“Are we there yet?” You have probably all heard those words. Usually from children forced to endure the agonies of long walks or long car trips. Or you can remember saying them yourself, “Are we there yet?”
Or perhaps you’ve asked the question another way, “Am I there yet?” unsure if you have reached the place you want to reach. Or you’ve heard them from the mouths of your detractors, people saying, “You are definitely not there yet. You have a long way to go.”
This is what the church in Colossae was struggling with: “Are we there yet? Have we, truly, become right with God, through the teaching about Jesus that we have heard and received? Are we there yet?” And surrounding them – scholars hypothesise – were other voices saying, “No, you’re not. You still have some way to go.”
There is a great deal of discussion about who these voices were. Was it the influence of local religions? Was it some early form of gnostic teaching that salvation was to be achieved through mystical or esoteric knowledge? Or was the confusion caused, as Tom Wright argues, by young converts imagining that, “having become Christians, they must complete the process by becoming Jews?” Was it a mixture of the three?
Whoever these voices were, these philosophies, as Paul refers to them, based on tradition and the spiritual forces of the world (we need to note that Paul is not anti-philosophy or anti traditions per se – only when they are life taking rather than life giving!), he is adamant that the Colossians are not to be taken in by them, condemned by them or disqualified by them – to believe they are not there yet. “You are there,” Paul says, “You are there – because you are in Christ!”
And to emphasise this, he repeats it six times! “Just as you have received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives ‘in him’ (verse 6)…rooted and built up ‘in him’ (verse 7)…. For ‘in him’ (verse 9) all the fullness of deity lives…and ‘in him’ you have been brought to fullness (verse 10)…. ‘In him’ you received a spiritual circumcision (verse 11) and ‘in him’ you were buried and raised (verse 12).…”
I am reminded of those signs – that you find in shopping centre or big complexes that tell you where you are. This is where you are, Paul is saying to the Colossian Christians. All the fullness of God is in Christ, and you have found this fullness! Christ is head over every power and authority. And you are here. You are ‘in Christ’. You are where you need to be.
And Paul goes on to describe in this passage what it means to be ‘in Christ’. According to Charles Wesley, “in vain the first-born seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine.” But Paul is not deterred! He piles metaphor upon metaphor to tr to describe the new reality in which Christians find themselves. (Jim Barr once gave me a book titled, I never metaphor I didn’t like. And I think the same could be said of Paul!)
But in all these metaphors there is a common theme – location. Location, location, location. Each one speaks of being ‘in Christ’. Each one speaks of belonging to God.
The first metaphor is circumcision, spiritual circumcision – a theme that runs right though the Old and New Testaments – the circumcising of human hearts. What is meant by this? We can get very tangled up in the physical aspects of circumcision, or the gendered aspects, but what Paul is emphasising is a new identity through circumcision. The work of Christ on the cross, our receiving that work in our lives, has stripped away our old human solidarities. As he goes on to say in Colossians 3:11, “There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.” We are a new people – drawn from every race on earth. We are here – all in Christ – all God’s people.
The second metaphor is baptism – the celebration of being a new people, or, Paul gives us another location, adopted into a new family. Baptism is not an empty ritual. It is the outward and visible sign that we belong to this family – a place where we learn what it means to live in Christ. Tom Wright says, Paul’s “vision of the church [is] the loving and welcoming family of God, the people who, by support, example and teaching, enable one another to accept the gospel down to the depths of their being…” We are here – in God’s family.
The third metaphor flowing from baptism is life. As Gentiles, Paul says to them, you were dead in your sins, but you are now alive in God. And he includes Jews, too, in the second half of verse 13, shifting to an inclusive plural. “[God] forgave us all our sins.” Coming back to Charles Wesley, “We are alive in him, [our] living head.” We are here – in God’s life.
Fourthly, Paul tells us, we were once condemned, but now we stand in freedom. Christ has taken all the charges against us, all our sin, and in his death has nailed those charges to the cross. They are there, but we are here – standing in God’s freedom.
The fifth metaphor is a Roman triumph – the parades where defeated imperial enemies were publicly shamed, and the greatness of Rome exalted. Rome is still there, Paul is saying, but the power, the authority these displays claim, no longer have a claim on you. In an extraordinary switch Paul describes the former powers now being these paraded, the former victors, vanquished. By dying on our behalf, Tom Wright says, “Christ breaks the last hold that the powers had over his people….the ways of the old world – its behaviour, its distinctions of face and class and sex, its blind obedience to the ‘forces’ of politics, economics, prejudice and superstition – have become quite simply out of date, a ragged and defeated rabble.” We are here – part of God’s new world, God’s new way of being.
Who are the voices that tell us today we are not there yet, that we have a long way to go?
Perhaps it is the voices of modern scepticism telling us that faith in Christ is ultimately pointless. These are important dialogues to have, but I come back to what Paul says here – that being in Christ gives life meaning and connection and hope and justice and life!
Perhaps it is the voices of other Christians telling us that we – or others – are not good enough to be truly Christian. Perhaps it is our own inner voice saying this. These voices are right! We, ourselves, are not good enough to be Christians! We do not earn our salvation by being good enough or maintain our salvation by being good enough. We are in Christ.
There’s a story set in World War 2, in France, of a group of soldiers who wanted to bury a friend who had been killed. They found a cemetery surrounded by a low stone wall outside a little Catholic church. This was just the place, they thought. But when they spoke to the priest, he told them that unless their friend was a baptised Catholic, he could not be buried in the cemetery. The man wasn’t. Seeing their disappointment, he showed them a place just outside the walls where they could bury their friend and reluctantly, they did so.
The next day the soldiers returned to pay their final respects, but they could not find the grave. “What’s going on!” they said, “It was right here!” They went to find the priest and he took them to a place just inside the cemetery walls. “Last night I couldn’t sleep,” he said, “I was troubled that your friend had been buried outside the cemetery walls, so I got up and moved the fence.”
We are in Christ. Christ has moved the wall for us. We need to have the grace to remember this when we deal with each other – when we hear that voice in our own heads. We are now part of God’s new people, included in God’s family, found in God’s life, set free by God’s actions, living in God’s new world.
Is this a static reality? By no means! Paul is not done with the metaphors! In verse 6 we are a tree, plated firmly in Christ, – the aorist tense here indicating “a once-for-all planting of the Christian in Christ” – but we are growing, growing, growing. We are a building with firm foundations, but we are being built up – the present tense here suggests continual growth. As it says in Ephesians 3:17 we are “rooted and grounded in love.”
Can I leave you with one final story that Ella Whateley told us, at prayers on Friday.
Last weekend as part of the Open Home Melbourne programme she and others at St Marks Anglican Church in Melbourne invited people to come into the church and pray – and she hung some of her work. They called the exhibition ‘Quietude’. And a man came in and stayed for a very long time, and eventually he went to speak to someone, who brought him to her to give the background to the exhibition.
“It’s wonderful,” he said, and he explained that he came from Iran, that the faith tradition he had grown up in was very intolerant. “If you don’t follow exactly as you should,” he said, “They punish you. If you become a Christian, they might kill you. That is not love. That is not love.” And he kept repeating that phrase.
And he asked Ella about St Marks website which says they welcome a diverse humanity, “rich and poor, gay and straight, male and female, single and married, black and white, locals and people who travel from far and wide” to come there.
“Is this true?” he asked. “That you welcome gay people. Is this true?”
“Yes,” said Ella. And she asked if he would like to write a prayer or pray with her?
“Is it allowed,” he said.
“Yes”, said Ella. So, they prayed, and Ella asked, “Would you like to come to church here tomorrow?”
“Is that permitted?” he said.
“Yes!” said Ella.
And last Sunday when Ella and Andrew went to church, there he was, and after the service (which Ella thought might put him off because it is a very high Anglican church) she asked him his impression and what he said was, “God is love. I know here that God is love.”
We are in Christ. We know here that God is love. All the metaphors came back to this – that we here. We are now in Christ. We now belong to God.
Let’s sing this together.