Full
Colossians 2:6-19
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All around us, every day, we live with a series of things that are subject to depletion and replenishment, including our own bodies. Maybe before we went to bed, we noticed that the cell phone needed to be recharged, so we plugged it in to the charging cord. When we wake up the battery is full, and so too are our bodies- recharged after a night’s sleep. But we are also empty, our stomachs may rumble as we consider what to have for breakfast, to refuel our bodies for the day. So, we have a little something to eat, until we are full. Depletion and replenishment. We go out to the car and get in to go… somewhere- work, the store, coffee with a friend. We turn the key in the ignition and look to see that we need gas, the tank is close to empty, so our first stop is the gas station to fill the tank. If we go to work, we do what we can, what we need to, and at the end of the day we might feel spent. Sometimes it helps to connect to someone. Sometimes it helps to be alone, so we can re-charge our own internal battery. Depletion and replenishment. Here in the desert we can see it so dramatically. After awhile without rain things start to dry up, the ground cover fades. But then the monsoon rains come through and the desert blooms with hidden beauty that just been waiting to be replenished by the rain.
This same pattern of depletion and replenishment can happen in our lives. Maybe we go through what we call a dry spell. Maybe things start to feel empty, or drained. So we go looking for the thing that we think will recharge us. We go looking for the thing that we think is missing that needs to be replenished. Elsewhere, in another letter to the church in Philippi, Paul quite famously writes about how Jesus did the opposite of what we do every day. Instead of filling himself up, or grasping the thing that made him special, the thing that made him Christ- instead of holding tightly to his connection to the divine, he emptied himself. While we spend most days trying to re-charge, re-fuel, re-fill ourselves, Jesus was in the process of emptying himself of any vestige of what made him God, so that he could connect with us in our own places of emptiness, our own place of lacking- in short, our own experience of being human. Because that’s basically one of the things it means to be human. It means continually replenishing what gets depleted by the dailiness of life.
Sometimes that happens more quickly than others. When I’m traveling, I tend to use my mobile phone more than I do in my normal day-to-day life. I’m consulting maps. I’m checking messages. I’m sending texts. I’m filling the time with the music, or books, or social media that’s all stored on my phone. And what I notice is that the battery charge goes a whole lot quicker. Somedays require more of us. Some seasons of our lives require more and deplete us faster. And when it gets really bad, just like a phone that gets used more than usual, the risk that we’ll go dead altogether. Maybe not in the literal sense, but dead inside. We have no more to say, no more we can do, no more to give. And in those times, we might go searching for a charge, a boost, a jumpstart to bring us back to life.
Paul’s words to the church here are something of a caution. He names some of the options of the day: philosophy, human tradition, or the elemental spirits of the universe. The names may change, but the upshot is the same. There is an empty deceit to them all. There is an empty deceit to political philosophies that are rooted in the desire for power above all else. There is an empty deceit in human traditions that promise belonging and direction at the price of controlling who we talk to and the paths that we pursue. There is empty deceit in religious systems that act as though they have access to a secret that can only be obtained by adherence to a certain set of beliefs and rituals. The one thing they all have in common is that they hold us captive, offering life- but only at a price, only if we do, say, or think what they would have us do, say and think. None of these things are necessarily bad on the face of it. Politics is how people learn to share and direct the power between us. Human traditions like families, schools, or associations connect us to essential human community. And it isn’t so much religion itself, as it is the abusive potential of religious power in human hands that often negates the very experience of God that it seeks to promote.
Jesus once told a story about a sower who went out to sow seed that landed in all sorts of places. Only some of it ended up in what he called “good” soil. It wasn’t that the seeds themselves were better than the ones that landed elsewhere. The seeds were all pretty much the same. It was where they took root that made the difference in how they grew. And the seed that found purchase in good soil offered yields beyond anyone’s wildest of imaginations. So too, it is what our lives are rooted in that determines how they are built up. When who we are and what we do are rooted and built up in Christ, rooted and built up in the fullness of God that made its home in Jesus, from Nazareth, Mary and Joseph’s boy, then who we are and what we do is connected to a source of life that never runs out, never gets depleted. So rather than looking to a political philosophy or party to fill our lives with meaning, our lives- already filled with the meaning that comes from dwelling in the fullness of Christ- can pursue a way of sharing power that is rooted in the grace, mercy and peace made real to us in Jesus. Likewise, our families, schools and other human associations, rather than dictating who belongs and who doesn’t, are built up by the radical welcome of Christ in whom all belong. And our religious practice- our worship, our mission, the community we form with one another- has Christ, and no pastor, no polity, no personal preference, as its ultimate source.
All the rest is cut away. All the agendas, all the schemes, all the insecurities and worries about what we fear we don’t have enough of, all of it is the product of the same empty deceit that would have us chase our salvation like it’s one more depletion we need replenished. Instead we are made full. We are made full not according to all the machinations of human ingenuity, or society, or anything else we might turn to. We are made full in the in the same Christ through whom and for whom all things were made. Which means when the principalities and powers of this world would have us believe we are lacking, we are depleted, we are dead, we turn to the promise that such claims are ultimately empty. They have been disarmed by the same one who animates all of creation, who fills it all.
We hold fast. We hold fast to the promise of our baptism that reminds us to whom we belong; body and soul, in life and in death. We hold fast to our baptism that assures us that the sufficiency of God’s love is always for us, fully on our side. We hold fast to our baptism in which we are made alive with Christ by the power of forgiveness that sets aside every claim against us that we might have the kind of life that is not held captive by the past, but free to grow into the future that God has for us. The future that God has for each of us, and for all of us as we grow in and through Christ alone.