Sermon Tone Analysis

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:

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.