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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
All things are being reconciled to God. All things are under repair. It can sound here like Paul is saying, well, let's just stick with the status quo. When the context of Paul's larger imagination, this conviction that all things are on their way back to God shows us that these lines actually become radically subversive. Today, though, it's the end of our cosmic thoughts.
Jeremy Duncan:So let's pray, and then we'll jump in. Gracious God, as we gather today, we come with stories still unfolding, doubts and desires, questions and convictions. But more than anything, we come with longing to live lives that reflect your grace and your love, to be shaped by something deeper than the distractions that claw for our attention. As we near the end of this journey through Colossians, help us to see once again how big your story really is. Cosmic in scope and yet personal in its call to us.
Jeremy Duncan:You hold all things and yet still you make room in that vastness for us. So teach us what it means to pray with expectation and to speak with grace, to live with an awareness of the sacred that is woven throughout the ordinary moments of this week. In all of it, would you open us up today to wisdom that lands in our bones, and a story that stirs our imagination, to peace that steadies us for the work of love ahead. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Jeremy Duncan:K. It's the end of our series in Colossians. And today, we are going to work toward Paul's closing sign off in chapter four. And to be honest, that's really just where he name drops a bunch of his friends. But we're also going to look back across the letter and gather up everywhere that we've been so far in this series.
Jeremy Duncan:And to do that, we will cover the cosmic opening, our contributions and desires, household codes and their subversion, and then finally, bringing it all home. But four weeks ago, we opened with the cosmic part of Colossians, And we spent two weeks there looking at how Paul grounds all of his practical teaching in the stars. And I love that idea. I spend a lot of time with language and words, and so first of all, I just I love the juxtaposition of grounding ourself in the stars. It's an idea that I played with in my book, Dirt and Stardust.
Jeremy Duncan:That book was all about the sermon on the mount, and that title came from Jesus' famous line in that sermon. You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. Literally, what he says there is that you are the salt of the land. The dirt beneath your feet, you are part of the flavor of the earth that you inhabit.
Jeremy Duncan:But also you are the light of the cosmos. It's the same language from cautions we find there in Matthew. And cosmos, that context, as here, is not necessarily talking about stars and galaxies, solar systems the way we might imagine cosmic scales today, but it is talking about the intangible. So faith and politics, systems and structures, relationships, and even economics, all of the ideas that shape our experience of the land beneath our feet. So to be salt and light is to care about all of it.
Jeremy Duncan:As I wrote in that book, the story of God runs the gamut from the dirt we till to grow our food to the systems and structures that define our relationships to everything and everyone. It encompasses sustainable food production and equitable economic systems and healthy concepts of our neighbor. It includes moments of kindness as well as large scale justice initiatives. It's not either or. The kingdom is both and because you are the salt of the ground beneath your feet, and you are the light of the cosmos above.
Jeremy Duncan:You are part of what is good about both dirt and stardust. And this is why I think Paul is really onto something here by starting in the stars. He wants to talk about how we live together, but he knows that that actually starts in how we talk about everything. And so in the Colossian hymn, the poem that sets the stage for this letter, we hear that one, Christ is the image of the invisible God. Two, in him all things hold together because three, the fullness of God intends to reconcile all things through Christ.
Jeremy Duncan:And that sounds wonderful. At the same time though, maybe a little grandiose, almost esoteric. It can be hard at first blush to connect that to any kind of practical outworking in our lives. And this is why some people have argued it's it's too disconnected from what follows. And we actually have questioned Paul's authorship of this letter because of that.
Jeremy Duncan:But my argument, and I would argue Paul's argument, is that actually it's our biggest ideas about everything that find themselves played out through our daily choices. For example, if you believe that God is forever intangible and invisible, inscrutable to human imagination rather than perfectly expressed in the life of Jesus, you might follow the rules, but you might also eventually find yourself substituting your preferences for Jesus' ethic and calling that holy. Or if you believe the universe is ultimately run by a stingy god where some things are held, but with only so much love to go around that it needs to be meted out based on merit, well, you might start to live as if you need to acquire as much of that love, maybe as much of anything really as you can for yourself. If you believe that some people are intended to be reconciled and others abandon to endless meaningless torture, my concern is that you and I, we might start to live as if some lives really do have more eternal value than others. And, again, I'm not suggesting here that there's no such thing as judgment.
Jeremy Duncan:That's not what Paul says. I'm not suggesting for a second that judgment is somehow going to be pleasant. What's wrong will be made right. The bible's language for that transformation is hell. What I'm suggesting alongside Paul is that God was pleased to have all fullness dwell in Christ and through him to reconcile all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven by making peace through his sacrifice.
Jeremy Duncan:In God's economy, reconciliation is always the end even on the other side of judgment. But it's these convictions that Jesus is where we see God clearly, that Christ is what holds all things together, that the fullness of God intends to reconcile all things through the cross. These will eventually shape everything about how we treat everyone, which is precisely why Paul can then make the shift from those cosmic thoughts toward our daily lives. At the end of chapter one, he starts to make that shift. He talks about how his sufferings are filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions.
Jeremy Duncan:That's verse 24. And we spent a lot of time there dealing with that enigmatic line, all the translation options that are available for us. What does it mean that Paul suggests he could complete anything that would be lacking in Jesus? In the end though, it's not really about changing the translation as much as the angle from which we approach it. We call this the mystical union interpretation, that we are in Christ.
Jeremy Duncan:And therefore, all of our choices, any of the cost that we pay to do what's right in the world, anything we even suffer to contribute to the betterment of our here on earth, all of that is now mysteriously, beautifully part of Christ's work in the world. It's it's actually it's a really big deal for Paul. In fact, it's an important part of his pivot into the chapters that follow because he's reminding us, look, we believe big things about the universe and where it's headed. But because of that, we also believe that our lives, our choices can become a very small part, but a part nonetheless in that very big story. You are part of how God heals the universe.
Jeremy Duncan:And that's why Paul knows that rules can't contain faith. They can point us in the right direction. They're even helpful at times, but rules could never delineate every circumstance you will ever find yourself in, which means they can never replace the way that Jesus' ethic of love needs to be born in us and shape us and reshape us from the inside out. That's why Paul writes at the end of chapter two, don't handle, don't taste, don't touch. All these rules, they're not based on much more than human commands and teaching.
Jeremy Duncan:They have an appearance of wisdom with their self imposed structure and their false humility, their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any real value. They can't actually save you. For that, you need cosmic convictions that play out in your daily steps. This is where Paul really makes the move to get into the implications of faith. Chapter three, he writes, since then you've been raised with Christ, set your heart on things above.
Jeremy Duncan:Your real life now, that's hidden with Christ in God. So put to death whatever belongs to your old nature, who you used to be. Clothe yourself now instead with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, even patience. You you believe these big things, so let's see it. And this is where we get a bunch of lists in this chapter.
Jeremy Duncan:Right? Things to lean into. Paul might have called them fruits of the spirit in another letter, but also vice lists, things to avoid, things to stay away from in our lives. Again, this has to be read in the context of a letter where Paul has just told us rules aren't gonna work. They're not gonna get you there, which means the point here isn't just to check boxes.
Jeremy Duncan:The point is to reflect on what takes us away from love and to shift our focus toward what moves us toward each other. Paul's question in the first half of chapter three is really this. Are your desires leading to more goodness, more peace, more flourishing for you and the people around you? If so, lean into them. Give it more energy.
Jeremy Duncan:But if not, it's time to recalibrate. And, again, I think it's really important to understand this moment if we wanna get Paul's argument in this letter. He's not saying, look, you're dirty little monkeys who do bad things, and you need to be scolded into compliance. He's actually saying, you're a human person who gets to decide where you will point your life. And an important part of that is asking yourself, is what you want good?
Jeremy Duncan:Is it good for you? Is it good for your neighbor? Is what you want good for the world around you? And if the answer answer is no, then the honest next step is to learn to want differently. Now maybe you say to me, why?
Jeremy Duncan:I can't do that. Like, I can't just change my desires on a whim. The heart wants what it wants or else it does not care. That's Emily Dickinson, by the way, not Selena Gomez. But my answer to that is nonsense.
Jeremy Duncan:Because I think when we tell ourselves that we can't change our desires, what we really often mean is that we refuse to interrogate them properly. For example, I think often we think what we want is money, and what we really want is security. Right? Or what we think we want is pornography, but what we really want is intimacy. What we think we want is celebrity, but what we really want is to be known.
Jeremy Duncan:Or better said, just to have friends. And if we could slow down enough to actually interrogate our desires, to decide if they're pointed at what is actually good for us, and then if not, maybe even shift them just a couple degrees. What we might find is that we actually want something very different for our lives than we thought we did than what we thought we had been chasing. Because what we really want is peace. That's what Paul tells us.
Jeremy Duncan:Again, probably better said here, shalom. That that Hebrew sense that involves more than just an absence of conflict, but it means wholeness and an integrated sense of self, a thread that runs through every facet of our lives. And often, that thread runs counter to a lot of the surface desires we spend a lot of our time chasing. That's what Paul's trying to bring to the surface here. Not more lists for you to live by, but an honest evaluation of what you want for yourself and for those near you, given everything you believe about the cosmos.
Jeremy Duncan:Except this is where things start to get a little sticky. Because Paul has now made the movement from the cosmic to the personal to the peace that we desire, now he shifts to the way that lives out in your household. And so at the end of chapter three, this is where we get some difficult lines about husbands and wives, about masters and slaves. Lines that without that cosmic grounding can actually really seem to go off the rails a little bit into reinforcing cultural codes that honestly probably don't have a lot of place in our modern world. Now for example, we read this in verse 18.
Jeremy Duncan:Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. And in verse 22, we read, slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything. Now, of course, those lines were nothing new for Paul's audience. Nobody would have blinked reading them. Those lines were the cultural starting points within the Roman world.
Jeremy Duncan:They were what literally everybody already assumed about their homes. But that means it's actually in the follow-up that Paul brings Christ to bear. So it's husbands, love your wives and don't be harsh with them. It's masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair because you know you actually have a master yourself. That's where Paul's focus is.
Jeremy Duncan:And so a couple things here. First, husbands and wives, we hear wives submit, husbands love, and we still think, well, that that sounds a little cringey. I wanna submit that's because we're not really aware of context here. I mean, to submit is to do what someone asks you to do for bare minimum. To love is to do what someone doesn't need to ask you to do.
Jeremy Duncan:And, again, that really means that love is the expectation here. Now to drive this home, let's look at what Paul writes over in a parallel in Ephesians. I'm gonna read you Ephesians five twenty two as it's found in most of your bibles. It says this, wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as you do to the Lord. Do you know what the verb in that verse is?
Jeremy Duncan:It's a trick question. There isn't one there. The word submit is not anywhere in that verse actually. In English, we've carried it over from the previous verse. A verse which says, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Jeremy Duncan:So verse 22 is an example of that submission, which should say, wives to your husbands as you do to the Lord. And verse 25 is another example of that submission, which should say, husbands, by loving your wives as Christ loved the church. The point here is actually mutual submission one to another. That's how the actual verb submit is used in Ephesians. Now over here in Colossians, the same word is used again, but this time with the intent to undermine the power dynamic within the household code.
Jeremy Duncan:Love is always going to be better than submission. That's the culmination of Paul's argument here. Okay. Well, then what about the slaves? I mean, that's still pretty problematic.
Jeremy Duncan:Right? Well, first off, we should know that slavery in the Roman Empire was evil. There's no need to defend any of it. At the same time though, it was also very different from the chattel slavery that was practiced in North America. In the Roman world, you could sell yourself into slavery to pay off your debts, for example.
Jeremy Duncan:But that also meant that slavery wasn't necessarily lifelong, and it was not irrevocable. It was also not based on a racial identity. Now to be fair, in the Roman empire, certain ethnic groups were disadvantaged economically, and that did mean absolutely that slavery was certainly imbalanced against certain people groups. There was, of course, still very much a marginalized element to this practice. However, while the New Testament writers don't yet have an imagination for a Roman world without this economic pillar, We also see pretty clearly throughout the New Testament that the early church saw this economic system as inherently dehumanizing.
Jeremy Duncan:One example comes from the book of Revelation. There's this really powerful image of this woman who represents the economy of Rome, and she cavorts with the beasts who represent religion and power of empire. She's drunk on the blood of those who suffer. But at one point, when Jesus' kingdom comes, we read that this economic system falls and the kings and the merchants of the earth weep because no one will buy their cargo anymore. That cargo is delineated for us.
Jeremy Duncan:So we read about their gold and silver, precious stone and pearls, their fine linen and purple silk, their scarlet cloth. Every expense of wood and marble, cinnamon and spice, wine and olive oil, wheat and cattle, sheep and carriages and human bodies. It's not human beings there. It's soma, human bodies. That's what the system has done.
Jeremy Duncan:It has turned beloved children of God into products to be bought and sold like cloth. Paul is not endorsing the system in Colossians. The New Testament is very aware that all of this is wrong. Paul is saying that within this broken world where Christ's afflictions are not yet complete and where even your suffering is part of moving that story forward toward the reconciliation of all things, even your story can be transformed into the good. That's why Paul follows up here saying, slaves, whatever you do, do it as if you're working for the Lord, not for human masters who misunderstand their place in God's plan.
Jeremy Duncan:And masters, whenever you think about yourself, you better at least provide what is right and what is fair. If the debt is paid, you honor that. If the time is done, you send them away with your blessing. Because while they work for you notice Paul refuses to say while they belong to you, while they work for you, you are to devote yourself to them the way that God devotes God's self to you. And, again, without that cosmic understanding from the opening chapter, without Paul's conviction that all things are being reconciled to God, all things are under repair, It can sound here like Paul is saying, well, let's just stick with the status quo.
Jeremy Duncan:When the context of Paul's larger imagination, this conviction that all things are on their way back to God shows us that these lines actually become radically subversive. They're not directed at wives and slaves. They're directed at husbands and masters. They're directed at anyone who thinks they can play along with the regime and get their little slice of power at the expense of those near them. Because Paul is reminding them, reminding us that the story is bigger than we think.
Jeremy Duncan:And our identity can be so much more than just who we control, who's under our thumb. Our identity can be in Christ. As a very loyal Gen X kid, I might even paraphrase Paul this way. The world is a vampire sent to drain. Secret destroyers hold you up to the flames, and what do you get for all that pain?
Jeremy Duncan:Betrayed desires and a tiny piece of the game. Men, husbands, bosses, any of us who hold power over anyone else, those of us who think that we are succeeding on the terms that we've been handed, a piece of the game is not enough to dedicate your life to. And those desires, they will only suck the life out of you anyway. Instead, you've gotta have some kind of conviction that's cosmic in scale, a conviction that will point you toward the peace that you actually want to see in the world for you and for the people around you. Without that, you and I, we are just gonna find ourselves chasing any little bit of power that we can get our grubby little hands on, and when we get it, we will find ourselves completely empty anyway.
Jeremy Duncan:But if we can believe in our bones that the world is on its way home and that we get to play a part in that story, there is so much more to live for than just a piece of the game. And so now we finally hit chapter four. And if you've been reading ahead in Colossians this week and you got to chapter four and you wondered, what on earth are we gonna talk about here exactly? I get it. Chapter four is kind of just a roll call.
Jeremy Duncan:Titus will tell you all the news about me. He's coming with Onesimus, our faithful and dear brother. Aristarchus sends you his greetings as does Mark. You know his cousin Barnabas. Justice, whose real name is actually Jesus, but he goes by the nickname for obvious reasons.
Jeremy Duncan:He sends his greetings. It's been great to have him around while I'm stuck in prison. Epaphras, remember him? I mentioned him in chapter one. He says, hi, dude.
Jeremy Duncan:He's always praying for you. And our dear friend Luke, the doctor, he likes to be known that way, and Demas, they both send their greetings. If you can, tell Archippus to keep up the good work. And by the way, once you're done reading this letter, send it down the road to our friends in Lodea to see us so they can read it, and get the letter I sent to them that you guys can read that one too. I'm actually gonna take the pen back from Timothy here.
Jeremy Duncan:I'm gonna write this myself. Grace in peace, Paul out. That's essentially chapter four. Like, that's the whole thing, but there are a few neat ideas here. First, the letter to the Laodiceans.
Jeremy Duncan:That's cool. We don't know what happened to it. Some of the early church fathers do write about it, but they don't actually reference any of the content of the letter. So we don't know what it was about or what happened to it. By the way, first Corinthians, Paul references an earlier letter sent to those guys, which we also don't have.
Jeremy Duncan:So there are a few of these missing letters lost to history. Interesting. I do think the role of names here at the end is neat too, particularly in terms of this unfolding progression in the letter. We move from this cosmic imagination of Christ reigning in the universe to our participation in that unfolding story, to how that story shapes our personal desires, to how that plays out in our homes and our imaginations of what's possible for them, and all the way down into some greetings and thank yous and some encouragement to keep up the good work. I kinda like that.
Jeremy Duncan:That is absolutely where your biggest convictions about the universe should land. Kind words for the people near you. Encouragement, telling them how much you love them. I think that's actually a pretty powerful way for such an expansive letter to land. But as we close, I wanna draw our attention back to the beginning of this final chapter.
Jeremy Duncan:As Paul shifts into his closing thoughts, he writes this, devote yourselves to prayer, be watchful and thankful, And pray for us too that God might open a door for our message so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ for which I am in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly as I should. Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders. Make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversations always be full of grace and seasoned with salt so that you may know how to answer anyone.
Jeremy Duncan:I love this as a way to land Colossians. Think back across everything we've talked about in the series, all the movement we've explored today in this letter, and then think about this closing invitation. Be thankful, be hopeful, be wise. The universe is being reconciled. That's our starting point.
Jeremy Duncan:Gratitude is where we begin every morning. And we're grateful because we've been invited into that story. So that's our hope that we might find opportunities to move the story forward even just a millimeter, which is why we ask for wisdom. And we pray for guidance so that in the words of Colossians three seventeen, whatever we do, whether words or deed, all of it is done in the name of Jesus giving thanks to God the father through it all. Living lives like salt that make the world taste a little bit better.
Jeremy Duncan:In the end, even when we don't realize it consciously, it's a straight line from our cosmic thoughts about everything all the way down into our daily lives and the choices we make with each other. Grateful and hopeful and wise about the ways that we contribute to the repair of all things. Let's pray. God, thank you for this invitation to play a small part in a story that is so much bigger than us. In those moments where we get focused on what's in front of us, the thing we want to acquire, the desire that's driving our emotions in that moment, would you help us to step back and see the big picture, the cosmic conviction that our life is part of your story, or that if we can point it at what is good, good for us, good for our neighbor, good for your world, then not only can we find our place in this story, but we can find ourselves at peace, integrated and whole, our desires and our aspirations, our talents, and our gifts, the steps that we take aligned and moving back toward you.
Jeremy Duncan:May even a taste of that remind us of how good it is to be on your path, following your footsteps. And may that motivate us to work even harder with more courage and more hope to move the world forward even just a step in our neighborhood or on our street, in our conversations, in the spaces where we share the goodness you have extended to us. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Hey Jeremy here and thanks for listening to our podcast.
Jeremy Duncan: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. 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.
Jeremy Duncan:We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.