Saturday, 26 July 2025

Take the Transfer

Colossians 1:13-14, 2:6-15

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In many ways I am glad I am a minister in a denomination that doesn’t transfer ministers from charge to charge to charge to charge.  The Anglicans do it up here in Canada.  From what I’ve seen happen with my Anglican colleagues, the pattern seems to be to start a priest out some place small or where a Newbie won’t do much damage.  You give them a couple to a few years to get a feel for the work and then, if the minister is successful, you move them on up the ladder to bigger and supposedly better.  Personally, I’m not convinced bigger is better.  The pattern repeats itself until retirement.  Then there’s the other side as well, if the minister doesn’t do so well or there is conflict, you move them somewhere else hoping they’ll do better…and the pattern repeats itself

Or, if you’re like the Rev. Carrie Irwin here in Grey and Bruce Counties, you start her off in an area with an impossible workload in the number of churches assigned and, in Carrie’s case, watch her pastorally excel in those churches through closures and possible amalgamations and adding more congregations.  She started in these a couple years before I did ten years ago and with the help of a skilled underling, the Rev. Anne Veyvara Divinski has kept Anglican Christians vibrant in this monster of a geographical challenge.  Now she’s been moved up to be the Rev. Canon Carrie Archdeacon of Essex and Kent and part-time Rector St. John’s, Windsor in a place called Sandwich.  We will need to pray for her congregations (St. Paul’s, Southampton; Christ Church, Tara; St. John’s, Port Elgin; and now dissolved appointments in Chatsworth and Chesley, and let’s not forget her hospital chaplaincy work in Southampton) for they are going to be grieving, greatly grieving.  Moreover, the person who replaces her will have big shoes to fill.

For Carrie, the transfer will entail a physical change in location, a change in work responsibilities, new faces in a new office, and a new way of “this is the way we do things around here.”  In short, this transfer means you and your little dog too are not in Kansas anymore.  No click of the heels will get you back.  But in the bigger, brighter picture Carrie will be able to help and coach congregations and ministers with her invaluable expertise in the area of multi-point ministry as it is becoming more and more and more and more common.

Bear that in mind as we think about what Paul means here in Colossians when he says that God has “rescued us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”  Paul is saying that here in the present, here in the right now God has done a saving act that has transferred us literally and effectually from one jurisdiction into another.  We were under the jurisdiction of darkness where we were willing slaves to dark powers that demeaned and destroyed us, but in Christ Jesus God did a saving act and transferred us literally and effectually and right now into the Kingdom of his beloved Son where we are literally and effectually God’s adopted beloved children who share in the inheritance belonging to the Beloved Son.  We got transferred.  We got transferred to work in a different kingdom actually.

You may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” (Talking Heads reference, if you got it.) “How did this transfer happen?”  Paul had a very "focused-on-Jesus" understanding of what is going on in history.  For him it is that in, through, and as Jesus Christ the Beloved Son of God entered his Creation and by means of his very being, faithful living, death, and resurrection defeated the powers of darkness primarily Sin, Death, and Evil.  

Jesus, the Beloved Son of God became human as the Jewish Messiah, took Sin, Death, and Evil into his fully divine and fully human self and destroyed them in death when he was wrongly crucified.  Then, God the Father vindicated Jesus when by the power of the Holy Spirit God raised him from death and set in motion a New Creation that will ultimately be free of Sin, Death, and Evil.  But for now, God the Father and God the Son in the power of God the Holy Spirit are dispelling the unseen spiritual powers of darkness as the Kingdom of the Beloved Son, the Reign of the Beloved Son, bursts forth all over the world.  The dispelling of darkness happens as the good news of the Gospel, the Divine royal edict of God’s victory in Christ is being proclaimed all over the world.  God’s Kingdom comes as Christian gatherings begin to form among people touched by love of God through the presence of the Holy Spirit come to believe this Good News and change their loyalties to the reality that Jesus Christ is the world’s Lord and Saviour.  These communities through the love they embody are living signs that God has not abandoned this world and there is reason to hope.  

Through the power, presence, and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God’s victory over the dark powers and his reign are being manifest in people whom God has transferred literally and effectually from the jurisdiction of that darkness into the reign of the beloved Son.  We are among those people whom God has transferred.  In us, this change in jurisdiction is literally and effectually taking place right now in the present.  

Transfers come with better benefits. Paul says that one of the benefits of this transfer is that in Christ Jesus we have redemption.  Redemption does not mean that we got a book of coupons to trade in for discounts on stuff.  Redemption is a term from the slave trade and means to pay to buy another human being out of slavery and give them their freedom and dignity.  By the price of Jesus’ life God bought us out of slavery to the dark powers in which we so often willingly served.  In turn, God has set us free to live for the purpose he created us for: to be that part of God’s creation that bears the image of God in and as loving community.  God has given us our true human dignity back, a dignity which we live through love for one another.

We also have the benefit of the forgiveness sins.  God is not holding a ledger against us for when we have willingly participated in that slavery to the dark power.  Our sin was nailed to the cross with Jesus and died with him.  Yet, it was not also raised to new life with him.  The old life truly is gone and a new one has begun in Christ.  Now we must live a life worthy of Jesus that brings honour to him.  

This transfer took effect in us when we heard this Good News.  There came a time when we heard this Good News of what God has done for us in, through, and as Jesus Christ and by the touch of the Holy Spirit it got hold of us and gave us the assurance that we are God’s beloved children.  Karl Barth, probably the greatest theologian of the 20th Century, was once asked if he could sum up the Gospel in one sentence and he answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”  Notice that he left out the part of the verse that says, “for the Bible tells me so.”  For Barth the only way you can know and understand God’s love is to experience it by encountering the Holy Spirit.  From that moment on the love of and for God begins to grow in us and we find ourselves beginning to share in the work of Christ due to the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit with us so that we begin to care about people in a way we never thought possible.  And the next thing you know we have the very real and certain hope that God is saving his creation and that nothing can separate us from his love.

Paul also brings baptism into this notion of being transferred.  Since most of us were baptised as babies and don’t remember it, Paul’s understanding of baptism goes over our heads.  In baptism, we participate in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection.  To Paul, we have all already died, but now we live.  As the fullness of God nature dwelt fully and bodily in him, he now fills us with himself, with his life.  We live in him.  So, we must walk in him, being rooted and built up in him.  Through Christian community Jesus makes himself visible.  There’s a lot hinging on how we, his followers, let Jesus make himself visible through us.  

At the beginning of the letter to the Colossians, Paul noted his thankfulness for how they were expressing their fidelity to Jesus in the way they showed the love of Christ to one another.  Like Paul, I express my thanks to God to be the minister of these four churches who excel in love for one another.  You are definitely rooted in Christ and being built up in him.  I look forward to the day when the community around us begins to say, “I want what they have.”  But, the timing of that is in God’s hands.  All I can say now is “Take the transfer.  Continue on.  Enjoy the benefits.”  Amen.