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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Every time we choose compassion. Every time we get down or we sit across the table and we really try to listen to a child. Every time you address your trauma as the primary means to preventing theirs. Right there. Right there.
Speaker 1:That's the meeting of the cosmic claims you make and the gritty embodiment of faith. Today, we are picking up in our series that looks at the early Christian letter to the Colossians. We called this series Cosmic Thoughts for Daily Life because this little letter does a lot of work in just a few pages. Listen, don't know if you know this, but Paul had this tendency as an author, as a leader in the early church, he could get wrapped up in these massive theological arguments like he does in his letter to the Romans. Alternatively, there's other places in his writing where he just fills tons of parchment addressing the practical interpersonal issues that were happening in community like he does in his correspondence with the community in Corinth.
Speaker 1:Now here in Colossians, Paul and his writing associates seem to actually be blending the theological and the poetic with the practical. And I actually I agree wholeheartedly with something that Jeremy said right at the beginning of the series. That religion and faith are at their best and most authentic when they integrate soaring theology with intentional practice. And maybe, as we've been moving our way through this letter, you've sensed that your faith, maybe your process for following Jesus, you've kinda sensed it being stretched. Maybe it was the poetry that Paul used to describe God placing divine fullness in the person of Jesus.
Speaker 1:Perhaps you sensed that fullness in your early summer rhythms and activities and encounters around commons. It's actually towards practical rhythms that Paul seems to be leaning as he starts to wrap up his letter. Last week, Bobby sort of led us into some of those statements through a helpful discussion of the very real consequences to the poetry that Paul used, which I just wanna suggest to you, this is how good poetry always works. You should find yourself arrested by rhythm and metaphor and turn of phrase. But then, when rhythm and metaphor and phrasing set the hook of their deepest truth, that's when you realize that poetry makes a demand of you.
Speaker 1:Poetry demands that you see the world with new eyes, that you live with more compassion, that in some cases, need to change the direction in your life. And as Bobby suggested, this was true for Paul. In Paul's mind, there was no way to encounter the divine in Christ without it changing the way you form a sexual ethic. For Paul, was no way to follow Jesus without putting on kindness and humility and patience. And as followers of Jesus in the twenty first century, it is our inheritance, just like the ancient Colossians, to pair our poetry and our practice as best we can.
Speaker 1:And today, things get even more practical. But before I lead us into all of that, I don't know what you may have brought with you to community today, but why don't we pause, make a little space for whatever it is we carry in our hearts? Won't you pray with me right now? God, who is a creative force, who appears in our common human story in Jesus, God who still stirs our hearts. We're grateful today for the ways that we are surrounded by community.
Speaker 1:We're also grateful for the ways that we may have encountered simple grace. For the ways that you help us in the work of staying awake in our everyday lives, present to the challenges that we face, maybe that we carry with us today. And so, today, we are aware that we are going to turn to ancient words. As we do, may we encounter a peace that we cannot explain. May we encounter light here for the situations where we have found hard to know how to how to move forward.
Speaker 1:And may we sense the ways that you are so so faithful in how you are shaping us, how you're changing us, how you're caring for us. And if we are anxious today, would you come and bring clarity? If we are fearful, would you come and spark new courage? If we are tired, would you come and ease our burden? In the name of Christ, who is ever and always our hope.
Speaker 1:Amen. Alright. Well, today, we are gonna try to run through the last little bit of Colossians chapter three, which is gonna set us up to finish the series next week. And this just means that we need to talk a little bit about what lies beneath. We're gonna talk about our attempts at love, the end of harshness, and going a little bit further.
Speaker 1:And I wanna jump straight into the text so we can get to work, and I just wanna start by giving you a reminder that up to this point in Colossians three, Paul has been busy connecting his grandiose claims from the first two chapters. When he said he says things like, how Christ is the image of the invisible God. He says that in Christ all things have been reconciled to God's great goodness. Paul's been trying to connect those claims to their implications in our lives. How followers of Jesus should be marked by different ethic.
Speaker 1:How members of the Colossian community should put aside their anger and their destructive language with one another. They should pick up kindness instead. And in a way, Paul sums all of it up when he says, listen, whatever you do in word or in deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Let your actions and your words make it clear that you serve a different ruler than Caesar, Paul implies. Use some care, Paul encourages, because you the way that you live, this puts your cosmology and your theology into sharp relief for those who are watching you.
Speaker 1:And then, well, Paul gets a little bossy? Is that what it is? I'm gonna let you decide. I'm just gonna read you what he says. Wives, submit to your own husbands as is fitting in the Lord.
Speaker 1:Husbands, love your wives. Don't be bitter toward them. Children, obey children. You can almost hear the bereiter saying, children, like in the back, children, obey your parents in all things for this is pleasing to the Lord. Fathers, don't provoke your children lest they become discouraged.
Speaker 1:And bondservants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eye service as men pleasers do, but in sincerity of heart, fearing God. And whatever you do as bondservants, as slaves, do it heartily as to the Lord, not to your masters. Knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of inheritance. And then finally, masters give your bond servants what is just and fair knowing that you also have a master in heaven. Now, at first pass, this can seem like a bit of a random list.
Speaker 1:We might wonder why Paul isn't writing a letter to the church leaders in Colossae or to the members of the political elite who needed to dial back their posturing at Sunday services, or to the merchants in the community whose economic dealings were causing division between community members. Now, alternatively, some of us as readers, we might hear this list, and it can appear as anything but random. It can feel like a version of the misogynist, patriarchal moralism that's all too common in institutions, and maybe religious ones especially. And let me just say this, this isn't a random list. It's it's not as though Paul and his scribe woke up haphazardly one day and decided, you know what?
Speaker 1:You know who hasn't been put in their place recently? Women and children and slaves. We should probably get to work on that. No. The truth is that there's an ancient context beneath the surface of these statements.
Speaker 1:One intrinsic to Greco Roman societies, with literary roots going all the way back to the renowned philosopher, Aristotle, in the third century BCE. See, Aristotle held that the relationships of master and slave, husband and wife, father and child, these were fundamental to the structure of individual households. He also believed that the household was the basic organizing unit of the state. Therefore, if you wanted to ensure a robust, vibrant civic life, like Aristotle did, you needed to pay attention to those relationships especially. And this is why there were similar considerations or household codes is what we call them.
Speaker 1:They show up here in Colossians, but they also show up in other ancient sources that were roughly contemporary to Paul's writing. For instance, the famous Roman poet Seneca wrote about these. It's also why we find similar lists in other places in the scriptures, like Ephesians five or first Peter chapter two, which, like Colossians here as well, these were addressing early Christian communities that, not coincidentally, were organized and meeting in houses. And we're gonna talk a little bit about the details of the list in a moment, but I think it's important to note a couple things about this ancient context. First, that Paul's not just sounding off with his own unique parochial views when he dictated these words.
Speaker 1:He's participating in a robust public conversation that had spanned several centuries already. And when we look carefully, perhaps we'll see that maybe he's not just capitulating to the dominant views. And then second, it's important to assume that behind these prescriptive codes, behind the bossiness of them, there was a wide variety of functioning dynamic relationships. There were partners of different persuasions loving each other in the ancient world. There were parents doing their best.
Speaker 1:There were masters and slaves subverting the worst of the horrid systemic institution that they participated in. And these notes can assist us as we read today because our households, all of the households represented in this room today, they are not the same as those in the ancient world nor should they be. But also because under the surface of your most intimate connections, beneath your partnerships that don't repeat harmful patterns, beneath the ways that you choose to expand the meaning and the practice of family, beneath the way that you raise your children, beneath the way you interact with children who are not your own, beneath the ways you pursue equity and justice in your economic relationship to other people in the world, Behind every pursuit of health and flourishing is a sacred work of the spirit. The same spirit that inspired these texts. Now, you don't have to dig very far though to see that Paul is speaking and conforming to some features of what we would say is a patriarchal social order.
Speaker 1:He's actually addressing what we call the pedrofamilias here. That's just the Latin term for the male leader or head of a Greco Roman household. And in such a structure, the oldest male in every household like this had utter and complete authority over all members and structures in it, all women, all children, all servants and slaves, all property, all livestock, all other assets belonged to him. And this is why, as Paul tells wives to submit, the Greek term there literally just means to be subordinate to. On one hand, Paul's just simply reflecting a standard ancient Mediterranean understanding of the wife's legal status.
Speaker 1:That said, it's it's also important to recognize that even as feminist scholars like Elizabeth Johnson do in their interpretation, Paul isn't blithely asserting patriarchal norms. No. He's actually trying to work out the significant implications of the theological claims that he's made about who Jesus is and how we should live as a result. Paul saw conversion and baptism into Christian community not as being understood as only spiritual practices, but decidedly impacting our social ones. So then it's possible that when Paul says, wives submit as fitting to the Lord, he may have been encouraging Christian wives of non Christian, not adhering husbands in Colossae to maintain their partnerships with integrity so as to win their husbands over in faith.
Speaker 1:We actually see that same argument in first Peter. But but rather than focus on the nomenclature that Paul uses, rather than focus on the gendered actors that he's naming in this text, I'm I'm convinced that we should attend more to the implications of Paul's overarching arguments here. Especially, because in the next few verses, he tells first century husbands to love their wives and not be bitter toward them. And this instruction is striking for a couple of reasons. First of all, the Greek verb for love here is agape and in using it, Paul is telling husbands literally to model Jesus' self emptying, serving love in their first century partnerships.
Speaker 1:News flash, this was the antithesis of pedo familia's practice. And then second, the Greek verb for bitterness here is In using it, Paul is addressing ancient husbands who maybe, probably were pulling rank or using power in their role as household leaders only to find, as always happens with coercion, that the resulting relationship is meager and cold and loveless. And this shows that Paul may have actually been offering an antidote to paterfamilias. And once we're aware of this, Paul's wider argument for a kind of Christ inspired mutuality and partnership, it actually becomes accessible to all of us in this space. See, we don't live in a world where any male should aspire to first century levels of control or authority in any relationships.
Speaker 1:We also don't live in a world where partnerships are only recognized if they contain the categories of those who are a wife and those who are a husband. We do live in a world where, as relationship therapists contend, we all have to deal with and find our way through what they call relational ambivalence, which is just a clinical way of saying it's complicated. You all know what relational ambivalence is. It's those those contradictory thoughts and feelings of love and hate, of attraction and disgust, of excitement and fear that we all feel toward those we're in a relationship with. And whether you are partnered or not, regardless of the configuration that your partnership might contain, even if you're facing challenge or uncertainty in a partnership or in a key relationship, in all our ambivalence, Paul's invitation to mutual Christ like submission and surrender and to mutual Christ like choices to abandon power and status as a way to love.
Speaker 1:These just might offer us the signposts we need in the courageous daily attempts we make to care for others. Now, Paul's instructions go on from there, obviously. He goes on to give instructions to children to obey their parents and to fathers to not provoke their children. Here again, we stumble into Paul's contention that there are daily implications for the cosmic theological truths that we like to espouse. I think it's important at this point in the sermon to put my cards on the table that as a parent, I definitely agree that children should obey.
Speaker 1:And I think all parents know that this is about as self evident as the scriptures could ever get. But what's funny is that you don't even have to be a parent to agree with Paul here. I would think that there are most of us here in the room, we would share the view of my 19 year old daughter. She does not have children but she does work in customer service and she does regularly come home and talk about her displeasure directed at the children who are acting out in her retail checkout line. And for the record, the irony of her position isn't lost on me because I clearly remember her in her distraught toddler era and having to stand in a store wishing I could be anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 1:Right? Now, kidding aside, what we know is that Paul is espousing expectations that were common to both Jewish and Roman moral teachings to children. But we also know that he might have been offering an alternative to forms of normative ancient parenting practice. For example, the book of Sirach, which is a Jewish source from the second century BCE. It gives the following ethical instructions to parents and parents, get those journals out.
Speaker 1:Let's take some notes right here. So this is what Sirach says, Don't laugh with your children or you will have sorrow from them. And in the end, will gnash your teeth. Give them no freedom in their youth and do not ignore their errors. Bow down their necks in their youth and beat their sides while they're young or else they will become stubborn and disobey you and then you will have sorrow from them.
Speaker 1:Discipline your children and make their yoke heavy so that you will not be offended by their shamelessness. Which might sound a little harsh to us, though I'll just make it clear that it doesn't say anything about whether or not you should give your kids an iPad. So you're fine. You're fine if you do that. K?
Speaker 1:The truth is that this kind of harshness was the rite of paterfamilias. And it's wise scholars note the profound psychological sensitivity in Paul's instructions to parents here. There there's an assumption that parents must provide care and boundaries for children to flourish, but there is no appeal to inherent authority or hierarchy to justify the role that parents and adults play. And for us as twenty first century readers, that means there's a potent theological and practical implication. Simply, that as adults and parents, we are invited to serve and love children as Christ served and loved the world.
Speaker 1:And I don't know why that hits today for me, but it does. In Colossians, the ethic of our relationship to the children in our care is firmly grounded in Paul's theological pleas earlier in chapter three that we use kindness and humility and gentleness as the primary tools of moral and spiritual formation. And why would we choose those? Well, so that we might shape young hearts to be soft and open to the faith that we talk about. And trust me, I know that when you're in the weeds of nighttime feeds and emotional dysregulation and tantrums and hormones, when you're helping your children navigate neurodivergence and educational demands and early employment and relationships and identity change, can feel like a hard thing to lean away from harshness.
Speaker 1:But if the embedded psychological awareness in Paul's writing shows us anything, it's that every time we choose compassion. Every time we get down or we sit across the table and we really try to listen to a child. Every time you pause and you reset yourself emotionally. Every time you address your trauma as the primary means to preventing theirs, every time you advocate for them when they seem incapable of gratitude, right there, right there, That's the meeting of the cosmic claims you make and the gritty embodiment of faith. Which brings us to the business end of Paul's household code, where he spends more time addressing the relationship between slaves and masters than he has any other relationships.
Speaker 1:And in some ways, this this might have been just pragmatic for Paul. Slavery was in fact an embedded reality of first century societies around the Mediterranean and posed a unique challenge to early Christian communities. Estimates are that roughly 10 to 20% of the Roman empire's entire population was enslaved. And scholars are quick to point out then that Paul's early categories of partners and parents and children likely contained both slaves and free individuals. And this is because, and I can't make this point more clearly, slavery in the ancient world, while still an evil, was very different than the race oriented chattel forms that we tend to think of.
Speaker 1:Slavery was an economic feature of the Roman empire. Individuals could become slaves by conquest or by birth, but some could also become slaves as a way to pay off their debts. In this way, slaves had no legal or few legal rights, no to no to few. But we also know that many slaves acquired status and wealth in the ancient world, which just means extended instructions to slaves and masters here are a feature of a wider ancient context and then words that are then being applied to the specifics of the ancient Colossian community. And what do I mean by that?
Speaker 1:Well, see, in Colossians chapter four, just a few verses after we're reading, Paul will mention that one of the carriers of the letter to the community that he's written is a young man named Onesimus. And most scholars agree that this is the same Onesimus that Paul advocates for in another New Testament letter, the letter to a person named Philemon. And all you need to know about this is that Onesimus was Philemon's slave, And Onesimus had run away from Philemon to join Paul's entourage. So subsequently, Paul writes to Philemon, to the master, to try to restore this relationship of master and slave. And in both letters, attempts to argue that in Christian community, slaves and masters were to interact with each other in new ways.
Speaker 1:Here in our text, Paul tells slaves to serve sincerely on account of their trust in Jesus. Then he uses economic terminology when he tells slaves that in being faithful to Jesus, they would secure an inheritance for themselves. This would have been revolutionary for many slaves to hear that they might return or receive something because in fact, many of them had no right or prospect for receiving the resources of their masters. Alternatively, then Paul turns to masters and says, be just and fair, which would have been to be inordinately generous to one's slaves. And why would Paul encourage this?
Speaker 1:Well, because in Christ, Paul believed that all pedophamilias in the Colossian church had come to recognize Christ as the benevolent master of all things. And with that spelled out, I think it's important for us to note, as many of you may have already, as we've been sitting here reading this text together, Paul doesn't call for the overturning of a problematic social institution. He actually appears to relativize slavery in light of his cosmic claims about Jesus, but there was no revolution to free indebted members of early paw line communities as far as we can tell. And that historical reality has caused the Christian tradition some issue. For example, Sylvia Keesemat notes how in the eighteen hundreds, both sides debating the moral grounds of slavery in The United States, both sides used this passage as justification.
Speaker 1:Slave owners did, saying that Paul is affirming the practice of owning slaves while giving instructions for how we could do better at it. For abolitionists, Paul is undermining the practice and giving instructions for how to dismantle this. And then, in our own time, where modern social democracy and the primacy of human rights informs our sense that political pressure could bear actual results. Perhaps you find yourself listening to these words and being almost offended by Paul's instructions that appeal for a kind of quiet pragmatism. Like, just stick with the program.
Speaker 1:It could seem like Paul's maintaining the status quo, when in fact early Christians had little to no way to exert political pressure in their world. And I think that that can leave us feeling like we don't know how or if it's even appropriate to apply cosmic claims for daily life from the language and the institution of slavery. And I actually don't think that the job of a sermon like this one is to somehow resolve that tension for us. But I do wanna suggest that we can choose how we are going to read the scripture here. We can choose how we are going to pair our theological poetry with the practice of our faith.
Speaker 1:And as you attempt to do the work of choosing well, let me encourage you first. When you read scripture that is at odds with your sensibilities or with collective modern wisdom or even your personal conviction, there is no need to throw it all away. No. I think it's actually possible to hold these tensions and interpret with faithfulness. Even as I wholeheartedly wholeheartedly believe that at times, our challenge as followers of Jesus is to live up to the measure of ancient words.
Speaker 1:What do I mean? Well, just try loving your neighbor. Try praying for your enemies. And then there are other times when, like, in the bounded language around how partners should relate or in the condoning of slavery in Colossians, I actually believe that our responsibility is to take scripture's soaring, poetic language and go further with it. Whenever we do this, I think we affirm what's best and beautiful about Christian faith.
Speaker 1:Faith that was never meant to be built upon a static set of instructions for particular members of ancient households, But faith that can be found as we catch glimpse maybe here in Colossians of early Christians going beyond with their imagination of what it meant for the world to be different. A world where partners and children and slaves and masters weren't just somehow supposed to become more moral or more righteous or more straight laced in society. No. Paul's letter invited them, and it invites you to go further than that. To form a world in which individuals and households and communities become healthier.
Speaker 1:A world where we enact the law of love as an end to harshness. A world where you and I and those we meet begin to look more and more like Jesus. And see, we know that something happened when they started to do that work together. And I think it still happens when you and I read and live and tell the story of it more expansively. Let's pray together.
Speaker 1:Loving God, some of the mystery of coming to the scriptures, it's that the scriptures have this way of naming our common human experience. Sometimes that comes to us when we look at the ancient world. Sometimes it comes when we start to consider our own very real relationships right here, right now. How we wound one another. How sometimes we choose power and status over care and compassion.
Speaker 1:And even as we can sort of sense that awareness, we can be grateful for the ways perhaps we are able to see new ways forward. Perhaps for us, we can see our inherent worth in relationship today. Perhaps we can see the boundaries that are needed. Perhaps we can see that we are in fact doing the work of seeking wise and trusted sources. Perhaps we can feel that we are starting to do the work of pairing our theology with our practice.
Speaker 1:And wherever we might be today, spirit of the living God, I pray, would you be our guide as we continue to try to be a community that encourages this work? And would you give each of us courage as we live an attempt to go further in our attempt to follow your example. Pray in the name of Christ who is ever and always our hope. Amen.
Speaker 2:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Speaker 2:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.