The Garments of God: Sermon Proper 13 C RCL, Colossians 3:1-17

Sermon: Proper 13 C Revised Common Lectionary
To be Preached at St. John's Lancaster on August 4, 2013

Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107
Colossians 3:1-17
Luke 12:13-21

The heart of Psalm 107 is found in four stanzas which relate the experiences of four types of people who followed their own desires to destruction, and who then “cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress.” (NEB) The Psalm opens with a call to respond to God’s love with thankfulness, and it ends with a catalogue of his blessings to his people. As I have said from this pulpit before, not much really changes in the world. People are pretty much the same wherever you look. Have you ever made a bad decision, I mean a really bad decision, which has threatened to cost you dearly? I don’t mean a bit of anxiety. I mean a decision which has threatened to cost you your family, or your job, or your health, or your enrollment in school, or a huge amount of money, or your physical safety. Most of us can probably remember such a time in our lives. Remember the discomfort, the growing sense of dread, and the abject fear that followed that first rush of adrenalin or anger? I don’t want to repeat, or even remember those times in my life, but the fact that I am still here makes the psalmist’s point. For some reason known to God alone, he did save me from my distress. And for that I am thankful.

Today’s proper lessons, slightly expanded, provide a ready catalogue of the types of things that are likely to get you and me into trouble in our lives, and call us to avoid most of those situations by living our lives as if we are truly thankful to God. The psalmist indicates that our bad choices get us into trouble, and then we call on God and he delivers us, and then we are thankful. Conversely, the lessons today would seem to indicate that if we live lives directed by genuine thankfulness to God, we are much less likely to need delivering from our own bad choices. Today’s lessons give us a sort of check list of what not to do, and the Gospel, together with the extension of Colossians, tells us what we should do if we have truly been transformed by thankfulness to God for the salvation he has given us through the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ, our Saviour and our Lord. We must not forget the lesson from Hosea, which gives us an extensive list of those types of things which get us into trouble with each other and with God, but it is to Paul that we turn for the specific list that will not allow us to escape honest introspection and self-evaluation.

Here is his first list. “fornication, indecency, lust, foul cravings, and ruthless greed which is nothing but idolatry.” (NEB Col. 3:5) While I am confident that Paul never read Freud, it is obvious that he understands those urges which drive us to preserve ourselves and those like us, and how they tend to get out of control with some regularity. I also find it interesting that blessed Paul mentions “ruthless greed”, which is the focus of our Lord’s comments in today’s Gospel, alongside of sexual sins. Our news today seems to be dominated by lust and money, or by someone’s demand that they be able to pursue the same in any way they wish. Everything seems to be viewed through those twin lenses. Perhaps Paul was onto something here. Perhaps he understood something about himself and about all of us. Perhaps he realized that those good things that God gave us to produce families and provide for them are likely to be perverted. He understood that the opportunity to produce children from within that creative union between a man and woman which demonstrates the true nature of Christ‘s relationship with his Church is likely to be discarded in the name of pleasure or control. He knew that those gifts which enable the kind of security which lets children grow into the image of Christ free of want, privation, and brutality, are often thrown away or demeaned because of excessive emotion, self centeredness, or “ruthless greed.”

And then St. Paul continues. “…you must lay aside all anger, passion, malice, cursing, filthy talk- have done with them! Stop lying to one another, now that you have discarded the old nature with its deeds and have put on the new nature, which is being constantly renewed in the image of its Creator and brought to know God.” And then comes that famous verse about Jew and Greek, slave and free, and the like. This message is for all of us. But I digress. Remember that time you were in real trouble that you thought about at the beginning of this sermon? What did you do when you got caught? Were you angry? Did your passions become enflamed? Did malice cause you to blame someone else? Did you curse like a drunken sailor, or a frat boy with too much to drink, or an adolescent coed trying to convince the world that she was more grown up and worldly than she really is? Did you lie to yourself or to someone else in a vain attempt to get out of the situation? You see, St. Paul could also be called Dr. Paul, because he really does get it. Like the good Rabbi he was trained to be, he understood human nature as well as any Psychiatrist that ever lived. Sex and money, and their friends pleasure and power, lead in the end to most of our problems with ourselves, with each other, and with God. But as Paul says, we have put all of that away, because we are signed with the cross, and marked as Christ’s own forever. Our sins have been washed away in Holy Baptism, and we have committed ourselves to Jesus and his way in confirmation. And then, Paul describes for us what a Christian looks like, and he challenges us to step up to the kind of disciplines which help the world to see the very nature of God writ large upon our lives.

“Then put on the garments that suit God’s chosen people, his own, his beloved: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. Be forbearing with one another, and forgiving, where any of you has cause for complaint: you must forgive as the Lord forgave you. To crown all, there must be love, to bind all together and complete the whole. Let Christ’s peace be arbiter in your hearts; to this peace you were called as members of a single body. And be filled with gratitude. Let the message of Christ dwell among you in all its richness. Instruct and admonish each other with the utmost wisdom. Sing thankfully in your hearts to God, with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Whatever you are doing, whether you speak or act, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (NEB Col. 3:12-17)

That is a very different picture from the picture of a life dominated by sex and greed, by pleasure and power, by self-absorption and demands that I be accepted as I am. It is a picture of a life given to thanksgiving and praise, a life which understands the nature of forgiveness and transformation, a life which demonstrates to all people the truth and reality of Jesus Christ. Might we all aspire to such a life, and might we all so walk in harmony with the clear teachings of God in the Bible that we find the humility and daily reliance upon his grace to live as did Jesus when he was in this world. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. AMEN.