St Peter & St Paul’s Godalming

 

June 22^nd, 2008

Sermon by Tim Dean

 

Colossians 1: 15-20 ~ ‘Jesus: Creator, Sustainer, Reconciler’

 

 

When those of us who go into ordained ministry first approach the Church authorities with such an idea, there follows a period of reflection and inquiry. And one of the things we try and articulate is what motivates us, what drives us to want to serve God in this particular way? There may be many wrong answers – but there is no one definitive set answer. And were you take each of the clergy here in St Peter and St Paul aside and ask them that question, I’m sure we’d all come up with many different answers. And the question doesn’t go away once you’ve turned your collar round. You’ll be pleased to know that while we curates are in training, the Church authorities still ask that question. In my case it’s part of an annual review carried out by John. So it was that a few months back I was sitting in John’s study faced with the question again. Then discussion over, John duly wrote up my appraisal and sent it off to Diocesan House. So what answer do I give to the question: what motivates me?

 

Before I give you my answer, one thing has struck me as I have thought about the question over the last three or four years. My answer is not new to me, because it has been central to my motivation for the last 30 years or more – as a lay Christian. For each one us who adopts the faith of Jesus Christ – whether ordained or lay – needs to find answers to the question of motivation – because all of us, together, share in the mission and ministry of Christ and his church.

 

So now for my answer. What John wrote in his report was this: ‘Tim sees his calling as making disciples for Christ, and encouraging Christians to be engaged with the world, working to reconcile all things in Christ’. I hope you can see instantly the connection with the two readings from Scripture that we have heard this morning. In Matthew’s gospel, he records what we have come to call the ‘Great Commission’ of Jesus to his disciples. First we have the quite staggering claim of Jesus, ‘All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.’ At one level, you’d be forgiven for thinking that for any human being, the statement is breathtaking in its audacity. Then Jesus instructs his disciples, ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations...’ with the promise that he, Jesus will be with them – and by implication – all his future disciples including you and me, to the end of the age.

 

This week I was reading a collection of essays in a book entitled, ‘Jesus in the World’s Faiths’. One person related that at a meeting between Christians and Jews one Jewish participant turned to the Christians and asked, ‘Why do you need Jesus? Why can’t you talk directly to God? Isn’t God enough?’ After a stunned and uncharacteristic silence, one of the Catholics responded, ‘It isn’t that we need Jesus. He just is.’ He just is, in the words of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, He just is, ‘the image of the invisible God’ and ‘all things have been created through Jesus, and for Jesus’. But of course, this is an elaboration of the answer to the Jewish participant at the conference – for God actually is enough for us, because it is through Jesus that God is known.

 

These verses from Colossians are admittedly, somewhat dense and multi-layered in their meaning. These particular five verses, are written in poetic form, and could well be part of an early church creed or a hymn. And like many things that are written to be read over and over again they are intensely rich, so trying to get to grips with what they are saying is more than a little mind-boggling. They are also visionary. Giving us a vision of Jesus that goes way beyond his human form – revealing Jesus to be, in the words of the Creed we will say in a moment, ‘true God from true God, and that ‘through him all things were made’.

 

All Christians by definition are disciples of Christ, and as such we are people who are committed to follow Jesus, to learn from him, and to try and emulate him in all that we do. Being a disciple is not a one-off event, so that once you are Christian, that’s it, there’s nothing more to do. Discipleship is a continual activity day by day until we die – ever wanting to learn how to be more like Christ in all that we are, in all that we think, believe, and do. But we haven’t just picked any person from human history to follow. Some people think of Jesus as little more than a Jewish prophet, a sage, a man of wisdom, a great moral teacher, a healer, and so on. But he is much more than that. Right from the earliest days of the Church, Christians understood that Jesus of Nazareth was God. Hence the appearance of this poetic vision of Jesus in Paul’s letter. [The idea of Jesus as the Creator God, wasn’t something that took a few centuries to invent and put into a Creed.]

 

Now over the last month I have been in conversation with a few Muslim leaders. One thing all of them said was, ‘for us, God is very distant’. And they might also have posed the question: ‘Why do you need Jesus? Isn’t God enough?’ There is a sense in which what they are saying is quite right, God is distant – how is it possible for us to imagine or comprehend the Creator God, he is so vast, infinite, how can our little finite minds grasp anything of who God is? God is a mystery. Yes, but. ‘Jesus is the image of the invisible God.’ The Christian contention is that we can know about God, know god, learn of God and from God, precisely because God communicated to us in form we can readily understand – as a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. In this rich passage, we learn that ‘Jesus, is the image of the invisible God’, all things have been created by him, all things for him, and in Jesus, the fullness of God – not just a little bit of God – but the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’. As I’ve said this is mind-boggling stuff. Try and get your mind round this: think of the last tiny newborn baby you saw. Those tiny perfectly formed hands, with their minuscule fingernails. Think of the baby Jesus – and then say to yourself, from those hands the whole universe was created. Into those hands, cruel nails were driven pinning them to a tree. The Creator, crucified. One person, one God. Yes, it’s a mystery. But this is also an extraordinary truth: Jesus is God. Everything in the universe including you and me, was created by him and for him – as set out in the rich poetry of this ‘Jesus vision’ in Colossians.

 

In the book of Proverbs we are reminded that ‘where there is no vision the people perish’, and as disciples this vision gives us confidence that we are not following just a man, but rather walking in the way of God. It doesn’t take a genius work out that within this world, and if we’re honest, within ourselves, there is so much tragedy, and so much pain and hardship. But this is a vision of Jesus with purpose: ‘through Jesus, God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross’.

 

Over the last few minutes, I have only just started to scratch the surface of these intense, rich and life-affirming verses about who Jesus is. But it speaks to our discipleship. It shows that God’s mission in this broken world, is to bring about reconciliation: to bring about the unity of God and humankind, in love, justice, and peace. As disciples of Jesus, we too share that task of reconciliation – and part of that task has been well expressed in the famous prayer of St. Francis of Assisi:

 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, let me sow pardon;
where there is doubt, let me sow faith;
where there is despair, let me sow hope;
where there is darkness, let me sow light;
where there is sadness, let me sow joy.

 

Amen.