HEAD OF THE CHURCH

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

            What is your favorite hymn?  We’re hearing from many of the worshipers who gather here what hymns they would like to sing beginning in August.  This is an annual tradition, as you know.  But what makes a hymn a favorite?  I like “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” because of the stirring tune written by Ludwig van Beethoven.  The tune is found in his Ninth Symphony.  It gets my blood flowing!  But I can also admire a hymn for its thoughtfulness and ability to communicate to my need, through the power of both its words and its music.  “Spirit of God, descend upon my heart; Wean it from earth, through all its pulses move; Stoop to my weakness, mighty as Thou art, And make me love Thee as I ought to love.”  What great words!  “Teach me to feel that Thou art always nigh; Teach me the struggles of the soul to bear, To check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh; Teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.”  Oh, how that hymn has spoken to me through the years!  That’s what makes that hymn a favorite of mine.  What makes a hymn your favorite?

            Well, for the writer of the Letter to the Colossians, Christology is the reason he has chosen to include a hymn of praise to Christ.  Hymns have a way of communicating that goes deeper than prose somehow, especially if you want to talk about the importance of Christ in God’s overall plan of redemption.  So the Letter to the Colossians contains a hymn of praise, declaring what is so important about Jesus Christ.  “He is the image of the invisible God,” sings the hymn.  A universal human hunger is to know God.  And, oh, how we would love to see God face to face!  Would it be a friendly face?  Would it be a face that notices us or ignores us?  Would the face of God smile or frown on us?  The Christ hymn in Colossians declares that humanity has seen the face of God.  It announces that the face of God can be seen in the person of Jesus Christ.  “He is the image of the invisible God.”  But you say, “God was about creating the entire universe, from the smallest creatures seen only in a microscope to the vast solar systems.  Is Jesus Christ the face of this God?”  Precisely so, declares the hymn.  “He is the image of the invisible God . . . in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible . . . all things have been created through him and for him.  He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”  In other words, in Jesus Christ, you see the face of our Creator God.

            You know what that means?  Creation is permeated with meaning.  That is to say, the universe is not present because of some cosmic accident.  Things didn’t just come together to create a “big bang” and then the universe came into being.  Not if it is true that “all things have been created through him and for him.”  Jesus Christ is the image of the God who made all things out of his own purposiveness.  The universe is intended.  Our world was meant to come into being.  You and I were meant to come into being.  As we see from the presence of Jesus Christ, God’s image in the world, God intended a relationship with the world from the very beginning.  Its inhabitants are precious to God, so much so that he sent his Son Jesus Christ to be his self-revelation to the world.  Without God’s own self-disclosure, God would even now be unknown.  Yes, we can look at the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, the beauty of the Texas Hill Country, or the shores of the Texas Costal Bend with the sea life and sea birds and behold internationality.  To some, it may seem an oversimplification to say that as a watch implies a watchmaker, so the precision of the universe in general and of our world in particular indicates the activity of a Creator.  To me, it seems most obvious that all of these things didn’t come about because of some impersonal coming together of the right cosmic ingredients, and then—boom—the universe!  So, something of God is revealed in his Creation.  Still, the clearest and fullest way human beings see God is by means of God’s own self-revelation in Jesus Christ.  Jesus is the human face of the Creator God.  The universe is intended for God’s own purposes.  That tells us that all of creation is permeated with meaning.

            Of course, God’s purposiveness is blurred by the brokenness we see everywhere.  There is brokenness in human existence, which cannot be denied.  We sense it within ourselves.  We are not whole.  There is an internal struggle within us.  We try to live according to what we believe we ought to do, but we wind up doing something we are certain we shouldn’t be doing.  We don’t live in accordance with our beliefs, and we feel the brokenness.  There is a brokenness among the nations of the world.  Nations rise up against nations to conquer or to make them submit.  There is a visible brokenness in what we refer to as “nature.”  Rain continues to fall over land that is saturated, causing flooding.  Lives and property are lost.  Other parts of the country at the same time are parched because of a long-term lack of rain.  Wildfires break out.  Lives and property are lost.  Hurricanes make landfall, bringing their fury inland.  Lives and property are lost.  Earthquakes toss over buildings and crumble bridges.  Lives and property are lost.  There is disease in both plant and animal life.  And what is sickness but a kind of brokenness?  In all of this, we sense that the world—from great meteorological phenomena to tiny germs within the human body—we sense that the world is not the way God originally intended it to be.

            Good news!  If brokenness is the problem, then Jesus Christ is the solution.  The hymn of praise to Christ in Colossians declares that “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”  Are you getting the powerful significance of this hymn?  In Jesus Christ, we see the face of the otherwise hidden God.  It is the face of reconciliation.  Although the hymn doesn’t spell out how exactly Jesus’ death on the cross accomplishes our reconciliation to God, it affirms that Jesus’ death on the cross does produce the reconciliation of all things to God.  We may not yet see the completion of the process of God reconciling all things to himself, but we can see places where it is happening, all pointing to that day when all brokenness will be made whole.  We may not see new life everywhere, but we see glimpses of it in human life.  The writer of Colossians uses the rhetorical device of contrasting “once” with “now.”  He writes, “. . . you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.”  Probably most of the Christians in Colossae would have remembered their previous state as pagans, estranged from God, living lives marked by evil deeds.  When they responded to the good news of Jesus Christ—that he lived and died and rose for them—they began to live a new life.  They became genuinely new creations.  Their lives had a new orientation from living for self to living for God and neighbor.  While few, if any, of us began as pagans, the Colossians’ story is nevertheless also our own.  Though we may have known about Christ and given our lives to him at a very early age, we have also seen ourselves abandon our commitment to Christ in order to live for self.  But Christ remains in our lives to reconcile us to God and to restore us as new beings.  When someone gives his or her life to Christ and accepts his or her reconciliation to God, new life begins.  “Some time ago,” Lloyd Ogilvie remembered, “I sat down next to a student on an airplane.  After I found out where he went to school, he asked me what I did for a living.  I told him I was a communicator of life.  That didn’t satisfy.  ‘No, I mean what kind of a job do you have?’ he asked.  Finally, I admitted that I was a clergyman.  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘don’t give me any god talk.  I don’t believe in religion!’  ‘Neither do I!’ I responded.  This amazed him.  I told him that my business was people and introducing them to an abundant life.  We were off!  We talked incessantly all the way to Chicago.  He wouldn’t let the conversation lag for a moment, and when we landed, he followed me all the way into the terminal and to the cab stand.  He wanted life, and so do we all.  Since then we’ve exchanged letters, and I have seen him several times.  During that first visit, though, it came out that he was really hung up about what to do with his life.”  Ogilvie explained that the young man had been involved with drugs in an attempt to find some meaning and purpose.  He was in turmoil about his sex life with the girl to whom he was pinned at that time.  Ogilvie asked him what he would do with his life if he knew he could have limitless power to love and care for people.  The young man began to list some exciting goals.  “Eventually,” Ogilvie added, “he asked God to guide his life and accepted God’s love for him.”  That’s new life!  Jesus Christ is the face of the God who wants to reconcile all things to himself.  He is the face of the God who seeks to give new life to all who are currently broken.  If brokenness is the problem, then Jesus Christ is the solution.

            What’s more, Jesus Christ is the head of the church.  As the hymn of praise to Christ makes abundantly clear:  “He is the head of the body, the church.”  But more than that, Jesus Christ is declared to be “the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.”  In this wonderful doxology there is transmitted the message that Jesus Christ, who is the face of the invisible God, is sovereign over all things.  He is the head of the church, the church universal and First Presbyterian Church of Lancaster, Texas.  At camp and retreats, I like to lead the song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”  We sing about the “wind and the rain” and the “little bitty babies.”  We sing, “He’s got you and me . . . in his hands.”  And then I like to lead the group to name each church represented.”  “He’s got First Presbyterian Church in his hands.”  I love to be silly and sing, “He’s got First Presbyterian Church, Lancaster, Texas, in his hands,” cramming all those words into a very short musical space.  But, in all that silliness, there is a serious point.  The point is also made in the hymn of praise in Colossians 1.  It says, “He is the head of the body, the church.”  Jesus Christ, the face of the hidden God, is the head of the church.  He is sovereign over the entire universe, including the church universal, even First Presbyterian, Lancaster, Texas.  Those who understand that, seek to make the church an instrument of Jesus Christ, the head of the church.  One hundred fifty-one years ago next Thursday, July 26, 1856, five women and four men—John Harris, Jane Harris, R. M. Harris, Emily Guy, Elizabeth Grove, William R. Moffett, Ealenore Moffett, Henry Moffett, and Anna Moffett—organized First Presbyterian Church of Lancaster, the second Presbyterian church in Dallas County.  According to one account, these nine pioneers met at John Green’s cabinet shop with the Reverend Michael Dickson, who came up from Milford.  First, the church met in a small schoolhouse near the square.  In 1868, according to another account, the church was meeting in the Masonic Hall.  Another account speaks of how the Baptists and Methodists in Lancaster offered our congregation space in their churches.  That same account reports that from our nine-member beginning, our congregation grew to thirty members in 1868, down to twelve by 1878, bounding up to seventy in 1888, then down to sixty by 1890.  In 1906, the church rocketed to a whopping one hundred forty members!  Think of all the ministry done as the church gathered:  sermons preached and heard, the good news taught to adults and children, people’s lives committed to Christ, men and women and children baptized, broken lives made whole again, the sick brought comfort, and support given to those who mourned.  Besides all that, consider the increase of ministry engaged in by the church scattered.  Church members have served on the Lancaster City Council or the Lancaster Independent School District board.  From this place, children we don’t know have been served through our Presbyterian camping program.  Our church has loved neighbors through the Lancaster Outreach Center.  Imagine all the children we have touched through Operation Christmas Child.  What’s more, consider all the ministry that has been accomplished by church members in their daily lives at their occupations, the neighbors we have loved through the years.  The one-hundred-fifty-one-year-old history of our congregation is one example of a church trying to be faithful to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the head of the church.

            Needless to say, to be faithful to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the head of the church, we must hold fast to the gospel.  The church’s responsibility is to proclaim our faith in Jesus Christ, not some other faith.  We must let our faith in Jesus Christ as revealer, sovereign, and reconciler be the message we proclaim.  And that message must be the foundation for all our ministry.  We must hold fast to our faith in Jesus Christ and not drift in and out, proclaiming some other message.  There has always been a temptation to waver from the gospel message for some other.  For the Colossians, the temptation came from false teachers who came to that faith community.  Churches today face the temptation to proclaim a message that is not the gospel.  I sometimes wonder if the church is answering questions that people today are not asking.  If that is so, should we shift to another message that answers those questions?  That’s not an easy question to answer.  If the issue is finding new ways to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ, then the answer is yes; we should be doing that.  If the issue is changing the church’s message in order to suit a new generation, then the answer is no; we should never alter the gospel message.  To be faithful to Jesus Christ, the head of the church, we must remain steadfast to the gospel we have received, the gospel that has transformed our lives.  Today, people want to hear from their pulpits encouragement for being successful at the workplace, in their marriages, and in their families.  They want to hear messages that encourage them to overcome obstacles toward a good and successful life.  Where the pulpit speaks these messages, pews are packed.  Is a packed church a clear affirmation that that congregation is being faithful to Jesus Christ, the head of the church?  I have trouble believing that.  Instead, I believe the gospel of Jesus Christ is about God reconciling the world to himself.  I believe that the gospel has to do with us being agents of reconciliation in the world.  I believe that the gospel has to do with announcing the presence of God’s kingdom in our midst.  I believe that God’s kingdom becomes visible when we are obedient to Jesus Christ, loving neighbors.  Our task, if the church is to be faithful to Jesus Christ, is to point to him by our speech and by our actions.  Instead of gaining success, wealth, and happiness, those faithful to Jesus Christ may have to suffer loss and persecution as he did.  We act and speak the gospel in a world hostile to love and forgiveness.  As in Jesus’ time, the world today is enamored by power and wealth and status.  Promoting the world’s values is not the role of the church.  Accordingly, the church is often required to be countercultural.  To be faithful to Jesus Christ, the head of the church, we must remain steadfast, preaching and living out the gospel, in season and out of season.