Let Christ Have a Word With You

A Sermon Based Upon Colossians 3: 16;  Luke 8: 15-21

By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Pentecost 7c, June 30th,  2013

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly….”  (Colossians 3: 16).

When you have something to say, you raise your hand, or you find a way to make a statement loud and clear.  Back in high school, I was not very articulate and stuttered a bit at getting my words out.  I was nervous about expressing my feelings to people I didn’t know.  Once, during a meeting, where all the presidents of various school clubs was meeting, I struggled to speak up, and the quick witted, very impatient, but brilliant teacher-advisor, Mrs. Flo Gainey, who was also an English and Humanities teacher, noticed my impediment and told me “You needed to learn to speak correctly and clearly, or you need not speak up at all.”  Her words sounded harsh at the time.   But they were just what I needed to push me the comfort of my safe ‘nest’ and into the real world of ideas and words. 

Do you have something you need to say?  Are you willing to put the time in to learn how to best say it?  I have heard all my life the statistic which says that the greatest fear most people have is the fear of speaking in public.   I guess that’s some sort of job security for me, since I’ve been speaking publically ever since that teacher shoved me out of my comfortable place and into the world of words.   But what words are worth saying?  We live in a world with so much information; including as much misinformation.   Many of the words we hear every day turn out to be just noise; noise that take ups space on the airways and in our heads, they are words that do little good.  How do we know the value of our words?  And what is this virtue of ‘letting the word of Christ dwell in (us) richly’?  If Christ does have something to say, what then does it mean for our lives today, and what would it look like in our ears and on our lips?

The Christ Who Has A Word to Say

In the struggle to define truth, and to know what ‘truth’ or what ‘words’ are worth saying and worth hearing, we need to think about how Christ’s words measure up to the rest of the words we know, hear and value.  Does Christ have something to say that is worth hearing, worth knowing, and worth holding on to in our lives?

Some of you might have seen the academy award winning movie, Life of Pi.  The writer of that story, and C.S. Lewis have a lot in common on how they view the value of the Word of Christ in our lives.   C.S. Lewis depicts Christ as a Lion who fills the world with both terror and goodness.  The key words in C.S. Lewis about Aslan the Lion, who represents Christ, is that he’s not safe, but he is good.”   You get the same kind of story in The Life of Pi, which depicts the fictional story of a young Indian boy who survives 227 days, crossing the Pacific ocean after a shipwreck, on a life boat with a Tiger named, Richard Parker.   At the beginning of the story, as Pi retells his tale to a writer, he says when you I tell you this story, “you will believe in God”.  As the story unfolds you have a young boy who grew up Hindu, became Catholic, and tried out Islam.   He wanted to find the truth of life from day one.  But when his parents attempted to move their zoo away from India to Canada, Pi was the only human survivor of a terrible shipwreck aboard a Japanese Freighter, as he was push out onto a life-boat along with a Zebra, a Heyna, an Orangatan, and the Tiger named Richard Parker. 

You can imagine what the Tiger might have done to the other animals, but really the Tiger actually never hurts anyone.  In fact it is the Heyna that proves to be most deadly, killing both the already injured Zebra and the friendly Orangatan.   Pi barely escapes his bite, until he manages to kill it in self-defense.  But as the story continues, it the Tiger that gives Pi the greatest challenge to survive.   But it is the challenge to feed, train and tame the Tiger that also keeps Pi alert and struggling to stay alive on his very dangerous journey across the Pacific.  When Pi finally reaches the Mexican shore, the Tiger and he are both weak, but as Pi looks up to rejoic with him, the Tiger never looks back, and quietly walks away into the Mexican wilderness.    

Recovering in the Hospital, Japanese insurance adjusters want to hear what happened to the Ship and to Pi, but they cannot believe his story about the Tiger, the Zebra, the Hyena and the Orangatan, nor another part of his story about a floating island where he found fresh water to drink during the day, which turned to a pool of poisonous acid at night.   So, since they did not believe his story, Pi changed it.   He told them that the Zebra was a sailor with a broken leg, the Orangatan was his mother, the Heyena was a cook who killed the sailor and his mother, in order to them like a Cannibal, and finally the Tiger was Pi himself.   By the time you get to the end and his explanation, you don’t know which story is real.   The insurance Adjusters don’t know either.  Since the second story is too real and too graphic, they go back to the original story of the boy and Tiger on the boat.  To the fantasy was less frightening than the reality.  So, the Tiger that kept the boy alive.   And this Tiger represented the God who gave him life, struggle, fear, and made his trip so very dangerous, even more dangerous than lying down and dying, that it also gave him life.

Do you believe that Christ words are like that?   If you studied the ‘Radical’ Bible study with us, from David Platt, you would see them that way.   Christ’s words are indeed life giving, but they are also very demanding and terribly dangerous.   As Dietrich Bonheoffer once paraphrased Jesus’ call to discipleship, “When Christ Calls a man, he bids him to come and die.”   The only way to find true life in Christ is to find a kind of living death which keeps you alive all your life.   Those are not the kinds ‘tiger’ or ‘lion’ words we want to hear, but there is something captivating in them like jumping out of an airplane, like skiing on a mountain where there are avalanches, or like swimming in a part of an ocean that is full of sharks.   These things are dangerous, very dangerous, but they also give some people a thrill of life.   The words of Christ can give you a similar experience to what it gives Rosie, the female jockey, when she rides a race horse.  She’s known today as the fastest woman who ever rode on a horse.  In a recent interview, she told how many times she’s fallen, how many bones she’s broken, and about how dangerous alongside of stronger men and she told about what it’s like to 40 miles an hour on a horse and the toll it continues to take on her body.  But she also says she can’t see herself not doing it.  She lives to get on that horse as see what they can do together.  When she is so close to death, she is so full of life.

The words of Christ can also bring us life, but not without a struggle, without demands, without a cost and not without a call being made upon our live.  “If anyone would come after me, let him (or her), deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.”   Those are not easy words to hear.  They are certainly not easy words to follow.  But there is something in them that rings truer than life itself.  Unless you have something to die for, you will have no real reason to live---no matter how much you own, make, keep or try to hold onto.  Life does not come through wealth or length of days, but life is most full when you have a reason, a purpose and a goal that is bigger and large than yourself.   No matter what you think about Jesus, you can’t escape the truth of these words.  Life is only worth living, if you know what you are both living and dying for.   This was at the core of Christ’s words about life and death: Unless you die to yourself, you can’t live.  Unless you live for others, your life is not worth living.   We are all in this together forever, with God and with each other, or what is the value or use of it at all?

The Christ Who Is The Word Worth Saying

When Dietrich Bonheoffer was captured because he had a part in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler, Bonhoeffer knew from the beginning of his involvement, that it was all or nothing.   And when you look back at Bonhoeffer, you see both great success but you also see this single sad moment of human failure.   If Bonhoeffer had not picked up the sword and had trusted in Christ’s coming victory over Hilter, and had waited for the Allies to become victorious over Nazi Germany, he might not have been captured, and even if he had been, he might have not been hung.  Bonhoeffer could have survived that terrible time and seen the coming whole new world to his Vaterland.    But in this one moment, Bonhoeffer failed to trust in Christ’s words and in Christ’s victory.   Had he not only followed Christ’s words, but also followed Christ as the ultimate Word and power of God’s voice; and had he out of the political struggle and stayed in his pulpit, he might have lived and done even more good for Germany.  

Now, I’m not judging Bonhoeffer, for I admire him greatly.  I admire him probably more than any other theologian because he was willing to put his life on the line and suffer and die for what he believed.   But in the end, what that war proved, and what any war proves, is that we can’t solve the world’s problems the world’s way.   We may even win the war.  It may even be a ‘just war’, if there is such a thing.   But those who live by the sword, will eventually die by the sword.  The way of the world will always fail to achieve what we want.  This is what Jesus wanted to teach his own people, but they would not listen and do the things that make for peace.  They continued to take up the sword and they continued to die by the sword.   But Christ wanted to show them a better, higher, greater, and more promising way.   A way that also requires sacrifice, but a way that in the end, will bring the greatest success---and perhaps, at least as Jesus believed, this other way, this ‘third way’, is the only way that will bring the end of all war and usher in the Kingdom of God.  What is this new way of Christ?  What is this word of Christ that stands above all human words? 

John opened his gospel, with the words, “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….”, that is “the Word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”   (John 1:1, 14).   The point John’s gospel is trying to make, is that not only did Jesus tell us the truth about God, Jesus is God’s truth; he is God’s truth in the flesh that lived among us.  But in the same passage, he also says that he was the ‘truth’ and the ‘light’ that was rejected.  “He came unto his own, and his own people did not accept him.”  And who is Jesus’ own people today?  Is that not us?  Are we not the people who are still afraid to follow Christ as the Word?  We are prepared to trust in his words, but we still lack following him as the only truth worth following.   The Word once became flesh and told the truth, way back when, but we are only just ‘so’ interested in following that truth today.  We want his words, but we are still our own TRUTH.  We can only follow His truth so far.  But is it far enough?     

I’m glad, because of God’s marvelous grace, that God can work his salvation in me, and in the world, in spite of me---just as he did in spite of Bonhoeffer; but I’m also sure that God could work much more of his grace and fullness in this world, if I would listen and cooperate with his Spirit more fully, more freely, and more completely---trusting his Word in Jesus even more than his word in me.   If I could only move a closer to closer to Christ by doing more than taking him at his word, but by taking him as THE WORD, for my own life.  That is the direction Paul is encouraging.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.  Who can do that?

The Christ Who Can Be the Word in You and Me

When Paul prays for the church at Colosse to “let the word of Christ dwell in (them) richly,” I don’t know exactly what he is talking about in their situation, but I might know more about what that means for my situation right now.  Paul does not want Christ to be a secondary consideration, but he wants Christ to be our primary consideration.   He wants us to allow Christ to be in us so that Christ becomes both our first and final Word for life.  

Tom Long says that we live in a culture that uses a lot of words, but seldom trusts any of them.   In a sermon about Words, Long says, “We use Words by the bushel, in fact we are the age that does "Word processing." Even so, we don't trust Words; we build scaffolding out of them, but we don't put our weight on it. We know that Words can be slippery, weasel things, used to conceal, to deceive, to distort. Words are cheap; people can hide behind Words.   When a politician gives a speech, what do we say? Promises, promises. When the appliance repair shop says, "We'll be there to fix your refrigerator tomorrow at 2:00. You can count on it." We don't. When a president speaks boldly of building a "new world order" or assures us "I'll never lie to you" or coos soothingly "I feel your pain," we raise a skeptical eyebrow.   Rhetoric, talk, Words -- we don't trust them. Words are sneaky; talk is cheap. We don't want Words; we want substance. As Eliza Doolittle says to her two suitors in My Fair Lady: Words, Words, Words ... is that all you blighters can do? Don't talk of stars burning above; If you're in love, show me! Or, as Edgar Guest put it, uncomfortably closer to home: "I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day ...."  (From Tom Long in Words, Words, Words, at sermons.com).

So how do we trust Christ’s words?  When Christ indwells, we live for him and his truth.  There is nothing spooky about this and it is not always that spiritual.   When the truth of Christ dwells and lives in us, we put on a different set of clothes, and we put a very different self forward.   Our priorities are different.  Our attitudes are different.  Our goals are different.  Our relationships are different.    In the final analysis, we are different---different than we have been, sometimes different than we want to be, and almost always different than the world around us.   When Christ’s presence dwells in us, we are not just survivors going through life, but we thrive in ways that brings life to others, as well as ourselves.  

Letting Christ as the Word live in our life makes one very big difference----our life is no longer our own, because we have been we are bought with a price, we have been born again and we have been crucified with Christ, so that now we find a pearl in living that gives us a treasure which can’t be stored in this world, but can only be stored in heaven.   Holding on to our life as long as we can, the best way we know how, is indeed a a treasure, but it not ‘the pearl of great price’.  Only holding on to Christ and God’s truth in him is ‘that’ pearl.  For Christ not only has a word for us in our lives, he wants to be the Word in us for all our life---now and forever.  Christ is the only one worthy or right enough to be God’s first and final word.  He is the Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, first and the last, and he is the truth, way and life, so that no one comes to the Father without knowing the truth that is Him!  

Several weeks ago I was visiting the hospital and walking through a long hallway.  I noticed ahead of me at some distance, a man lying on a bench as if he was not feeling well.   As I walked toward the man, many, that is, too many people walked buy and did not stop, including some with 'white coats'---that is doctors and nurses.  Right as I got near him, finally a security guard came over to him and asked if he was feeling alright.  Then I heard the man lying on the bench answer, "I think I'll be O.K".   Isn't it something, that even in a hospital with people trained to 'care' a person could still die for the lack of it?

It can happen at church too and in our communities that have churches around almost every curve and corner.   Bill Hybels once wrote the the greatest form or strategy in evangelism and sharing of the goodness of Jesus starts in the simplest place with the smallest deed, "simply walk across the room".   When we 'walk across the room' with our faith, that is when Christ's words "dwell in us richly".  

Do you know the truth that is more than words, but is the very truth of Him, not just some truth about him, but is the truth that is Him himself, that can become the truth in and about you?   This is the truth Paul wants you to know and to live.  How will you know for sure that his word is the truth?  You’ll never know until you let his word speak through your life.  You’ll never know until the truth out there, become the truth in here, right in the middle of who you are each and every day.   This is how you’ll know how ‘rich’ he is, and how poor you were, until you let him inside you.   Amen.