Category: January 2016

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January 2016 Lectionary Ramblings

January 6th 2016: Colossians 4:2-18

You can find today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

‘Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving.’

It’s hard to keep going, isn’t it? New years very often don’t mean a new you, or a new start (unless you work in, or have fallen prey to a marketing tactic). I remember several late Decembers in recent years where I’ve thought something along the lines of ‘it’ll be great when this year’s over, I can leave it all behind me as I move on to the new.’ Except that doesn’t work. January begins and, most likely, what your life looked and felt like in December will be what it looks like in January. It can be discouraging to tread on through January and find that the exalted hopes we sang about and resolutions we made have already faded into distant memory. Is it worth it all?

Well, yes it is. We’re hidden with Christ in God. We’re clothed in love because he has dressed us that way, and now we can live with him day by day, devoting ourselves to prayer. God wants to talk to us. He wants us to listen for his voice around us, but also, he wants to listen to us. What a strange thought, that God would want to listen to me. Especially when I feel like I struggle to get people around me to listen sometimes! But God wants me to bring myself to him every day, not necessarily in a set series of forms of words (although those help many people) but as myself. Are you talking to God, today? Not just bringing him your cares and concerns, the things you’d like to see fixed or redeemed, but in a relational way. Are you honest with God? There’s no point pretending when we pray. We’re searched and known anyway. But in praying we are acknowledging God, bringing ourselves to him, making life about more than us. In some small way we are doing part of the work of ushering in the kingdom. Prayer ‘works’ because it causes us to look to God beyond ourselves and acknowledge our need of him. Sometime today, at least once, spend some time making yourself think of things for which you can ‘render thanks for the great benefits we have received at his hands’. It’ll make the world about more than you and, ultimately, bring the glory of God once again back in to focus as the centre of your day.

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January 2016 Lectionary Ramblings

January 5th 2016: Colossians 3:12-4:1

You can read today’s passage by clicking on this sentence.

Over the last few days we’ve been thinking in different ways about being ‘in God’, and here’s another perspective on it. We are to ‘clothe ourselves in love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.’ We, hidden with Christ in God as we are, can only clothe ourselves in love because God, who is love, enables us to love as we live in him. Again, reading this passage, it is feasible that I should decide that clothing myself in love is something that I must do, a decision, or series of decisions, resulting in actions which show that I am clothed in love. It may be that this is what writer of Colossians was getting at, but as is my wont, I want to argue for a slightly different reading. I think, following from yesterday’s passage, the writer is exhorting those who heard and read the letter to return again to a place of submission to God, that our gentleness, patience, humility and other positive relational characteristics would flow from a renewed sense of who God is, who we are, and what we are called to be and do for him.

Again, this isn’t a free pass for us not to bother with behaving in a way that imitates the character of Christ. We do have a role to play in living life as Christians, but the single most important thing I think most of us have to do is also the hardest thing for most of us: we have to accept that God, rather than ourselves, or other people, is who we really need. If God really is my strength, my refuge, my deliverer, my shield, then I am not my strength, my refuge, my deliverer, my shield. I can be strong. I can be purposeful. I can be of use to God in the building of his kingdom perhaps, but these are as nothing compared to the strength and purpose of God, his overwhelming desire for relationship with me, his pursuit of reconciliation, not just with me, but with the whole of the world, which has already been successful. I am important to God. My life is his. He has clothed me with love. Now I have the opportunity to live for him today.

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January 2016 Lectionary Ramblings

January 4th 2016: Colossians 3:1-11

You can read today’s passage by clicking on this sentence.

This is a rich reading full of imagery. It would be easy to focus on the latter part of the reading’s insistence on the response to the goodness of God being a transformed ethical and moral life. The experience of being saved may well, indeed perhaps could be expected to, result in our day to day lives looking different. Some people think that the whole point of the Christian life is this developing conformity to Christ.But discipleship has to be about more than a changed outlook or set of standards. We are not all the same, nor are Christians designed to be robots.

In actual fact, I think discipleship is primarily about becoming ever more aware of the sufficiency of Jesus, and what it means to have died and been hidden with Christ in God. Most of us haven’t physically died, so this can be a hard concept to grasp. Even after we are raised to new life in Christ, in actual fact, much of our previous lives continue as they did before. It can result in a loss of hope, if we were expecting everything we previously disliked about ourselves and our lives to disappear when we come to know Jesus.

To be ‘in God’, though is to be in a place of safety and security, We have been welcomed in to God, because of his love for us, his invitation to us and because he did what was needed to make the way open. We’re there because of him. I might live in a way which shows that God is real and Jesus is who he said he is and did what he said he would do. However, the saving work wasn’t, isn’t and can’t be done by me. I want to be confident and content that my life is hidden with Christ in God. I want to let go of the guilt and shame of not living for God ‘properly’ or ‘well enough’, to stop looking at the lives of others and seeing their followings of Jesus as better than mine, and instead to thank God that I have been welcomed in to fellowship and unity with him. It’s this fellowship, this hope of glory within me that makes me able to love God, love others and love myself. This is the only way I can follow. The only way I can be a disciple.

I am hidden with Christ in God. I am safe, secure and free. Now let’s see how I can follow his example today.

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January 2016 Lectionary Ramblings

January 2nd 2016: Colossians 2:8-23

You can read today’s text by clicking on this sentence.

‘See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority’

These verses have so much power to them it’s almost unfair.

Where does the power lie in your life, in mine? We can think we need to find ways to assert ourselves, our independence. Our society demands that we submit to leaders for the common good (a common good which not many of us have often agreed to and seems to shape-shift to fulfil the demands of political expediency), as Jesus does of course, in telling us to ‘give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’ (but what might that be?). Here though, the writer of Colossians reminds us of a key point with which to begin our year: all of God is in Jesus, and we have everything we need and were made to be in him. He is where our focus is to be. He is the source of our life, our breath, every need or lack we had is met by him and in him. It may well not feel like it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

I’ve always found the concept of being ‘in Christ’ a challenge. I think in part it’s because everyday life feels so immediate, so pressing, that I’m so ‘in the world’, that the idea of being ‘not of it’ doesn’t get much of a chance to take root and develop.  There’s so much injustice that we’ve been asked to partner with God in seeking to fight and overcome. There’s so much of society which sorely lacks hope, that needs to hear the Good News of joy, peace, possibility and freedom in Christ. As an activist-y kind of person, I’m always wanting to get stuck in, bring about as much change as I can, make a better world, make the world I live in today more like the new world that Jesus promises us is coming in the future.

But here’s a question: when I’m working hard to bring about the world that I think is the one that God is building, when I’m going forth and making disciples, baptising them in Jesus’s name, am I letting God begin the building of that world with me, in me? Am I content to be in Christ, or am I seeking to grow something that looks like what he lived and died for, but is actually my own version of it, inadvertently leaving him out? To my understanding, if we have been brought to fulness in Christ, then we have. If we’re brought to fulness, we’re already at fulness. We’re already ‘in’ Christ. There’s not a further way for us to be ‘in’ Christ. We don’t need to work harder, become more tired, sacrifice more and more, seek new ways to suffer, or find ways to impose our doctrines and our way of life on others. Jesus has done what needs to be done to bring us life, hope and a future already. My worry and stress will not make me any more alive. More to the point they may well cause me to lose sight or focus on the simple glorious truth of just how fully I am alive.

I have the choice to live my life directed God’s way, but that does not bring me more life, more fulness. Those are God’s to give to me.

To be in Christ is the safest, most secure place to be. Let’s enjoy resting there today.

 

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January 2016 Lectionary Ramblings

January 1st 2016: Luke 2:15-21

You can read the text of today’s reading by clicking on this sentence

There’s a certain matter-of-fact-ness about this account of the visit of the Shepherds to the newborn Jesus. I find it intriguing that, having had what must have been something of a life-altering experience, they accepted the explanation of the Angels without a second thought and went to Bethlehem. Is that what we do? Is that what I do? Often when something happens in my life, whether I’ve got as far as recognising God at work in it or not, my first thought is to try and think it through, to rationalise it, make sense of it, plot a sensible course of action, based on scripture, tradition and reason and so to work out what the best thing to do next might be. It sounds sensible doesn’t it, but this isn’t what the Shepherds did. Beyond being terrified a few moments earlier, the writer of Luke doesn’t allow for a moment’s doubt. They’re told to go, and they go. And as they go, they find things just as they were told they would be. No small wonder they told everyone they could find about what they’d seen.

The story of the birth of Jesus is not rational. It does not make sense. Many people make careers out of trying to crowbar some logic in to the Incarnation. What it shows most clearly is that God requires straightforward, but not often simple, faith and trust from us. Each character in this story had to in some way or other suspend rationality in order to go where God invited. As we start 2016, are we willing to let go of our supposed wisdom, our cynicism, our higher logic, and simply commit to spending this year trusting God first? Not to say that we should suspend the use of our understanding, but that they should not become idols elevated above the one whose story we live to share and who has invited us to share in the writing of new chapters this coming year.As the song goes, ‘God is with us, round the earth the message bring’.