March 17, 2013 | 4:00 p.m. | Fifth Sunday in Lent

The Fifth in a Series of Sermons on the Apostle Paul

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Colossians 3:12–17

Our administrative staff here at the church got new office cubicles this week. Some people expect that most of what goes on around my office each week is stuff that feels very “churchy,” and there’s a lot of that, but there are some things in every job that are inescapably corporate, and getting new cubicles is one of them. So this week there were lots of jokes outside my office about the movie Office Space—people asking, “Who took my Swingline stapler?” And “PC Load Letter? What the **** does that mean?” And “Somebody’s got a case of the Mondays . . .”

If you haven’t seen the movie and aren’t getting these references, it’s a satire on work and the struggle to find meaning in the midst of the mundane tasks that fill up many of our days. The movie is good comedy because almost everybody who has had a job in any kind of office can relate to some element of it. People frequently ask me what I do between Sundays, and though there are plenty of hospital visits and counseling sessions and Bible studies, I also spend time negotiating prices with florists and audio technicians, working out conflicts when two meetings are planned for the same room, and gathering data for annual reports. At a number of points during my week, were someone to pose the question, “What would Jesus do?” I would be tempted to answer, “Not this.” I imagine many of you feel the same way. The topic I want to address today is the importance of creating some greater meaning out of those mundane tasks—why it’s important to restore some purpose to the little things and how you might go about doing so.

I’m going to get at that topic by talking about love. Paul, whom I’ve been preaching about for several weeks, talked about love as much as anything else. The passage John read to you is one that is used in lots of weddings. It is similar to the familiar message Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13 (which Edwin talked about a number of weeks ago): “Love is patient, love is kind. . . . Faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” Tonight’s passage from Colossians, while probably not written by Paul, comes from the same school of thought.

The kind of love being talked about here isn’t isolated to a wedding or even to our most intimate relationships; it’s broader than that. The point is simple but far reaching: if we really get the message of Jesus right, we integrate love into every part of our lives: not just planning your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, but figuring out how to respond when the printer says “PC Load Letter” and won’t print your report. Jesus’ message is supposed to help us restore some meaning to the things in our everyday lives that threaten us with meaninglessness. When we restore meaning to the little things, there’s a hope that we would also find greater meaning in the things that are most important to us.

The text seems to suggest that greater meaning in life is generated when you “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, weakness, and patience” and “above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together.” It sounds like a nice list of things, but it’s a little difficult to know what it means or how to apply it to one’s life.

Some of you will find this uncharacteristic of my preaching, but I actually think that one of the best ways to understand what is being said here is to take it quite literally. If you want to see a difference in the way you experience all of life, if you want your heart to change and your life to have more meaning, you have to “clothe yourself” with things like compassion and kindness; you have to “put them on” in every small and concrete way you can. John Coakley has noted that “the outside change becomes precisely the condition, or invitation, for the inside change. In other words, I put on my coat, and then I warm up inside: two events, but really only the former event is an action on my part.” When we habituate ourselves to thinking differently about the things that surround us, that habit or discipline over time allows our hearts to change, because we are opening ourselves to what God’s Spirit is able to do inside of us.

I was reminded this week of a story that illustrates the point. The Death of Ivan Ilych is a novel by Tolstoy. I remember reading it in high school English class. It’s an incredibly well-told story of a man’s prolonged death that helps readers like us think more deeply about the life in front of us. The book begins at the funeral of a man named Ivan Ilych. Our first impressions of the man are of the things that are overheard after he has died: we hear about how other people react to his death. He’s given a list a little like the one in the passage from Colossians tonight: people describe Ilych as “intelligent, polished, lively, and agreeable, . . . , capable, cheerful, good-natured, sociable.” The way he is described, you get a sense as the reader that Ilych “clothed” himself with these things. He surrounded himself with a certain set of people and experiences that eventually cultivated within him this set of characteristics. His life sounds pretty good, much like many of us would say our lives are pretty good.

But the story is more complicated than that. Following the opening at Ilych’s funeral, we flash back to what happened before he died. We get to know him in his professional life as a lawyer and a judge. Then he gets sick. It’s a prolonged, difficult march toward death during which we go inside of Ilych’s head as he gets progressively more helpless and incapable, and we see his perceptions of his life change and deepen as he experiences and appreciates his surroundings in a new way. He begins to feel differently about things and especially people that surrounded him in life. One of the most poignant shifts is that he begins to feel differently about Gerasim, the servant who helps him eat and bathe and dress. This lowly servant, of whom Ilych once took almost no notice, becomes for Ilych the expression of what it means to live a truly meaningful life because of the care and compassion—the love—he brings to everything he does. There is just something about the way he carries out all of his tasks that is admirable and full of meaning. Ivan Ilych sees the shape of Gerasim’s life and begins to have doubts about his own life. He wonders if his life has really been worthy and valuable, and he struggles for meaning as he looks back on the way most of his life has been spent, much of it now seeming quite meaningless.

As I thought about Ilych’s story this week, two things occurred to me about it. First, that Ivan Ilych certainly wasn’t a bad person. In fact, it actually reflects positively on him that, faced with his own death, he becomes reflective on his life and finds things he wishes he had done differently. This, I think, shows him to be a person of some significant depth. Second, though, the cruel reality of the story is that Ilych has these reflections when it is too late to do anything about it. That is sad for him—but an important cautionary tale for us. We can learn from him to ask the questions sooner.

I find Ivan Ilych’s story instructive because of how it paints a picture of the kind of personal characteristics one might want to cultivate, a picture that is very different from what most of us tend to see in our everyday lives. Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, you say? Most of us are taught to cultivate ambition, strategy, egotism, and impatience. Most of us rarely slow down enough to ask if those are the qualities we should be pursuing. How unusual it sounds to walk through one’s day and, when confronted with a situation, have the patience to slow down and wonder, what is the compassionate response in this situation? The kind response? The humble response? It is the cultivation of these kinds of characteristics that opens us to the lives of love Christ calls us to live. Most of us don’t ask these questions often enough. But the good news is that we still have time to do so.

A couple of further realizations focus the importance of these questions. For one thing, I hope it is clear that the letter to the Colossians was not written for the purpose of teaching us to put on a happy face or avoid conflict. It was written to a church in conflict and to people who knew each other well, who spent a lot of time together. People who cared about each other but who often fought, and who were seeking “a disciplined pattern of redemptive life together” (Feasting on the Word). These people weren’t just trying to be polite; they were asking the big questions of what it takes to create a life of meaning. When you think about that, it’s worth noting that the places in our own lives where we have to do the hardest work in creating meaning have to do with our closest relationships. It’s one thing to react patiently and compassionately when the copy machine breaks and quite another when you are betrayed by your spouse. Nevertheless, the two go together. Once again, like the analogy of putting on a coat in order to warm up inside, the kinds of habits and patterns we cultivate around the little external things eventually shape the kind of love we are able to share with those we want and need to love the most. It’s hard to swear at the copier all day long and then come home at the end of the day and be a loving and compassionate spouse.

The season of Lent is a time for this kind of deeper self examination. We sometimes talk about giving up chocolate or making additional time to read the Bible or pray as if these little, external activities are the essence of Lent. The little things matter, but they are not the essence of the season. The essence is much more in the connection between these small things and the big questions that really matter. The point is that we should be adopting external practices in our lives that deeply reshape the way that we understand Christ’s presence inside of ourselves. We should be putting on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, like a coat that causes us to warm up on the inside. We should be cultivating these good things in each small way that we can so that we are constantly being shaped into people of love.

Whether or not you have had a particular discipline during the season of Lent up to this point does not matter. I invite you in this week to consider what it means for you to live a life more full of love and to do so by finding a few small things in life that seem meaningless, that seem not to matter, and in those things to think about surrounding yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. The hope is that in so doing, you will find that God shapes your innermost being to reflect the love of Jesus Christ. Amen.