A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

August 5, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Above and Below

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 24
Colossians 3:1–11

“Set your mind on things that are above.”

Colossians 3:2 (NRSV)

You are the body of Christ: that is to say,
in you and through you the work of the Incarnation must go forward.
You are meant to incarnate in your lives the theme of your adoration—
you are to be taken, consecrated, broken, and distributed,
that you may be the means of grace and vehicles of the Eternal Charity.

Augustine of Hippo

A story for you this morning to frame our reflections on the scripture passage we just heard. A story not from the Christian tradition, but rather from the East—from the Buddhist tradition.

A guru was so impressed by the spiritual progress of his disciple that judging he needed no further guidance, he left him on his own in a little hut on the banks of a river. Each morning after his daily washing, the disciple would hang his loincloth out to dry. It was his only possession. One day he was dismayed to find that it was torn to shreds by rats. So he had to beg for another from the villagers. Now when the rats nibbled holes in this one too, he got himself a kitten. He’d no more trouble with rats, but now in addition to begging for his own food, he had to beg for milk as well. Too much trouble begging, he thought, and too much of a burden on the villagers. I shall keep a cow. Now when he got the cow, he had to beg for fodder. Easier to till the land around my hut, he thought. But that proved troublesome too, for it left him little time for meditation. So he employed laborers to till the land for him. Now overseeing the laborers itself became a chore, so he married a wife who would share this task with him. Before long, of course, he was one of the wealthiest men in the village. Years later his guru happened to drop by and was surprised to see a palatial mansion where once a hut had stood. He said to one of the servants, “Isn’t this where a disciple of mine used to live?” Before he got a reply the disciple himself emerged. “What’s the meaning of all this, my son,” asked the guru? “You’re not going to believe this, sir,” said the man, “but there was no other way I could keep my loincloth.”

The story has many layers of meaning. It’s a parable that offers a sense of there being a tension between the earthly and the spiritual. The loincloth becomes a symbol of the spiritual life in tension with the earthly, with the belongings that the disciple amasses. This way of reading—offering tensions—is a device that’s used in various places. We find it often used in the New Testament in the documents around which we learn about the life of the early church, often in the form of letters written to communities of early Christians in different cities in the Middle and Near East. Paul, who wrote many of the letters, is one of those writers who uses this rhetorical device of setting up oppositions . And so you’ll find in Paul’s writings that he talks about flesh as opposed to spirit; gospel as opposed to law; faith and works. And a very important one for Paul’s writing is the opposition, the tension, between the present and the future. This is partly because much of Paul’s theology is grounded in his belief in the imminent return of the glorified Christ.

In the letter we read from today, the letter to the Colossians, there is a somewhat different opposition that is set up by the author. New Testament scholar Lewis Donaldson, in a commentary, says this: “The primary tension in Colossians is between above and below.” Above and below—he argues that this is one of the reasons why he believes the author of Colossians is not Paul but one of Paul’s followers or one of Paul’s interpreters. Regardless of the question of authorship, here is a letter for which we, in the first instance, have to be careful in our reading. It would be too easy to read this text and the list of moral exhortations that the writer sends to the church and to see that as the center or the “meat” of the meaning of the letter—the list there in verse 5: “put to death fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry).” I think these are symptomatic in the letter of what the author is trying to share with the people. And as we go deeper in the text I think that we find that what the writer is talking about goes to the very heart of the mystery of our faith. Chapter 3 is the rhetorical climax of the letter. Our passage is the prelude to a passage that I’m sure is much more familiar to many of you, well loved by couples getting married and looking for a scripture reading. Verse 12: “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. . . . Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” This is a gathering together of the points that are lifted up in the first part of the chapter that we read earlier: the idea of putting off that which is rooted in this realm, that which is affected by idolatry—putting that off and putting on what is new, the new clothes of love. What the writer is doing here is challenging the hearers of the letter. Challenging them and the ways of the world, which he describes as idolatry, and calling them into the new way.

This is gathered up at the end of our passage in that last verse where all the barriers of earthliness and idolatry are knocked down—there’s no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, slave and free—and then the soaring claim of the writer: “But Christ is all and in all.” Christ is all and Christ is in all. There is here something of the doctrine of the incarnation, which means God taking on what it was to be human in the person of Jesus the Messiah, the Christ.

Hans Küng, the great contemporary German theologian, writes about this in one of his reflections on the New Testament letters, and he says that in these letters the incarnation is understood as mainly about emptying: about God emptying God’s self and this being the justification of Christian love and unselfishness. Now Küng warns us that this is not some kind of feeble disempowerment, but rather, as he says, it is “a life without fear even in the presence of dangerous risks through struggle, suffering, and death firmly trusting and hoping in the goal of true freedom, love, humanity of eternal life.”

There is a beautiful Christmas prayer that kind of gathers up that idea and the concept of the incarnation. It’s written by a very fine writer from Britain called Kate Compston. It begins like this:

Thank you, scandalous God,
for giving yourself to the world,
not in the powerful and extraordinary
but in weakness and the familiar
in a baby
in bread and wine.

In bread and wine. Reflecting on this, it seems to me that Communion, the Eucharist, the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, stands for us as a symbol of the resolution of this tension about above and below.

I love this thing that’s written by an Anglican Bishop Steven Bayne as he talks about this in the context of Eucharist. (Eucharist is the Greek word for “thanksgiving” that is often used for the liturgy of Communion.) He says, “Eucharistic people take their lives and break them and give them in daily fulfillment of what our Lord did and does.” He goes on: “He took his life in his own hands. This is freedom. He broke it—this is obedience. He gave it—this is love. And he still does these simple acts at every table and in every heart that will have its soul and time and eternity meet.”

Above encounters below and transforms it, and we embody the drama of the table as bread is taken and broken and shared; so we are called by God and called to understand our brokenness and live it and to share and to give and to love. That’s what St. Augustine is talking about on the quote printed on the cover. It’s at the heart of a beautiful poem by Denise Levertov, one of the great poets of faith of the present time. In her poem “Altar,” she reflects on the meaning of this act:

Thy presence is made known
by untraced interventions
like those legendary baskets filled
with bread and wine, discovered
at the door by someone at wit’s end
returning home empty-handed
after a day of looking for work.

This then is the place where above and below meet, where eternity bursts into time and transforms us. What happens to the bread happens to us because we become for Christ his body, so that the hungry folk will be fed, so that the sick might be healed with justice and peace and love would reign.

Great God, your love has called us here
as we, by love, for love were made.
(Brian Wren, “Great God, Your Love Has Called Us”)

Amen.