Sermon Series: Growing in Faith (Colossians)
Sermon Series, “How to Grow in Faith,” no. 1, Trust the process (Colossians 1.1-14)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, 5th Sunday after Pentecost, July 14, 2019
Tom James
I will say that the sermon title for this morning is a little insensitive. A little coachy, you might say. In fact, it comes from a line that was repeated often by Miami Heat basketball coach Eric Spoelstra several years ago. The Heat had acquired LeBron James and Chris Bosh in 2010, and they already had Dwayne Wade. These were all great players, and there were a lot of high expectations in Miami. In the beginning, though, they didn’t do as well as some fans might have expected. Spoelstra told his players, and his city, to “trust the process.” There’s a plan here. No one said it was going to be easy, or instantaneous. It’s going to take time. But don’t get impatient. Trust the process. Have a little faith.
Well, it’s easy to have a little faith if you have what Spoelstra had to work with during those years. And the team did go on to win two NBA championships. But trusting the process isn’t always so easy, and it doesn’t always make as much sense, frankly. “Trust the process.” Tell that to someone who has a terminal illness, for example. Tell that to someone who has recently lost someone. Tell that to someone who struggles with addiction and who doesn’t see any way out. Tell that to someone who is fleeing gang violence, only to find themselves in a crowded detention camp. Whatever your politics, think about what this experience must be like in human terms. Trust the process? The process doesn’t seem to lead to anywhere good for a lot of people. And sometimes, it doesn’t seem to lead to anywhere good for us. What sense does it make to trust it?
There’s a larger question here. What sense does faith make in the modern world? The twentieth century was supposed to be a hundred-year march toward shared prosperity, with mind-blowing technological advances, longer life expectancies, the elimination of poverty, and the end of tribal mentalities and warfare. Instead, we got some of the worst wars in history. We got technologies that made killing easier and more efficient, technologies that were destroying the balance of nature and undermining our long-term ability to survive. We got concentration camps and lynchings, totalitarian governments and global monopolies. And, today, much of these things are still with us, while their effects are becoming clear. We’ve already seen a rise in average global temperatures. We’ve already seen mass deforestation, shrinking ice caps, increasingly turbulent weather, loss of insects that help pollinate essential plant life. We’ve already begun to see human life expectancy in this country decline. We already have twenty-one percent of our children in this country (15 million of them) living below the federal poverty line. We’ve already seen an alarming increase of what some psychologists call “deaths of despair,” when people give in to the lure of narcotics or suicidal thoughts because there doesn’t seem to be any hope. What sense does it make to “trust the process?” Maybe for the majority today, the process doesn’t seem to lead anywhere good.
Christians seek out God. So, where is God in all of this? Where has God been, while people have been crowded into camps and others have been languishing in their own private houses of despair?
In Paul’s letter to the churches in the ancient city of Colossae, he gives thanks for their growth in faith. Paul uses an organic metaphor to describe this growth. Here, growth in faith is depicted as if faith were a kind of plant that has a natural tendency to grow. It’s as if, once we have the seed of faith in us, all we have to do is to be patient, to wait, and the power of the seed will do its work and the shoots of faith will emerge from the ground, and faith will sprout leaves and will reach full flower. It’s as if the process is automatic, as if we are simply the passive beneficiaries of something that is happening within us that we don’t contribute to at all.
There’s something important about this metaphor. It points to the fact that faith has a way of capturing our imagination. It has a way of just happening to us. We can fall into faith much as we can fall into love. It can seem to come from nowhere and then take root in us and transform us over time. The Bible calls this “grace.” It is God’s grace that touches us and makes faith possible for us. Some experience we have, some comfort or perhaps challenge we receive, opens the possibility of faith for us, plants a seed within us that, over time, can make a huge difference in our lives. If we want to grow in faith, the first thing we must do is to learn to pay attention to this grace, this way that God has of reaching us and stirring something new in us. We have to learn to recognize grace all around us.
But we should probably get rid of the idea that anything about faith is automatic. In fact, we should probably take leave of the expectation that anything God does in the world is automatic, or that God is going to automatically make everything ok or that God will relieve us of responsibility for what we are doing to ourselves and to our world. We should probably grow out of the image of God that many of us sometimes cling to—the image of an all-knowing parent who will step in when things get too bad and make sure that we don’t hurt ourselves. It seems like we have enough evidence by now that that God doesn’t exist. And, if we are going to learn to take responsibility for ourselves and our world, we might do well to shed our illusions that there is going to be some kind of dramatic rescue at the eleventh hour. The view of God as rescuer, as an all-knowing parent, keeps us children, and it’s very much time that we as a species learn how to be adults if we want to survive.
But faith doesn’t have to be faith in the all-knowing parent. There’s another way to think about faith, another possibility for faith. In today’s world, a lot of people don’t seem to feel like they need God. They don’t have time for God. They don’t believe that God has anything to do with them. But that is often because they accept life as it is—they don’t hope for more; they don’t give themselves over to desires for a different way of living and being. They accept a world characterized by bitter fights over scarce resources. They accept global wars and concentration camps and environmental destruction and shorter lifespans. Maybe they hoped for more once, but know they have given up. The “deaths of despair” that happen every day in our modern world suggest that many feel this way, and there are many more whose despair doesn’t lead to physical death but only to a quiet misery.
And, so, for today, maybe faith means that we keep open a space for God. Faith means that we don’t shut God out, even if we don’t always feel God’s presence or see visible proof that God is real and is making a difference. Perhaps faith means that we recognize that, even though God’s dream of a just and healthy world, a world that is “very good,” as it says in Genesis, is being trampled on in many ways today, even if God appears to be losing, excluded from the world’s plans, we haven’t given up on God’s dream. As long as there are people who dare to have faith, God has a hearing; as long as there is faith, God’s voice isn’t completely drowned out by the roar of machines. As long as there are people who have faith, there is an opening for God.
So, trust the process. Not that everything is magically going to be ok, but that we are able to keep the door open for God by prayer, by faithfulness, by hope, by doing the Christian thing no matter what. To grow in faith doesn’t mean losing our doubts, but, instead, it means growing more determined to love God even when it seems that God is being forgotten.
Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in a detention camp in Germany during War II. He was there for being involved in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler and for aiding and abetting the resistance. And as he sat in prison he wrote a number of letters, papers, and poems. Bonhoeffer looked out at Europe during that dark time and didn’t see signs of God’s victory over evil but quite the opposite: he saw God losing; he saw God being trampled on; he saw God suffering; he saw God hanging in the gallows. And he wrote that to be Christian in today’s world, you have to go to God in his suffering. It’s not that God comforts us, assuring us that everything is going to be fine in the end—that’s a faith for children. For adults, faith means that we go to God. We stand with God, we identify with God as one who is forgotten, whose dream is being trampled, whose heart is being broken. Every time a child dies, God’s heart is broken. Every time there is a death of despair, God’s dream dies. Every time we lose a species, every time a war is started, every time someone is abused, or exploited, or oppressed, God loses. To be faithful means that those heartaches are our heartaches. Those losses are our losses. To be faithful means that we believe in God’s broken dream still, that we are willing to stand in the gap for God, to hold the door open for God, to suffer God’s disappointment so that, one day, we may feel God’s joy.
I promise you that this sermon series is going to brighten up! But, if we want to grow in faith, we need to strive for a faith that is grown up. We need to recognize that faith in God doesn’t mean blind trust but faithfulness to a dream. It requires something of us. It is, as Bonhoeffer put it, costly grace. The advice to “trust the process” means that faithfulness requires not passivity but patience, not quiet acceptance but steady determination to believe and hope for a God whom we do not see and whom the world has forgotten. It is to believe in a God who often seems dead in the present moment, whom we lose in times of grief and despair and forget about when things are going fine. It is to believe in a God who lives in the future. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
Sermon series: Growing in faith, no. 3, Practice abundance (Colossians 2.6-19)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Pentecost + 7, July 28, 2019
Tom James
Over the last three weeks, we have been talking about growing in faith. So far, we have said that growing in faith involves, (1) trusting the process, but also recognizing that the process is not automatic but something that we must play a part in, and (2) remembering the plan, but recognizing that the plan is not a detailed roadmap of our lives but the union of God and ourselves in Jesus Christ. The practical upshot of both of these two points is that faithfulness means taking responsibility. Growing in faith means moving toward a faith that is grown up, that doesn’t look for magical solutions to life’s problems from God but commits itself to realize God’s dream, that recognizes that God’s plan can’t come to fulfillment without us.
We’ve been following Paul’s letter to the Colossians during this series, and, this week, we come across a passage that is packed with difficult ideas and points that have a lot to do with the context of the letter. People were being tempted to go astray in Colossae by all kinds of esoteric teachings that promised advantages in this life and the next to those who followed secret rituals. From what we have said so far, “seeking advantages” is the problem. A faith that “seeks advantages” is an immature faith. A faith that tries to get God to do you favors is a faith that puts yourself in the center of things, that refuses to recognize that faithfulness means learning, growing, and changing, and not simply having things handed to you.
But I want to focus this morning on something a bit more positive. Throughout our text for today, Paul uses some imagery like “fullness” and “overflowing.” These are images that suggest a way of looking at life that, I believe, is crucial for a growing faith. They suggest a theme that comes up again and again throughout Scripture: that we belong to a good creation in which we have everything we need, in which there is an abundance of good things that can be freely shared.
In this view, scarcity is something that we have to artificially create, and we create it by our tendency to hoard things for ourselves. Our society creates scarcity by fencing people out, by restricting access in order to drive up the prices of commodities to extract more profit from them. This is nothing new. In ancient Jewish law, people who had land rights are commanded not to go back a second time through their fields and harvest what has been inadvertently left behind. They were commanded, in other words, to honor the earth’s abundance, to allow the poor to come into their fields and take what they need from the what is left over, and not to create artificial scarcity by taking every last scrap for themselves, as they would have done otherwise. After all, they may have held rights to the land, but they didn’t produce the grain—only the powers of nature, of God, can do that. In fact, to take everything from the land for yourself is, according to the vision of life we find in Scripture, to steal what belongs to everyone because everyone is God’s beloved.
But this raises a difficult question. If is this is the biblical vision of abundance, how do we practice it in our world today, when fences enclose the land and when artificial scarcity prevails? How do we practice abundance in a world that is no longer community-oriented but based on private ownership? How do we practice abundance when everyone seems to be out for their own, when biblical values are reversed so that it now appears that the poor person entering the rich man’s field to gather what they need is the thief, rather than the rich man who hoards?
First, let’s start with a principle—call it a “principle of abundance.” It goes something like this: If God is to be trusted as a kind creator who wants good things for us, life can’t be about getting our share and protecting it from others. Life can’t be about closing our fists around what we have. If God is to be trusted, closed fists don’t make any sense. Life can’t be a matter, primarily, of security. In fact, I’d say that the desire for security above all else reflects a distinct lack of faith—or, at least, a lack of Christian faith. And yet our society is obsessed with security, isn’t it? We are obsessed with keeping other people away from our stuff—our property, our jobs, sometimes even our neighborhoods. So much of our behavior is driven by fear, and, in response, we tend to isolate ourselves into like-minded enclaves and artificially manufactured neighborhoods that function to separate us from people who are not like us and whom we take to be a threat to our stuff. We act as if there isn’t enough—that we have to jealously guard everything because, evidently, everyone is out to get what we believe is rightfully ours and ours alone. During vacation season, I’m reminded of the way nearly all the nearly endless beachfront in coastal areas is privatized and enclosed so that the public can no longer even see the ocean or the lake except in a few small areas. Small public beaches are super crowded while endless miles of beach are unoccupied, effectively fenced off in case a beachfront property owner might want to sit alone on the sand at some point. Evidently, nature is only for people who can afford it—or who can afford to hoard it for themselves.
But how do we live in a different way? How to we put into practice the principle of abundance? There is a deceptively simple answer do this question. We can do what we call “stewardship.” But we have to do it in a different way than we have been taught, because it turns out that stewardship, like a lot of other things, has been corrupted by the mentality of scarcity. We tend to think of stewardship as taking care of what is rare and in danger of being lost. And there are some ways that this is true. We should exercise care over rainforests and bee populations, for example, because we need healthy forests and lots of bees to survive, and because they both are currently under threat. We care for old buildings because it is hard to replace them. But stewardship should not only be thought of care for scarce resources because at a deeper level, stewardship is a call to reflect God’s generosity with our own. I’m not just talking about money here, and certainly not about giving money to the church. We have people working on that if you can believe it, and you’ll be hearing from them, have no doubt. I’m talking about being generous with who we are—of giving without expecting return, not because we are good people, but because we trust that there is enough, because we believe that there is a faithful God who provides what we need and more. I’m talking about living with open hands rather than closed fists because with open hands we can not only give, but we can receive, too. The good steward is one who generously gives and openly receives, who hasn’t closed themselves off in their private enclave or walled themselves into some zone of comfort that is purchased at the cost of isolation. Because the good things God gives, like manna, tend to spoil if they are hoarded. The empty beach becomes a prison of loneliness. The segregated neighborhood becomes a ghetto of superficiality. It turns out that the only way to preserve the good creation in the form in which it is still good and not a poison pill is to share it, to make sure that it is there for everyone. So that it is a free space filled with the rich diversity of human life and not an impoverished wasteland of sameness that makes life dull and meaningless and shallow.
I’ll be honest. I don’t know if there is a path beyond despair in our world today that doesn’t involve spiritual growth. We live in a world that can crush everything that is best in us. We live in a world that can starve us, spiritually if not also physically. Faith doesn’t fix everything—in fact, it doesn’t really fix anything. But it does offer us the possibility of rising above the loneliness and the brutality of modern life, not by helping us to escape but by teaching us to hold fast to the better qualities of human nature in hope that we can make the world a better place, where people are cared for instead of ground down, where people are welcomed and loved instead of excluded and despised. But, in order to do that, the very first thing we must do is to get beyond fear, and the only way to do that is to learn to trust. The only way to lose our fear is to see that there is enough, and that we are free by the grace of God to live in the abundance that God gives. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
Sermon series, Growing in Faith, no. 4, “Welcome the future” (Colossians 3.1-11)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Pentecost + 8, August 4, 2019
Tom James
Max Lucado tells the story of Bob, who was born in the town of Coats. His mother loved the color blue and made Bob’s first coat a lovely shade of blue. Every time she noticed her son in his lovely blue coat, she cheered, “Yes, Bob!” He felt good in his blue coat, but Bob had to grow up and go to work. So he put on his best blue coat and slipped out of the house, going to his new job. The people on the street saw him and began to yell, “Yuk, Yuk!” Their coats were yellow and they hated blue.
Into a store ducked Bob and bought a yellow coat, put it over his blue coat and continued on his way to work. The people cheered, “Yea! Bob!” Bob felt good in his yellow coat over his blue coat. He stepped into his boss’s office to get his assignment for that first day. He sat waiting for this boss, who came in, looked at him and yelled, “Yuk!” Bob jumped up, took off the yellow coat and stood waiting for approval in his blue coat. The boss yelled, “Double Yuk! Bob. Here at work, we wear green coats!” With that, Bob slipped back on the yellow coat, over the blue coat and put the green coat on top. “Yea! Bob!” said the boss. As he left for work, Bob felt good.
After work, Bob slipped off the green coat, put it under the yellow coat and walked proudly home. He opened the door, went inside, as his mother looked at him with a “Yuk” on her lips. Bob quickly changed coats, putting the lovely blue one on top. Mom whispered, “Yea! Bob!”
Bob got so good at changing coats until he became a popular man around town. He changed coats so swiftly until he had folks fooled into believing that whatever coat they had on, he had it on too. Bob loved hearing the crowd say, “Yea! Bob!” He couldn’t stand hearing “Yuk” Bob was elected mayor of the Town of Coats and had a faithful constituency. One day he heard a noise outside of his window and then heard a pounding on his door. The Yellow Coats brought in a man wearing no coat. “Kill him!” they cried, “he doesn’t fit in!” In his yellow coat, Bob said, “Leave him to me.”
“Man, where is your coat?” he asked. The man said, “I wear no coat.” Bob replied, “everybody wears a coat. What color do you choose?” The man responded the second time, “I wear no coat.” By then the Green Coats had gathered under Bob’s window. Running to the window, his green coat on top, Bob yelled down to them, “I have it under control.” The Green Coats shouted, “Kill him!” At this time his mother entered the room, and Bob slipped his blue coat on top. “Bob, where is his blue coat?” Mother asked, The Man replied, “I don’t wear a coat.” “Kill him,” said Mother as she left Bob and the man alone.
“Man, said Bob, you have to wear a coat or they are going to kill you.” “Bob,” said the man, “you need to decide to stop wearing your different coats. Take them off, take them all off and let the world see who you truly are.” “Take them off? Take them all off?” asked an incredulous Bob. The man said again, “Bob, you have to make a choice.” As the crowd kept crying, “Kill him!” Bob washed his hands, opened the door and marched the man toward sure death. The man looked at Bob, with one final word, “Choose.” Bob was left alone with his three coats and the questions ringing in his mind, “Take them off? Take them all off?”
The unnamed stranger in Lucado’s story, of course, is Jesus. He wears no coat because he is the human being who is stripped of those identities that we wear and that serve as a way of excluding and rejecting people who wear different “coats,” if you will, and that serve as props to shore up our pride. And the fact that he refuses to wear a coat is what makes him offensive, a danger to the elaborate system of coat-wearing that helps us make sense of our world—that provides a rank and order to people.
Of course, it’s not really about coats. The identities we cling to may not be as obvious or tangible. Some of them may. Paul says in our text for this morning that, in Christ, there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. These would have been obvious things. Being Jewish or Greek would have been both deep identities and sources of pride and very obvious differences in dress and language and practice that provoked contempt from others who were not Jewish or Greek. Much more recently, the great sociologist W.E.B. DuBois wrote about how white skin can be felt as an advantage, a privilege, among white workers—something they cling to and seek to protect. The problem, DuBois wrote, is that this distinctive marker of identity makes invisible what white workers and black workers share in common, and makes it impossible for them to work together to advance their shared interests to make their lives better. “White skin privilege,” as he called it, is a kind of fool’s gold, like a yellow coat that tends to hide who we really are and blind us to what is really important.
There are many today whose “coat” is their whiteness. They are preoccupied with preserving all things white—they march in the streets expressing their fear that they will be “replaced” by non-white people, or they spend their time opposing efforts to make our communities, our schools and our neighborhoods, more diverse. Or, and I’ll include myself in this, they simply say little or do little to challenge the racism that so infects our culture. We sometimes live under the illusion that all that stuff is behind us, and that things will always automatically get better. But they don’t. Nothing is automatic or assured. If we are going to get rid of the coats, someone is going to have to have the courage to take theirs off.
There are more subtle coats we wear, of course. There are attachments we have to a past, for example. Nothing wrong about that. We all come from somewhere, and there’s nothing wrong with loving our history—as long as we can love it critically. We are part of a story that is valuable, and it is valuable in part because God has been involved in that story, calling and enabling us by grace to become our best selves. But that past can become a coat, too. It can become something that we cling to to differentiate ourselves from others, to separate ourselves into closed groups who share prerogatives with each other and deny them to outsiders. The church itself can become that kind of closed group. We can wear our church identity as something that is so important to us that we reject others who don’t wear that coat. We can put expectations on people that they know our language and our customs and our habits and maybe even our stories, or else they are outsiders or guests but never members of our community because they simply don’t have the right coat.
But Jesus wears no coat. What are to do with that?
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of growing in faith is to learn to live with no coat. It is also the most liberating. To lean on nothing, to renounce the way that the past functions as a crutch—to live with no crutch—that is truly to live. To reject the sacred quality of the past and to live openly to the future. That is what faith is.
To bring it back around a bit. I’ve said this before: the future of the church is not white, and it is not rich. There are reasons why Christianity is booming in the global south and declining in our country. Growing up in faith is going to have to mean letting go of the fantasies of a bustling, well-healed church in a safely middle-class community, the fantasy of a white Christianity, because the truth is that a whole lot of white, middle-class people today are bored with faith or are just not interested. We all know that. And it’s not just that people are busy. In the ancient church, Sunday was a workday, and congregations met early in the morning before work. They were no less busy when the church was rapidly growing than people are today. Life for most people was grueling back then. There wasn’t much free time. The truth is that white, middle-class Christians live with the fantasy that their advantages give them everything they need. It’s a common biblical theme—their ease and comfort become for them a reason to reject God. The cross makes no sense to them. Fewer and fewer of them go to church at all, and the churches they go to often don’t proclaim the cross, they don’t speak of God’s future in which all those advantages are set aside, but instead cater to their wants and whims, suggesting that all they need is to make a few tweaks here and there, adding a dash of faith to a way of life that is good enough as it is. All the coats are fine, these churches say. This kind of Christianity may do well in terms of creating larger congregations, much in the same way Walmart devours mom and pop retail stores by offering cheaper stuff, but it has no future because it does not believe in the future. Amid all the buzz of the modern and the contemporary, this is a kind of Christianity that is stuck in the past, that is clinging to old advantages, that is proudly wearing coats that they don’t even realize are faded and threadbare.
I’m not out to criticize mega-churches, though. Our more traditional congregations have the exact same problem. We all tend to cling to a past we treasure, and we all tend to shield ourselves from the future that God wants to bring. Especially when that future is challenging to us. Especially when that future calls us to change—and it always does. So all of us need to hear Paul’s words anew. Our life is not in our identities, our advantages, our rich histories and stories. Our life, if it is to be a real life, a life with a future, is hidden with Christ in God. That is to say, it is sheltered not by our connection to a beloved past but by its openness to God’s future. Growing in faith is welcoming this future. It is learning to dare to live with no coat. It is learning to live as the people we really are, vulnerable and fragile, and yet together in our weakness and open to God. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
