Old First Presbyterian Church, San Francisco

December 31, 2006

Rev Laura Cheifetz

Good morning!

It is good to be wearing my mother’s robe and standing in the place my father usually stands.  A little pastoral collegiality goes a long way.

The New Testament reading for this morning is one of those passages that sounds like judgment.  It reminds me of those passages I was told to memorize in youth group that left me with the impression, in the midst of my adolescent pain, that I was not clothing myself with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience.  Instead the passage triggered in me and my peers the kind of shame that almost led us to live with docility, always studying, attempting kindness, and quite frankly being boring.

Turning from my baggage to the text. 

The letter of Colossians was written to a Gentile congregation probably established by Epaphras.  It is up for debate whether or not Paul wrote this letter.  There is one linguistic key that may suggest this passage could have been written by someone other that Paul.  In Paul’s letters, gender roles and roles of different ethnicities and backgrounds were set out as equal, in opposition to prevailing cultural norms.  However, the letter to the Colossians reflects a post-Pauline sensibility of a return to gender roles reflective of the values of the wider culture.  As Sikhism and Islam technically hold women as equals to men and this is not necessarily reflected because of the influence of the surrounding cultures, so has Christianity upheld and reinforced cultural understandings of the value, or lack thereof, of certain gender roles.

The Colossian community was struggling over holy behavior.  On the one hand the congregation is questioning whether it is necessary to behave in a certain way to get to God (ascetic practices, worship of heavenly powers) while the writer is emphasizing that Christ was the one to give humanity access to God (1:27 “Christ in you”) and that was sufficient.  The question facing the Colossian community was how to live now that the believers were resurrected in Christ. 

Colossians presents a set of instructions for corporate life – all of life, not just Sunday worship, followed by instructions for household life.  The author exhorts the hearers of the letter to, as a community, clothe themselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  There are a few virtues missing here.  The missing virtues, interestingly enough, are the 4 cardinal virtues in Greek society:  wisdom, bravery, sobriety, and fairness.  Instead the author lists the virtues given in the HB and NT of God or the Messiah (Anchor p. 418).  These attributes and actions are directed ultimately to God.

Let me be honest.  To my post-modern ears, these exhortations all sound weak and unrealistic.  As if I am about to let others walk all over me because I am trying to be patient, meek, and kind.  Of course this is where the interpretative challenge lies.  We tend to think of these as exhortations for individuals when in reality these are not intended to be about individual responsibility or individual actions.  This letter and its exhortations to change behavior are about community responsibility and community actions.  It is about making the community whole.

In other words:  compassion in the Bible is typically an attribute of God.  Compassion is what transforms God’s anger.  It is what God turns to when God is done being angry.  The word translated for “heart” as in “heart of compassion” is the intestines, most likely here meaning the feelings that parents naturally have towards their children.  The entire being of a person “was to be controlled by compassion” (Anchor).  Kindness is that kindness that is poured out by God towards God’s people.  It is an abundant kindness.  And meekness, well, remember it is the meek that will inherit the earth.  Meekness is contrasted with “eruptive rage” (ibid.).  Meekness is the appropriate attitude for an entire people who had done something as a people or a nation to deserve God’s judgment.  And remember it is the meek who God will save and who will inherit the earth when all is said and done. 

We could go on with studying these words, but the point I believe this makes is that this is no weak individualistic ideal, but a powerful set of values with the potential for social and economic transformation.  If we as a society and a culture were directed by compassion, perhaps health care would not be so elusive for so many.  If we as a society and a culture were clothed with kindness, perhaps all people would enjoy God’s blessings of abundance and protection from harm.
 
We as Christians in the United States are much like the early church.  Despite these writings in our own canon, we have not clothed ourselves in these attributes.  Like the early church, we too have accommodated ourselves to the wider culture.  Instead we as North Americans clothe ourselves with the fabric of classism and racism which infect our otherwise God-led compassion and kindness.  We as Christians clothe ourselves with the fabric of willful ignorance and triumphalism rather than humility, meekness and patience.

The movie I have seen most recently in the theatre (with a bunch of three-to-five year olds) is “Happy Feet”.  If you haven’t seen it and want to, cover your ears:  I’m about to ruin it.  “Happy Feet” is about a little Emperor Penguin called Mumble.  All the little penguins go to school to learn to sing, since the mark of a penguin is her or his “heartsong.”  Poor Mumble can’t sing, but he can tap dance.  The other penguins think he is totally weird, and he is cast out of the community by the leader of the Emperor Penguins.  He finds other friends and with them he discovers the reason for the famine among the penguins:  humans are consuming their food source.  Through his tap dancing, he is able to communicate to humans that they need to stop overfishing so that the rest of the animals have enough to eat.  And the Emperor Penguins learn that maybe different forms of expression aren’t so bad after all.

It’s a classic story in some ways:  a young penguin with a different way of expressing himself is ostracized by the wider community.  He leaves and finds another community of the similarly outcast; more plot notes – there comes a crisis in which his particular expression is what saves his community from the callous overconsumption of humans, and he comes to be accepted and loved by everyone.  I think “Happy Feet” is also a story of cultural values and systems.  The cultural values of the penguins prefer one expression of self, and the system built around that value serves to exclude the outliers: those who do not quite fit into the norm.  The system that is slowly destroying the penguin population is set in place by global patterns of consumption by humans, which serves to imbalance the entire ecosystem. 

It is nearly impossible not to live into death-dealing systems:  whether we like it or not, we live in a country that has this pattern of forcefully asserting economic dominance; whether we like it or not, we live in a world that integrates each member of society into systems of inequality.  We live these systems built around cultural values that do not affirm all people.  We differently value people based on education, race, accent, national origin, and religion.

This call to the community of the letter to the Colossians was not written to us but is salient for us.  If we who are Presbyterian are called in our baptism to respond to God’s gift of grace, then we ought to start living it in a recognizable way; we ought to start living according to a different set of values.  And this is my brothers and sisters where the rubber meets the road!

This is a real exercise, a definite challenge, to clothe ourselves in these attributes of God and not in the vices of society because it goes against every social expectation and every system in which we function.  Try wriggling out of the market economy… it is difficult to not clothe ourselves with privilege if we are one of the above:  college-educated, male, heterosexual, white, upper or upper middle class, a homeowner, employed, an American citizen, healthy, or fluent in English.  Upholding human dignity in a society built to affirm only the dignity of people with these privileges is quite a challenge.  I am as caught up in this as you are:  it is impossible to avoid participating in systems of privilege.  It is the fabric that offers us comfort and makes our lives possible, and also serves to blind us to its existence.

Clothing ourselves in the attributes of God and the Messiah according to the HB and the NT might mean giving up some of our privilege.  Clothing ourselves in the fabric of these other attributes means adhering to a standard that is foreign in a society in which upwardly mobile is the best way to be.  Clothing ourselves in these other attributes means living into the new life in Christ.  It means finding ourselves in a different way of being because of Christ’s resurrection.  We can’t do it if we each personally clothe ourselves in compassion and kindness.  We can only be transformed if our personal convictions undergird our work together in community to create new systems that function with the new clothes.

Back to my adolescent baggage – this is clearly a difficult task but it is one to which we are called as Christians.  Taking on this identity for some might be a matter of course; those of us who grow up in the church may never have contemplated any other way of believing.  Those of us who are Christians but did not grow up in the church, or who had long stretches of questioning and protesting and alienation and poking around this 2000-year old faith tradition, at some point have had to make a claim about who we are and what we believe.  And in claiming Christian identity, we claim for ourselves new clothes.  In some Christian traditions, people who are baptized wear white; in the early church, those catechumens who made it through their 3 years of studies to their baptisms wore white as an outward manifestation of their new life in Christ.  Being Christian in a nation that is still predominantly Christian is nothing special.  What is special is knowing that being a Christian entails not a partisan vote but a completely different way of being.  Being a Christian entails a completely different value system that is foreign to all of us:  one that is interested in life, not death; one that is interested in love with the other, not power over the other; one that is interested in the liberation of all people, particularly the “least of these”, not personal economic gain at someone else’s expense.  Being a Christian means having hope in an alternative world in which all people are treated as though they have been created precious in the image of God, in which all creation is cared for because it is God’s own, in which being a Christian in the United States is not equated with cultural imperialism but with standing against evil in foreign policy.

Let’s do something a little different for this year’s New Year’s resolutions.

V. 17 of this passage exhorts this community to, “in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”  The psalm for this morning is pure praise.  It is the 3rd in the group of 5 psalms that close the book – all praise songs and called hallelujah psalms.  All 5 psalms begin and end with “Praise the LORD!”

Instead of continuing as though nothing special has happened, we are called to live in a different fabric, to live in recognition that the a chain of events is about to unfold throughout the coming year; in our Christian calendar Jesus of Nazareth, son of a carpenter, will grow up, answer God’s call to teach and preach, raise all kinds of hell for the authorities, and be crucified for his commitment to teaching and living an alternative values system, and will be raised in God’s answer to the powers of death. 

Praise him, sun and moon;
   praise him, all you shining stars!
Kings of the earth and all peoples,
   princes and all rulers of the earth!
Young men and women alike,
   old and young together!
Praise the Lord!

Amen.

 

Charge and Benediction:

Go out into the world with praise for all that God has done.
Go out into the world clothed with kindness and humility.
Go out into the world living an alternative values system.

And may the attributes of God, the radical values of Christ, and the love of the Holy Spirit be with you, now and forever.
Amen.