Colossians 3:1-4
So if you have been
raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is,
seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are
above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life
is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed,
then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
Sermon
EITHER/OR,
AND/BOTH
“Seek the things that are above. Set
your mind on things above.” I’ve
loved this passage from scripture, these two simple commands: seek the
things above, set your mind on things above.
I’ve loved that for some years now, ever since I first
encountered them in music in a popular song by Bobby McFarrin.
In that song, the singer, who I believe was actually the
artist’s father, was singing a particular verse in the gospel
tradition of the black church. And
he was talking about how we need to strengthen our weak knees and set
our minds on things that are above in order to persevere in Christian
life. Somehow, in that
musical setting, it seemed especially meaningful to me.
And I’ve tried to take these words to heart now for several
years, ever since I heard them in that song, because at that point they
spoke to me, in a new way. “Seek
the things above! Set your
mind on things that are above! That
sounds like a fairly straightforward command, doesn’t it?
That sounds like the kind of thing we can easily put into our
lives, we’ll just do it, doesn’t it?
Only I’ve had the experience of needing to start over again,
and again, and again, and again. And
I’m not finished yet.
I’ve had the experience of having to start over again, so many
times, whenever I’ve tried to set my mind on things that are above;
whenever I’ve made it an effort. So
as I was thinking about this sermon, I thought about what
Saint Paul
, himself, might say to me if I told him about all those
obstacles that get in the way of my setting my mind things above.
If I told him about my busy life and my hectic schedule and my
multiple commitments and all those things that keep me from marinating
that kind of focus that this verse calls us to make.
I got kind of technical in this “conversation” with
Saint Paul
, so I actually drew up a list of things that he would say
to me. If
Saint Paul
were my spiritual
director, looking at my life, and looking at the problems that I was
confessing, or bringing before him; he would ask me a series of
questions I think, and his first questions would be: “Today, how many
hours have you spent in prayer? How
many hours have you spent reading the Bible?
How many hours have you spent listening humbly and obediently to
the teachings of Christians more experienced than you?” That,
I think, is where he would start. But as I kept on working on
this idea, I thought of other questions that
Saint Paul
might ask me, looking at my life.
He might say “What five things do you truly believe God is
calling you to do with your life? Which of these are the most important?
Which are the most pressing?
Have you made decisions about what’s most important and
what’s most pressing? Are
you sure that these are really God’s priorities, not just your own
personal experiences?” And
then
Saint Paul
might also ask, “What
specific things that are above have you set your mind on today?”
And he might ask, “How have you set your mind on these
things?”
That’s the way in which I think my examination would go before
any knowledgeable spiritual director, whether Saint Paul or somebody
else. They would ask me if I
had drunk deep with the resources of the faith, prayer, studying the
scriptures, listening to the experiences of persons more wise that
myself in the faith. Have I
drunk deep of these resources? And
then have I moved on to make lists of priorities, to decide what needs
to be done now and what can be put off until later; and to check myself
and see whether I was making decisions based on my personal wishes and
inclinations rather than on God’s desire.
And then, I also need to find ways of making myself accountable;
to think about certain concrete, specific things above on any given day;
and to set my mind on these things in some particular technique or
framework or some sort of approach that is concrete and meaningful and
maybe even measurable. These
are the kinds of questions that I was imagining
Saint Paul
would ask me; this is the
kind of examination of myself that I could imagine being done on the
basis of these verses, “Seek the things that are above.
Set your mind on things that are above.”
Only my problem is the one that I announced at the outset of this
sermon. I keep on
trying, and I keep on having to start over again, and again, and again.
That is my problem, and I think it’s a problem many of us have,
and I think it’s not just that we want so many things that we don’t
make the tough decisions. I was originally thinking, when I made up the
title of this sermon, that I’d be talking about how
Saint Paul
wants us to be either/or
while we always want to be both/and; that’s where the sermon
originally came from. Since
then I’ve moved away from that original purpose, but still that’s a
helpful way to think about the way we make these decisions and choices
about how to get close to God in our spiritual lives.
Most of us want to have everything in our lives; we want to have
all kinds of different relationships; all kinds of interesting
activities. We want to live by multiple commitments and we want to
engage with God’s purpose in our lives in as open-ended a way as
possible. And Saint Paul in
scripture seems so different from that; he seems, in so many cases, to
be telling us to make tough choices, to eliminate things, to zero in on
only the things that God really wants of us; and not keep all these
other plates spinning, or all these other options open.
Saint Paul
says we need to be
either/or, while our own inclination in this day and age is to be
both/and.
That, as I said, is what I was thinking at the beginning of the
week; and it was only I continued to struggle with this in moving
towards Sunday, only as I tried to think about what sorts changes I
would make, that I realized that it really isn’t just that, and it’s
maybe not even that at all, this either/or or both/and distinction that
I was starting with when thinking about this scripture.
I think instead, the problem for me, the reason why I can’t
keep setting my mind on things that are above and the organized list of
priorities like I’ve been talking about, the reason I can’t do it,
can be explained in a simple word – relationships.
The list of priorities, the organizing schema for our lives,
those are based upon tasks, and tasks are a part of what we do, a part
of what God probably wants us to do with our lives.
But tasks are not the only things we do with our lives.
Each person here is also heavily invested in relationships with
other people; maybe family members: parents, children, brothers or
sisters, spouses; maybe close friends; maybe people that you work with
and it’s a working relationship, and yet it’s still
multidimensional, still complex.
And the important thing is God is probably working in each one of
these relationships which means that God wants us to have these
relationships. And in fact,
I would even go further and say that the tasks God wants us to do are
meaningful only in the sense that they find there true depth and their
true ultimate purpose in the relationships that we form on the basis of
those tasks. So that
those lists of priorities are not really where God is primarily working
with us; but rather it’s in the quality of our relationships.
And relationships can’t be put into schemes and frameworks and
organizing plans. You
can’t plan to deepen your relationship with your spouse by setting
aside five minutes every morning in which you will always spend time
just focusing on that person. People
try it, maybe it’s better than nothing, but it generally falls apart
after a few days. A
relationship like that, where you’re sharing the same house, the same
life, the same obligations and ties, that kind of relationship is by
nature open-ended and unstructured.
And almost every other relationship you can think of that has any
depth at all is also open-ended and unstructured; it has to be.
Think about parents raising young children; those relationships
obviously are crucial to you. God
has given you the gift of these children to care for so that you will
raise them and guide them and nurture them and support them as they grow
into the unique creatures God wants them to be.
What greater calling could there be than that?
But you can’t put that calling into a plan of action.
You can’t, easily at least, put it into a structure that allows
you to organize your life along the lines I was thinking of earlier this
week. It’s a relationship,
and relationships are complex. Relationships
involve people with the same kind of depth and intricate minds that we
have; whereas tasks are usually things that we can get our minds around.
You can’t get your mind around another person, unless you are
limiting them, and that’s not a relationship.
God wants relationships for us.
God wants us to make something out of our relationships that have
come our way in the course of our lives.
Whether they are few, whether they are many, whether they are
intimate and close, whether they are more formal and structured; in any
case, these relationships, which are all complex are the main way that
God has given us to form our lives, setting our minds on things that are
above.
So my original impulse to put it all into a structure, to make
another plan, the kind of thing I’ve done again and again, and again.
I’ve even brought in guest speakers, and recruited people in
the church and had a whole event over a long week end; the purpose of
the event was to teach us how to manage and plan our lives so that
we’re always setting our minds on things that are above.
So that indicates the way in which I’ve tried this on multiple
levels, all my life. But,
relationships do not fit into that kind of approach, and yet they
matter. They matter,
perhaps, more to God than anything else in all creation.
That is God’s primary way, perhaps, of relating to all that is.
And we certainly know that it’s God’s primary way of relating
to humans.
God was intimate in his knowledge of and level of discourse with
Adam and Eve; he knew them like a parent knows a child.
God was intimate the same way with Cain, the murderer; God was
close to Cain and made plans to protect Cain when Cain’s own guilt
made his life endangered. God
was close to Noah. Noah was
noble and righteous at one point in his life, and was drunken and
inappropriate at later points in his life.
God was close to Abraham. God
formed relationships with key people throughout the Biblical history,
the narrative that is sacred to us.
God continues again and again and again to speak to the hearts of
people and form complicated relationships; sometimes arguing back and
forth relationships, often relationships in which God has an agenda that
molds and shapes the person.
So that’s God’s primary mode of relating and that’s
probably where he wants us to live out our particular calling in life.
To live that out in the relationships that are there in our
lives, for us to make some meaning out of together with another person.
So God might not really be in favor of these week end retreats
where you can figure out how to plan your lives, as much as he is in
favor of us working on the patterns that get in the way of our
relationships. God might not
be so much in favor drawing up schemes and making designs and blocking
out the hours of our days so that we have more time for the things that
are above; when those things that are above come to us in relationships.
I know this is something that I am now struggling with because it
was only in the realization this week that when God says to set my mind
on things that are above, that if that isn’t connected with
relationships, then I am not doing what God is asking me to do, yet.
But it’s hard to figure it all out, I know.
It does answer one question – Why is the term “things that
are above” so vague, so open-ended?
Saint Paul, in our Holy Bible, tells us – set your mind on
things that are above. He
doesn’t even give us a list to go by.
And elsewhere in scripture, he does give us a list, but that list
once again, it includes almost anything you can think of: whatever is
true, whatever is honorable, whatever is noble, whatever is pure,
whatever is excellent, whatever is worthy of praise; think about these
things. Words like
“things” words like “whatever”, those are all called lists.
Not because Paul is shallow, not because Paul is vague, but
because Paul realized, even though he wasn’t the best in personal
relationships himself sometimes, he had a tendency to kind of injure his
friendships, he had a tendency to expect people to do things that maybe
got in the way of some of their relationships, he was a pretty hard task
master, Saint Paul was. Nevertheless,
he understood, I think, that the things that are above are the things
that come up in relationships, in all their complexity; rather than in
things that we can put on lists, and figure into our diaries, and
structure our lives around.
Meanwhile John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was a great
success and a wonderful man in so many different ways.
And I feel very close to him as I study his writings and read his
works. I like the way his
mind thinks. I think he and
I could have been friends. Meanwhile,
John Wesley found in his own life, the greatest failures to be the close
relationships. His brother
Charles, who meant so much to him at the beginning of the years of
Methodism, died at a time when John wasn’t even close by.
And he had to grieve after his death, without having a good
chance to say farewell to his lifelong companion.
His wife, the woman that he married in middle years, could only
stand to live with him for a few months.
They lived several years apart because he didn’t have what it
took to bring his commitment to God into a relationship.
John Wesley was good in so many ways; this was one area where,
perhaps, he needed to be more aware of the complexity of it all; the
open-endedness of it all. He
needed to let God work with him instead of trying to put it into any of
his famous patterns and formulas and schemes that he used.
Let’s do one better than John Wesley here, not neglecting the
good things that come to us from the founder of Methodism, but let’s
do one better in our relationships.
And that takes us back to the very first questions Saint Paul
would have asked me if he were my spiritual director – “How much
time do I spend in prayer?” That’s
my relationship with God; and the time I spend is . . . not enough.
“How much time do I spend searching the scripture for some
purpose other than figuring out a sermon?” Again the answer is . . .
not nearly enough. “How
much time do I spend in conversation with guides and wise teachers and
leaders? People of the faith
who have experiences that I could benefit from? People who are ready to
lead me further down the path because they have been there and they know
where I need to step next and they’ve made the mistakes and want me
not to make them? And this
includes the author’s old books as well as people I actually know.
How much time do I spend in these conversations?”
Again . . . not enough. “How
much time do I spend thinking about, connecting with, allowing my heart
to fill with love for the one who made the relationship with us the most
intimate and close relationship that it could be, our Lord, Jesus
Christ?”
Here is where the things that are above are to be found.
In relationships with God, through all the different means he
provides; relationships that focus on his son Jesus Christ,
relationships that God gives us to fill out our relationship with him
and with other human beings. Here
is where we set our minds on things that are above; the whole question
of either/or or both/and doesn’t really compute anymore for me.
It’s rather a matter of knowing that in those relationships is
my calling; the most important thing that I can do, and all the
complexity that I can spend a lifetime exploring, enjoying and learning
how to work with. And those
relationships, I know, in your lives have the exact same purpose for
you. Amen.
^ top of page
