All the Power... Reflections on Colossians 1

“All the Power”

A lover doesn’t figure the odds.

He figures he came clean from God
as a gift without a reason,
so he gives without cause
or calculation or limit.

A conventionally religious person
behaves a certain way
to achieve salvation.

A lover gambles everything, the self,
the circle around the zero!
He or she cuts and throws it all away.

This is beyond any religion.

Lovers do not require from God any proof,
or any text, nor do they knock on a door
to make sure this is the right street.

They run,
and they run.

~ Rumi

I love this sweet story of a five year old big brother who asks to go see his baby sister alone. His mom, concerned, stays close and overhears him ask his sister, “Tell me what God is like. I’ve forgotten”

Can you relate?

Big questions: What is the nature of reality? Can God be trusted? In our human experiences of ups and downs, expectations and disappointments, pain and joy — sifting through it all, we wonder about the nature of reality. The Apostle Paul is right — we do see through a glass darkly

Today’s text is about reality with a capital R that goes from big to small— what is most true within God is what is most true in us.

Colossians 1:15-20 is an early Christian hymn, a grand sweeping anthem of praise, declarative statements about the supremacy of Jesus Christ. It’s what theologians call a description of The Cosmic Christ or Universal Christ. This idea that what we experience and see in Jesus is not just the scope of a human life 2000 years ago but the human manifestation of a larger reality that is the foundational reality of the universe.

Paul develops this big theology over his lifetime: in Jesus we see something bigger that has a cosmic or mystical dimension and he names that something, Christ. Today’s text begins with “The Son is the image of the invisible God,” and ends with “This is the mystery: Christ in you the hope of glory.” Christ is the biggest thing we can know and the most intimate part of ourselves.

In answer to the big brother’s question to his little sis: This is what God is like.

Every once in awhile, I feel like I need to step out and talk about how we might hold big ultimate questions like the nature of reality because this is delicate territory in a place like 945 Portola Rd.

Many of you drove by SLAC: the National Accelerator Laboratory on your way down Sand Hill Road this morning where they are experimenting with dark matter and astrophysics and the early universe… these are studies I can barely begin to get my mind around and certainly the writer of Colossians would have had no idea.  And yet, in the face of modern science and all that we’ve learned in the last two thousand years, how do we understand these grand sweeping biblical statements about the nature of reality when even our most brilliant scientific minds are still discovering the most foundational elements of the universe?

And it’s not only scientific issues. Many in our world and in this room do not believe in one exclusive definition of who God or reality. We affirm there are many ways that people have put together a life of faith and many of those have nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth and the word Christ in any form.

OR you may completely disagree with that and think there is just one definition of reality and you are starting to get a little worried that this sermon is starting to sound a bit out of your comfort zone.

Wherever you are — solid skeptic or definite doubter or absolute believer — I invite you to take a step away from your assumptions and step into paradox with these big questions.

My children had the odd position of being in preschool and early elementary ages when I was in seminary. Just as they were asking all the “why” questions about the world, my assumptions about the nature of God, the authority of the Bible and an exclusive understanding of Christianity were being reshaped.

I struggled a lot with how to share the stories in Scripture in a way that would allow them to stay open to faith and the power of the Christian story but not get locked into dogmas that would shut them down from learning about the world.

Now: I’m not sure I was successful in this. And in my defense, as Christianity has become seen more of a political position than a living faith in this country recently, it’s difficult to see and hold the paradox of faith for so many of our kids.

But trying to do it for them helped me do it for myself and this this is how I put it together… since the beginning of consciousness, humans have been telling stories about the nature of reality. They look at what they observe and they try to name what they experience, and they see patterns.

NONE of these named stories or paradigms or patterns can full capture the nature of reality. Not when they come out of this ancient text or even when they come out of the SLAC accelerator.

We’re always discovering, confirming, experimenting, trying, losing faith and finding it — and sometimes that is distressing, but mostly I find it comforting. No one ever sees all of it.

We can hold our faith to be universal without being absolute and embrace its particularity without being exclusive.

Instead, we can say: this is a story about a God who was seen in a man named Jesus.

As a Christian, I’m with the writer of Colossians: “He is the image of the invisible God.”

This is what the image of the invisible God looked like Jesus expressed the nature of Ultimate Reality, which Paul calls Christ — it’s a pattern of unconditional love, community, connectedness, forgiveness, grace, hospitality and freedom.

So if this is the pattern, what does that mean?

I’ve recently been reading a book by Adrienne Maree Brown called, Emergent Strategy where she talks about the natural world as a model for how we operate in the world. Ferns, mushrooms, flowers, seasons, redwood trees — they help us understand patterns of flourishing and growth.

Adrienne Maree Brown says this “Existence is fractal.”

Fractal = An object whose parts, at infinitely many levels of magnification, appear geometrically similar to the whole.

Fractals are everywhere in nature — one you can see right here in this sanctuary are ferns. If you keep breaking these ferns down into smaller parts, you would find similar patterns from one level to the next.

Fractals allow for patterns that also contain randomness — no two parts are exactly alike but there is a pattern nonetheless.

Adrienne Marie Brown continues: “There are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe… what we practice at the small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.”

This is how I understand this passage in Colossians. The writer celebrates the pattern of divine reality as we see it revealed in Jesus: “He is the image of the invisible God.”

And the pattern that emerges is of reconciliation — what is broken put back together, wholeness, embrace and forgiveness. Reconciliation is what love in “real life” looks like.

And the writer says just as this is the reality on the cosmic level, so it is to be the reality in how we gather as a church, it is to be the reality between groups of people who have been separated, and it is to be the reality in our lives.

This is the fractal pattern of what it means to affirm the God we see in Jesus Christ — from the biggest view of reality we can take to how we are together to what happens in our own soul:

Christ in you, the hope of glory.

When we allow our lives to be aligned with this fractal reality of Christ, we connect with the flow of Christ in the world and this is the source, the power of our lives.

This text is not an invitation to a system of belief but to a way of being — not to be a conventionally religious person but a LOVER, as Rumi says

So: Where is this pattern of LOVE showing up in your soul? In your relationships? In your workplace? In your world?

And where can you move in greater alignment?

Richard Rohr: “What we seek is what we are.”

Grace Lee Boggs: “Transform yourself to transform the world.”

This Christ pattern is where we come from and where we return. It is the source of our healing and growth and connection and meaning and what makes a difference in the world because it’s what’s most deeply true about us and the universe.

So let us open ourselves up to this reality. It is shaped like many things but one of my favorites is a table — a table where we are all gathered and reconciled into the image of Christ.