Proper 12, Year C | Colossians 2:6-19
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
July 24, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
“See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.” – Colossians 2:8-10 [1]
If you haven’t checked out our noon Eucharist on Thursdays, I hope you have a chance to give it a try this summer. We tend to have a comfortably small group—roughly 10 people—and instead of a sermon we have a question and answer time. While we always start with the texts for Sunday, the conversation can—and often does—wander off into some of the wilder and less frequented realms of Christian thought and practice. For me, those discussions fulfill two purposes. First is that they’re kind of fun: I feel like they keep my brain nimble, challenging my own assumptions and forcing me to think (and talk) on my feet. Second is that they give me insight into what some of our parishioners are thinking about or struggling with, and that can suggest a direction for what we end up talking about on Sundays.
This week our Colossians reading brought up a topic the group has delved into a few times recently: philosophy. Philosophy can be an extended, fascinating realm that often pairs itself closely with religion. After all, theology is simply philosophy rooted in a particular set of religious texts or traditions. The different areas and schools of philosophy can be a lot of fun to play around in, helping us consider alternate points of view and opening our minds to new ways of looking at the world. They can also help us look ahead along the paths our lives are currently taking and show us ways to emend or avoid looming pitfalls.
But philosophy also carries some danger with it. People might tell you that’s because of “the slippery slope” where someone adopts a particular thought position that results in them turning from God or losing themselves in a dark and twisted logical labyrinth. And while that might be a valid concern, it doesn’t appear to be a common issue. In my own experience, the “slippery slope” generally isn’t somewhere below you, threatening to suck you into its depths. In truth, it’s often above you, making it difficult or impossible to climb out of the pit or rut you didn’t even realize confines you.
For me, the larger concern with philosophy and its offshoots isn’t necessarily what people do with their ideas. Often, it’s what they don’t do. Philosophy has a tendency to turn our attention inward, allowing us to build elaborate internal worlds. Again, those aren’t a bad thing in and of themselves. The problem is that we become so enamored with our imagined world that we forget to make any significant motion or effort in the real world, the one where “we live and move and have our being.”[2] I easily slip into the idea that if I think right—if I know enough information about all the right things along with knowing the right way to put that information together, that will somehow make me as a being “right” or “good.” Those of us who are Christians frequently end up creating imaginary realms of moral superiority, comparing our “right” thinking with how everyone else is thinking “wrong” and then associating that supposed logical error with a commitment to evil.
But what we think of as clarity from the inside often reveals itself to be stagnation or self-satisfaction when viewed from the outside. The moral certitude of our philosophy, along with our continuing internal focus, makes us unable to adapt to the changing realities around us. Or sometimes, and certainly worse, it can lead us to actions that prevent those around us from making progress in discerning or exploring more loving and merciful ways of being. Disconnected from the real world, the existence that ought to be informing our internal worlds, we try to force everything around us to match the elusive—and illusive—perfection of our inner life.
So I guess when it comes down to it, I see the danger wearing two faces: either a sort of smug petrification or what easily develops into a self-satisfied and sanctimonious cruelty. Instead of trying to raise a new and better world on the foundations of the one that already exists, we drag and claw at reality, demolishing the good with the bad and struggling to conform it not just to an ideal that doesn’t really exist, but one that can’t.
And here we find ourselves running into our idea from Advent that “the world is always ending, and the world is always beginning.” But from this angle a little over halfway through the year, I wonder if we shouldn’t be looking at some details our recent discussions about Empire and the Reign of the Heavens appear to have brought to light.
It turns out Empire is perfectly content with its citizens turned in on themselves and inactive—people who won’t do anything can never pose a threat to any sort of greater power. They don’t necessarily advance the cause, but they certainly don’t get in the way. But Empire finds its real joy in getting its subjects to actively adopt its philosophy and implement its methods: then we’re just doing the work for it. It can sit back or turn its attention to other areas as we ramp up our demands that the real world to fit our personal, fabricated ideal, no matter how many existing lives end up as “collateral damage” along the way. Instead of Empire simply dragging us along the way of Death, we gradually turn ourselves into Death’s enforcers. Deluded into accepting or even approving the harm our destructive actions impose on others and charging forward with the fervor available only to those certain of their own righteousness, we become literal angels of Death. Under the flag of “God” or “Christianity” we’ve chosen to chain ourselves not simply to the end of the world as it truly exists but to emptiness itself, a hopeless and desolate phantasm of how the world should have been. Our desire for and adoption of dominion and rule and power—the things we think give us the right and ability to change the world—simply bind us to a present built on cruelty and leave us desperate to reestablish an utterly fictional past.
But that isn’t the way things have to be. The letter to the Colossians offers us an alternative: a way to look at the true basis of reality and, from there, begin to perceive what it might have the opportunity to become.
For a few weeks now, Paul has been sharing a vision of the entire universe as rooted in and growing throughout the Cosmic Christ. With Christ as the basis of reality—the foundational truths of incarnation, resurrection, and love as action—we begin to comprehend the continued dawning of our new world, the Reign of the Heavens, and we become able to release both the false and the fading past.
To a people too often focused on their individual internal business and longings, Christ’s incarnation screams to us the significance of physical creation. Our God isn’t simply one who deigns to become involved in the universe when forced into action. God has actively embraced and assumed the very reality within which we made our existence. Resurrection surprises us with God’s continual creative power and imagination—a path where Life abounds even beyond life, an unquenchable vitality resulting in the energy and freedom to truly live. And Christ’s exemplary agape—love made action; devotion, commitment, and faithfulness given flesh—shows us how to continue in and replicate that incarnate, resurrection life. Every movement of love—every act of kindness, each tear of compassion, every rejection of the wicked and callous expectations of Empire—doesn’t simply reveal the true presence of the Kingdom of God. It actively draws God’s presence into the present—reforging a world where God is not only with us or for us, but one where God is, quite literally, within and among us.
Philosophy itself is no danger to the Christian. It inhabits a limited existence in the world of thought. The danger comes when we adopt that inner world as reality, either abandoning this world to dwell exclusively in one of imagination or forcing this world to conform with that which is unreal. But Christ, not Empire, is the basis of reality. Where Empire encourages us to dwell among our fantasies and delusions, Christ calls us to engage with existence as it is. While Empire hopes to drag us into the oblivion of a false and dying world, Christ guides us to the reality of new and abundant Life, for “he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation…in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For 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.”[3]
So,
“see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Acts 17:28a
[3] Colossians 1:15-20