More Than a Carpenter

So I was at a retreat with a group of college students at Richmond Hill, an ecumenical retreat center in downtown Richmond. It was back when I was in campus ministry and I had taken a group of students who were living together in intentional Christian community to see how another intentional Christian community lived. Richmond Hill is in an old Catholic monastery high on the top of Church Hill in Richmond. The nuns moved out about 25 years ago and an ecumenical group has run it ever since.

If you go there, they will put you up in some of the old cells that the nuns used to use. Over the doors there are the stenciled names of Catholic saints. There’s the Ignatius room, the Augustine room. Well, I was staying in a very small room at the end of the hallway. The only furnishings in the room were a desk, a chair, and a small twin bed. I fell asleep with the chair right up against the bed.

In the middle of the night I woke up with a start. I had a very strange feeling that someone was watching me. I opened my eyes and there, straddling the chair and looking at me, was the King. That’s right. You know who I mean. Elvis was sitting on that chair. It was such a vivid image that when I actually woke up awhile later I had a hard time convincing myself that it was only a dream. And who knows?

I don’t know what that vision meant. At the time I took it to mean that I was really hungry for some evidence of God’s power and my brain did that crazy thing brains do in dreams and gave me a king. But it was during a low period in my life and, strange as it was, it did tell me that God was present.

Today, though, we talk about the real king. It is the last Sunday in the Christian year. Next week we begin Advent, which is the first Sunday of a new Christian cycle, and we will start moving toward Christmas. The scripture lessons will take us back to the promises of the Messiah’s coming and then to the beginning of Jesus’ story in a manger.

The Christian year always ends with this day, though. We may start with a baby. We may walk with Jesus through the sufferings and the trials of his life and death. But we end the year with this image of kingship and we ask ourselves what it means to call Jesus, not just our friend, not just our brother, not just a carpenter, not just a great human being, but the one who will reign forever.

This is not an easy thing for us to hear. Our world doesn’t make it easy for us to talk about who Jesus is for us. There are all kinds of competing claims out there. All kinds of messages. All kinds of options. We might pay lip service to the idea that Jesus is king, but it’s hard for us to live it out.

Last year the Pew Forum came out with a study on how Americans think about their faith and what they found is that most of us use a kind of cafeteria style to put together a set of beliefs. We take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, throw it together and come up with beliefs that are individual as we are. For instance, almost 40% of Americans attend worship regularly at multiple places, 28% at worship of different faiths. 22% of Christians say that they believe in reincarnation, which is about the same percentage as in the general population, and even though the Christian story, centered on Jesus, has a very different message about what happens to us after death. Other people say that they mix their beliefs in Christianity with astrology or crystals or nature worship.[i]

This doesn’t surprise me. It tells me that we are a spiritually confused and spiritually hungry people. We see people who have experienced powerful mystical experiences and we are attracted to that. Like Julia Roberts discovering Hinduism in Eat, Pray, Love. We like the idea of something new. And maybe we have heard about Jesus for so long that we think we know him. Maybe he’s become so thoroughly domesticated that we can’t see him as wild and holy anymore. He’s like the sweater Grandma knitted us when we were teenagers. It’s warm. It’s comfortable. But we’re a little embarrassed to wear it out in public because we’re not sure how stylish it is.

There are dangers to being confused, though. I have talked in several sermons recently about the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a Christian theologian working through the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and into World War II. Bonhoeffer watched as the Christians around him began to compromise their beliefs in order to conform to the pronouncements of the Nazis. When the Nazis said that Jewish Christian converts shouldn’t worship with German Christians, the main Christian church agreed. When the Nazis said that clergy ought to pledge an oath to Hitler in addition to committing themselves to serving God, the Christians agreed. When the Nazis said that the Old Testament was degenerate and the cross was a bad symbol because it revealed weakness, the church got rid of both.

Bonhoeffer looked at all of this and he could only conclude that Christianity as a religion had failed. If a thousand years and more of Christian teaching in Germany had produced people who couldn’t put up any more resistance than that, then perhaps the religion needed to die. If Christians were able to hear the gospel message and then go on and do whatever they wanted, including doing things that were directly contrary to the gospel, what good was the title Christian? What Bonhoeffer said from his prison cell in the darkest days of the war was this: “We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’”[ii]

Bonhoeffer feels far ahead of his time in talking like this. Or maybe it’s just that our culture today feels a lot like his, not because we have Nazis challenging the Christian message but because we have so many other ways in which that message is being challenged. If we use Christianity as our grounding, it seems to be only in the bumper sticker sense.

Colossians has a much larger vision of who Jesus is. Remember that the early church grew up in a Roman Empire that was also a place of many competing religions. The Christians in Colossae would have been very tempted to be just like we Americans are, picking and choosing from a menu of religious options. What made Judaism and Christianity so threatening to the Empire, though, was their insistence on making these outrageous claims for a single God.

The letter to the Colossians says that Jesus was not just a great person within this world, he was also the one who liberated us from the power of darkness and transferred us into a new kingdom. We may have been a people marred by sin and stuck in our tired stories of failure, but we do not have to be that any longer. We have been forgiven and freed for new life with a new ruler who is not like any other ruler in the world.

He was human, but Jesus was also the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, which means he was there at the beginning of all creation. Everything was created thorough him. He is the head of the body, the church. He was there at the beginning and he will be there at the end. He was God. And he was God in a way you never expected. He was God in a way that went to the cross and died and made a way through his blood to peace and life.

Now if you believe that, it means that it challenges every other way of thinking. If you believe that, it means that you can’t live in the world in the same way. If you believe that, it may make you uncomfortable sometimes. But it may also make you understand the greatest power the world has known.

Robert Capon writes that when we Americans think of a powerful Jesus, since we don’t have kings anymore, we think of Jesus as Superman.

“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It's Superman! Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way." If that isn't popular christology, I'll eat my hat. Jesus -- gentle, meek and mild, but with secret, souped-up, more-than‑human insides -- bumbles around for thirty-three years, nearly gets himself done in for good by the Kryptonite Kross, but at the last minute, struggles into the phone booth of the Empty Tomb, changes into his Easter suit and, with a single bound, leaps back up to the planet Heaven. It's got it all -- including, just so you shouldn't miss the lesson, kiddies: He never once touches Lois Lane.[iii]

Yet the way that Jesus saves is so much different than that of a superhero. He is thoroughly human and the life he calls us to is to be thoroughly human ourselves. If we follow this Jesus we will encounter each other in deeply personal ways and we will experience a new way of being human.

There is a popular story that tells about a person walking down the beach. She sees a man standing at the water’s edge and flinging starfish into the ocean. She also sees that the beach is covered with starfish and that even if the man stayed there all day he would never be able to make a dent in the number of beached starfish. So she goes and says to the man, “Isn’t this a little silly? You’ll never be able to save all these starfish. There are just too many.”

The man pauses for a moment, then picks up one more starfish and tosses it into the water. “I saved that one.”

Living in this world as a Christian can seem like a silly and pointless thing at times. Following Jesus can seem like a waste. “What good are we to the world?” we might be tempted to ask. Why should we live differently than this world does? But we follow one who says, “I desire that those whom you have given me will be where I am.” Jesus comes to lose no one and invites us to discover what it means to reign with him. Thanks be to God.

Colossians 1:11-20 (NRSV)

May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.

He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers -- all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

---

[i] “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 9 December 2009, http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/Many-Americans-Mix-Multiple-Faiths.aspx.

[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Eberhard Bethke, April 1944, quoted in “Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity” on the blog Experimental Theology, 10 Oct 2007, http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2007/10/bonhoeffers-religionless-christianity.html.

[iii] Robert Capon, from the website CrossWalks Christian Resources, Brian P. Stoffregen, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/luke23x33.htm.

Body Building

I’m going to begin today with a word. It’s a very simple word. A very familiar word. It’s not a 5-syllable $50 word. It’s not a word I pulled out of a theology book in seminary. It’s not Greek or Latin or Hebrew or Swahili. It’s just a word but it is one of those words that can make all the difference in the world.


When you’re lazy, you don’t use this word. When you don’t want to think about the consequences of the decisions you make, this is not a word you want to hear. When you think something doesn’t really matter, you don’t use this word. When you just want to be entertained, you don’t want this word.


But if you think your choices make a difference…if you think there is something more to the Christian life than just the entry point…if you think there is something for us to do after we sing, “Here I am, Lord”…if you think there is some walk to go along with the talk…if you think that there may be something more to this journey of faith than a few steps across the room and a few tears at the altar rail…if you don’t think that Jesus rose so you could pose…if you believe that standing on the promises is more than sitting on the premises…if you want…desire…need…thirst for…hunger for…yearn for a life worth living in a church worthy of its Savior…have I got a word for you. The word is…wait for it…THEREFORE.


Therefore. Scientists use it to explain their scientific proofs. “Given all of these complex calculations, THEREFORE e=mc2.” Politicians use it to explain their resolutions. “Whereas King George is a tyrant, THEREFORE be it resolved that we are independent.” Children use it to explain their behavior. “Since I am hungry, THEREFORE I am going to take a cookie from the cookie jar.” And Christians use it…well, how do they use it?


“As you THEREFORE have received Christ Jesus the Lord…” That’s the beginning of the reading from Colossians that we had for today. Do you recognize it? As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, THEREFORE there are consequences. There are things that flow from that. There are QEDs. There are implications. There are subsequent provisions. There is more.


Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist who lives in Philadelphia but who grew up in East Tennessee says that he grew up in a Christian tradition that encouraged him to give his life to Jesus but did very little to guide him in what to do next. I have given my life to Jesus, THEREFORE I am going to do…what? Claiborne, in the book The Irresistible Revolution says, “I must have gotten born again six or eight times and it was great every time. (I highly recommend it.)…I came to realize that preachers were telling me to lay my life at the foot of the cross, but they weren’t giving me anything to pick up. A lot of us were hearing ‘don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t sleep around,’ and naturally started asking, ‘Okay, that was pretty much my life, so what do I do now?’” [The Irresistible Revolution, [Grand Rapids:Zondervan, 2006], p.38]


Shane Claiborne needed a THEREFORE. So he went to live with the poor and the homeless and to love them. We need a THEREFORE. Don’t get me wrong. We need the initial life-altering, head-turning, jaw-dropping, mind-blowing, sin-releasing, redemption-receiving, falling-in-love-with-Jesus thing, too. We need that because otherwise we’ll always have those totally-depressing, low-down, mind-messing, working at the car wash blues. We’ll always be trying to do it on our own power, under our own steam…never knowing what it means to be loved despite ourselves and just for ourselves. But we need a THEREFORE.


“As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, THEREFORE continue to live your lives in him…See that no one takes you captive…” Back in the day, what did it mean to be taken captive? What is this letter to the Colossians trying to say? Were there slave traders going through? Were they being arrested? No, the thing that was going to make them captive was a competing vision of the world. There were mystery religions around them. There were esoteric philosophies. There were powers at work in the world. And they wanted to claim the Christians. They wanted to seduce them into believing lies about themselves. They wanted them to forget who they were.


Let me tell you, you can do a lot of analysis on what these competing philosophies and religions looked like. You can break down the clues in the text and you can figure out what sorts of groups were active in first century Greece. We could get into Jewish splinter groups and Gnostic branches of Platonism. But you don’t need to do all that to understand that the same sorts of forces that were lying to the Christians of Colossae in 60 AD are still lying to the Christians of Franktown in 2010 AD.


Those groups were telling them that their bodies didn’t matter, therefore they could be treated in extreme ways. Those groups said that their identity was not in Christ, that his death and resurrection were irrelevant, that what really mattered was what they ate and how they ate it. What mattered was which festival they turned up at and how they greeted the new moon. Jesus wasn’t it. Something else was.


To which this letter says, “No.” The whole fullness of God dwells bodily in Christ. There is no other thing or person or spirit above him. What a crazy thing to say! Why be so radical? Why speak in such a radical, exclusive way? Isn’t that going to set us apart from other people? Isn’t that going to be a barrier?


“In him you were circumcised.” The writer goes back to the old Jewish ritual that was the sign of the covenant in the flesh. Now we are told that the mark in the flesh, the mark that frees us was Jesus’ shedding of his flesh on the cross.


“You were buried with him in baptism and you were also raised with him through faith in God.” Everyone of those new Christians in Colossae went through the waters of baptism and it gave them a new identity. “You were dead in sin…and God made you alive together with Christ.”


All of this focus on Jesus. Wasn’t it going to make them stick out? Wasn’t it going to make them look funny? Wasn’t it going to make them feel uncomfortable about living like their neighbors? Well, yeah!


THEREFORE don’t let anyone condemn you. THEREFORE don’t believe that your worth or your identity or your self-esteem is tied up with the values of the world because the world can’t offer you any security of position or worth. THEREFORE you are part of the body of Christ and hold fast to the head.


I’m getting ready to go teach in Dallas. I’m teaching local pastors who are serving churches. So every year I try to assign books that will be challenging but will help them see how talk about God is really talk about what we do as people who love God. This year I gave them Shane Claiborne’s book to read. But every year I assign a book called Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon. I assign it because it challenges preachers and lay people to think about what we do as though we are a colony in a strange new land.


We are hearing a lot of talk these days about aliens in our immigration debate today – who’s supposed to be here. Who’s not. But it’s helpful for Christians to remember that they are supposed to be aliens in this land. If it was ever true that Christians could depend on the culture around us to support the lifestyle Jesus commands (and I don’t think it ever was) we certainly can’t today. The blue laws that kept Sunday a distinctive day of the week are gone. People can’t comprehend why we do the things we do…why we would say that Jesus has turned our world upside down in such a way that it changes what we do and how we live in the world. The world is even losing its ability to understand and appreciate Christian practices like giving, like compassion, like humility, like working for justice, like self-denial, like fasting –when is the last time you saw any of these promoted in popular culture?


So what does it take to be resident aliens – people who love the world so much that they won’t facilitate its lies? People who love the world so much that they will embrace the strange truth and strange practices of Jesus? People who live fully in this world, but whose home is never fully here?


We have been talking a lot in these last few weeks about our baptismal covenant. We have talked about the special responsibility we have to be a community that cares for our children and youth and who commit to “surrounding these persons” with care and with nurturing them in the faith. Well, now it’s time for the THEREFORE. Since Jesus is the reason we’re here…since we trust that it’s not our merit that matters, but God working in us…since we are bound to each other as one body…since God is counting on us to be Christ’s body on earth…since all these things…THEREFORE we are going to be a body. We are going to act in ways that draw us closer to one another and closer to God. We are going to pass on our faith as it was passed on to us.


Because if we don’t, who shall we be? A people who have given our verbal commitment to Christ but who never give Jesus our bodies. THEREFORE be the people…God’s people. Thanks be to God.


Colossians 2:6-19 [NRSV]
As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.


In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.


Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.

Hide and Go Seek

I have a confession to make. I once melted a vinyl-upholstered chair. I’m not exactly proud of it, but there, I’ve said it. Now I can live in peace. It happened a long, long time ago when I was a student at the University of Virginia. During my second year there, I was living in a house with three other guys and we had a hideous orange vinyl chair in our living room. I think my roommate, Wart, had brought it from his house, or the landfill, I really don’t remember. It was ugly, no doubt, but it served its purpose and everything was fine until it started to get cold. That’s when we stoked up the wood stove in the living room that happened to be right next to the hideous orange vinyl chair.

Well, I suppose that I, as stoker of the fire, should have known better, but I was young and inexperienced in the ways of fires and vinyl. The fire I mastered. We had a roaring blaze in no time and we were soon stripped down to T-shirts and shorts just to survive the heat. It wasn’t long before we noticed a funny smell, though, and looking at the orange vinyl chair we discovered what it was. One side of the chair had turned to liquid. Now if you school children have been studying your science SOLs, you know that it’s perfectly normal for matter to exist in different states--solid, liquid, gas--but this is not acceptable for a chair. Needless to say, it was never the same again, which doesn’t mean that we didn’t continue to use it after this little incident. It was just more hideous than ever.

I have another confession from those years, though, and this one is a little more serious. I had a roommate by the name of Geoff and it was during that year, that second year of college, that we grew apart. Geoff was from New York City and he was trying to find his way in a houseful of Southern guys and there was a certain cultural adjustment we all had to work through.

Geoff loved basketball. We all did and that’s how we spent a lot of our free time. Once we even played a four-and-a-half hour marathon game that in our memories has now become legendary. The Game. But our interests started to diverge through that second year. Geoff spent less and less time in the house. I’m sure the fact that I was teaching myself to play the guitar during this time had absolutely nothing to do with it. We started to get on each other’s nerves. And we stopped talking to one another, not in a hateful way, but just because we didn’t know what to say anymore.

Friendships that develop in college can be intense. Lifelong friends emerge from the experience of sharing space and time together. But it’s also a time of change and growth and in a year you look back and realize how different you are than you were when the year started. What happens to relationships in the midst of change?

Well, they can take the route my relationship with Geoff took. A year later we were living separate lives in separate parts of the university and we rarely saw each other. But another way they can go is to introduce honesty and really confront the changes that are going on. I wish, instead of letting that relationship go, I had had the strength to say, “Geoff, I know we are going separate ways, but we’re still friends. Let’s talk about what’s really going on.” Perhaps we would have still gone very different ways. But maybe we would still be friends.

Richard Foster, in his book, The Celebration of Discipline, talks about the importance of honesty in relation to simplicity. He talks about the spiritual discipline of simplicity and considering what it means to live simply, since it is something that Jesus asked of his disciples. Foster says that part of that discipline is simple, plain speech. He’s pretty blunt about what that means: “If you consent to do a task, do it. Avoid flattery and half-truths. Make honesty and integrity the distinguishing characteristics of your speech” (CD, 93-4). Our culture now laughs at the blunt honesty therapy methods of the sixties and seventies as a “touchy-feely” extravagance, but there was a great truth there. We can’t be real until we can really say what we mean.

For most of us, me included, this really is a difficult discipline. Maybe we’re too respectful, especially us Southerners…too respectful to speak an unvarnished truth even when we see someone we love dying from the decisions they are making. Maybe we’re too fearful that the world can’t handle the truth. Maybe I’m too fearful that the world can’t handle me. “If they really knew what I was like, with all the mess that there is within me and in my life…if they really knew me they would abandon me.” And so we live our lives with some of the richest, deepest parts of ourselves tucked away, even from the people to whom we say we want to be most open.

Paul, in his letter to the Colossian Christians, reminds us, “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self.” Failing to be truly honest with each other is a form of that lying.

This is my memory of a Garrison Keillor story. He once told a story on his radio program, A Prairie Home Companion, about a time when he was a boy and he saw his neighbor, a farmer in the town of Lake Wobegon, walking down to a ravine outside of town. Being curious he followed him from a distance, watching to see what the man was up to. He saw him pull a box from under some rocks and get something out and look at it. Then, after awhile, he put whatever it was back in the box and hid it away under the rocks again.

Well, of course, this got Garrison’s curiosity up, and after he was sure that the man was gone, he snuck down and got that box out from under the rocks. He opened it up and there inside were old, faded letters from many years ago. Love letters written to the man when he was much younger. He realizes that they must have been from an old flame in a time before the man was married and he kept the letters for who knows what reason – to remember a special time in his life? To reconnect with something that was very important to him, something the relationship with the young woman brought to life? But it was definitely something that he wanted to keep hidden, even though he was now very old.

Garrison says that he would often go to the ravine after that and read the letters, even though he knew he was invading a very private space. He was fascinated by the depth of the exchange between the two lovers, the ideas they talked about, the plays they attended. Plays! He had never known that this dour, old farmer had an interest in plays or philosophy. He would never have expected it. Suddenly he looked at this man in a whole, new light, with a whole, new respect for how deeply he experienced life.

Then one day he was putting the box away beneath the rocks when he saw the man approaching from down the ravine. He didn’t think it was obvious what he was doing, but he hurried away trying not to look guilty. Later that afternoon, though, he saw the man standing over a fire behind his house burning all of those notes. Now, Garrison says, that man is dead and all the richness of those letters has never been told. Only he knows that story of what that man was capable of and one day he will be gone, too.

“Do not lie to each other,” the apostle Paul says, “because you have put on a new self in Christ.” You have put on a new self in Christ. Have you ever worried that putting on a new self in Christ might mean giving up your true self? If I give myself to Christ, does it mean that I lose my individuality? If I say ‘Yes’ to Jesus does it mean that I am less than I was? After all, Paul says that when we are in Christ “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” I don’t know what the modern equivalents to that are but it certainly sounds like there will no longer be Cavaliers and Hokies, baysiders and seasiders or any other distinctions. Christ is all in all. And where does that leave me?

The promise Paul gives to us comes a little earlier. To me this one of the most amazing promises in the Bible. It’s one of those things that takes a lifetime to live into. “Your life,” Paul says, “is hidden with Christ in God.” Your life, your true life, your authentic life, your honest life, your honest-to-God life, your life that you have been dying to live, your abundant life, your life that you have been trying so hard to conceal from everyone else because you’re just not sure how it could possibly be your real life, your life that is waiting to be born, to be exposed, to be revealed, your life that you never knew you even had until Christ came to liberate you from the life that is death…that life is hidden with Christ in God.

You know what this says to me? It says that we get real when we get closer to Christ. We get to be…we get to be the people God always intended us to be. And when we do we can give up all of the lies and illusions and delusions with which we’ve been trying to cobble together a life. We can stop trying to pretend that we’ve got it all together or that our lives are fine…no really, I’m fine…or that we’re not dependent on someone or something. We can stop the defensiveness, stop the elusiveness…and risk being honest with ourselves and with our brothers and sisters in Christ and, most importantly, with God. Most of us are giving lip service to God, saying that we trust God to take care of things, but as soon as our prayers are over we are grabbing everything back again. If we could be honest, oh, then we could be more than we ever imagined.

What does it mean that our lives are hidden with Christ in God? It means that we ultimately find out who we are by getting in touch with something outside ourselves. We don’t get dropped into the world self-sufficient. We, unlike any other creature on God’s earth, have the capacity to change our orientation to the world entirely. A possum does not come into the world with the capacity to ignore its instincts, pierce its tongue, get tattoos and start up a garage band. Only humans can do that. But humans can also find themselves in Christ. Humans also need to find themselves in relation to God. And the way has been opened for us to do just that.

I aspire to one day be the Alex Joyner that God intends me to be. It will be the most honest and authentic day I can imagine. It will also be the day when I give up trying to be separated from God’s love for me in Jesus Christ. I want to ask you to help me be that honest and open and I will pray to be able to do that for you. Thanks be to God.

Colossians 3:1-11 (NRSV)
So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things -- anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.