral consequences of such hooking up behavior. She warns that unless we as a society confront this normative activity running through our young adult population, we will end up with many scarred and damaged people. If we refuse to practice sexuality under God, then Venus is all too willing to take charge.
When business is done just for money and not as a gift from God, then mammon takes charge and the rich gets richer and the poor get significantly poorer. When war is waged under the guise of this invisible power of “terrorism” with no real enemy to fight, then Mars is all too willing to take charge and all hell breaks loose.
Jesus is the Power
Jesus comes to take on the principalities and powers. He lived and taught a way of being human which challenged the powers to be. The powers said, “Live and die for the almighty dollar!” Jesus said, “You can’t serve God and mammon.”
The powers said get a big gun and use it; that’s the only way to see results. Jesus said that those who take the sword perish by the sword.
The powers said that Caesar was the most powerful ruler in the world. Jesus proclaimed the reign of God.
The powers whipped us into line by threat of military force. Jesus ruled as a bleeding lamb upon a throne.
Now, what happens to people like Jesus who stand up to the powers? It looks fine for awhile and then the powers get organized. The tanks roll in. The sales ads fill are TVs, newspapers, and even computers. The powerful, invisible forces get going. That’s what happened to Jesus. The powers can’t stand people who challenge them. The powers rule by the illusion that they have everything under control. So when Jesus challenged the powers, proclaims of a new kingdom and a new day, the powers get nervous.
The powers nailed Jesus on the cross charging him that he was not in charge. He acted like he was in charge when they were in charge. They stripped him naked and publicly humiliated him in his trial and crucifixion. They celebrated their victory over the would-be king. And then Jesus hung there, proof that nobody can beat the powerful system.
But listen to what Paul said in 2:15, “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it!” It was not that Christ was defeated on the cross by the powers; it was the defeat of the powers by the bloody cross of Christ!
There’s a mystery in the image of Christ reconciling all things “through his blood on the cross.” Perhaps the very tragic examples of this understanding in our times is when memorials spring up quickly after a massacre like the Amish school shooting or at Virginia Tech. In the aftermath of bloody carnage is when people come together to become unified and to not let the powers of this world take charge.
Last October, Charles Carl Roberts IV, a 32-year old milk-truck driver, carried a shotgun and a handgun into the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania. Roberts lined up 10 girls against the blackboard, bound their feet and shot them in the head, killing five of them. He then shot himself, leaving many unanswered questions and broken hearts.
This was the fourth of five recent school shootings, but this one stands out. Not because it was more violent or claimed more casualties, though both were true at that time. It stands out because the reaction of the victims set an example of mercy. It sets an example of an entire community acting just as Jesus would. The Lancaster County Amish community invited the widow of the killer, Marie Roberts to the funeral of the five slain girls, and attended Robert’s funeral in an inspiring act of forgiveness. The Amish have shown that forgiveness and love not only ease the pain of tragedy, but also connect people together.
The powers in our world like lust, greed, fear, hate and all the rest. Go along and get along. Get a gun, or a fat bank account, and work with the powers. But Paul says that these powers were defeated on the cross. They have no power over you. The battle has been won. Jesus has done away the powers.
Christ Our Lord
As Christians today, we believe that the battle has been won in Christ. The battles we face today are part of the mopping up operation to implement that victory. In the meantime, we are to live as those who know that the decisive battle has been fought, the war has been won, and we have been liberated to live as those who know for sure who sits on the throne. There is only one king in town. There is now only one power we are to obey, in life and death, in life beyond death. That power has a human face, a face once crowned with thorns.
How can we live in the light of that victory that was won on the cross?
Every time you pray that prayer that our King has taught us, “Thy kingdom come,” you are saying, in great joy and in great defiance, that Jesus Christ is Lord and that the “powers” aren’t.
Every time you bow your head and say “Thank you” for your meal, you are making a political statement, saying that the food that you partake is a gift of God, not an achievement of your economic mastery or the farm subsidy bill.
Every time you come forward and receive the bread and the cup, you are partaking in the inauguration banquet of the victorious Jesus as King defeating the invisible powers around us.
Every time you pledge your allegiance to God, you are standing up for the inalienable rights of people everywhere created in God’s image to have food to eat, places to live, and opportunities to use their gifts to fulfill their life’s purpose. You are saying that “economics” is not my god!
Now that you have heard this political proclamation, this victory announcement from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, we are to go back home to our neighborhoods, go out into the public square of our communities, and live as those who now know who sits on the throne and how the world will end and who is in charge.
Jesus Christ is the King of kings. He is the God of gods. Jesus Christ is Lord and Venus, Mars, Caesar, mammon, Maggie and Charles’ Buddhist temple god and all of the kitchen gods are not. The battle has been fought and won. Victory has come. Now let us go and live victoriously in Christ Jesus!
Let us pray.
O Christ, our King, help us to see your reign over all things. Preserve us from the desire to keep any area of our lives immune from your rule. Free us from the powers! Then, fill us with the wisdom to live as those who know who sits upon the throne. Amen, my Lord.