Sermons

“Abiding in Mercy ”
Colossians 3:1-11; Hosea 11:1-11; Luke 12:13-21 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn
Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – August 4, 2019
First of four in the “Abiding in ” Series

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might confess our wickedness and find a home once again in your mercy. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

As I started to read through the suggested scriptures for the month of August, I started to realize that through some blessed miracle of the lectionary, they were offering us an opportunity to further riff on the theme of our recent General Assembly. “Abide in Me” – the theme of the Assembly – comes from John 15, of course, and here we will be wandering through Luke and the prophets and epistles. But the idea of what it means to have life in Christ, to live life in Christ, to be alive in Christ, to have Christ living in us and so on and so on is woven all through the texts we will read over the next few weeks. So I decided a sermon series is in order, looking at these scriptures but also looking back over the wonderful spiritual food we were offered in Des Moines. I hope you will make the choice to attend the class Michael will be leading over the next two Sundays covering many of the conversations we had there.
If we’re going to build on a theme, we need to clarify what that theme is. “Abide in Me” is basically a way of describing the Christian way of life. The passage from John 15 uses the imagery of a grapevine, where Jesus is the main vine, and we are the smaller branches where the fruit is supposed to grow. Jesus points out in these verses that grapes cannot grow on branches that are not connected to the vine; those branches wither and die. So the idea is that if we want to lead faithful, fruitful Christian lives, we need to live in connection with Jesus, that is, we need to abide in Christ. Jesus tells us elsewhere that we “will know them by their fruit”, meaning we can tell where our heart is abiding by looking at the results of our behavior. We are not literally grapevines, so our fruit is metaphorical, which means that what abiding in Christ looks like is slightly less clear. That is where these other scriptures come in. There is a wealth of good teaching here, some obvious and some more subtle.
Let’s start with the passage from Luke, which offers us a very clear example of what not abiding in Christ looks like. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed,” Jesus says. And then he goes on to tell the parable of the Rich Fool. “Oh! I have too much stuff! I guess I’ll make bigger storage facilities to keep it all in! Then I can party as long as I want!” And then God drops the big “Nope. You’re dead.”
Now, before we move on, it’s important to note that the Bible rarely gives the benefit of the doubt to rich people. There is a gospel bias that assumes that if you have more than you need, you likely accumulated it by cheating or exploiting other people. It’s sad how hard this is for grown-ups to absorb. If I were to do a Children’s Moment about this, and ask the kids what I should do if I had seventeen bags of candy and only two hands, they would know immediately that the correct answer is “Share the candy!” But somehow, once we’re grown up with bank accounts of our own, the answer easily turns into something like “you could get a basket or a fancy new plastic storage bin at Target to hold your candy in.”
So the first way that greed keeps us from abiding in Christ is that it’s the opposite of sharing, which is one of the primary gospel imperatives. But it goes deeper than that. Maybe you don’t relate very strongly to that Rich Man; maybe you’ve never had way more stuff than you could handle. If that is the case, it’s important to remember that the Rich Fool was just a character, an extreme example. The person who was actually there in Jesus’ presence was the one who wanted their share of the family inheritance. It wasn’t actual wealth, but anticipated wealth that was at issue. “Be on guard against all kinds of greed,” Jesus said.
There is a hint in Colossians that helps us understand why greed is so dangerous. In the middle of a list of bad things, “fornication, impurity” and so on, greed is the one that gets a parenthetical descriptor. “Greed” it says, “(which is idolatry).” The Rich Fool helps illustrate this. He proclaims that he can finally relax. Why? Because he’s accumulated enough wealth to do so. And though that sounds remarkably reasonable and familiar, we need to recognize how it is also idolatrous. The Rich Fool, and even the anticipating heir, are placing their trust, not in God, but in wealth. They are replacing God with supposed financial security. If part of true worship is the astounding realization that we are only truly and eternally safe in the arms of God, pretending that wealth can protect us is idolatry. Focusing on accumulating that wealth is idolatry, because it demands that we give our allegiance and energy to our own self-preservation, rather than the priorities of the gospel, which calls us to pour out our lives for the sake of love.
Jesus clearly thought greed was enough of a threat to our capacity to abide in him that he focused on it exclusively in this story. But there are other temptations this lesson about idolatry can apply to. The passage we heard from Colossians makes clear that our abiding in Christ is something we need to work on continually. You may have left “that life” the writer says, but there is still stuff you need to work on. Your major behaviors and choices may reflect a more Godly life, but the words of your mouth have retained their bad habits. We have this idea that our words aren’t as powerful as our actions. I know I tell myself that. But I also know how my words shape my heart, and it’s not always pretty. “Abusive language” and “malice” can easily be rationalized as “venting”, right? As long as they’re spoken behind someone’s back? And what about what Colossians says about lying? Are we still lying to one another? Dare we consider how often we’re lying to ourselves?
To strive to abide in Christ is to aim to shape our actions and our words with the love of Jesus. This is not a one-time moment but an ongoing reality of the Christian life. Colossians writes about being clothed “with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.” It’s continually happening. We are called to work, in every moment, on opening up our channels of connection to Christ, so that we can be renewed and re-shaped in the image of God. And this renewal, in Colossians, leads us to another interesting point.
To abide in Christ is to abide in community. Where does that renewal lead, as we are shaped in the image of our creator? In this passage, the implication is that it leads to unity in Christ, across all societal divisions that might threaten to separate us. “There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!”
As Disciples, we may find this an easy statement to affirm. But as a church that is growing and changing, we need to look at it more closely. Theoretical unity is a snap. But that’s not what concerns us here. This passage is telling us that abiding in Christ means that we are being re-made constantly. We are going to be re-shaped day after day after day. Every week we move into God’s future, every month that passes, this church will be “renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator”, and that means we will be learning over and over how to live in unity with children of God who are different than we are.
It doesn’t just mean that we celebrate and welcome the new people who arrive. It also means we must stand up to protect the weak in our midst. It means we must denounce anything that diminishes the life and dignity of any of God’s children. It means we must work continually to dismantle systems within our society like white nationalism that act like cancers attacking particular parts of the Body. This call to unity in Colossians makes very clear that the writer is not addressing a group of individual “yous”, but rather the collective “you”, the church as a whole. We are in this together, seeking to get rid of the wickedness in our actions and our words.
The branches of a vine don’t just produce fruit. Sometimes they are called upon to draw power from the vine to neutralize threats. When I was in Illinois, my mom and step-dad took me on a drive around the west farm to see if there were any blackberries left. On the way, we saw a small tree with a major deformity in its trunk about three feet from the ground. My step-dad explained that it’s called a burl; it’s where something unhealthy got inside the tree, and tissue built up around and around it until it was no longer able to cause any harm. What’s ironic about this self-healing process is that it creates some of the most beautiful wood to make furniture out of. Can you imagine a difficult time, when we were called to resist the powers of evil, pushed up against the edges of our comfort zones, being remembered as time of triumph in the face of danger, rather than a season of stress and division? Could we be living in such a time? Can we draw power from the Vine that can help us create a beautiful righteousness from these days?
There is one more point I’d like to pull out of Colossians that then directs us to Hosea and the main point of this sermon. (Were you wondering when I would get there?). The writer of Colossians mentions the word “wrath” twice. The first time, it’s something that God has, and that’s clearly seen as appropriate. The second time it’s something we humans are commanded to get rid of. Colossians plainly doesn’t think humanity can handle wrath. We don’t have to look too far to see how true that is. As far as Colossians is concerned, wrath is for God alone. But Hosea offers a different take on that. Are you ready for this? Simplistic notions of an “angry, Old Testament God” are going to be endangered by what comes next! The passage we read from Hosea 11 shows us God as a loving mother or a tender grandfather, “like those who lift infants to their cheeks.” This whole section is about how wicked Israel has been, how they were continually turning away from God. It seems as though it’s moving into a dramatic wrathful finale of destruction. But what happens instead?
“My compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.”
Colossians tells us that God alone can handle wrath, but in Hosea, God tells us that precisely because God is God, God will reject wrath. God will instead extend the mercy of a loving parent to a small child. That is where we are living when we abide in Christ. In a warm bed of compassionate mercy, held by a God who loves us no matter what we do.
This does not mean we do not need to root out the wickedness within us. The thing about mercy is that it can only really be accessed when we admit our need for it. It can only truly flow through our souls if it’s flowing both in and out. To abide in Christ is to be a channel of God’s mercy, accepting it with gratitude and offering it to others with humility.
Rejecting greed calls us to trust in God’s providence for our bodies. Opening ourselves to mercy requires us to trust in God to take care of our souls. All of this is possible because we’re invited, as individual branches, to be grafted onto the Vine that is Christ, to abide in Jesus and find our power for compassion and generosity there. This is how we bear fruit that is pleasing to God and healing for God’s world. We gather here, week after week, because we are in constant need of cultivation by the Vinekeeper, in whose image we are continually being shaped. As we grow together, let us mutually encourage one another to seek to abide in Christ. Alleluia and Amen!