Sometimes when I read the book of Colossians I wonder what the congregation must have been thinking as they listened to it being read. I have to stop and think practically after every verse so I can imagine people saying to the reader, “Don’t go so fast. I didn’t get that. Stop and go over that again. Can I get a copy of that to take home with me to read?” So much of what Paul writes to the churches is practical counsel for day to day living and further on in the book there are rules for daily living. But in the first two chapters we are working through Paul’s concerns about their being taken captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. (2:8) To counter that, Paul lays out true and real theology that is counter to the basic principles of the this world – and that makes it difficult for us to handle. We love common sense and practicality. We love books and ideas that are sometimes more consistent with the basic principles of this world than the basic principles of Christ. We live in the here and now – not in the by and by. The book of Colossians is not easy but without it we will wander off into baptizing as Christian whatever new ideas about church, life, God and salvation come along.

1.  The lesson this morning is on reconciliation and for that we turn to Colossians 1:15-23:

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. 21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— 23 if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.

There are several levels of reconciliation. This is the first. Everything in earth and in heaven is reconciled to God through the blood of Christ. We’ve talked about that before and come to the conclusion that we really have no way of understanding what that means. This is one of those verses that people in Colossae wanted to take home with them, isn’t it? What does it mean to reconcile everything created. Is that universalism? No. Is it Paul thinking the whole world is now at peace with God? No. It is, I believe, God’s declaration of available peace for those who will lay down their arms against him. It is his announcement that peace is possible and our part in a larger rebellion will not be held against us. There is not only amnesty but forgiveness. Not only forgiveness but reconciliation – a starting over from the beginning as if we had never joined the rebellion.

But there are terms and it is those terms that infuriates the spirit of the world and the gods of this age that we talked about last week. What is that spirit? It is the belief that I have a claim to my right to myself. The belief that I can discover truth for myself. The belief that it is only through Christ that we will have peace and it is that exclusive claim that incites the anger of the Spirit of the world. Paul is saying that peace and reconciliation with God is far different than a search for truth. It is revealed – not discovered. It comes from God alone and it comes only through the blood of Christ and the death of his physical body. This is not the same as come to church and find your passion or join our family to have your needs met, is it? It is uncomfortable even to talk about with people. It is why people have called it “that bloody religion” in the past. It is not what we market to people and they are often surprised to hear it. There is something about it that stirs up the spirit of the world in us and makes us resist it. We want to reduce it to teaching or practical wisdom or the result of our natural search for truth – but it is not. Peace with God is only possible through the blood of Christ on the cross. Yes, there is wisdom but it is hidden from those who refuse to accept the terms of this peace.

1 Corinthians 2:

2 And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. 2 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. 4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. 6 We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

There is no genuine wisdom or peace with God available except through the cross and the blood of Christ.

2.  Paul goes on to describe the next level of reconciliation – our personal reconciliation with God.

“Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior, But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation…”

Paul says in Romans 5:1: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.”

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17-21:

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

It is not difficult to read this and we tend to read it quickly and nod our heads but we have trouble believing, as did Paul, that we are fully reconciled with God. The word means “to be made friends again.”

We think of it as a truce or a cease fire but not as the war being over. There are too many times we fail or sin or make mistakes or fall short that make us doubt God’s full acceptance of us based on the blood of Christ. We sometimes think of ourselves in a stand-off with God but not a true friendship. We go to the other extreme and become overly familiar with Him and refer to him as our co-pilot or the man upstairs or as I heard someone say on the news this week, “The good ‘ol Lord.”
It is hard to believe that we have peace with God and so many of us stop short and keep trying to find ways to please Him or pacify Him or keep Him at arm’s length. It is why we keep trying to reinvent rules and regulations that will create peace with God. We are still in the treaty and cease-fire way of thinking. We want laws and stipulations – not only for ourselves but for others. We want to know when we are good and bad. We want to know when others are as well. How many times does Paul say this is the spirit that kills? It is only the Holy Spirit that gives life and allows us the freedom to see ourselves as friends of God. We are strivers by nature. We are achievers and we are more comfortable when we are proving ourselves to ourselves, each other and to God than when we simply accept the complete peace that God offers in Christ.

Ray Stedman puts it this way: True peace is oneness. It is not merely the cessation of hostility, the absence of conflict; it means being one. Anything else is superficial and temporary and highly unsatisfactory. You know this to be true. You have made peace on superficial terms and have found it only external. If you merely agree not to fight, it is not peace. And invariably it results in a new outbreak, with all the previous animosity surging to the surface once again. This is why what we call peace among nations never lasts–because it isn’t really peace. It isn’t oneness at all. It is only a weariness with warfare, an agreement to stop it for awhile until we can all recuperate and rearm. Then it breaks out all over again, because nothing is ever settled.

What God has offered is true peace – not simply an agreement to stop fighting.

3.  The next level of reconciliation is being reconciled with each other. There is no real possibility of genuine reconciliation without our being under the blood of Christ. We can have therapy or organizational consulting but there is no genuine fellowship without the blood of Christ and the cross. Here is how Paul says it in Ephesians 2:14-22:

14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. 19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

There are probably more verses in Paul’s letters about getting along than there are about evangelism, doctrine, theology or anything else. From the beginning of the Church there have been conflicts within. We cannot idealize the picture of the early Church. As someone said about the ark: “Were it not for the flood on the outside I could not stand the smell on the inside.” There were all the same dynamics that we see today and it was all of that keeping Paul’s mind preoccupied most of the time.

Ephesians 4-6, Galatians 5, Philippians 2, 1 Corinthians 13, are all about how we are to get along with each other. We are to put aside all the scrambles for position and power, all harsh words and gossip, all grudges and deceit. The nitty-gritty things of reconciliation. I like what John Townsend said this week about how we are to treat each other. “We are not told to be nice but to be kind. Kindness tells the truth in love.” But it is this kind of reconciliation that ends up being how the world sees us as different. It is not our stand on public policy issues or how we vote or our programs or our social outreach. It is our ability to exhibit behavior that can only be explained by our reconciliation with God. There is more power in that than our words and programs.

Many of you are familiar with the writer Malcolm Gladwell from his books like The Tipping Point, Blink and now his new book, David and Goliath. Malcolm was brought up Mennonite and early in his career was faithful in church and part of a fellowship. However, he drifted away until he began to write this latest book about the irony of power.

“When I was writing my book David and Goliath, I went to see a woman in Winnipeg by the name of Wilma Derksen. Thirty years before, her teenage daughter, Candace, had disappeared on her way home from school. The city had launched the largest manhunt in its history, and after a week, Candace’s body was found in a hut a quarter of a mile from the Derksen’s house. Her hands and feet had been bound. Wilma and her husband Cliff were called in to the local police station and told the news. Candace’s funeral was the next day, followed by a news conference. Virtually every news outlet in the province was there because Candace’s disappearance had gripped the city. “How do you feel about whoever did this to Candace?” a reporter asked the Derksens. “We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people’s lives,” Cliff said. Wilma went next. “Our main concern was to find Candace. We’ve found her.” She went on: “I can’t say at this point I forgive this person,” but the stress was on the phrase at this point. “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.” I wanted to know where the Derksens found the strength to say those things. A sexual predator had kidnapped and murdered their daughter, and Cliff Derksen could talk about sharing his love with the killer and Wilma could stand up and say, “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.” Where do two people find the power to forgive in a moment like that? I was raised in a Christian home in Southwestern Ontario. My parents took time each morning to read the Bible and pray. Both my brothers are devout. My sister-in-law is a Mennonite pastor. I have had a different experience from the rest of my family. I was the only one to move away from Canada. And I have been the only one to move away from the Church. I attended Washington Community Fellowship when I lived in Washington D.C. But once I moved to New York, I stopped attending any kind of religious fellowship. I have often wondered why it happened that way: Why had I wandered off the path taken by the rest of my family? What I understand now is that I was one of those people who did not appreciate the weapons of the spirit. I have always been someone attracted to the quantifiable and the physical. I have always believed in God. I have grasped the logic of Christian faith. What I have had a hard time seeing is God’s power. I put that sentence in the past tense because something happened to me when I sat in Wilma Derksen’s garden. It is one thing to read in a history book about people empowered by their faith. But it is quite another to meet an otherwise very ordinary person, in the backyard of a very ordinary house, who has managed to do something utterly extraordinary. Their daughter was murdered. And the first thing the Derksens did was to stand up at the press conference and talk about the path to forgiveness. “We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people’s lives.”

Maybe we have difficulty seeing the weapons of the spirit because we don’t know where to look, or because we are distracted by the louder claims of material advantage. But I’ve seen them now, and I will never be the same.”

It was not preaching but the results of a reconciled life that affected Malcolm.

4.  But the ultimate purpose of reconciliation is neither personal piety or people learning how to get along with each other. There is something greater – the establishment of the church. Paul is never satisfied with good behavior or personal sanctification. For Paul, we are reconciled for a larger purpose and the hostility between us is over for more than personal peace with God or a better life with others.

Ephesians 4:4-5, 11-16:

4 As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. 2 Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3 Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. 11 So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, 12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. 14 Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. 15 Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. 16 From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

We are not individual Christians. We are part of a Body – part of a Church. The goal of reconciliation, as we said last week, is to prepare us to be future rulers. Not according to the principles of this world but the principles of the next. How are we prepared to rule? By serving – not just consuming. What are the gifts we have been given in order to serve? What is the purpose of those gifts?

We have marketed the church as a place to be served. The church is a vendor in our quest for happiness. We have other vendors but the agreement we have with the church is it will serve us in ways that we define or we will find another – or just leave altogether. Unfortunately, many churches have fallen into this trap and see themselves as having to create programs that meet the needs of people and have discovered there is no end to the needs people have. They become incredibly sophisticated and are never satisfied. It’s funny but a friend sent me a list of complaints received by the Thomas Cook travel company:

THESE ARE ACTUAL COMPLAINTS RECEIVED BY THOMAS COOK VACATIONS FROM DISSATISFIED CUSTOMERS :

1. “I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts.”
2. “It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallarta to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ‘siesta’ time — this should be banned.”
3. “On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food.”
4. “We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price”
5. “The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room.”
6. “We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow.”
7. “They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax.”
8. “No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared.”
9. “Although the brochure said that there was a fully equipped kitchen, there was no egg-slicer in the drawers.”
10. “We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish.”
11. “The roads were uneven and bumpy, so we could not read the local guide book during the bus ride to the resort. Because of this, we were unaware of many things that would have made our holiday more fun.”
12. “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair.”
13. “I compared the size of our one-bedroom suite to our friends’ three-bedroom and ours was significantly smaller.”
14. “The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the resort’. We’re trainee hairdressers and we think they knew and made us wait longer for service.”
15. “There were too many Spanish people there. The receptionist spoke Spanish, the food was Spanish. No one told us that there would be so many foreigners.”
16. “We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no air-conditioning.”
17. “It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel.”
18. “I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes.”
19. “My fiancé’ and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”

Doesn’t that sound like some of us who have become church connoisseurs? Our tastes are always being refined and our expectations raised and the church is always scrambling to keep us happy and comfortable and attending. As James says, “Brothers and sisters, this should not be so with you.”

Instead, we should read and re-read what the purpose of the church is. It is not to entertain us. It is not to serve us. It is a place we are to be prepared for works of service, “so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

Have you heard the term “peace dividend”? It is money that a government originally planned to spend on its military that becomes available for other things when a situation changes (such as when a war ends). We have a peace dividend ourselves now that our war with God has ended. We have capital available to invest that once went to building up defenses and protection against God and other people. How do we invest that? In the service of the Church.

5.  One last thought and then I’ll close. It may well be that the ultimate purpose of reconciliation is not personal, interpersonal or even corporate. It may be something that is a mystery only to be revealed later. However, read this and think about it.

Ephesians 3:10-11: “His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

What does that mean? Think about it this way. You’ve probably seen pictures of amphitheaters in medical schools and hospitals where students and other doctors could view operations carried out below. This was a common practice in the 1800’s. You can see pictures of students leaning over the rails to watch surgery. Perhaps that is the image Paul is using here. Rulers and authorities are leaning over the rails above us to watch how we do this. We are, in some unimaginable way, teaching them the practice of what it means to be at peace with God and each other. We are God’s way of instructing powers we cannot even see and one day it will be revealed how the role of the Church was far more than making the world a better place to live. It is God’s flawed tool for teaching the unseen powers and authorities.

And that brings us back to the beginning, doesn’t it? “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” It is the Church that is God’s means of reconciling all things in heaven and on earth and it is our service to the church that is a part of that purpose.

When you serve you are not just volunteering. You are showing worlds you cannot see what it means to become mature and what it means to be reconciled to God.