No Condemnation

Colossians 2:6–7 NRSV

6 As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

Colossians 2:16–19 NRSV

16 Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. 17 These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18 Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, 19 and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.

Let me tell you, 19 year old me had it all figured out.

20 years ago, I headed home for my first summer break after freshmen year of college at Western Washington University. It had been quite a year of growth and discovery for me. I’d left Edmonds, WA, headed up north to this beautiful town, and experienced an incredible first year of college, making new friends, learning a ton about myself, and having some fairly significant spiritual experiences that led me deeper into my faith in Jesus Christ.

Armed with a newfound sense of certainty and insight, I returned home that summer to work and live back with my parents and sister.

During freshmen year, I’d encountered all kinds of new forms of Christianity, new communities of faith like the INN Ministries, Campus Christian Fellowship, big churches like Cornwall and Christ the King, and a whole spectrum of folks practicing and living out their faith in Christ in ways I’d never experienced before.

How about this for an example: Tuesday nights, we would walk down North Garden Street to First Pres. Bellingham and attend the INN. These gatherings were full of energy and sound, spectacle and connection. The music was loud. And it was good. And people moved when they worshipped. They raised their hands, and they sang out. I loved it! As a kid who’d grown up singing almost exclusively from the Presbyterian Hymnal, this new brand of worship felt so liberating to me.

Again, remember, 19 year old me had it all figured out. This year, I learned that I could raise my hands while I worshipped and sing out at the top of my lungs. It was a sweet and simple bit of growth that I took in and made mine.

Now, I then remember coming home and going back to worship on Sunday mornings with my parents at Calvin Presbyterian in Richmond Beach. Back home to the good old ways of doing things, right?

Nope, not me! I’m sure my parents looked on lovingly as their awkward, growing teenage son stood in the back row of the sanctuary, dancing and singing at the top of his lungs, arms raised, to “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” It was something, I’m sure.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against worshipping with our full body, singing out with feeling and emotion. But, what came along with this newfound liberation was a healthy dose of self-righteousness. Remember, I was 19 and so, of course, I had it all figured out.

Those Summer Sundays, I began noticing people around me and inwardly scoffing at their more subdued style of expression. Were these people not faithful? Well, why weren’t they running up and down the aisles and clapping their hands? Why weren’t they making a public spectacle of kneeling during the last, moving hymn? Had I discovered true religion, true faith?

Adding yet another lair to this newfound wisdom and public expressiveness 19 year old me had arrived at, I also found myself inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) judging my high school friends for their lack of devotion. Being in the echo chamber of community at college, I had spent a year with folks who thought relatively the same as me, were experiencing similar growth and spiritual experiences as emerging adults, and because of this, I had lost a bit of a sense for what it meant to live in intergenerational, mixed community with others. And in kind, I forgot what it meant to experience life alongside others who had not shared this time of growth and discovery. So, I became that guy who doubled down on my rules and restrictions — no, we can’t drink, we’re underage; no, you shouldn’t use that uncouth language; no, we can’t watch that movie, it’s got too much sex and violence. Don’t you get it!?!

I’m sure you can’t imagine me being as incorrigible as I’m describing. Or, maybe you can.

Maybe you know what this is like, either from your own experience or from being a parent.

Now, in retrospect, I look at this and see how it was part of my process of maturing and finding my identity. I was trying to figure out who I was and how to live out my growing faith the best I could and I was using others around me to compare and mirror back to me what had changed in myself. Nothing wrong with that, right? That’s part of healthy human development.

And so here’s where we find the Colossian church, once again. Clearly, these people had come to a greater sense of faith under the teaching of Paul and the formation of their new community together. But with any period of growth, we always encounter forces that make us question whether we’re “doing it right” or if someone else’s devotion is sincere.

There are two parts to this morning’s text, so let’s look at them in turn.

Chapter 2, vs. 6-7 open with a really straightforward, simple statement about where we are supposed to root our lives. We have received Christ, we’ve encountered him somehow and experienced something spiritual that has awakened in us and drawn us to follow Jesus.

This is our foundation.

I watched the concrete be poured into the new foundation that the Caruso family is setting as they begin their home remodel this week. The concrete sets in forms that will provide the stability for all that is built upon that ground, the walls and floor which will hold all the life of their home. A good foundation is where we start.

And Christ, for us and for the Colossian church, is to be this foundation, this root. Everything goes back to Christ, all things flow from Christ. Live your lives in him, Paul says, be rooted, built upon him, established in the faith.

And do this with thanksgiving.

19 year old me needed this reminder: do it in thanksgiving, not self-righteousness. Gratitude for finding life, not judgement that others haven’t or their life of faith looks different than yours…come on.

Christ is our foundation. Christ is the place of sanity and groundedness that find. Our life with Christ sets all other things into proper orientation.

Another simple way I think of what it means to have this foundation is to relate it to politics. Someone may ask me whether I vote Republican or Democrat or Independent. The answer, for me, is not that I vote for any particular party, but that my vote and my politics are first and foremost rooted in, founded upon, established by my faith in Christ. Above all other things.

Ok? Ok, so let’s take this foundation and think about the next piece of the text.

Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation of this next part is very helpful, as it unpacks some of the more cumbersome language of our NRSV reading. Peterson paraphrased vs. 16-23 this way:

The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language Chapter 2

So don’t put up with anyone pressuring you in details of diet, worship services, or holy days. All those things are mere shadows cast before what was to come; the substance is Christ.

18–19  Don’t tolerate people who try to run your life, ordering you to bow and scrape, insisting that you join their obsession with angels and that you seek out visions. They’re a lot of hot air, that’s all they are. They’re completely out of touch with the source of life, Christ, who puts us together in one piece, whose very breath and blood flow through us. He is the Head and we are the body. We can grow up healthy in God only as he nourishes us.

20–23  So, then, if with Christ you’ve put all that pretentious and infantile religion behind you, why do you let yourselves be bullied by it? “Don’t touch this! Don’t taste that! Don’t go near this!” Do you think things that are here today and gone tomorrow are worth that kind of attention? Such things sound impressive if said in a deep enough voice. They even give the illusion of being pious and humble and ascetic. But they’re just another way of showing off, making yourselves look important.

I love the language, both in the Message and the NRSV, that puts this all into context: All these rules, these specific practices, these new moon festivals or obsessions with angels: these are all the shadows of the substance which is Christ. The shadows of the substance that is Christ.

Back to pious, self-righteous 19-year-old Seth: the hand raising and the loud singing — a shadow of a substantial growth in me as I encountered Jesus in new ways. Shadows. Not bad, but simply glimmers, echoes.

To parse the language a bit more for us, condemning on matters of food or drink would have pertained to whether things were clean or unclean and whether those old customs mattered any longer. The same goes for the festivals of the moon, harvest and planting rituals — did these matter now that Christ was our center? How about when we practice the sabbath? Or whether we fast and pray in certain ways? Does the particular way matter?

It seems not. But the problem is that there were folks who thought there was a particular way they had to be done.

Again, I love Peterson’s words: Do you think things that are here today and gone tomorrow are worth that kind of attention?

What 19-year-old me didn’t recognize was that the shape of the devotion of the person just down the pew from him was different, but no less vibrant and deep. Often, on those Sundays, I would worship alongside one of my parents or even my grandparents. I can certainly imagine them inwardly (or outwardly) rolling their eyes at me, just as I rolled my eyes at them. Our maturity in faith looked different.

Here’s the kicker, the through line, the punch of this text: We cannot let others disqualify or condemn us for how we live out our faith. It’s not fair, for one, because we each journey with Jesus in a myriad of ways and should instead look to each other to learn and grow from what we both share and do differently.

This isn’t a question of right belief or theology. It’s a caution about how we perceive public expressions of faithfulness among us.

So, what does this look like for us, both here at church and also out in the world.

Well, for us gathered, I have to say one of my favorite things about this community is there is not typically a spirit of judgement about how each of us practices our faith. Now, there’s the occasional grumble about folks talking over the prelude or offertory or the kids making too much noise, but that stuff is normal. Carolyn Mullen, our former music director, used to joke about praise songs as 7 words sung 7 times slowly. Sure, that’s in jest. But the caution we should attend to is that we not get stuck in our ways and neglect opportunities to learn and grow in our expression of faith. Maybe you need to try out practicing the sabbath differently or lifting your hands in praise — maybe you’d learn something new, encounter God’s presence in a new way. Are you willing to try new things? Perhaps we should be wary of being stuck and stagnant and finding condemnation there, rather than exploring what ways we might grow.

And for us out in the world, I feel there’s such an invitation in this text to bear witness to how others live out their faith. How much could we learn from our friends and families if we actually got curious and asked them about their faithful practice? What might some of us learn if we perhaps even checked out another church some Sunday to see what was different and learned to appreciate our uniqueness as members of the whole body of Christ?

Next week, for instance, we have the opportunity to take part in the Sacred Earth Fair at the Center for Spiritual Living. We are blessed to be a part of an inter-denominational, interfaith community here in Bellingham. What can we learn from our siblings of other traditions? Or should we condemn them for not being as socially active or climate conscious as us? You get my point?

Paul closes by tying this all together — Christ is the head of our body. It is to Christ we hold fast, the head and the foundation of all that we are. The substance of things, not the shadow.

So, friends, let go of the shadows that don’t help you grow and mature in faith. Don’t condemn someone for where they’re at, but rather, invite them to share with you what they are learning and growing in. Hold fast to Christ, together, and celebrate our differences and all that we share as we journey together.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Together, us, in Christ, fumbling our way forward, learning and growing and hopefully maturing in the process. This is the kind of community we can be, this is who we can choose to be.

Amen.