Colossians 1:15-20

 

I: — “Doesn’t revelation occur today?  Surely revelation is ongoing.”  I hear this all the time.  It’s not so much a question as an assertion, a vehement assertion.  Someone is maintaining that it would be arbitrary to restrict revelation to a First Century figure like Jesus, and spiritually harmful as well. It’s spiritually harmful in that just as God spoke through Abraham, through Moses, the prophets, John the Baptist, and Jesus of Nazareth, surely the living God continues to speak – through humanism, the Enlightenment, through feminism, the Green Earth movement, and so on.  People who challenge me on this issue insist that unless revelation occurs today God is dead, or at least inert.

Such people I startle by agreeing with them: unless revelation occurs today, God is indeed inert if not dead.

Revelation, according to the logic of scripture, occurs when God-in-person acts upon us and then illumines us concerning the truth and meaning of his action. He delivers his people from slavery through the Red Sea , and then illumines them through his servants, the prophets, as to what it all means and what its consequences are for his people.  He raises his Son from the dead, and then informs the apostles throughout the “Forty Days” what the event of the resurrection means concerning both them and their Lord.

In light of the scriptural understanding of revelation, does revelation occur today? Certainly.  For God still acts and illumines today.  Even tonight don’t we expect him to seize someone here, shake her, startle her, and send her home with new understanding, newly captivated by truth?

Is there a preacher among us who doesn’t expect all this and more to happen next Sunday morning at 11:00 ?

As I said a minute ago, I agree with my interlocutor (regardless of her motivation) that revelation occurs today.

At the same time, I suspect her motivation.  For in putting the matter as she has, she wants to deny the supremacy (and therefore the sufficiency) of Jesus Christ.  She wants to say that Jesus Christ can be superseded.  She wants to say that revelation, in terms of its content, advances beyond Christ. She wants to deny that the God who is sole creator of heaven and earth has rendered himself incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and done this precisely for the purpose of reconciling and restoring his creation, gone awry through the sin of humankind.

Since there can be no advance beyond God (by definition; to suggest anything else is absurd), and since God has incarnated himself in the Nazarene, then the so-called advance of “on-going revelation” is impossible. When the hymn-writer cries, “What more can he say than to you he has said?”, the only answer possible is “Nothing”.  God can’t ‘say’ anything more than he has said and done in that Nazarene whose life is identical with God’s life.  There’s no advance on the conclusive, definitive act of God.

For this reason Paul doesn’t hesitate to declare that Jesus Christ is “the image of the invisible God”.  To speak of him as “image” is to say that God’s being and nature are perfectly revealed in him.  Jesus Christ, as the eikon or image of God, mirrors God’s word and work, will and way.

Yet as the image of God, Jesus Christ is more than this; in him God’s word and work, will and way are operative.       In everyday life, “mirror image” is merely a reflection of substance, never substance itself. When you and I look into the mirror we do not see ourselves; we see only a reflection of ourselves.  Strictly speaking, we see only a reflection of ourselves in place of ourselves, instead of ourselves. If we reach out and poke what we see in the mirror, does our face feel pain?  Of course not. Then what we see isn’t ourselves but only a reflection.

How different it is with that image of God which Jesus Christ is.  He isn’t merely a reflection of the Father lacking the Father’s substance; he isn’t a reflection of God that we apprehend instead of apprehending God. As eikon, image, Jesus Christ is God-with-us operative.

In light of this, there can be no advance beyond him.  “Surely revelation is ongoing” – no, it isn’t ongoing if “ongoing” means that our Lord can be superseded.

To think we can advance beyond him is to fall short of him.  To add to him is to subtract from him.  To augment him is to diminish him.  All whom the Incarnate One has seized and brought to faith in him know this. And who better than Thomas Cranmer, author of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer? I used to chuckle at the prayer of consecration for Holy Communion that Cranmer has penned wherein he speaks of Christ’s atoning death: “…who made there, by his one oblation (i.e., sacrifice) of himself once offered, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world….” It seemed unnecessarily redundant. Why did Cranmer have to say the same thing three times over?  I don’t chuckle any longer, since too many people seem to have overlooked the crucial point Cranmer is concerned to make.  Listen to the cumulative force of it all.  “Who offered there, in that place.” Jesus Christ is the venue of sacrifice. Everywhere in the older testament the altar is the venue of sacrifice, the place where God meets with sinful people without having to annihilate them.  (Never let the word “altar” be heard in a Reformed Church except in reference to Christ alone.)  “ Who offered there”; plainly Christ is priest.  “Who offered there himself”: Christ is himself the sacrifice that he offers. Our Lord is simultaneously sacrifice, priest and altar, the place where sinners can meet with God and survive God’s holiness.  Jesus Christ needs no supplementation whatever.       His one oblation of himself once offered – adequately, definitively, conclusively – it cannot be repeated. The newer testament rings with the consensual apostolic recognition and affirmation and confession of Jesus Christ in this regard.  He, he alone, is the image of the invisible God.  In him God-with-us is savingly operative.

 

II: — There’s more to be said.  Anyone who hears the expression “image of God” immediately recalls Genesis 1. Humankind is made in the image of God. Here, of course, “image” assumes a different meaning.  You and I can’t be God operative; can’t be God at all. Still, as made in the image of God we are summoned, in our obedience to God, in our daily “doing”, to be God’s faithful, cheerful, human covenant partner. As his human covenant partner we are created to reflect his faithfulness, patience, integrity, constancy.

Created in the image of God though we are, however, the Fall means we are now hideously deformed. Nothing about us resembles the image in which we were created.  The image is so thoroughly defaced as to be unrecognizable.

To be sure, we haven’t ceased to be human. The Fall has defaced the image.  It hasn’t effaced the image, even though the image that remains is wholly unrecognizable. Because the fallen human remains human we can still think: the structure of reason remains unimpaired. But the integrity of reason is devastated. Now reason – perfectly logical still – serves to excuse sin when sin is conscious and rationalize sin when sin is unconscious.

Sinners haven’t ceased to be human, and therefore we can still love. Regrettably, however, what we should love we now hate; and what we ought to hate (sin) we have come to love.

Sinners haven’t ceased to be human, and therefore we can still will. But will what?  We can will only our disobedience; we can never will ourselves out of our disobedience. The will can still will, but now it never wills, because it cannot will, God’s righteousness.

Sinners were created in the image of God.  We can’t sin this image away.  Yet thanks to our sin, the image is nowhere recognizable in us.  We remain human, even though our humanness is nowhere evident.  Fallen human beings are incapable of informing themselves as to what it is to be human.

“Surely not!” someone objects.  “Surely our humanness is evident everywhere and is described by biologists and social scientists, as well as novelists who probe the human.” Let me say right now that I esteem the work of the life scientists and the social scientists, plus any and all who shed light of any kind on human conundrums.

I teach a course called “Theology of the Human Person”.  Because it’s a course in theology (albeit theological anthropology) and I’m a theologian, students frequently assume I dismiss any non-theological discipline as worthless.  I don’t. Since we humans are embodied, inescapably embodied, I want to know what the biologists are saying. Since we humans are embedded in societies, I listen to the social sciences.  From time to time I startle students with such questions as “What’s the suicide rate in Canada ? What is the socio-economic profile of the convict? What are the three most commonly prescribed anti-depressant medications?” (I want students to know that jokes about Prozac are never funny to the people who need Prozac. And since more people in any one congregation are using Prozac or Zoloft or Paxil or similar anti-depressant than is commonly thought, no such joke should appear in any sermon.) “What’s the average age of onset for bi-polar mood disorder?”  I want the students to know that I deem such knowledge important, especially if the theology student plans on being a pastor.  I remain convinced that the social sciences have much to tell us about the human situation.

As much as the social sciences can do for us, however, they appear clumsy compared to literature. The best social scientist wields a clumsy, blunt instrument compared to the skilful novelist. The able novelist has in her hand a dissecting knife that exposes inherent human complexity as well as self-willed self-contradiction, not to mention fortuitous victimization. What’s more, the able novelist lays bare the manner in which complexity, complication and contradiction are multi-faceted and inter-related.  The result is a profundity and a subtlety that the social sciences can’t approach. Still, life-scientist and social scientist and novelist (or poet) together describe the human situation.

But none of them, nor all of them together, describes the human condition. The human condition is much deeper, and much more perverse, than the human situation.  The human situation is that level or dimension of human existence accessible to human wisdom. The human condition, on the other hand, is known only to God, and thereafter to those whom God’s Spirit renders beneficiaries of the gospel.  The human condition, in other words, pertains to the Fall; it pertains to our sinnership. Human wisdom, however genuinely wise, knows nothing of this.

Since sin is the contradiction of what God created us to be, we must come to know God’s intention for us if we are to understand our predicament as sinners. We were created in the image of God. Jesus Christ is the image of God. Therefore we must look to him if we are to understand ourselves, how perversely we have falsified ourselves, and what our glorious destiny is by God’s appointment. In a word, only Jesus Christ can inform us as to what it is to be a human being.

In Genesis 1 we are told that we were created on the same “day” as the animals. They are our cousins (albeit not our brothers and sisters).  Since God loves all that he has made, he loves the animals as much as he loves us. Then wherein do we differ from them? While God loves them and us, God speaks to us alone.  Having spoken to us, he expects us to speak to him in return; to respond. Because he speaks to us we are response-able, able to respond.       And because we are response-able, we are response-ible; we must respond. Our capacity to answer renders us answerable to him, accountable.  The tragedy, of course, is that as sinners we do respond, and our response isn’t fit to print. “Shut up.  I didn’t ask to hear from you.  Buzz off. Mind your own business. Leave me alone.”

Since God gives us what we want (contrary to what most people think), what we want he ensures we are going to have.  We don’t want intimacy with him?   Then we are going to have estrangement.  We disdain right-relationship with him?   Then we shall remain sunk in unrighteousness.  In the words of Paul’s letter to Ephesus , we are “…strangers to the covenants of promise, have no hope, and are without God in the world.” In case we don’t get the point he amplifies this two chapters later where he speaks of humankind: “[living] in the futility of their minds, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.   They have become callous and given themselves up to licentiousness, greedy to practise every kind of uncleanness.”  In less prissy language the apostle is saying that as a sinner I am a person of beclouded wits, ungodly, a numbskull, spiritually insensitive, vicious and a dirty old man. That’s the human condition.

We learn of it not by looking in on ourselves; we learn of it only by looking away from ourselves to Jesus Christ, for he exemplifies before us what it is to be a human being created in the image of God.  We are meant to be the faithful, obedient, righteous, glad, eager, cheerful, human covenant partner of the Holy One of Israel.

Not only does Jesus Christ exhibit all this before us, as image of our humanness he renders all this operative within us as he brings us to faith in him. “He”, says Paul, is the image of the invisible God.”

 

III: — The apostle tells us as well that our Lord is the “first-born of all creation, for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities – all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

All things on earth and in heaven? Yes, contrary to what most people think, heaven is part of the creation.       Specifically, heaven is that aspect of the creation that isn’t visible, that remains much more mysterious.  Invisible and mysterious though it might be, it is creaturely and not divine. Heaven, in other words, is the utmost mysterious depth of the visible creation.

When Paul speaks of Christ as “first-born” he isn’t referring to temporal priority (as if Jesus of Nazareth had been born before anything else came to be – an absurdity.)  He’s speaking, rather, of logical priority: Christ is the one by whose agency the whole creation – earth and heaven – was fashioned.

“First-born” means even more.  In the ancient world the first-born in the family inherited everything the head of the family owned. Say that Christ is the “first-born” is to say that he is the sole inheritor of the creation. Not only is he the agent in its coming-to-be, he also has exclusive rights to it. He is the heir of the entire universe. The cosmos is his by right, and rightly he claims what’s his.       He made it and he owns it. Therefore he is nowhere an intruder in it. He is lord of all of it.

From another perspective, as agent Christ is the ground of creation; as “first-born”, he is the goal of creation.       Christ is creation’s ground and goal; he is its “whence” and “whither”. He “book-ends” the creation. He fashioned it in accordance with his purposes, and he remains its hidden truth and meaning. He guarantees the “open secret” of the universe as his possession and himself as its truth; he guarantees that all this, known to believers now but disputed by everyone else, will one day be rendered indisputable.

Many Christians in the ancient city of Colosse , however, thought otherwise. They had become infected with the heresy of gnosticism.  The Gnostics thought themselves to have special knowledge, privileged knowledge. They were “in the know” whereas “ordinary” Christians weren’t. The “knowledge” of which the Gnostics boasted was actually a Platonic corruption of Christian doctrine. Gnosticism maintained that matter was evil, inherently evil.  Because matter was evil, God couldn’t have created it.  Then who had? The demi-urge had. The demi-urge was the agent of creation, even as the demi-urge was considerably less than God.  Since God had nothing to do with matter, God had nothing to do with the human body. And since all human beings are embodied, God had nothing to do with human history.  History can’t be the theatre of God’s revelation.  Then the Incarnation couldn’t have occurred for two reasons: one, Incarnation is an event within history, and God scorns history; two, Incarnation entails embodiment, and God scorns bodiliness.  Since Incarnation is impossible, Jesus of Nazareth can’t be God incarnate; history isn’t important to God; and therefore history isn’t important to Christians. Then what is important to Christians, according to Gnosticism?  Gnosis is. Gnosis is knowledge, privileged information. Christians, according to the Gnostic heresy, are those who have come to understand that God acts on people only in the sphere of the intellect, the mind.  God equips his people with special insight and privileged information – thoroughly imbued with the presuppositions of Plato.  It’s important that Christians have the right information, said the Gnostics; it’s not important that Christians act, act in history, “do the truth”, in John’s splendid phrase. It’s not important, said the Gnostics, that Christians regard history as the theatre of their obedience, since history is never the theatre of God’s revelation. Obedience to God doesn’t entail our doing, according to the Gnostics; obedience to God entails only our thinking (even as their thinking was skewed).

Paul wrote his Colossian letter in order to address the Gnostic heresy that had made inroads in the congregation there.       Paul insists that Christ, and Christ alone (forget the demi-urge) is God’s agent in creation just because Christ is God. Paul insists that as the (visible) image of the invisible God, Jesus Christ is God incarnate. (Just in case the Gnostics are slow to get the point, Paul repeats himself in Colossians 2: “In Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.)  Therefore Paul plainly maintains that matter isn’t evil, bodiliness is important, history matters, history is the theatre both of God’s revelation and of the Christian’s activity.  It’s gathered up in one point: Christian obedience isn’t a matter of acquiring abstract notions (wrong notions in any case); Christian obedience is a matter of concrete doing.

Doing what?

 

IV: — Paul gives us a clue where he’s going when he tells us, “In him [Christ] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities – all things were created through him and for him.”

Exactly what are the principalities, powers, thrones, dominions, authorities?  For centuries many Christians have equated these with angels, now fallen, and therefore demons. To be sure, scripture speaks of the demons, demons whom Christ has to subdue.  Scripture speaks also, however, of the principalities, principalities whom Christ’s cross has reconciled.  (Please note that while the demons are exorcised, the powers are reconciled to Christ.) The demons and the principalities or powers plainly aren’t the same.  The demons are the demons and I shall say no more about them tonight.

The principalities and powers, on the other hand, are very different. Paul speaks of them again in Romans 8. He uses much the same vocabulary in 1^st Corinthians 2.  In 1^st Corinthians 2 he speaks of “the rulers of this age”. The rulers of this age aren’t individual humans. They are institutions, social entities, identical with the powers.  The rulers of this age, he tells us, “crucified the Lord of glory”.

To be sure, we can name the individuals most immediately involved in the crucifixion: Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod, and so on.  At the same time, these individuals represent, exemplify the force of, those powers that they happen to speak for: Pilate, Roman jurisprudence; Caiaphas, religious institutions; Herod, civil government amidst occupation.

Admittedly, the powers can work evil: they crucified the Lord of glory. But they aren’t inherently evil, since God created them.  The powers (principalities) are the link between God’s love and visible human activity and experience.       The powers are meant to be sinews, the ligatures that keep all the dimensions and aspects of human existence together, and keep it all together in God’s love.

Law, for instance, is meant to do this. Law conserves social order and fosters social intercourse.  Social order and social intercourse are impossible without law.  Therefore law as a power, a principality, has a divinely mandated role as a sinew of God’s love for his creation.

The economic order has a similar role.  While it’s true that we humans don’t live by bread alone, without bread we don’t live at all.  Since God wills our bodily life, God wills the economic order.

Education is a crucial principality.  We can’t love God with our mind as long as we are ignorant.  Therefore the apparatus needed to educate citizens is divinely mandated, and it too is another sinew of God’s love holding his people together.

Think of health care. In view of our Lord’s concern for healing throughout his earthly ministry we had better not say that God is indifferent to human health.  Then no Christian should doubt the importance of the apparatus required to foster human health. And no Christian should doubt the divine mandate of this particular principality and its role as a sinew of God’s love.

 

Christians, however, are aware of the Fall. We know that since the Fall affects the entire creation, the powers are fallen too. As fallen the powers, the authorities, no longer fulfil their mandate unambiguously.

Civil government, for instance, is divinely-mandated to prevent social dissolution and secure justice. However bad the governments might be that we are acquainted with, there is something that would be worse by far: no government at all.  No government at all would guarantee chaos.  Human existence is impossible amidst social chaos.       When threatened with social chaos, people immediately grasp the remedy which is most ready-to-hand: tyranny.  Life under a tyrant may be thoroughly miserable, but at least life under a tyrant is possible. Still, tyranny is tyranny and we rightly loathe it.  And however bad governments might be in Ottawa or Queen’s Park, they are preferable to Saddam Hussein, preferable to Moamar Khadafi, preferable to Josef Stalin or Chairman Mao.

Yet because the principalities and powers are fallen, governments work evil as well. Most important, because government, by definition, has a monopoly on power, the fallen principality of government is always in danger of doing what is unspeakably evil, what is out-and-out murderous.  In fact governments do. And therefore it is always the task of the Christian and the church to recall this principality to its vocation in Christ, through whom and for whom it was made.

Boards of education are mandated to educate, divinely mandated to educate, since God doesn’t wish ignorance to thrive.       Boards of education do educate — to some extent.  I myself have profited immensely from the educational resources of our society. At the same time, boards of education do a great deal besides fulfil their mandate to educate. They provide, for instance, a political stepping-stone for those whose real concern isn’t education at all but rather political self-promotion.  Most important: educators — history tells us over and over — educators, when pressed, turn education into propaganda.  Propaganda is falsehood disseminated for the purpose of achieving a social end. We can never inspect too closely everything that our children bring home from school.  Let’s not forget that in Nazi Germany schoolteachers had the highest proportion of Nazi party-members in their ranks of any social group.

The health care system is mandated to keep people healthy.  It does. A cardiologist brought my mother back from the edge of death, and the hospital harboured her for 75 consecutive days. For this I was billed no more than my income tax. Yet the health care system lends itself to games of political football, and as the football game intensifies less health care is delivered, even as misappropriation, corruption and scandal proliferate.

Because the powers are fallen they don’t accomplish unambiguously that for which they were created. They are now compromised, to say the least, in their acting as links between God’s love and different aspects of the created order. Worse yet, Paul tells us in Galatians 4 that the powers, now in revolt against God, deify themselves.  They claim an allegiance and adulation from humans that God never mandated them to have. Fallen, the sinews of God’s love have perverted themselves into idols, lethal idols.

Not only do the powers revolt against God; in their hostility to God they set themselves against one another.       They savage each other. Education blames business for everything that’s wrong in the society.  Business blames the criminal justice system.  The criminal justice system blames health care.  They slander and falsify each other.       This being the case, why doesn’t the creation spiral down into chaos? Paul tells us why: Christ is supreme – and therefore sufficient for the task of preserving the cosmos. “In Christ”, Paul announces in defiance of powers run amok, “In Christ all things hold together.”  Colossians 1:17 assures us that however fast, however violently, the world spins (metaphorically speaking), it can never fly apart.  “In him all things hold together.” Why doesn’t the creation fly apart (metaphorically speaking)?  Why doesn’t human existence become impossible?  Why don’t the countless competing special-interest groups, each with its “selfist” savagery, fragment the world hopelessly?  Just because in him, in our Lord, all things hold together. What he creates he maintains; what he upholds he causes to cohere.  “Hold together” is a term taken from the Stoic philosophy of the ancient Greeks. But whereas the ancient Greek philosophers said that a philosophical principle upheld the cosmos, Christians knew it to be a person, the living person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He grips the creation with a hand large enough to comprehend the totality of the world.

 

V: — Having declared the supremacy of Christ as creation’s agent and creation’s preserver, Paul declares the supremacy of Christ as the church’s Lord.  “He is the head of the body, the church; he is the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent.”

Let us be sure to note that our Lord is head of his own body. Strictly speaking the church is the earthly-historical manifestation of Christ’s glorified body. We are called to be the earthly-historical manifestation of his glorified body, functioning as his hands and feet throughout the world, particularly where there is suffering, ignorance and spiritual destitution.  In all of this he remains head.  Jesus Christ is Lord of the church as surely as he is Lord of the cosmos.   We must never think that he transfuses himself into the church so as to become the essence of the church.  To say the least, he is sinless while the church is not.  Let us always remember that the church is Christ’s body sheerly by grace; of itself the church is a fallen principality as nasty as any other.

When Paul speaks of Christ as head of the body he doesn’t mean what the ancient Stoics meant. The ancient Stoics spoke of a divine power that inheres the universe, thereby divinising the universe. For the past 250 years the Romantic Movement in the West has spouted the same notion of a divine power or essence inhering the universe, with the result, of course, that the universe is divinised.  The New Age movement says as much today.  We must always be aware that if the universe and all its aspects are divinised, then there is nothing in the universe whose essence isn’t God. If there’s nothing whose essence isn’t God, then sin and evil are no more.  Now you understand why the New Age movement and Romanticism are ceaselessly popular: they define sin out of existence.

Having sounded the warning that must be heard we may cheerfully go on to relish the force of Paul’s pronouncement concerning the church, the body of Christ. Christ is present to the church at all times and in all circumstances.  His risen life always and everywhere animates it.  Since the church alone acts in his name and on his behalf, the church does what no other institution, aggregation, group or party can ever do.

Christ ever remains Lord of his people, indisputably.  Still, they are his people unquestionably.  In Romans 8 Paul tells us that Jesus Christ is “the first-born among many brethren”. To be sure, he can be first-born among many brethren only because he is first-born from the dead. Still, because he’s precisely this he is “elder brother” to all of us who once were “dead in trespasses and sins” and who are now, by his mercy, the beneficiaries of his resurrection.

What’s the result of Christ’s being both first-born of all creation and also first-born from the dead?  The result is that he is pre-eminent.  Pre-eminent in the church, yes; but no less pre-eminent in the world (even though the world isn’t aware of it.)  Pre-eminent in the church for the sake of the church’s making known his pre-eminence in the world.

 

VI: — All of which brings me to my last point.  In the last portion our text announces that all things have been reconciled to Christ, just because he has made his peace with all things through the blood of his cross. Since Christ has reconciled all things to himself, therefore the church, Christ’s body, is summoned to announce his victory over the rebellious principalities. Since Christ has reconciled all things to himself, the church is summoned to inform the powers that their effort at contradicting their mandate has been defeated.  The powers have been stripped of their capacity to damage the creation ultimately. Since Christ has made his peace with the cosmos through the blood of the cross, the capacity of the principalities to function as they were meant to function has been restored.

Then the church must rebuke the principalities today; rebuke them and testify to them what their mandate is, how it has been restored, and why their revolt is futile. The church must testify on behalf of Christ to the principalities and hold them to account, correcting them relentlessly.  If we think, for instance, that Egerton Ryerson’s vision for public education now resembles a nightmare in some respects, then we are summoned to call public education to account, to recall it to its vocation, to inform if of its shabbiness where it is shabby and to declare its glorious place in God’s economy.

The Gnostics in Colosse, we saw minutes ago, thought differently.  The Gnostics maintained, erroneously, that history, so far beneath the purity of God, couldn’t be the theatre of God’s activity and therefore couldn’t be the theatre of the church’s obedience.  The Gnostics were wrong. History is the sphere of the church’s obedience.  And since Christ has reconciled all things to himself – thrones, dominions, principalities, authorities – the body of Christ had better not think it knows better than the head and retreat into privatized abstractions where its religious head-games are a substitute for concrete, earthly obedience.

There is no excuse for discouragement or inertia or despair among Christians in this matter. If we lack zeal in rebuking the powers, we haven’t yet discerned their corruption. If we lack confidence in addressing the powers, we are denying that Christ has reconciled them to himself, however much we pretend to believe the gospel.

Earlier in the sermon I mentioned that “heaven” means (at least in many places in scripture) that aspect of the creation we don’t see, the aspect that underlies the creation we do see.  “Heaven and earth”, then, are the entire creation in all its aspects. In Ephesians 3:10 Paul announces the goal of his ministry; his goal is that “through the church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.”

All of this occurs, of course, just because Jesus Christ, first-born of all creation, first-born from the dead, is supreme now, sufficient, and will be eternally.

                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          August 2005

 

Colossians 1:11

Ezekiel 36:26     John 1:12       2 Timothy 1:17       

 

It’s like sniffing cocaine, I am told. The taste of power is exhilarating, so exhilarating, in fact, that the power-taster craves more, then more and ever more. A friend who is connected to the powerful in Ottawa tells me that power seduces and addicts more strongly than money. Power-hungry people will give up money, give up a great deal of money, for even a little more power.

All of us have run afoul of someone on a power-trip. We know now what to expect from any power-tripper: arrogance, a need for adulation, contempt for proper procedure, distorted outlook, even childish dreams of omnipotence and invincibility, and of course a craving for even greater power.

When we run afoul of the power-tripper we recognize immediately that his self-interest is swollen hugely; he coerces whenever he can and manipulates whenever he can’t; he is never to be trusted since his only interest is his self-interest.

In the ancient world power was connected to magic. Ancient people believed that the universe was riddled with many different forces or powers, and magic was the means of harnessing, co-opting, exploiting the different forces.

We moderns do not believe in magic in this sense. Nevertheless we do know that there are different concentrations and configurations of power running through industry, the media, politics, volunteer organizations, sport, education, government. Some people are especially eager to exploit these, or especially adept at it, and thereby advance themselves to a position of prominence and power. The person who co-opts whatever power currents he can shares much with the ancient person who pursued magic: ancient and modern alike are consumed with self-promotion and self-enlargement.

Power, remember is like cocaine. Co-opting power is like sniffing cocaine. Both are addictive, and both are lethal.

 

I: — A minute ago I said that ancient people tried to tap into magic. Ancient Israelite people, however, were forbidden to do so. They knew that power for the sake of power is demonic. Instead of exploiting whatever power currents there might be they were to trust God.

Israelite people knew that God is powerful. After all, he fashioned the cosmos out of nothing and sustains it moment-by-moment unaided. And yet it isn’t the creative power of God which is at the forefront of Israelite consciousness; it is God’s redemptive power, his saving power. God’s creative power was a display of stupendous force; but God’s redemptive power is a manifestation of patience, mercy, self-renouncing pardon. God’s redemptive power is a self-giving which will absorb any hurt and withstand any humiliation. Israel knew this throughout its entire history, and came to know it most pointedly in Israel’s greater Son. For it is in the cross supremely that we meet redemptive power.

A question shouts itself at this point: if redemptive power is a self-giving that will absorb any hurt and withstand any humiliation, can it properly be said to be power? Isn’t self-giving, even giving oneself up to death, closer to powerlessness? Is it proper to speak of it as power, or are we simply misusing language? Would it not be more accurate to speak of such self-giving as “earnest appeal” or “attempted persuasion”? “Power”, after all, means that something is accomplished. What does hurt-absorbing self-giving accomplish? Another question, related to the foregoing is put to me over and over: “What is meant by the expression God Almighty or The Almighty?” And unvaryingly I say the same thing: “Be very careful about using the expression at all.” Yes, we all grew up hearing and using the expression. We all grew up assuming “The Almighty” was another way of saying “God”, an accurate way of saying “God” (without appearing sentimentally pietistic.) Scripture, however, scarcely uses the expression at all. Despite the fact that older church folk especially assume it is the most common or most typical description of God in the bible, as a matter of fact it is used only two or three times. Therefore we should be cautious about using the expression ourselves. The expression, “The Almighty”, makes God out to be the giant strongman, mightier than the world’s champion weightlifter, able to do so many “almightynesses” that they couldn’t be listed in the Guinness Book of Records. But such a notion identifies God with sheer power, and sheer power, remember, power for the sake of power, is what scripture means by the devil!

If we are going to speak of the power or might of God we must be clear as to what we mean by power. Power is the capacity to achieve purpose. Then what is God’s purpose, and how does he achieve it? His purpose is to recover for himself a people who love him, obey him, trust him, serve him. His purpose is to salvage from the sea of human self-wreckage a people who live for the praise of his glory. His purpose is to deliver from the bondage and misery and degradation of human depravity (sin) a people who mirror his image, that image in which they were created and which they have marred through spiritual perversity. His purpose is to woo and win a people who know their greatest good to be, just be, his sons and daughters. God’s power is God’s capacity to achieve this purpose. How does God do it? By giving himself up for our sakes, over and over, throughout centuries of humiliating self-renunciation and then supremely in the cross. If we are going to keep the vocabulary of “almighty”, meaning omnipotence, meaning all-powerful, meaning there is no limit to God’s power, then we must always understand all of this in the light of cross and resurrection. The cross means there is no limit to God’s self-giving; the resurrection means there is no limit to the effectiveness of God’s self-giving. To say that God is almighty, all-powerful, is to say there is no limit, no final frustration, to God’s achieving his purpose. And this is so. In other words, God is going to have a people (whether it consists of many or few) whom he has delivered and recovered, a people in whom his image is restored, a people who love him, obey him and live for the praise of his glory.

This has been a rather long answer to the question, “What is meant by the expression, God Almighty?” Still, the answer is crucial, for the notion that God is sheer power would make him no different from the devil.

 

II: — Plainly the single most critical instance of God’s power — the achieving of his purpose — is to render creatures of God children of God. In the prologue to his written gospel John says, “To all who received Jesus, who believed in his name [nature], he gave power to become children of God”. To all who seize him in faith our Lord gives power to become children of God. I frequently hear it said that all human beings should be treated with respect because all human beings are children of God. I certainly agree that all human beings should be treated with respect; God himself, after all, treats us all with respect. I disagree, however, with the assertion that everyone is a child of God. Everyone is a creature of God in virtue of being alive; we are made children of God, however, as by faith we seize the crucified one himself.

John Wesley was thirty-five years old, had been a clergyman for thirteen years, and had agonized over his miserable, year-long missionary stint in Georgia when he finally admitted he had nothing to offer anyone. For over a decade he had recited liturgies, assented to doctrines and conformed to ecclesiastical pronouncements. And then on that never-to-be-forgotten evening of 24th May, 1738, the proud cleric saw that he had been trying to gain God’s favour, had been trying to earn divine compensation, had been trying to out-moralize the most rigorous moralists. As the preface to Luther’s commentary on Romans was read by a Christian of simple faith whose name we shall never know Wesley understood that God had visited him not with a deal to be struck nor with a program to be followed nor with a moralism to be pursued; God in Christ had visited him in mercy with a forgiveness which blotted out his past and drew him into a throbbing relationship. For the first time in his uptight, squeaky-clean life he understood what the prophet Ezekiel had meant when Ezekiel had heard God declare, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; I will take out…the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh”. The difference between the heart of stone and the heart of flesh is that the latter beats; someone is alive. Wesley wrote in his journal, “Heretofore I had only the faith of a servant [ie, no faith at all]; now, the faith of a son.” To those who receive him our Lord will always give power to become children of God.

“Evangelism” is a word that leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many. Everyone here knows why. Nonetheless, I am convinced we need to reclaim the word. “Evangel” is simply Greek for “good news”; evangelism is a good news broadcast. Who can be opposed to announcing good news? For a long time I thought that the church-catholic could recover the substance of evangelism while finding a different word, a word with a better press. What I discovered was that what was put forward as evangelism-under-a-different-name wasn’t evangelism at all. It was congregational growth, financial appeals, denominational flag-waving; but the substance of evangelism — namely, a declaration that the power of God renders creatures of God by birth children of God by new birth — this was not heard. I believe now that the substance of evangelism will be recovered only as the word is reclaimed. Evangelism, then, is the church’s persuasive persistence that the power of God can replace the heart of stone with the heart of flesh; that those who are dead before God can be made alive unto him; that those who are now spectators or even detractors can be made disciples who know the master as surely as they know their best friend.

I am always moved at a simple line of one of Charles Wesley’s hymns: “O let me commend my Saviour to you”. Charles Wesley isn’t speaking from the position of a physician who recommends — must recommend — a medical procedure she has never had herself. No physician is expected to have undergone a procedure before she recommends it. (To think anything else is ridiculous.) But the exact opposite is the case the concerning the gospel. Here, the only authentic recommendation there can ever be is that of the believer who has already “tasted and seen that the Lord is good”. “O let me commend my Saviour to you” means “The one of whom I speak has confirmed himself to me as Truth; I have proved his promises and I rejoice in his unfailing love for me and his ironfast hold on me”.

Whenever people speak to me of a career in the church I wince. Of course there can be a career in the institution of the church, just as there can be a career in any institution — if that’s the game they want to play. But there is no making a career of our Lord. There is only a transparent, unself-conscious commendation of the one who is dearer to us than life. “O let me commend my Saviour to you.”

Power is the capacity to achieve purpose. God’s purpose is achieved as he whose self-giving is both limitless and limitlessly effective brings to faith yet another man or woman who is now added to the household and family of God.

 

III: — What happens henceforth to the person whom God’s power has rendered a child of God? Paul reminds Timothy that God has given every child of God a “spirit of power and love and self-control”. He means a power for love and self-control.

Tell me: what kind of person do you admire? Whom do you admire most? For years I admired those who were extraordinarily accomplished, extraordinarily talented. Guy LaFleur racing down the ice, his lion-like mane standing out behind him, unleashing a shot that the goaltender couldn’t see. Artur Rubinstein, at one time my favourite pianist, matter-of-factly telling a reporter that right now, at this moment, he could play twenty different two-hour concerts without a sheet of music in front of him. Paul Ardes, the world’s leading mathematician, sorting out theorems in a few minutes that had left world-class mathematicians baffled for years. And then one day I watched an intellectually challenged youngster struggle for hours to grasp something that the person of normal intelligence grasps in seconds. Suddenly I realized that there was nothing heroic at all about my so-called heroes. LaFleur and Rubinstein and Ardes were simply exercising that talent with which they were born. Their talent had nothing at all to do with character. What they did, and received adulation for doing, was no more difficult for them than walking across the street is for the rest of us.

I asked myself all over: whom do I admire? and why? Admiral Nelson? (According to some he’s the greatest Englishman ever.) Nelson’s naval genius was simply the exercising of the talent with which he was born. Then what about his character? Nelson was an unqualified supporter of the slave trade. When William Wilberforce, battling against immeasurable odds, endeavoured to have the slave trade abolished, Nelson raged, “As long as I can speak and fight I shall resist the damnable doctrines of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies”. Nelson’s vehement opposition to the man who spent his life relieving the torment of black people tells me as much as I need to know. You might be interested in knowing that in addition to his wife Nelson managed to support Lady Jane Hamilton, his long-term mistress. Betrayal, infidelity, adultery — they are no less reprehensible for being committed by someone nationally prominent. Supporting the slave trade is as little an instance of love as philandering is of self-control.

The child of God is promised power for both love and self-control. Love is the integrity of life-facing-out; self-control is the integrity of life-facing-in. Power is needed for both. As our love engages a harsh world we shall find ourselves souring; as our self-control meets with unrelenting temptation we shall find ourselves capitulating. Power is needed if love is to thrive and self-control strengthen. Every child of God, rendered such by the power of God, is promised as well power for love (as we confront turbulence “out there”) and power for self-control (as we discover treachery “in here”).

 

IV: — Lastly, the apostle Paul knows that God supplies his people with “power…for all endurance and patience with joy”. It is the hidden power of God that infuses his people with joy; and joy alone keeps patience patient and endurance enduring. You see, of themselves patience and endurance will tarnish, then corrode, and finally crumble. Of itself patience grows weary as it is tried day after day; patience-grown-weary becomes frustrated and slides into indifference; the last stop is apathy. Apathy may look like patience, but in fact apathy is patience whose nerve has gone dead. Of itself endurance grows weary as it is tried day after day; endurance-grown-weary becomes grim and then resentful. The last stop is bitterness. It is only as God-empowered joy infuses us that we can keep on keeping on and not slump down into apathy and bitterness.

When we are young we tend to think that human problems admit of quick fixes. Gradually we learn that very few human problems are set right overnight. To think that they can be, of course, is to want magic. When I am tempted by magic or frustrated because I can’t have magic I recall any one of those I admire, someone who models that discipleship I should be most grateful to exemplify myself. One such, for me, is the fellow I mentioned a minute ago, William Wilberforce. Wilberforce worked twenty years before he saw the slave-trade abolished; he worked forty-six years before he saw the practice of slavery eliminated in the British Empire. Forty-six! And in it all he never gave up, never gave in, never gave out venomous contempt for opponents and detractors. His endurance never became grim nor his patience apathy.

Kingdom-work of any sort is going to test our patience and our endurance in two months. We shall survive the trial, even glory in it, only as we are possessed of that joy which the power of God alone can supply.

Power, remember, is the capacity to achieve purpose. It is God’s purpose for us that we continue to shine as lights in a dark world, continue to be salt in a decadent world, continue to be the aroma of Christ (says Paul) in a world whose rot simply stinks, continue to be God’s letter (Paul again) to a world which needs a word from the heart of God himself. This is God’s purpose. His power is simply his guarantee that our joy-infused patience and endurance will continue as his purpose is achieved.

All of this, of course, has nothing to do with arrogance, manipulation, contempt for proper procedure, cravings for adulation, out-and-out coercion, as well as an addiction to even more power. All of this has instead to do with becoming a child of God,; it has to do with our outward and inward integrity as a child of God; it has to do with our usefulness as a child of God.

Power is the capacity to achieve purpose. God’s purpose is a people who reflect his glory. His power will see to it that such a people lives now, and will live before him for ever and ever.

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd

February 1998         

 

Colossians 1:19

 

Canada is religiously diverse. Muslims outnumber Presbyterians in Toronto and outnumber us again in Canada as a whole. We used to read about Hindu people in India and elsewhere. But when a trustee from the Toronto Board of Education spoke of Mahatma Gandhi in a manner that offended the Hindu community, we learned quickly that our Hindu fellow-Canadians are more numerous and less visible than we had thought.

Unquestionably we live amidst religious pluralism. In the sea of religious pluralism the Christian conviction concerning the Incarnation sticks out like a sore thumb. If we remain silent about the Incarnation we can always pass ourselves off as vague theists; i.e., people who believe in a deity of some sort, people who believe enough about God to appear religious yet who don’t believe so much as to appear offensive.

Then should Christians downplay the Incarnation, as one professor suggested to me? We can never do this, for the truth; the undeniable, uncompromisable truth of the Incarnation has seized us. At any time, but especially at Christmas, we exult in the truth that the Word was made flesh, that God has come among us by identifying himself with all humanity in the humanness of one man in particular, Jesus of Nazareth. We who have cherished the gospel of the Incarnation for years are like those men and women of old whose elation concerning Jesus caused them to shout in exultation. Detractors didn’t like this. They told Jesus to silence his followers. “Silence them?” said Jesus; “If my followers fell silent the very stones would cry out [in acclaiming the truth.]”

We who cling to our Lord today must cry out too in gratitude for all that God has given us in him and done for us in him. We are never going to be found denying our Lord by denying the Incarnation. We are never going to surrender the particularity of the Incarnation in order to blend into the blandest religion-in-general. Without hesitation we are going to thank God for his coming to us as Incarnate Son in Jesus of Nazareth. Without embarrassment we are going to announce this truth in season and out of season.

Why are we going to do this? What does the Incarnation mean? Why is it crucial to all men and women everywhere even if they disdain it?

 

I: — In the first place the Incarnation means that God loves us in our misery so very much that he is willing to share our misery with us. He loves us enough in our alienation from him as to stop at nothing to fetch us home to him.

But do we need to be fetched home? In his best-loved parable, “the parable of the prodigal son,” as we call it, Jesus uses two pithy, single-syllable words to describe our condition before God. The first word is “lost;” the second, “dead.” Please note that Jesus doesn’t attempt to explain what he’s said in order to defend himself for saying it. Neither does he argue for it in order to persuade us to believe it. He merely states it: “Lost, dead.” He expects us to agree with him.

On another occasion people are gathered around Jesus, listening. They hear him using the strongest language concerning the spiritual condition of humankind. They assume he’s referring to “others,” “others” being inferior sorts whom they don’t like in any case and whom they could readily agree to be spiritually defective. “But what about us?” these hearers ask Jesus, expecting to be exempted. “What about us?” Whereupon our Lord utters two more words: “blind, deaf.” Suddenly enraged, these people fly at him: “Don’t talk to us like that. We are better than that. We have Abraham for our father.” “Abraham?” says Jesus; “You wouldn’t know Abraham if you fell over him. Your father is the devil.”

You and I ought never to deceive ourselves about our sinnership. We ought never to forget it. We should recall it daily, and daily feel better immediately, since to recall our sinnership is to recall the Christmas truth that God loves us enough to condescend to us sinners and number himself among us.

We speak of God’s love presumptuously and therefore shallowly. “Of course God loves. What else can he do? Of course God loves me. Who wouldn’t love me? Of course….” It’s all so very shallow.

We need to ask a profounder question. “How much does God love? How far will he go in loving me? What price will he pay to love me? How much will he suffer to love me?” The truth is, God loves us sinners so much that his love will stop at nothing to reclaim us and rescue us. His love doesn’t go “only so far” and stop there; his love goes as far as it has to go in order to have us home with him again. Plainly it wasn’t sufficient that he love us “from a distance;” plainly he could love us savingly (anything less is useless) only if he condescended and came among us as one of us humans, and humiliated himself by identifying with us sinners.

In my first congregation I came to know an old man, Jim MacCullum, who had served in World War I. One day he and his best friend were moving forward in “No Man’s Land,” the open space between allied and enemy trenches. Enemy fire became so intense that the Canadian troops had to fall back. When Jim got back to his trench he couldn’t find his friend. Whereupon Jim went back out to “No Man’s Land,” into the teeth of murderous fire, searching and calling out until he found his friend. His friend was badly wounded and unless rescued would shortly perish. The wounded man looked at him and said, “Jim, I knew you’d come.”

There’s a moving similarity between the situation of Jim’s friend and our situation before God. In Romans 5 Paul speaks of us as helpless. That’s the similarity. There’s also the profoundest dissimilarity between Jim’s friend and our situation before God. In Romans 5 Paul also speaks of us as enemies of God. Jim’s friend wanted to see Jim as he wanted nothing else. We sinners – blind, deaf, spiritually inert – don’t expect a saviour and don’t want one.

And it is for all such perverse people that God’s love swells and swells until his love has to find embodiment in the Nazarene. At this point God has loved us so very much that his love has humbled him in a manger, humiliated him with a reputation he doesn’t deserve (“sinner”) and tortured him in Gethsemane and cross.

Tell me: people who speak so very glibly about God’s love – how do they know that God loves them at all? We know that God loves us at all only as we see him loving us to the uttermost, only as we see him loving us until his love stops short of nothing in order to reconcile us to himself.

Let’s be sure we understand something crucial: while the Incarnation is essential to our salvation we aren’t saved by it. We are saved by the Incarnate One’s sin-bearing death. Then beyond God’s condescension and humility there’s humiliation as he, the holy one, identifies himself with unholy rebels.  And his humiliation takes him even into a torment wherein he absorbs in himself his just judgement upon us in order that we might be spared it. This is how much God loves us. And only as we see him loving us this much do we have any reason to believe that he loves us at all.

For years now I have pondered the fact that the best Christmas carols sing about the Incarnation for the sake of singing about the atonement, the cross. Think of one of my favourites, “Hark! The Herald Angels sing!” But first let’s listen again to our text: “For in Jesus Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Incarnation) and through him to reconcile all things…making peace by the blood of his cross (atonement.)” Now listen to the carol: “Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.”

Think of the carol, “As With Gladness.” It says, “So may we with willing feet, ever seek thy mercy-seat.” In ancient Israel the mercy-seat was the gold lid on the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant was the place where God met with his people; and the mercy-seat, the gold lid, was the place where costliest sacrifice was offered. Jesus Christ is where God meets with his people; his cross is the mercy-seat. Costliest sacrifice is offered here, which sacrifice bathes us in effectual mercy. And we learn it all from a Christmas carol.

I glory in the Incarnation. I know that God loves me at all just because I first know that his love stops short of nothing in his searching for me and his rescuing me.

 

II: — In the second place I glory in the Incarnation in that Jesus of Nazareth, human with my humanness, has fulfilled on my behalf the covenant obedience that God’s love wants from us humans. God covenants himself to us in that he promises ever to be our God. We in turn covenant ourselves to him in that we promise ever to be his people.

God unfailingly keeps us covenant with us. What he promises he performs. What he pledges he delivers. And we? We promise unfailing obedience to God. We promise exclusive loyalty to God. We promise uninterrupted love to God. We promise truthfulness before him. Whereupon we break all the promises we make. Even the promises we make with the best intentions we break nonetheless. We are covenant violators.

God looks out over his entire human creation, hoping to find promise-keepers. Among six billion people he can’t find one human being who gladly, gratefully, consistently, fulfils humankind’s covenant with God. At this point God is faced with an alternative: write off his human creation on account of its disobedience and rebellion, or fulfil humankind’s covenant himself. He has already fulfilled his covenant in loving us undeflectably. Now he also has to fulfil our covenant with him if our covenant is ever going to be kept. In the Incarnate One of Nazareth God not only fulfils his covenant with us; he also fulfils our covenant with him. In other words, in view of humankind’s disobedience God has to come among us as human and in this way fulfil our covenant himself.

I glory in the Incarnation in that the Incarnate One is the human covenant-keeper to whom I must cling, covenant-breaker that I am. To be sure, I have heard the gospel invitation and responded to it. I am a new creation in Christ and grateful for it. Yet the old man, the old being, still clings to me. When we became new creatures in Christ the old man, old woman, was put to death. But as Luther liked to remind us, the old man or woman won’t die quietly; the corpse keeps twitching. This being the case, it’s plain that in Christ I am a new creature; in myself I remain the old covenant-breaker. Then I must cling to Jesus Christ so that his covenant-keeping comprehends my covenant-breaking.

To be sure, I do love God. But I never love him as much as I’m supposed to. Then I must cling to that Son whose human love for his Father is defective in nothing. To be sure I do trust God. But somehow my trust in God is always being punctured by episodes of distrust when I dispute that he can or will do for me all that he’s promised. To be sure, I do obey God. At least I aspire to obey him; I want to obey him. But actually obey him? In all matters? Without exception? Then I can only cling to that Son whose human obedience to his Father is faultless. To be sure, I am possessed of faith. Yet how faithful is my faith? Faith of the head comes easy to me: I believe all major Christian doctrines and have never doubted any of them. So much for my faith of the head. But what what about the faith, faithfulness, of my heart? My heart is treacherous. Then I must cling to that Son whose human faith in his Father was never compromised.

Let me say it again. God unfailingly keeps his covenant, his promises, to us. Just as surely we violate ours to him. Then we must cling to the Inarnate One in whom God as man has come to keep that human covenant with him which we can’t keep.

In other words, Jesus Christ, the Incarnate One, mediates God to us and at the same time mediates us to God. He is the one and only Mediator – both manward and Godward – whom God has provided us in our great need.

 

III: — Lastly, I glory in the Incarnation since it is the greatest affirmation of life. After all, if human life is so precious to God that he chooses to live our human existence as human himself, then human existence must be rich, wonderful, a treasure. If God so prizes human existence then we must prize it no less. If in living every dimension of our humanness God endorses every dimension, then we must endorse every dimension too.

Life is good. I didn’t say easy. I didn’t say life is trouble-free or confusion-free or pain-free. I said life is good. The Incarnation is the story of God’s coming among us to rescue us inasmuch as he deems our existence worth rescuing. Then human existence, however problem-riddled, remains good.

I feel sorry for the people who have slipped or skidded or otherwise fallen into the rut of not being life-affirming. Frequently they tell me they don’t feel very good because they have had the ’flu six times this year. But no one gets the ’flu six times per year. ’Flu-like symptoms – dragginess, weariness (“psychomotor retardation” is the fancy medical term) – these are the symptoms of low-grade depression. Low-grade depression is usually so very low-grade that it’s not recognized as depression. It’s what people slide into unawares when they don’t have reason enough to be life-affirming.

The Incarnation is reason enough. I love that verse from the book of Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in all his toil.” (2:28) We are to enjoy eating and drinking and working not simply because they keep life going; we are to enjoy these because they are pleasurable, good in themselves.

I’m always impressed with the child’s exuberance. A child is on the tear every waking moment. He doesn’t want to go to bed – even when’s so tired he’s staggering – in case he misses something. Yes, I know; we adults don’t have the child’s physical stamina, and we are aware of the world’s grief in a way the child isn’t. Nonetheless, the child’s exuberance should inflame ours.

One day after church the Shepherds’ lunch-hour table-talk roamed hither and yon from that morning’s sermon to Canada ’s newest submarines to Alice Munro’s most recent collection of short stories to the Argos ’ Grey Cup victory. Maureen looked at me said, “You have a thousand enthusiasms.” Indeed I have. Isn’t this better than a thousand wet blankets? In the Incarnation God affirms everything he pronounces good.

The Word became flesh. The Word was embodied. Then to say “life-affirming” is also to say “body-affirming.” The taste of green apples and blue cheese. The crunch of buried ice fragments in the middle of our ice cream cone. Flannelette sheets on a winter night. Renee Fleming’s soprano voice. Yitzhak Perlman’s violin. Riding a bicycle for hours longer than we thought we could. One day I was walking through the ward of a nursing home where the residents were in the worst condition imaginable. One malodorous, old man was hunched over in his wheel chair, head on his folded arms, seemingly more dead than alive or virtually comatose. I assumed he was asleep or depressed or deranged or all three at once. As I tiptoed past him he sat up, grinned at me and shouted, “Did you bring the sweets?” I could have kissed him.

 

It’s Christmastide. Together we are pondering the foundation of our faith, the Incarnation, God’s coming among us as human in Jesus of Nazareth.

– Because God has visited us in this manner we know how much he loves us: he will do anything, suffer anything, absorb anything, to have us home with him again, reconciled to him forever.

– Because God has visited us in this manner we know that he as human has fulfilled our covenant with him when we couldn’t fulfil it ourselves.

-Because God has visited us in this manner he has affirmed the goodness of our existence, and insists that we affirm it too.

 

Yes, we do live amidst religious pluralism. So did Jesus himself. Yet he remained who he was amidst it and never apologized for being who he was and is. We are unapologetic. For that truth which has seized us we could never deny – and in any case would never want to.

                                                                                            

                                                                                                 Victor Shepherd    

Christmas 2004

Colossians 2:7

 

Aren’t you amazed at God’s magnanimity, his generosity, his large-heartedness? Clues to his magnanimity (but only clues) are seen in his handiwork. His creation abounds in examples of munificence. Think of the stars. There are billions of them in our galaxy (even as ours is not the only galaxy). Not only are there are innumerable stars, many of these stars are vastly larger and brighter than the star we know best, our own sun. The largest star is 690,000,000 miles in diameter; it is 800 times larger than our sun, and 1,900 times brighter. (Can you imagine a star 800 times larger than the sun?) And how vast is the star-world? Light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. Other galaxies have been located as far away as six billion light years.

The creation is profuse just because the heart of the creator himself overflows ceaselessly. How many kinds of plants are there? And within the plant domain, how many kinds of trees? And within the tree domain, how many kinds of pines? Ninety! There are ninety different kinds of pine tree alone!

And then there is food. When I moved to the Maritimes I was astounded the first time I saw a fishing boat unload its catch. As the gleaming fish spilled out of the hold I felt there couldn’t be another fish left in the North Atlantic. And I was watching one boat only, an inshore-fishery boat at that, unloading only one day’s catch!

As much as we are inundated with fish we have to remember that only 1% of the world’s protein comes from fish. The rest comes chiefly from grain. And right now there is enough grain grown to give every last person 3000 calories per day. (We need only 2300 to survive.) When I was in India I saw tons of food piled at the roadside, in village after village. To be sure, there’s often a problem with food-distribution — since 15,000 people starve to death throughout the world every day — but there’s no lack of food-production. Let us never forget that France is the breadbasket of the European Economic Community, yet the nations of central Africa — where protein-deficiency diseases proliferate — produce more food per capita than France does. Even in its very worst years of famine India has remained a net exporter of food.

Whenever I reflect upon God’s overflowing bountifulness I pause as I think of food; I pause, but I don’t linger. I do linger, however, whenever I think of God’s great-heartedness concerning his Son. The apostle John cries, “It is not by measure that God gives the Spirit!” (John 3:34 RSV) [“God gives the Spirit without limit!” (NIV)] The rabbis in Israel of old used to say that God gave the prophets, gave each prophet, a measure of the Spirit; but only a measure of the Spirit, since no one prophet spoke the entire truth of God. Upon his Son, however, God has poured out the Spirit without limit. The Spirit hasn’t been rationed, a little here, a little there. No rationing, no doling out, no divvying-up; just the Father pouring out everything deep inside him upon the Son, then pointing to the Son while crying to the world, “What more can I say than in him I have said?”

It is not by measure that God has given Christ Jesus the Spirit. To know this is to know that in our Lord there is to be found all the truth of God, the wisdom of God, the passion of God — as well as the patience of God — the will and work and word and way of God. It’s all been poured into him.

If God has poured himself without limit into his Son, then you and I can be blessed without limit only in clinging to the Son. If God has deluged himself upon his Son, then we are going to be soaked in God’s blessings only as we stand so close to our Lord that what has been poured into him without limit spills over onto us as well.

I: — Paul tells the church-folk in Ephesus that the riches of God’s grace are lavished upon us in Christ. Grace is God’s love meeting our sin and therefore taking the form of mercy. (Eph. 1:8) Since God’s mercy meets our sin not once but over and over, undiscouraged and undeflected, God’s mercy takes the form of constancy. God’s constancy remains constant not because God is inflexible or rigid (and therefore brittle); God’s mercy remains constant not because he expects human hearts, now hard, to soften (some will, some won’t); God’s mercy remains constant in the face of our sin just because he has pledged himself to us and he will not break his promise to us even if every last human heart remains cold and stony and sterile. Grace, in a word, is God’s love meeting our sin, expressing itself therefore as mercy, and refusing to abandon us despite our frigid ingratitude and our senseless resistance. To speak of grace at all, in this context, is plainly to speak of the riches of grace. And such riches, says Paul, are lavished upon us, poured out upon us without calculation or qualification or hesitation or condition.

Several years ago in Cook County Jail, Chicago, the prison chaplain visited a prisoner on death row. The convict had only hours to live. Quietly, soberly, gently, sensitively the chaplain acquainted the convict afresh with the truth and simplicity and sufficiency of God’s provision for all humankind, and specifically for this one fellow who would shortly appear before him whom any of us can endure only as we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. The convict — angry, frustrated, resentful, envious of those not in his predicament, just blindly livid and senselessly helpless — the convict spat in the chaplain’s face. The chaplain waited several minutes until a measure of emotional control seemed evident and said even more quietly, soberly, sensitively, “Would you like to spit in my face again?”

When the apostle speaks of “the riches of God’s grace” he never means that God is a doormat who can only stand by helplessly while the entire world victimizes him endlessly. When he speaks of the riches of God’s grace, rather, he means that the patience of God and the mercy of God and the constancy of God — the sheer willingness of God to suffer abuse and derision and anguish for us — all of this cannot be fathomed. Two hundred years before the incident in Cook County Jail Charles Wesley spoke for all of this when he wrote in his hymn, “I have long withstood his grace, long provoked him to his face”. Because of our protracted provocation, God’s grace can only be rich, can only be lavished upon us. Little wonder that Paul exclaims, “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” (Rom.5:20) The marvel of God’s grace is that as abhorrent as our sin is to God, it is so very abhorrent to him that he wants it to become abhorrent to us as well; therefore he meets our sin with even more of his grace.

Why does he bother to meet our sin with grace abounding? Because he knows that if only we glimpse how much more he can give us we should want nothing less for ourselves. Jesus insists, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Our Lord has come that his people might have life aboundingly, hugely, wholly, grandly, plentifully.

We should note that while Jesus urges “abundance” upon us, he doesn’t tell us in what the abundance consists. He simply says that what he lends his people is to be described as bountiful, copious, plenteous, profusive. Why hasn’t he spelled it out more specifically? I think he hasn’t in order to minimize the risk of counterfeit imitation. If our Lord had said, ‘Abundant’ life consists in a,b,c,d, then people would immediately endeavour to fabricate or imitate a,b,c,d — all of which would render abundant life, so-called, utterly artificial.

People crave reality; they won’t settle ultimately for artificiality, regardless of how useful artificiality may appear in the short run. They crave reality. Surely that which is genuinely profound and truly significant will also be attractive. And surely that which is so very attractive will move more people from scepticism to faith and the possession of abundant life than will a clever argument which leaves them unable to reply but more sceptical than ever.

A minute ago I said that when Jesus speaks of “abundant life” he doesn’t say in what the abundance consists. Nevertheless, from the apostolic testimony as a whole we can put together a composite description. If generosity is a mark of discipleship, then one feature of abundant life is ungrudging, anonymous generosity. If love is too, then another feature is uncalculating concern for others regardless of their merit or their capacity to repay. If forgiveness of injuries and insults, then a marvellous forgivingness and an equally marvellous forgetfulness. If seriousness about prayer is a feature of abundant life, then equally significant is a willingness to forego much before foregoing the time we spend with our face upturned to God’s. Nobody wants to reduce holiness, the holiness marking Christians, to sexual purity. At the same time, wherever the New Testament urges holiness upon Christ’s people the context nearly always pertains to sexual conduct. (This is something the church has simply forgotten today.)

Needless to say, in all of this we shall always know that the abundant life streaming from us arises at all only because of the riches of God’s grace proliferating within us.

II: — In view of all that God pours into us, generates within us and calls forth from us we are to “abound in thanksgiving”. (2 Cor. 4:15; Col.2:6-7) We are to spout — geyser-like — uncontrived, unscheduled outbursts of gratitude to God. Of course there’s a place for scheduled acknowledgements of God’s goodness to us as we offer thanksgivings at set times (including Thanksgiving Sunday). More frequently, however, and more characteristically, unplotted effusions of thanksgiving overflow even the channels of good taste and middle class demeanour.

Despite all the sporting events that can be watched on television, there remains no substitute for seeing them “live”. Saturday night broadcasts into one’s living room and the Maple Leafs “live” at the Air Canada Centre are simply not the same event. One thing that never ceases to thrill me at a live game is the crowd’s spontaneous eruption when the home team scores. A Leaf player “drains one” (as they say in the game), and 19,000 people shout with one voice. There are no signs that suddenly flash, “Applaud now.” There is nothing prearranged to cue the crowd. There is only uncontrived exclamation.

Surely you and I will “abound in thanksgiving” only as we are overcome yet again at God’s astounding munificence and we cannot stifle our exclamation. And on Thanksgiving Sunday in particular, is there anyone whose heart doesn’t tingle at blessings too numerous to count? Then of course we are going to abound in thanksgiving.

III: — To know we have been given so much, to be grateful for having been given so much, is to shout “Amen” instantly when Paul urges us to “abound in every good work.” (2 Cor.9:8b) Anyone who has been blessed profoundly, anyone who gives thanks profusely, will always want to abound in “every good work”.

The older I grow the more I realize how important the ordinary, the undramatic, the “ho-hum” (so-called) is everywhere in life. Often the dramatic is deemed especially important, if only because the dramatic is unusual. An automobile strikes a pedestrian crossing the street; the pedestrian’s leg is severed, and the throbbing artery spouts blood, quickly draining away life — when along comes a fellow in his brand-new Harry Rosen Italian wool suit; without hesitating, he rips up the sleeve of his jacket and twists on the tourniquet — just in time. Good. None of it is to be slighted.

At the same time, 99.9% of life isn’t dramatic. For every dramatic assistance we might render there are a million opportunities for the most undramatic, concrete kindnesses whose blessings to their recipients are priceless. Maureen and I in Brandenburg, Germany, for instance, (one hour off the airplane) trying to find the tourist information bureau (needed for a list of “Zimmer mit Fruehstueck” — Bed & Breakfast); we have made four circuits in our rented car of the downtown maze of a mediaeval city, know by now that we aren’t going to find the tourist information bureau if we make 40 circuits, know too that we don’t know how to stop making circuits; a woman who speaks German only saying, “It’s too complicated for me to describe how to get to the bureau from here; I’ll walk you to it” — and then walking the longest distance out of her way to help two strangers from a foreign country whom she will never see again. The young mother across the aisle from me on the train to Montreal; her baby is only six months old, too young to be left alone; the woman is exceedingly nauseated and needs to get to the washroom before; would I hold her baby until she has returned from the washroom? Of course.

Because the undramatic abounds in life (as the dramatic does not), the apostle is careful to say that we are to abound in every good work.

IV: — There is only one matter left for us to probe. What impels us to do all of this? To be sure we are commanded to abound in thanksgiving, commanded again to abound in every good work. We can always grimace grimly and simply get on with it just because we’ve been ordered to; or we can recall the riches of God’s grace that have been lavished upon us. But to have to recall something is to admit that we are lacking an incentive that is immediate; and to grimace grimly and do onerously what we’ve been told to do is to admit that discipleship is a pain in the neck. Then what impels us to abound precisely where we know we should abound? Paul says we “abound” from the heart as joy — joy! — wells up within us.

When Paul saw that the Christians were going to go hungry in Jerusalem during the famine there he asked the Christians in Macedonia for help. The Macedonian believers were poor, dirt-poor. And yet when the apostle asked them to help people they had never seen they “gave beyond their means.” (2 Cor. 8:3) Not only did they give beyond their means, they begged Paul to grant them the privilege of helping others in dire need.

What impelled them to do it? Paul says simply, “…their abundance of joy overflowed in a wealth of liberality.” (2 Cor. 8:2) It was their joy — not their sense of duty, not the obligations of obedience — just their joy in Christ, their joy at the mercies of God, their joy at the super-abounding grace of God in the face of their abounding sin; it was their abundance of joy that impelled them to give beyond their means, poor as they were, as soon as they heard of those who were poorer still.

Only a superfluity of joy renders us those who are willing to make a real sacrifice for the kingdom; and only a superfluity of joy allows us to see that alongside the wounds of Christ we shouldn’t be speaking of our sacrifice at all.

On Thanksgiving Sunday, 2002, I want such abounding joy in my heart as to attest the mercy of God lavished upon me and lavished upon me endlessly in the face of my all-too-abounding sin and undeniable need. For then abounding thankfulness will stream my lips, even as abounding kindnesses flow from my hands.

                                                         

                                                                       Victor Shepherd   

October 2002

“…abounding in thanksgiving.”

(A word-study in the Greek verb PERISSEUEIN, “to abound”)

 

Colossians 3:5-14   Romans 13:14     Ephesians 4:24 

 

 Nakedness renders very few people more handsome. Most people look worse in the bathtub than they do anywhere else. By the time we are 25 years old gravy and gravity have taken their toll. We look better clothed.

Then what shall we wear? Anything at all? Shabby, old clothes? Or “far-out”, ostentatious, unserviceable clothing? Surely we want to wear clothing that suits us. And if we can find clothing that is just perfect for us, we may even say that our clothing “makes” us.

St.Paul was fond of the metaphor of clothing. In his letters to congregations in Rome, Ephesus and Colosse he speaks metaphorically of clothing which should be thrown out, as well as of clothing which should be worn all the time. The apostle knows something we do well to remember: nakedness (metaphorically speaking) is not possible. It is impossible to be unclothed spiritually. He never urges his readers to put on something in order to cover up their spiritual nakedness. Instead he urges them to take off that clothing which always clothes, naturally clothes fallen human beings, and then to put on that clothing which adorns Christians, and adorns them just because they have first put on the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

 

I: — Everyone knows that some clothing is not merely old or frayed or threadbare. Some clothing is much worse than this: it is vermin-ridden. Vermin-ridden clothing is not to be washed or patched or simply set aside. It is to be destroyed. Of course! Vermin have to be killed.

For this reason Paul begins his wardrobe recommendations with the startling phrase, “Put to death…”. “Put to death what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity…” and so on. Degenerate sexual behaviour is inappropriate to Christian discipleship and must be eliminated.

What the apostle had to say in this regard shocked the ancient world. In ancient Greece a man had a wife for human companionship; he had as many mistresses as he wanted for libidinal relief; and he had a young boy for the ultimate in sexual gratification. As the gospel penetrated the ancient world Christian congregations stood out as islands of sexual purity in a sea of corruption.

Do we still stand out today? Several weeks ago the Toronto newspapers published articles on the promiscuity of NHL hockey players. Players were not named, for the most part (although one Maple Leaf named himself unashamedly as one who had been tested for AIDS). A player with the Montreal Canadiens, a fellow who makes no Christian profession at all, remarked, “I always thought it was supposed to be one man and one woman for life.” Does it take a hockey player to remind the present-day church of what it is supposed to uphold? In the ancient world the church stood out as startlingly different; the society surrounding the church had never seen anything like it.

I am asked over and over what I think about “trial marriage”. Invariably I say that “trial marriage” is a logical impossibility; it is as logically impossible as a trial parachute jump. As long as you are standing in the doorway of the airplane, you haven’t jumped at all. Once you have jumped, however, it isn’t a trial; it’s the real thing. A trial parachute jump is logically impossible. So is a trial marriage. If a commitment hasn’t been made it isn’t marriage at all. If a commitment has been made it isn’t a trial. We can be sure of one thing: the mindset which foolishly thinks that there can be “trial marriage” will also think that there can be “trial adultery”. St.Paul, reflecting the conviction of all Christians of the apostolic era, insists that some clothing cannot be helped by spot remover. It must be destroyed. “Put to death what is earthly in you”, is his manner of speaking.

We must be fair and acknowledge that there are additional items of clothing which should be destroyed. “Passion, evil desire, covetousness”, with covetousness underlined, since covetousness amounts to idolatry, he tells us. The Greek word for covetousness is PLEONEXIA. PLEON — more; EXIA, to have. Covetousness is the passionate desire to have more — have more of anything. It is evil in that the passionate desire to have more corrupts us and victimizes others.

To crave greater prestige, greater notoriety, greater visibility is to embrace compromise after compromise until we have thoroughly falsified ourselves, a phoney of the phoneys. To crave more goods is to fall into dishonesty. To crave more power, greater domination, is to become first exploitative then cruel.

Paul sums up the passionate desire to have more — covetousness — as idolatry. Martin Luther used to say, “Our god is that to which we give ourselves; that from which we seek our ultimate satisfaction.” What we pursue, what we actually pursue, what our heart is set on when all the socially acceptable disguises are penetrated, is our god. Because we expect to be rewarded by this deity we secretly, yet surely, give ourselves to it. Such idolatry, insists the apostle, we must swiftly put to death.

He isn’t finished yet. Also to be killed are “anger” and “wrath”. ORGE, anger, is smouldering resentment which nurses a grudge and plots ways to even the score. THUMOS, wrath, in this context refers to a tantrum, the childish rage, childish decompensation, which is no less sinful for being childish. The adult who still has uncontrollable tantrums; the adult whose hatred still smoulders; these people are pitiable. After all, they think they are well-dressed when in fact their shabby clothes are verminous.

Lastly, the apostle speaks of “slander”, “foul talk”, and “lying”. Slander is the ruination of someone else’s reputation. Foul talk is abusive language, assaultive language, of any kind. Lying is deliberate misrepresentation. The slanderer is as lethal as a rattlesnake. The abusive talker is as brutal as a sledgehammer. These people plainly damage others. The liar, on the other hand, while certainly deceiving others, principally damages himself. You see, the liar who lies even in the smallest matters has rendered himself untrustworthy. Once he is known to be untrustworthy no one will say anything of any importance to him; no one will confide in him. All he will hear for as long as he is known as a liar will be nothing but froth. Of course the liar can be forgiven; but the liar can never be trusted. Far more than he victimizes others he victimizes himself.

The apostle never minces words, does he. There is clothing we must not merely shed; we must get rid of it. “Put to death”, he tells us, the impurity which defiles, the craving which corrupts, and the talk which either damages others or renders us untrustworthy.

 

III: — At the beginning of the sermon I said that nakedness (metaphorically) isn’t possible. We jettison the clothing which we must only because we have first put on, already put on, the new clothing which becomes all of us. In his letter to the Christians in Rome Paul says, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” We do put him on — in faith — so that he becomes ours and we become his. To the Christians in Ephesus Paul writes, “Put on the new nature , created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” To the Christians in Colosse he says, “Put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.”

It is plain that Christians are those who, in faith, have put on Jesus Christ himself. As we put on him we put on that renewed human nature which he is and which he fits onto us; as all of this happens the image of God, in which we were created but which has become scratched and marred and defaced — this image of God is re-engraved and now stands out unmistakably.

If this is really what has happened (and what more could happen?), what is the result of our having put on Christ?

(i) The first result is startling; the first result is so public, so notorious, so blatant that it can be observed and noted without contradiction even by those who make no profession of faith at all. The first result is that the barriers throughout the world which divide, isolate and alienate human beings from each other are crumbled. “Here there cannot be Greek or Jew”, says Paul, “…nor barbarian, Scythian, slave or free person; but Christ is all and in all.”

The barriers in the ancient world were as ugly as they are today. The Greeks regarded themselves as intellectually superior to everyone else. They were the cultured of the cultured. The Greek language was considered both the most expressive and the most beautiful sounding of any language. Why, compared to the sound of Greek all other languages had a harsh, unmusical, brutish sound: “bar-bar”. Greek people therefore regarded everyone else in the world as a barbarian.

We modern people look upon the study of foreign languages as a mark of the educated person. No one brags of being unilingual. But the ancient Greeks boasted of knowing one language only. They despised the study of foreign languages. They argued that since every language is inferior to their own, and since everyone who speaks an inferior language is inferior to the Greek people themselves, why waste time studying the inferior languages of inferior people? Max Mueller, an internationally acclaimed linguist of the late nineteenth century; Mueller insisted that a desire to learn other languages arose only through the indirect illumination of the gospel of Jesus Christ, arose only when the people who spoke these languages were no longer seen as barbarians but as brothers/sisters.

Just as Greeks thought themselves intellectually superior, Jews thought themselves religiously superior. They regularly spoke of non-Jews as “dogs”. Furthermore, since Jews were God’s chosen people, then all others had to be God’s rejected people, didn’t they?

The Scythians mentioned in our text today are named inasmuch as they were regarded as the lowest form of human life. “More barbarian than the barbarians”, is how the Greeks spoke of them. Scythians were held to be barely human, scarcely human.

Utterly unhuman were slaves. In the ancient world the slave was not considered to be a human being in any sense. Slaves had no rights. They could be beaten, maimed or killed with impunity — any why not, since killing a slave, through overwork, for instance, was no more significant than breaking a garden-rake through overuse. No less a philosopher than Aristotle had said that a slave was a highly efficient tool which unfortunately had to be fed.

And yet in the early days of the church the spiritual leader of the congregation was frequently a slave. Freemen and -women, people whose social class was incomparable to that of a slave; freemen and -women recognized the manifest spiritual depth of the slave who was leading their congregation. They recognized the spiritual authenticity, spiritual authority, the godliness of someone whom the society at large didn’t even regard as human, and deferred to it. Only in a Christian congregation could this phenomenon be seen. It happened nowhere else. It was the single most public consequence of putting on Christ.

One consequence of putting on our Lord, of putting on our new nature in righteousness and holiness, is that the congregation is a living demonstration of the collapse of those barriers which divide, isolate and alienate people from each other.

(ii) A second consequence: in putting on Christ, in putting on that new nature which is being renewed after the image and likeness of God, we become clothed with the character which shines in our Lord himself.

We put on compassion and kindness. Compassion is literally the state of being attuned to someone else’s suffering. It is the exact opposite of what we mean by “do-gooder”. The do-gooder does good, all right, does what he regards as good, but does it all from a safe distance, does it all with his hands but is careful to leave his heart out of it, lest his heart become wrenched, never mind broken. The compassionate person is completely different; the compassionate person’s heart is attuned to someone else’s suffering, even if there is very little that that person can do with her hands. If you were afflicted or tormented yourself, which person would you rather have with you: the do-gooder who can only tinker remotely, or the compassionate person who may only be able to resonate with your pain? Always the latter, for the latter will in the long run be infinitely more helpful and healing than the tinkerer.

We put on kindness as well. Kindness is holding our neighbour’s wellbeing as dear as our own. Such kindness has about it none of the negativities surrounding “do-goodism”. In the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry the word “kind” was used of wine; wine was said to be kind when full-bodied red wine had no sourness about it. Such wine was rich to the palate and delightful, but without any sour aftertaste. The same word is used by our Lord himself when he says, “Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is — is what, easy? The English translations say “easy”, but the Greek word is CHRESTOTES, and everywhere else it means kind. An ox-yoke was kind when the yoke fit so well that it didn’t chafe the animal’s neck. When our Lord tells us that his yoke is kind he means that the obedience in which we are bound to him will not irritate us, chafe us, rub us raw.

When we put on Christ, continues Paul, we put on lowliness, meekness and patience. Lowliness is humility, and humility, you have heard me say one hundred times, is simply self-forgetfulness.

Then what about meekness? Meekness is strength exercised through gentleness. All of us have strengths; to be sure, we have weaknesses as well, but all of us have strengths. We can exercise our strengths heavy-handedly, coercively, domineeringly, or we can exercise our strengths gently. When Paul wrote his epistles the word “meek” was used every day to describe the wild horse which was now tamed (and therefore useful) but whose spirit had not been broken.

Patience means we are not going to explode or quit, sulk or sabotage when things don’t get done in congregational life exactly as we should like to see them done.

We put on forgiveness, and forgive each other, moved to do so simply by the astounding forgiveness we have received from our Lord himself.

(iii) The final consequence of putting on Christ: we put on love, with the result, says Paul, that the congregation “is bound together in perfect harmony”. He maintains that a congregation is to resemble a symphony orchestra. An orchestra never consists of one instrument only playing the same note over and over. An orchestra consists of many different instruments sounding many different notes. The full sound of the orchestra is what people want to hear. Whether the full sound is a good sound or an unendurable sound depends on one thing: is the orchestra playing in harmony?

We should be aware of what the metaphor of harmony does not mean for congregational life. It does not mean that the goal of congregational life is uniformity or conformity; and it does not mean that voices which shouldn’t be heard all the time shouldn’t be heard at all. (The sharp crack of the timpani drum and the piercing note of the piccolo are not heard often in an orchestra, but when they need to be heard they should be heard.)

It is love, says the apostle, and love only, which renders congregational harmony as glorious as Mozart’s. For it is such love which renders our life together honouring to God, helpful to us, and attractive to others who may yet become Christ’s people as they too are persuaded to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. For as they do this, they will find, as we have found already, that to put on him is also to put on that human nature which God has appointed for us. And to clothe ourselves in this is to find that clothes do indeed make the man — and the woman as well.

 

F I N I S

                                                                        Victor A. Shepherd                                                                                       

   March 1992

 

    Colossians 3:13-17

 

Watts wrote them superbly, yet he wrote eversomuch more than his 697 hymns. A textbook on logic, for instance, that was used for years at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale. Not to mention his two books on geometry and astronomy. Upset at the inability of students to handle the English language creditably, he penned The Art of Reading and Writing English. It was followed by his Philosophical Essays (with its appendix, “A brief Scheme of Ontology”, ontology being that branch of philosophy that discusses being), then by Improvement of the Mind (this was actually a “how-to-study” book, and even A Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth. A minister for virtually all of his adult life, Watts also published ten volumes of sermons and scores of theological treatises.

Isaac Watts was born in 1674, the eldest of eight children, six of whom survived. The last quarter of the 17th century was a troubled time in England. Dissenters (those who refused to conform to the established church) were not only denied access to suitable employment and the universities; Dissenters were liable to prosecution and imprisonment for no greater “crime” than persisting in worshipping God according to their conscience. Watts’s father, a Dissenter, was imprisoned one year after he was married. His wife, Watts’s mother, gave birth to Isaac while her husband was in jail. She regularly nursed her infant son on the jail steps in the course of visiting her husband. (When Isaac was nine years old his father was jailed a second time — for six months — for the same offence: refusing to conform to the worship-practices of the established church.)

Young Isaac was plainly precocious. He had learned Latin by age four, Greek at nine, French at eleven, and Hebrew at thirteen. French was not usually studied in English elementary schools during the 1600s, but Watts was raised in Southampton, and Southampton was a city of refuge to hundreds of refugees who were fleeing persecution in France. The youngster thought he should know French so that he could converse with his neighbours.

A physician recognized the boy’s intellectual gifts and offered to finance his education at either Oxford or Cambridge. But regardless of his brilliance Watts would be admitted to either university only if he were willing to renounce Dissent and conform to Anglicanism. He wasn’t willing. (Had his father suffered for nothing?) He would never surrender conviction to expediency. As a result he went to a Dissenting Academy, the post-secondary institution for those barred from the universities. While completing his formal education Watts wrote much poetry, most of it in Latin. Upon leaving the Academy at age 20 he wrote his first hymn, “Behold the Glories of the Lamb” — yet did so only when challenged sharply by his father.

The writing of his first hymn was significant in view of the fact that hymns weren’t sung in English churches. German Lutherans had been singing hymns for over 100 years. Calvinists in Switzerland and France, however, had not. The Calvinists disdained hymns as unscriptural and popish. Calvin had wanted his people to sing only the psalms of scripture. English Protestants of Calvinist parentage had adopted the practice of singing only metrical psalms in worship. The texts of these metrical psalms were poetically crude and frequently ludicrous; for instance,

Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,
Your Master’s praises spout,
Up from the sands ye coddlings peep,
And wag your tails about.

The texts were ludicrous, the mood was ponderous, the tone of the entire service dreary, and one day Watts discovered he couldn’t endure any of it a minute longer. Returning from the service one Sunday morning he complained vehemently to his father about the psalm-singing that put people off worship. “Why don’t you write a hymn suitable for congregational singing?”, his father retorted. In the course of the afternoon Watts did just that, and the congregation sang hymn #1 the same evening.

Yet it must not be thought that Watts disesteemed the psalms. Far from it. So highly did he value them, in fact, that he immediately set about rewriting the metrical versions in a smoother idiom. Compare the metrical version of Psalm 20 with Watts’s version:

In chariots some put confidence,
Some horses trust upon;
But we remember will the name
Of our Lord God alone. (Metrical)

Some trust in horses train’d for war,
And some of chariots make their boasts;
Our surest expectations are
From Thee, the Lord of heav’nly hosts. (Watts)

(As relatively smooth as Watts’s hymn-line was, it would be made even smoother by 18th century poets such as Charles Wesley.)

Not everyone thanked Watts for his efforts. Some of his contemporaries complained that his hymns were “too worldly” for the church. One critic fumed, “Christian congregations have shut out divinely inspired psalms and have taken in Watts’s flights of fancy!” His hymns outraged many people, split congregations (most notably the congregation whose pastor, years earlier, had been John Bunyan, himself the author of an English classic), and got pastors fired. Still, Watts knew what his preeminent gift was and why he had to employ it.

Needless to say we of Streetsville United Church, having been thoroughly exposed to the genius of Charles Wesley, cannot help comparing the hymnwriting of Wesley and Watts.

Wesley’s hymns concern themselves chiefly with God and the individual human heart: their relations, their estrangement, their reconciliation, their union. Watts writes of this too, but with a major difference: the backdrop of God’s intercourse with the human heart is the cosmos in its unspeakable vastness. Watts sees the drama of the incarnation and the cross, the dereliction and the resurrection, as apparently small events that are in fact possessed of cosmic significance. Watts’s universe is simply more immense than anything Wesley imagined. For Watts nature is more prodigious, time more extensive, eternity more awesome. (This is not to say that Wesley is inferior. Indeed no one would rate Watts a better poet. Wesley had more poetic skill than Watts, and more thorough training in the forms of classical poetry. It is simply to say that Watts’s universe was larger.) It is said of Milton that he is the English poet who, above all others, makes the reader aware of the sky. In the same way Watts, with his fondness of astronomy, singularly makes the reader aware of the hugeness of the firmament.

There are technical comparisons as well of the poetry of Watts and Wesley. Wesley preferred a six-line stanza, but when writing a four-line stanza usually rhymed first and third lines as well as second and fourth. Watts preferred a four-line stanza and usually rhymed only the second and fourth lines. As a result Watts’s stanzas tend to read less compactly than Wesley’s. While Wesley combined Anglo-Saxon expressions (they are customarily blunt, one-syllable words like “hit”) with Latin expressions (usually multi-syllable words like “transported” or “ineffable”), Watts wrote page after page of hymns lacking even one word with a Latin derivation (despite the scores of Latin poems that he wrote). Watts evidently preferred to write hymns in words of one syllable.

Watts was a man with limitless appreciation of the passion of God. He himself was possessed of the profoundest experience of God. Listen to him:

Here at the cross, my dying God
I lay my soul beneath thy love.

*

The mount of danger is the place
Where we shall see surprising grace.

*

Turn, turn us, mighty God,
And mould our souls afresh;
Break, sovereign grace, these hearts of stone,
And give us hearts of flesh.

(Note that the last line, “And give us hearts of flesh”, consists of six words of one syllable each.)

Watts was accorded the recognition he deserved. By age 50 he was a national figure, esteemed by Anglicans and Dissenters alike. John Wesley had long acknowledged the genius, discipline and piety of Watts, and when Wesley came to publish his first hymn book, one-third of its hymns were Isaac’s. When John Wesley published his tract, The Doctrine of Original Sin, he incorporated 44 pages of Watts’s earlier work, Ruin and Recovery.

The poetic genius of Watts is evident. Yet since few poets (if any) have made a living from poeticizing, how did Watts manage to survive?

Upon graduating from the Academy Watts eked out a living as tutor to the son of a well-to-do English merchant. He never thought for a moment, however, that this was his vocation. In 1702, when he was 27 years old, he was called to a pastorate in London. The next ten years were spent fruitfully and happily as Watts immersed himself in the relentless round of responsibilities that every pastor must attend to — at the same time as he wrote books, treatises, poems and hymns.

The easygoing ten years were ended abruptly by a major illness from which he never recovered fully. While he was unable to work during his illness he asked the congregation to discontinue his salary. The congregation refused, and instead raised it so that he could pay his medical bills.

The illness incapacitated him for four years. When the worst of it abated he was left frail, fragile, sickly. In addition there was an apparently non-specific psychiatric component to his now-chronic weakness. On the one hand he wasn’t sick enough to die for another 38 years; on the other hand, he wasn’t sickness-free enough to be well. A wealthy benefactor, Thomas Abney, invited him to his home to assist his recovery. He gratefully accepted, and went on to live there for the rest of his life.

Watts preached whenever he could. There were periods when he could preach with little interruption, as well as periods when he was simply deranged and couldn’t function at all.

In 1739, at age 65, Isaac suffered a stroke that left him able to speak but unable to write. A secretary was provided for his dictated poems and hymns.

He died on 25th November, 1748.

Isaac Watts was unusual in many respects. A short man (five feet tall), his frail body was capped with a disproportionately large head. Virtually all portraits of him depict him in a large gown with large folds, an obvious attempt at having him appear less grotesque.

Unusual? How many working pastors write a textbook on logic that is used for decades by the preeminent universities of the English-speaking world?

Unusual? Who among us can write a book on metaphysics that probes ontology, and at the same time write a book of children’s poetry that goes through 95 editions within 100 years of its publication?

Unusual? Who has written hymns that have been translated into dozens of languages from Armenian to Zulu?

Unusual? What modern thinker has published a learned tome on astronomy and also published graded catechisms (one for five-year olds, another for nine-year olds, another for twelve-year olds)?

Watts was unusual: he regularly gave away one-fifth of his income, deploying his tithe locally yet also sending it as far afield as Germany and Georgia to help beleaguered people there.

Yet surely he was most unusual in that the jockey-sized man, ugly as well, handicapped by a thin voice and a history of psychiatric illness, could appear in a pulpit whenever sanity overtook him and draw hundreds who hung on words rising from a heart that hearers knew to be wrapped in the heart of God.

Watts was not unusual in one important respect. Like all Christians he knew that God is to be loved with the mind, and therefore reason must never be discounted in the exercising of faith or the discipline of the Christian life. Yet he knew too that the mystery of God himself, while never irrational, is oceans deeper than reason can fathom. Who among us would say anything else? Then it is proper for us to conclude with a four-line stanza Isaac Watts wrote concerning the fathomless mystery of God.

Where reason fails,
With all her pow’rs,
There faith prevails
And love adores.

                                                                                                      Victor A. Shepherd
October 1994

Isaac Watts
1674-1748

The singing of God’s praise is the part of worship most
clearly related to heaven; but its performance among us
is the worst on earth. (I.W.)

    Colossians 3:16 

 

I: — A French atheist, proud of his atheism, who heard the seven year old concert pianist in Paris exclaimed, “I have seen a miracle.”  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wasn’t a miracle in the biblical sense of the word; nevertheless, he was a marvel.

Today he couldn’t be exploited and exhibited as he was in his childhood. (After all, today people who are highly unusual physically, for instance, aren’t allowed to be exploited and exhibited in circus side-shows.)  Mozart’s father, however, was less wise and therefore less kind.  The elder Mozart, himself a composer and violinist of no little ability, quickly recognized that his son was extraordinary.  Mozart’s sister, Nannerl (five years older), was gifted too.         Father Mozart sent the two children on a concert tour that lasted three and a half years. Crowds sat agape as the seven year old boy and his twelve year old sister played two-piano duets breathtakingly.  Paris , London , Amsterdam , Geneva , Lausanne , Zurich , Winterthur , Schaffhausen; at last the concert tour was over and the exhausted children were home again.

Mozart was born 27^th January 1756 in the city of Salzburg , Austria , and was named Johannes Chrysostomos Wolfgangus Theophilos Mozart.  “Theophilos”, Greek for “lover of God”, was Latinized to “Amadeus”. Thereafter he was known by his last three names, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

His father began instructing him in music theory when he was three. By age four he was playing minuets flawlessly and had composed his first piano concerto.   His father looked at it and remarked that wonderful as it was on paper, it was so difficult that no one would be able to play it.  Whereupon the four year old played it.  When he was eight he was asked to accompany a singer in an Italian aria. He had never heard it before. Still, he improvised each repetition by developing it from the previous stanza.  When the singer had finished, Mozart kept playing the piece, fully scored, ten times over, each time with a different variation.  He would have continued playing in his inner transport and untrammelled spontaneity had not the adults in the room stopped him.

In 1782 Wolfgang married Constanze Weber.  His father vehemently opposed the marriage, vowing he would have nothing to do with her; thereafter he treated Constanze contemptuously if he had reason to deal with her at all.         Wolfgang, for his part, wrote his father, “I am just beginning to live.”   Her life would never be easy. In six of her nine years of marriage she would be pregnant or either recovering. (The longest interval between pregnancies was seventeen months; the shortest (twice), six months.) In 1789 she was bedridden for weeks with fever, severe nausea, and lameness.  The pseudo-medical treatment prescribed for her was to bathe her feet in water in which the entrails of an animal had been boiled.  The child she was carrying died at birth.  Throughout her life she lacked everyday wisdom, homespun “horse sense”. Despite her appalling lack of worldly wisdom and her relentless suffering, Constanze remained unconcerned and uncomplaining.

The young husband and wife were happy.  They were both silly, frivolous, and financially unteachable, apparently a perfect match. They moved twelve times in their nine years of marriage, house-rent being one of the financial items they could never quite manage.

In the social pecking order of eighteenth century Europe musicians were generally disdained, being one step (but only one) above the bricklayer or stonemason or blacksmith; certainly nowhere near the gentry, let alone the nobility. Constanze belonged to the same social class and knew it.  She and Wolfgang never strove to leave it.         Whereas Beethoven was socially ambitious and committed notable social blunders in his zeal for social climbing, Mozart didn’t blunder in that he scorned the game; he never cared a fig for ingratiating himself with social superiors.

In some respects he never grew up.  Emotional immaturity was as natural to him as musical sophistication. On one occasion he was practising the piano in an auditorium when he suddenly took note of the silence of those who had come to hear him rehearse as they hung on every note. He thought these people entirely too serious, entirely too adulatory; after all, he was only practising. Whereupon he jumped up on the back of a seat and capered around the room from seat-back to seat-back, all the while meowing like a cat.

Despite the people who recognized his gifts, and despite his fondness for partying, Mozart was so very isolated that it hurts even to read of it. Other musicians envied him and shunned him. Salieri, a court-composer of vastly less ability, plotted intrigues to ensure Wolfgang’s non-recognition. As has already been mentioned, his father detested Constanze.  (Later she burned every letter the older man had sent to his son.) Nannerl, his sister, not wishing to alienate her father, took the father’s side and was barely civil to Constanze.

So lonely was Mozart that his heart leapt when he found recognition and affirmation in a bird.  He was passing a pet shop in Salzburg when he heard a bird chirping a few notes from one of his piano sonatas.  Now only recently he had decided to attempt a measure of financial responsibility by writing each expenditure in a notebook, hoping thereby to see exactly where his money was going and get himself and his wife beyond their pecuniary precariousness.  The notebook shows careful entries of small sums for pencils or buttons or food; then a huge entry for the bird.  Mozart had done it again: bankrupted himself unthinkingly, recent resolution thrown to the wind, as he knew he had to have this bird.  Having dutifully jotted the purchase price in his notebook, he wrote down the musical notes he heard the bird chirp, indicating that the bird did not sing a G-sharp and several grace-notes.  Underneath all of this he penned, “Das war schoen” — “That was beautiful.” The bird lived three years. When it died he mourned it as he was to mourn little else.

A talent as rich as his would always ensure isolation.  His music pioneered new harmonies.  His grasp of counterpoint left people gasping.  (Counterpoint is the art of writing two different melodies in the one piece of music.) Whereas many composer/performers wrote a few piano or violin pieces and then took them on the concert tour, playing them over and over to different audiences in different cities, Mozart found that the more he performed the more he was inspired to write. As a result he frequently wrote new sonatas and concertos for each performance on a concert tour. When he did repeat a piano item with orchestral accompaniment, the orchestra, of course, played the music he had scored for it.  Mozart himself, however, played what he had written for himself the first night only; from the second night on he improvised, composing on the spot, nothing written at all, his on-the-spot creation fitting perfectly into the orchestral score.  Each night there was the same orchestral accompaniment but a brand new piano rendition, never heard before, and never to be heard again, since nothing was written and nothing recorded.

Unlike Chopin who had huge hands, Mozart’s hands, like his body, were small. So dextrous were they nonetheless that they caused the most difficult passages to resemble “flowing oil”, in the words of the little man himself.  At the same time, his wonderfully able hands were useless for virtually everything else. At the dinner table his wife customarily cut up his meat, a knife and fork being too difficult for him to coordinate.

On one occasion he asked a fellow-composer if he could look over the latter’s new symphony. The man refused to let Mozart see it. Whereupon our friend went to a concert hall where it was being performed, heard it once, returned home and wrote out every note for every instrument.

Despite his financial disasters and his isolation at the hands of the musical fraternity he never lost his confidence.  In fact he was self-assured in a way that others found off-putting. When the Austrian emperor, no less, remarked that an aria had too many notes in it, Mozart replied (to the emperor), “…there are just as many notes in it as there ought to be.” (Wolfgang, remember, wasn’t a social climber.)

Most composers created music at the point of a pencil, writing and erasing over and over until they got down what they wanted.  Mozart, however, created exclusively in his head; then he wrote it all out once, once only, never erasing a note.  Not surprisingly, he found the writing of music mechanical drudgery and a bore.  When asked about his musical inspiration and his manner of composing he remarked that he had very little to say about it.         “Travelling in a carriage, walking after a good meal, during the night when I can’t sleep; it’s on such occasions that my ideas flow best and flow most abundantly.  Whence and how they come I know not; nor can I force them…. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once.”  As soon as he had heard the full orchestra in his head at once, all that remained to be done, he liked to say, was mere scribbling.

There was no form of music which he didn’t write superbly.  Symphonies, quartets, trios; piano, violin, cello, clarinet and trumpet concertos; operas, church music.  Indeed it was as church musician that he acquired what he had long wanted: a job with a salary and therefore a regular income.  As Master of the Chapel in Salzburg he wrote music for the Sunday services.  He and the archbishop, however, could not get along.  Their relationship worsened until in May, 1780, having had the long-awaited steady job for a year and four months, he was fired.

While our soloist is singing Mozart’s church music today and the congregation several hymn-tunes, relatively little of his church music is sung in Protestant worship. His church music is largely the musical setting for the Roman Catholic mass.  Furthermore, the Protestantism which Mozart was exposed to was exceedingly dilute. The rich gospel of the Reformation, addressed to the entire person, had given way to a dry, cold mental abstraction, little more than an intellectual parlour game employing a religious vocabulary.  It led Mozart to comment that Protestant Christianity was a head-trip that left people unmoved, inert.  Another critical observation was even more telling.         The Lutheran recovery of the biblical truth of justification — namely, that God justifies sinners or puts them in the right with himself as they seize in faith the crucified one whom God has given as provision for sinners — this glorious dimension of the gospel was distorted and diluted until “justification” was nothing more than the thinnest coat of whitewash applied to sin, which sin was deemed only skin-deep and didn’t matter anyway.  For this reason Mozart commented that Protestants rarely understood the core of the Roman mass, “O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world.”

His poverty worsened. In order to earn money he gave piano lessons to the children of aristocrats, virtually all of whom were without musical talent.  One fellow, however, pleaded with him for lessons, and Mozart recognized enormous talent in the youngster; but Mozart’s father was dying and he felt he couldn’t spare the time or the concentration which so promising a pupil needed. He declined to take on this one outstanding student.  The student’s name was Beethoven.

Wolfgang began selling as much as he could part with.  His long, green velvet coat with the flared skirt, plus his red velvet coat (his favourite), even his viola — he sold them all, his viola fetching only a few dollars. Between major compositions he dashed off little ditties, tunes for what had become the new rage in Austria , mechanical music boxes with revolving metal cylinders.  These music boxes sat on a woman’s dresser and tinkled a tune while she brushed her hair. Surprisingly, he was well paid for these. Still, he was so far in debt that he was beyond help.

By now he was not only poor but sick.  His illness worsened rapidly.  In the last year of his life, knowing himself in a race against death (as he often said), he produced a torrent of glorious music.  At the same time, with only months left to him, he performed 20 two-hour piano concerts in four weeks.  Very ill now, he wrote to a friend in England , “I go on writing because composition tires me less than resting.”  A stranger commissioned him to write a Requiem.  He put the finishing touches to his last opera, The Magic Flute, and began work on his final piece of church music.  Sick unto death, he summoned three men who sat with him for several afternoons while he hummed the parts and dictated the score.  When he whispered to Constanze, “I have the taste of death on my tongue”, she summoned a priest.  He died at 1:00 o’clock in the morning, 5th December 1791, aged thirty-five, and was buried in a pauper’s grave, unmarked.

His debts were massive. The emperor sponsored a benefit concert for Constanze, as did his old friend Haydn, and the money gave her a small monthly pension.  Her health improved now, and she lived until she was seventy-nine. Whereupon she was buried in the grave of the man who had afflicted her for years and whose letters she had burned, her husband’s father.

 

Mozart’s life was short. His published works number six hundred and twenty-six.  We shall never know how much more music he wrote which his elbow knocked onto the floor and a broom later swept up.  And of course we shall never hear the music he played but never wrote.

Music-experts regard him as the most gifted composer ever.  Leonard Bernstein, American composer, conductor and pianist, maintains that compared to other outstanding composers Mozart resembles a deity who kissed the earthy briefly and then departed.

This little deity, however, was humble too.  All his life Mozart was especially fond of people below his social station. He loved to play for sick, elderly people in nursing homes.  “The unlearned will appreciate my music without knowing why”, he commented. They did.  They do. And they always will.

 

II: — Why are we honouring Mozart today in a service of worship?  Music isn’t the Word of God. To cherish Mozart’s gift isn’t to relish the gospel.  Then why do we bother with him at Sunday worship?

 

(i)         In the first place, while music is not the gospel it does assist us in our praise of God.  Architecture also assists us in our praise of God.  Sunday by Sunday we worship God in this building.  It cost much to build and it costs much to maintain.  Yet we continue to maintain it and gather within it inasmuch as it facilitates our worship of God. Music does as much.

It always has. Our Hebrew foreparents knew this. They used the flute at weddings and funerals; in other words, the flute was used in services of worship which had to do with the extremes of elevated joy or piercing grief. The tambourine was used in conjunction with dancing, and was always associated with gladness. The trumpet was used to remind the people of God’s summons to spiritual conflict.

We sing here Sunday by Sunday just because singing expresses a devotion, an ardour, a response of the heart so deep that merely spoken words can’t do justice to it. The lyrics of our hymns are poetry. But we don’t stand and recite poetry together week after week; we sing it. Poetry which is sung comes from depths in us that much deeper than poetry which is said.  Music assists us in our praise of God.  This being the case, it’s only fitting that we recognize someone who was musically gifted above all others.

 

(ii)         In the second place Mozart’s music is known for its structure, its order. The order of his music reminds us that our world remains ordered by God’s providence and God’s mercy. To be sure, in the wake of the Fall the world is disordered; not superficially disordered, but profoundly disordered.  Sunday by Sunday you hear me illustrate and analyse the world’s disorder and also hear me point, I trust, to its recovery in Jesus Christ. Disordered as the world is, however, it’s never as disordered as it could be.  It’s never disordered entirely.  If it were, existence would be impossible.

Everyone knows that life is impossible amidst chaos.  A completely chaotic world would be an uninhabitable world.  Scripture insists over and over that humankind’s wickedness imparts an element of chaos into human existence.  Then as one generation’s wickedness is added to another’s, why doesn’t chaos mount until it overtakes us and life becomes impossible? Because God himself, in his goodness and patience and mercy, constantly keeps chaos at bay as he preserves order enough to let us live.

The Hebrew mind always thinks concretely. When it thinks of chaos it envisages water, torrents of water, both coming down from above and welling up from below.  When the two waters meet, chaos overtakes the world and life is impossible. It is the testimony of scripture that God, by his goodness, patience and mercy, holds the “waters” back and preserves order, order enough to let us live and work.

When I hear Mozart’s music, with its marvellous structure, its exquisite order, I know it to be a reflection of that order by which God preserves the world in his mercy.  However fallen the world is, however tarnished, weakened and vicious it might be, it is never this entirely; if the world were this entirely, it would no longer be good. But God created it good and pronounced it good. Its goodness remains even in the wake of the Fall, for otherwise it couldn’t be the theatre of God’s glory.

Mozart’s music embodies an order, intricately worked out, subtle to be sure, yet always balanced and elemental.         His music is a token of that order by which God preserves a world which, if left to itself, could only collapse into chaos.         World? Your life and mine: left to itself, without God’s preservation — it too could only collapse into chaos.

 

(iii)         Lastly, Mozart’s music is to be received with thanksgiving simply because it’s a thing of beauty. Beauty is a gift of God. Not the gift (Jesus Christ, with all that he does for us and in us, is the gift); but a gift nonetheless, and a glorious gift.

Think for a minute of the Lord’s Prayer.  We are commanded to pray for daily bread.  Daily bread is not the bread of life. (Our Lord is this.)  But to say that daily bread isn’t the bread of life isn’t to say that daily bread is unimportant.         Indeed, so important is daily bread that we can’t live without it, and must ask God for it without ceasing.

Just as bread is food for the stomach so music is food for the mind and heart. Music too is a kind of “bread” that humankind needs and for which we are to thank God.

Do you ever think about the cloak which our Lord wore?  It wasn’t a potato sack. It was beautiful, so beautiful that the soldiers who stripped him didn’t throw it aside. Instead they gambled for it, each one wanting to be the lucky fellow to take it home.

Do you recall what Mozart wrote in his notebook about the bird that could chirp a few notes of his music?         “That was beautiful.” How much more beautiful was the gift of the man whose piano-playing resembled “flowing oil” and whose compositions are without peer.

 

At one point Mozart’s father, exasperated with his son, wrote to Wolfgang, “It’s always too much or too little with you, never the middle of the road.” The older man was correct on one thing: for Wolfgang it was never the middle of the road. But he was wrong when he said that with Wolfgang Amadeus it was always either too much or too little. It was certainly never too little. Then was it ever too much? There can’t be too much of Mozart’s gift.

There can’t be too much of the gift; there can’t be too much of the love our Lord poured out upon us at the cross and continues to pour out. There can’t be too much of the love we must pour out upon him and upon one another. Love, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself, is always a spendthrift.

 

                                                                                                         Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    January 2006