Here we are at the end of one of the several letters Paul has written from his two year imprisonment in Rome – Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, Titus and Philemon. As we’ve said before, prison produces different effects in people. For some, they give themselves up to bitterness and resentment. For others, their lives are permanently dulled and slowly destroyed. For some, however, it produces greatness. Victor Frankl wrote of his confinement in the German death camp during WWII: The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult…

It’s remarkable to me that Paul can move so quickly from arguing against the heresy of Gnosticism and how Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation to the most practical human concerns and relationships. He is not a scholar in the ivory tower. “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together..For God was pleased  to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile…

Doesn’t it seem a bit ironic that after telling them to avoid people who have lists of rules to obey he would then create a list of rules of his own for us to follow? Paul was a teacher and teachers often depend on lists – especially lists that people can easily memorize and use as guides for their behavior. Of course, the shorter the better but sometimes Paul had fairly lengthy lists that we often had to recite in Sunday School. There are negative lists: Romans 1:  They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.…

The earliest Church may have stayed pure and all of one mind sharing everything with each other for a few days or weeks but it soon faced the realities of imperfect human nature. Yes, they were all believers and what would later be called Christians but the perfect harmony could not last for long.  “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone who had…

This morning we are beginning our six weeks in the book of Colossians. It is worth noticing that the same author could have two such different perspectives of Christ and both of them are correct. They are not in conflict but two sides of the same coin. In the same way that the writers of the four Gospels have different accounts, Paul has a Philippian picture of Jesus and a Colossian picture. It was Ray Bakke, an urban sociologist, who first pointed this out to me. In his book “A Theology As Big As The City” he describes splitting a class into two parts. One part reads only the letter…