The New Life List, Pt. 1 - Sermon 373

May 2019

Colossians 3: 1-7 Easter is a beautiful and celebratory day – all about new life, all about resurrection from the dead, all about hope for the future. It’s why we often wear new clothes and have fellowship time together, and get up to worship at weird hours early in the morning. And where we live, the weather and all nature seems to mirror our feelings – all kinds of flowers blooming, all kinds of leaves sprouting, baby animals being born, the earth coming alive after the death of winter.

The issue with Easter is that it can seem like a one-day feast – and then regular life resumes. Obviously the flowers keep blooming, but we resume our lives of looking at our phones and not the flowers. So much so that the Sunday after Easter is sometimes called “low Sunday,” because everyone comes on Easter and then the next Sunday feel like sleeping in, or going fishing, I guess. Easter comes – and then what? New life, resurrection, and then what? We talk often on Easter about being an Easter people, a people who live a resurrection life all the time. But we don’t often talk about what that looks like, at least not in helpful ways. We have new life in Christ, and the bottom line seems to be – OK, go and sin no more. And we make a list of sins. OK, don’t do these things. Here’s the rules, the prohibited list. Be a good person. I don’t know about you, but that kind of conclusion takes all the wind out of my sails. It’s not that I don’t want to be a good person. But to take something as huge and beautiful and joyful as Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, defeating death, opening up eternal life, and then to reduce it down to some kind of list of really simple morality statements just seems like a let down. It would be like, if you were a performer of some kind, a musician, a dancer, and you gave the performance of a lifetime. You gave it your all. You absolutely nailed it. And felt the swell of all that joy of your art going out into the world. And as you were about to take a bow, someone comes up and says, I’m sorry, this person has been disqualified for wearing the wrong colored shoes. Wait – what? All this music, all this dance, all this beauty and joy and you were worried about what color my shoes are? That’s how you were judging? My shoe color? So the question is – how can we keep that swelling joy and uplift and beauty and song of Easter – and bring it into our real lives? How do we live lives that are beautiful to God, how do we live as Easter people, without reducing it all down to a few nit-picky points? After all, verses like we’re going to be studying for the next few weeks in Colossians have been used to reduce our beautiful life-giving faith down to lists of behavior control forever. Paul says these words, “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth.” Which is a lovely idea, but who gets to decide what are the heavenly things and what are the earthly things? After all, earthly in the Greek literally means things that come out of the soil. Which, if you want to get technical, and I do, we all come out of the soil. We were made from the dust of the earth, according to the creation story. Also, the flowers I’ve been talking about come out of the soil. But my phone stores everything in something called the cloud. And clouds are in the sky, and heaven is thought to be up, so maybe I should spend more time looking at my phone, and less time looking at the flowers, right? Right? Of course not. But you can see how easy it is to get things twisted, can’t you? I mean, if the people who sell smartphones used this verse, they could definitely use my line of thinking, right? It’s easy for verses like these, in the wrong hands, to be used for behavior control. A friend of mine came up with a fancy phrase for it – he calls it correctionalism. Correctionalism is the school of thought that says – hey – let’s make a list of right behaviors and wrong behaviors and tell people they need to live by them. Totally black and white – do this, not that. And then if someone messes up, we’re justified in punishing them – or even pushing them out of our community. Beautiful song, beautiful music, but I’m sorry - wrong color shoes. Only brown or black shoes are allowed, and you wore red. Off the stage. It’s up to us to use these verses in better, more life-giving ways. In ways that don’t cut down the joy of Easter and the expansiveness of all the possibilities that Easter brings. And yes, we want to become better people, because we have new life in Christ. But the words we use to describe this new life matter so much. Words make worlds. The words we use to describe things, especially the ways we think we should live as Christians, matter. Instead of correctionalism, Methodists have traditionally used the word connectionalism. Connectionalism. The way that we are all connected to each other. Correctionalism pushes people out of the beloved community – pushes people out of our circles – for doing the wrong thing. Shuns people for every little mistake. Makes them feel small, ashamed, angry, sad. Connectionalism pulls people back in, even when they’ve done something wrong, and says, hey, let’s figure out a way through this. Let’s figure out forgiveness, and love, together. Even when it’s not easy because you and I have different ideas of what are earthly things and what are heavenly things. Because pulling people back in to the community makes them feel important, and whole, and makes them want to live a new life. Connectionalism, not correctionalism. Jesus did this to a woman accused of adultery. Pulled her back into the community and shut down the people who wanted to kill her in order to correct her. Jesus did this over and over to lepers, who were outcasts, tax collectors, Samaritans, anyone who was outside of the traditional Jewish community at the time. He pulled them in, called them worthy, loved them, healed them. If that’s not Easter good news, expanding the circles of healing and hope, out, out, out to people who need it most – I don’t know what is. John Wesley did the same thing, in his time. Went out and preached to the poor in a time when being poor wasn’t just an unfortunate circumstance that you were born into. It was a moral judgment. If you were poor, it was because you were ignorant and lazy. The rich were literally called “the nobility,” as in the ones with good virtues, the ones who knew how to live right. So to preach to the poor was a more radical thing than we imagine. Why would you preach to them, people thought. They’re just bad people. They won’t get any better. But John Wesley believed in connectionalism. He pulled them in, helped them with food, medical care, taught them how to read, and formed them into groups to support each other. So like Jesus, like John, all this Easter season we want to flip the script. We want to come up with a better “New Life list.” Based on this letter that Paul wrote, and also rooted in our knowledge of who Jesus was, and our Methodist heritage of connectionalism – pulling people in, not casting people out. We need new words for a new age. Words that don’t dampen our Easter joy but become a channel for it to expand and pour out into our world. We need to be able to read this living word in ways that are, well, life-giving. What if we re-read these words as Easter people, as Jesus-people, as Methodist-people: thought of them in perhaps more helpful ways. Paul uses the words “earthly” and “from above.” Earthly, to him, is bad, and things above are good. This was a very typical way to phrase things in that time, for a man like Paul, who was highly educated, who had read Greek philosophy, and was writing to other people who also knew Greek philosophy. They were used to this kind of language. It wasn’t literally – all the things on earth are bad, all the things in heaven are good. It was a way of speaking. But when we read it today – without that same kind of philosophy in our background – it can get really magnified out of context. It can be read to mean that all earthly things are bad – like nature. We don’t need to care for it, because it’s just going to pass away anyway. Heaven is where we need to focus. Or our bodies – anything fleshly or earthly – must be bad, so we should be ashamed of them. Which leads to all kinds of bad things, shaming people for their bodies, not taking good care of or loving our own self, the self that God created. Trying to correct our bodies in unhealthy ways. I don’t think that’s what Paul meant. I don’t think that’s the Jesus life. We weren’t raised to new life just to be brought down again with shame and apathy. We were raised to new life so we can spread that new life. So maybe instead of “things above” and “earthly things,” we can call them “things that lead to life,” and “things that lead to death.” That’s more or less what Paul meant – things that lead to eternal life, and things that die. So let’s use those new words and read this again: “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that lead to new life, which is in Christ, who is in God. Set your minds on these life-giving things, not on things that lead to death, for you have already died, and your life is protected with Christ in God… so leave behind, therefore, whatever in you is leading to death, whatever is a dead-end: sexual immorality, dishonor, lust, evil things, and greed (which is idolatry). Because if you follow the way of death, you will be hurt, and other people will be hurt too. You know this from experience, these are the ways you used to do things, and they didn’t lead to life.” Now that we have new life in Christ, we set our minds on life-giving things. Not on things that lead to death. Not just on following everything we personally desire, even if it hurts someone, or grabbing up as much as we can, even when others don’t have enough. But on the things that keep our Easter joy going. And guess what – this venture is so much better when we do it together. When we can help each other through the hard times. When we don’t throw someone out when they mess up, but draw them in even closer. Connectionalism, not correctionalism. When we can say, OK, wow that didn’t go well. Let’s heal, let’s forgive – let’s try again. For God’s sake. Literally. For the one who brings us new life. So this is your challenge this week. Re-read these words from Paul with new language and start your list. What are the things you’ve tried before that led to death? And what are the things that lead to life? How can we share those experiences together, and draw one another ever closer to Christ, in whom our life is protected forever? Thanks be to God in Jesus Christ. Amen.

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