The sermon from Sunday, August 4.
Externally Whole
Colossians 3:1-11
August 4, 2013
Last month, the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Science approved the publication of a report
entitled, “A functional genomic perspective on human well-being.” Its primary
author is Barbara Fredrickson a psycho-physiologist at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill and her team of researchers. I wasn’t able to get my hands on the actual
study but, I’m going to keep trying. And
then get someone to explain it to me.
Emily Esfahani Smith of The
Atlantic Monthly summarized the research so, I’m indebted to her for this
explanation
The research looked at the difference between happiness and
meaningfulness at the cellular level.
They defined happiness in terms of feeling
good. They defined meaning in terms of being
connected to something bigger than yourself and helping others. People self-reported their feelings of
happiness and the levels of meaning in their lives and then the team of
researchers looked at what their cells were doing.
You see each of the cells in your body has the same genetic
code. Your blood cells have the same
genetic code as your skin cells.
Something within your body triggers the genes in your blood cells causing
the blood cells to act like—blood cells.
And something triggers your skins cells to act like skins cells. That’s internal. But external conditions can also cause your
body to trigger the genes of your cells to react differently. If you have a freckle, you know what I
mean. All of your skin cells have been
instructed by your body to function the same way—as skin cells. But something has caused a different trait to
be expressed—that the pigment of the skin should be darker in the region of the
freckle than in the area surrounding it. The cells have different genomic
reactions to circumstances.
So the researchers wanted to know, what was the impact of
happiness and the impact of meaning on a person’s immune system. What they found is pretty remarkable. Apparently, when a person experiences
"Happiness without meaning characterize[d]” by “a relatively shallow,
self-absorbed or even selfish life,” their bodies react at the cellular level
in the same way as people who are grieving or going through adversity. Smith writes, “Cole and Fredrickson found
that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives
— proverbially, simply here for the party — have the same gene expression
patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. That
is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats
by activating the pro-inflammatory response. Chronic inflammation is, of
course, associated with major illnesses like heart disease and various cancers.” By contrast, people who report having meaning
in their lives—caring for someone or something other than just themselves, have
genomic patterns that are healthier. My
older brother has a PhD in biology. I
actually had to call him to reach even this cursory understanding of the
summary. And he would remind me not to
make too much out of just a single study.
But, you gotta know that when legitimate scientists provide biological
evidence that one of them major teachings of the New Testament teaching is
actually, physically healthy for you, some preacher somewhere in America is going
to exploit the research in his sermon on Sunday morning. I can just hear him now—the God who designed
you at the very cellular level of your being is the same God who commands you
to love your neighbor. Why? Because God knows how you are made and knows
what is best for you.
Obviously in the best circumstances, a person has both
happiness and a sense of meaning. There
are people with both happiness and meaning.
But there are people—you know them—who have a lot of meaning in their
life but not a lot of happiness. We’d
think that there’s relatively few people who report having just happiness. However, perhaps the most startling finding
in the study Smith reported was this—75% of the participants in the study
reported having a high level of happiness and a low degree of meaning.
I wish we could say that this imbalance of pleasure-seeking
and meaningfulness only occurs in scientific research participants. But sadly many Christians could be
characterized the same way—they desire happiness but eschew meaning. Many Christians believe that the purpose of
faith, the church, the fellowship of saints, and indeed the purpose of God
God’s self is to enable their pursuit of happiness. We see this in those who think that the
reason for redemption is to provide a means for us to reach heaven—and that’s
it. Their theology of the cross could be
summed up as follows: Jesus died on the
cross to give a ticket to the greatest party ever. The greatest act of selflessness the world
has ever known gets distorted into a mechanism of selfishness-it seems, at the
very cellular level of the person.
As the letter of Colossians comes to a close, Paul begins to
address this question about the reason for our redemption. It is bound to Christ’s own death, burial and
resurrection but Christ’s own death, burial and resurrection. In Christ’s death-burial and
resurrection. God was reclaiming you for
God’s self. As the dean of African
American preaching, Gardner Taylor would say, “God is out to get back what
belongs to him.” (“The Sweet Torture of
Sunday Morning, Terry Muck and Paul Robbins,
Leadership, Summer 1981). When Jesus
Christ died on the cross, God acted to get back what belongs to him. But it was more than just that. The death, burial and resurrection is God’s
for model the human pursuit of meaning. “You
have been raised with Christ . . . you died and your life is now hidden with
Christ in God.” Death, burial
(hiddenness) and resurrection these serve as the patterns of the Christian
life. God had a purpose be enacted in
the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And that purpose was your redemption.
There’s a confessional move that must happen before that
happens in any one person’s life. They
have to say, “yes” to God’s actions in Jesus Christ. God is out to get back what belongs to him
but God grants freedom and so we have a choice about whether to acknowledge our
belonging or not. And here’s the remarkable
thing that happens when people say yes.
God begins to work in that person’s life making them internally
new. God’s Spirit cultivates within the
believer love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control. Even here, though, it involves our
participation. These characteristics are
the genetic code embedded in the Christian life. Yet, we yield ourselves to that genetic code
through the choices we make, the prayers we pray, the patterns of faithfulness
we cultivate.
But just as that genetic structure responds to internal
triggers in a particular way it also responds to external triggers. External triggers for the Christian come from
at least three sources. One source is
the Christian community surrounding the Christian—the local congregation to
which we belong.
A second source is other Christians who belong to other congregations. The
letters of the New Testament are windows into congregation’s needs. Read them closely and they offer vulnerable
portraits of what a congregation was wrestling with and the way they worked
toward solutions. The earliest set of
letters in the New Testament were written to congregations—gatherings of
believers in Rome, Corinth, Galtia—and most often addressed the needs of the whole
congregation not the needs of individual Christians. The congregation’s needs were the needs of
people trying to live together. The
later set of letters were written to Christianity in general. These letters still addressed the needs of
people trying to live together as a community of faith. Yet, these letters reflect the understanding
that there is something as a whole church or the “whole body of Christ” that’s
made up of believers in different locations and worshipping in different
communities. In between these two
points—the specific letters written to specific congregations and the general
letters written to the whole church—there are letters like Colossians.
The letter to the Church in Colossae was clearly written to
that specific congregation. But Paul
also indicates that they should share this letter with the congregation at
Laodicea. At the same time, they were
to read the letter Paul wrote to the church in Laodicea (we don’t know where
that letter is now; we have no copies)—Colossians 4:16. The point is the letter shows this emerging
perception within early Christianity that they were connected to Christians beyond
their local congregation.
It seems to me that
this also reflects the development of Christians. Starting out Christians know the people right
around them in their faith community—the people in their Sunday School class,
the people in their ministry team or small group. But somewhere along the line they discover
that there are other people who have the same depth of commitment to Christ
that they have. These other Christians
may look, talk, worship and believe quite different. The challenge of Christian faith at that
point is this: can the Christian reach out and create a bridge or does the
Christian retreat in judgmental isolation?
That may all seem too extreme.
Perhaps we could learn to follow the example Paul encouraged for the
Church in Colossae—exchange letters.
That is, try to understand the issues and problems that another group of
Christian faces and understand the solutions they work out and be vulnerable
enough to share the same realities existing for you.
So the Christian is called to respond externally to the
Christians nearest them in their congregation, then to the people in other
congregations, but finally, we are called to respond to those who live beyond
the fellowship of Christ. And the question
is how ought we live in relation to them?
If we respond as we might on our own—we like the people we worship with,
ignore the people who are Christian but different, and hate the people who
aren’t Christian at all. But what spiritual
genomic pattern gets expressed as we
relate to these contexts when our spiritual genes emerge from Christ?
Our scripture reading contains what we call a vice
catalog. The first time I read that
phrase “vice catalog,” I was in seminary
and getting pretty jaded by study and thought to myself—oh cool, there’s a
catalog of vices. I remember being a kid
and getting the JC Penny Catalog and circling the toys I wanted for
Christmas. I wondered if we got a
similar catalog of vices and got to go through it circling the ones we
wanted. But notice these vices that are
listed here. There are the sins we’d
usually name--lust, greed, idolatry. But
there are also those that destroy the lives we seek to live with one
another—anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language. In terms of conduct, how you live with other
people is as important to God as what you do to the life God has entrusted to
your care. It concludes with a call to
unity—In Christ there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised,
barbarian, Scythian, slave or free.” The
terminus of Christian faith is bigger than our conduct. It includes our
connections to others. The reason for
redemption is to make you a savior of the servant, internally new and
externally whole.
External wholeness comes through an attitude of life that
sees other people in the light of Christ.
Christ is all and is in all. In
just a few weeks, we will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther
King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech. King
envisioned a world in which people could be judged by the content of their character
rather than the color of their skin and that is a noble dream indeed. But the vision provided for here is larger
than that it is a vision that we as people of faith would not judge people at
all. But rather see them as Christ seems
them. See them the way God sees us when
God looks on us through Christ. We see
the people in our own congregation not as likeable or unlikable but in
Christ. We see the people in other
congregations not as radically different or basically similarly but in Christ. We see the people beyond the fellowship of
the church not as filthy hoards in deserving exclusion. We see them through the eyes of Christ as
those who, like us, God is out to get back.
External wholeness continues to unfold in a person’s life as
they find ways to connect and relate meaningfully to people. We have a long list of ways we seek to be in
service to our community. I’m proud of
our record of service. But I wonder if
between the school supplies we donate and the crock pots we prepare, do we have
enough opportunities to truly interact with those we work to serve? There are indeed certain things that are
triggered in us whenever we serve in any capacity but there is something much
deeper that gets triggered in us when we are face to face with another person
and we try to offer care to them directly.
External wholeness is an approach to the world around us
that seeks to join in God’s reclaiming of what belongs to God. Not in harsh, coercive, heavy handed
ways. But in redemptive, cruciform ways.
Our lives get hidden in Christ, buried
in the humility of his character and his willingness to die in order that
others might live. This is the spiritual
genetic code embedded in us. And when we
cooperate and allow it to be expressed in our traits, it produces in us
something much deeper than happiness. It
produces joy. And the spiritual genomic
expression pattern that becomes visible to others is one that looks like
Christ.
