Raised with Christ

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Romans 6:1-14; Colossians 3:1-4

We disciples of Jesus Christ have some statements to make about reality.  I call them statements rather than beliefs because if you call them beliefs they are immediately thrown into the world of comparative religions and Christian faith is not religion.  Christianity can certainly be called religion, all the pomp and circumstance we have created and dogmatized around Christian faith, but Christian faith is not religion.  What God is doing for his Creation in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah or Christ is not a matter of personal religious belief.  It is reality, real historical and indeed physical reality. 

At the top of that list of these statements is that God is Trinity – the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  In, through, and as Jesus Christ God has revealed God-self to be Trinity - three Persons who give themselves so utterly completely and unselfishly indeed sacrificially to one another in unconditional love that they are One.  If we miss this, that God is loving communion of Persons then we miss what it is to be humans created in the image of God and certainly miss what it is to be the Church.  

Another statement about real historical and scientific reality that we followers of Jesus Christ have to make is that Jesus Christ is God the Son become human flesh.  This was a hard one to believe from the very start.  For a Jew, it was blasphemous to say that God became human.  Gentiles didn’t buy it either asking, “Why would divinity, which is pure and perfect, become human?  We are weak, dull, and sickly. We routinely break out with fungi.  We stink and we die.”  

It wasn’t until the 300’s that the Christian church stated definitively that Jesus is God the Son become human with neither his divinity nor his humanity being diminished. The reason we state this as fact is as Gregory of Nazianzus said back in the 300’s, “What was not assumed is not healed.”  To heal his fallen Creation and us humans of the futility of sin and death, God had to take upon himself our fallenness and die with it so that it would be once and for all dead.  Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection has opened up a new way to be human that will come to its fruition when Jesus returns.  

The Apostle John in his Gospel liked to call that new way Eternal Life, a new human form of being in which we are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit through whom we are in union with Jesus the Son to share his relationship of steadfast love and faithfulness with the Father to the Father’s glory.  In, through, and as Jesus God has brought human being, history, and even physical matter into his very self, into the loving communion of his very self, and therefore he has and will heal it.

A third Christian statement that is readily dismissed these days is that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead.  Many, not just scientists and philosophers but even Bible scholars today, are resolute that this did not happen.  Many will say that Jesus' body was simply stolen by his disciples and buried elsewhere and then they made the whole thing up.  If that was the case, then why did the disciples of whom we have historical record live lives of poverty and die horrible deaths just to continue a lie.   If you are a fan of the DaVinci Code, then you say Jesus' disciples staged his death and he went on to live a long and happy life marrying Mary Magdalene and having children.  We must then again ask why his disciples would die horrible deaths just so he could live normally.  

If you are bent towards psychology and looking for a seemingly-scientific explanation, you will say that the post-resurrection experiences that his disciples had were just communal experiences of grief that involved a common hallucination of Jesus caused by mass hysteria among twenty-some people.  To my knowledge, such a hallucination has never been documented as ever happening among any group of people.  

Most people just fall back on reason and say that Resurrection is impossible.  Therefore, it never happened.  Yet, they believe there was something God-special about Jesus and so they follow his teachings and enjoy prayer.  

And finally, there are Christians who wholeheartedly believe in reincarnation because for some reason that seems more plausible than resurrection.  I could handle re-incarnation as long as I came back as a roach in the kitchen of a kind old grandma in rural Mexico; all-you-can-eat real Mexican food.  Sign me up.

The Gospel proclamation is that God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit bodily raised Jesus, God the Son become human, from the dead.  Jesus in his resurrection has a real human body that could eat and be touched.  Yet, his body was a resurrected body and that leaves us hanging a bit.  What is a resurrected body?  According to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, it is a spiritual body that is immortal and imperishable.  That's a bit misleading for us, for whenever the word spiritual comes up, we start thinking ethereal or ghostlike wisps of energy.  But, by a spiritual body Paul meant not only a person who is personally related to God, but also a body that has been made alive by God that will indeed never die; a body in which every atom is infused with the life of God.

As Christians, the resurrection is at the heart of our very real hope.   Resurrection means that death is not the final answer; that though we die, we will not die.  We will live again in bodies; not as angels with harps sitting on clouds in heaven or as stars, none of those fictions people tell their children.  Even though this physical fallen body will and must die, we will not experience death, complete cut-off-ness from God.  As Jesus told the thief on the cross, when we die, we will be with him in Paradise, a (I presume) bodiless state, until the resurrection when we will be given resurrection bodies, bodies of real human flesh in which every molecule about us knows the living and loving God and will never die again.

So, since it is the case that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is where this Creation is heading, we should therefore begin to live the resurrected life now.  Let’s talk about Baptism for a minute.  Paul says that if we have been baptized into Christ, we have then been baptized into his death.  Basically, we are already dead.  This old self of ours has been crucified with Jesus, in his crucifixion in order that this body of sin might be brought to nothing, that we may no longer be enslaved to sin for a person who has died has been set free from sin.  Hear this, in our union with Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit at our Baptism (and it doesn’t matter whether we were an unknowing infant or even how it was done) we died with him and we are now raised with him to share in his resurrected life now by means of the Holy Spirit.  If his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living, loving Communion of the Trinity lives in us, then the state of our being, our very existence is that we are free from death and our enslavement to sin and are now free to live in and for God.  

Therefore, Paul instructs us in Colossians to seek the things that are above where Christ is for our lives are hidden in God with Christ.  Live according to that hunger to be with your brothers and sisters in Christ in worship, in study, in fellowship.  Live according to that hunger to pray and read the Bible and hear the Trinity speak to you.  Live according to the hunger for seeing justice happen in this world, of seeing the poor fed and the sick healed.  Live according to the hunger to know oneself as always being in the presence of God.  Live in constant prayer reminded that no matter what, you are a beloved child of God in whom he takes great joy.  Live this way and you will be living Eternal Life.  Amen.

If you are a parishioner of St Andrew’s Southampton or Geneva, you may have the feeling that you heard that sermon before.  That was the very first sermon I preached in the Coop Easter Sunday April 5, 2015.  We wanted our first Sunday as a Coop to be Easter Sunday and that would be largely why April 1 is our founding date.  Over the last ten years we’ve grown, not so much in numbers.  Death has taken its toll on us.  Yet, we’ve had a few new faces who stuck around.  We’ve grown to be more and more like the image of the God who created us.  Each congregation has grown and deepened in love.  Disunities have healed.  We’ve welcomed and loved our surrounding communities.  People we’ve prayed for have been healed.  In a day when in our culture it is difficult to be the Church of Jesus Christ, we remain churches witnessing to resurrection hope.  Well done, good and faithful servants.  Well done.  Amen.

 

The Bone Rattlin' God

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Ezekiel 37:1-14; Colossians 3:1-4

When I read this text from Ezekiel I read it with my imagination.  You can’t help but visualize it and it’s not for the weak of stomach.  I can't help but picture this as an awesome, fearful, and gruesome sight.  Ezekiel standing in that silent Valley, the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  Who knows how he got there - The Spirit brought him - whatever that means.  There lying in the valley are the dried-out bones of hundreds, maybe thousands of people.  God compels him to walk around in the midst of them.  And he walks.  He stops, picks up a skull and says, “Alas, poor Yurich! I knew him well.”  (Sorry. The moment demanded a bit of Shakespeare.)  Ezekiel must have been overwhelmed.  How horrible could it have been?  How did all these people die?  How was this valley turned into an open mass grave? Who were they - soldiers? The innocent population of a nearby town some enemy devoted to destruction? Don’t know.  We just know it was a vast multitude.

Then God spoke to Ezekiel and asked a seemingly senseless question to which there was an obvious answer.  The question - "Mortal - you who can die - can these bones - which are very dead - live?”  Well, the answer we would expect Ezekiel to give would be, "No, these bones are very dead.  They cannot live."  But Ezekiel, knowing that it was God who was asking him the question, he did the Matlock thing.  Y’all know the Matlock thing?  Matlock was a TV series starring Andy Griffith as a southern detective.  The Matlock thing is something we southern boy's do so well when we feel we might be getting tricked.  We put on our best Gomer Pyle accent and play dumb so to see how a situation is going to play out so that maybe we can turn it back around on the trickster.  Ole Zeke said "O Lord God, Almighty ruler of the Universe, you know ‘cause you know everything.  I'm just a little ole mortal."

God starts to answer his own question.  "Say to those bones: I will cover you with flesh, put breath in you, and you shall live."  Well, Ole Zeke plays along and does what the Lord asks him to do.  Starts talking to them bones.  And low and behold…there’s the mighty sound of rattlin’ bones and it’s…"Foot bone connected to the leg bone.  Leg bone connected to the hip bone…..Them bones start rattlin'.  They start coming together joining together and the meat comes back on ‘em and then the skin.  Lord, have mercy. Hollywood can’t touch this.  There’s not just bones everywhere.  Now there’s bodies everywhere, but they ain’t alive.  

Then the Lord tells Ole Zeke to prophesy to the four winds to come and breath on them that they might live.  Ole Zeke again does as the Lord asks and the wind comes and there in the Valley of Dry Bones stood a multitude, a vast multitude, alive.  It seems them bones can live and Ole Zeke has got to be asking himself what sort of God he’s got there.  Most gods back them would just as soon melt the flesh off of mortals for entertainment.  Israel’s God restores them to life.  What kind of God can and would give life back and why?  What are we mere mortals that God should care?

God finishes up by telling Ole Zeke to prophesy to the house of Israel, who believed about themselves that they were dead.  They had been taken into captivity in Babylon.  Their idolatry and abuse of their own poor had gotten so evil, evil to the extent of sacrificing their own children to foreign gods, that God had to renege on his promise to their forefathers to give them the Land and make a great nation of their descendants.  Well, cast off their land and no longer a great nation, they were as good as dead and their bones, figuratively speaking were bone-dry with hopelessness and feeling alone, cut off from their God.  Can these bones live?  The God of the living who restores life was promising to the whole house of Israel that he was going to open up their graves and bring them back to the Land of Israel where they would again live as his people knowing that he truly is God.  Roughly 70 years later God did.  He brought his people back from exile and they began the arduous task of rebuilding.   

In the early church and in early Judaism this prophetic I don’t know what you’d call it, served as a prooftext of the resurrection of the dead.  It gave hope in assuring them that God can take what is dead - as dead as dead can be - I mean laying there in the field, dried out, and disjointed and restore it anew - put breath into it so that it lives.  They believed, as do we, that the day will come when God will do just what Ezekiel saw him do - Raise us from the dead and put flesh on us.  Breathe new life into us.  We believe that God has power over life and over death and that our God who is gracious will give life where it seems death has taken over. That’s the way God is. 

The early church also believed that this prophetic experience that Ezekiel had there in that Valley of Dry bones was in a way but not fully fulfilled when God poured out his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, upon the church on the Day of Pentecost.  Though God has not yet literally raised his people from their graves, we are raised with Christ.  We participate in his resurrection by baptism and by God breathing his Spirit into those who follow Jesus as Lord and Savior.  

Well, I know it’s Lent and we should probably be doing some old school Bible-thumping on how we are hopeless, dried-up bones living in captivity to sin and we got some repenting to do, but…why?  Why walk among the bones when we have the opportunity to breathe the fresh air of the new life in Christ from the Holy Spirit?  As Paul says in our reading from Colossians, we have been raised with Christ and our life is hidden with him in God.  We live.  We live.  We are alive.  God has breathed his life into us, the Holy Spirit.  What’s the evidence of that?  Quite frankly, it’s the basic fact that we are here right now and not somewhere else.  Going to church is no longer a cultural expectation where people are shamed for not attending.  Those of us who still come to worship particularly in small congregations come for the simple fact that we know we live in Christ and he lives in us and the loving fellowship we have at church is an important part of what it is to live.

As a congregation we may feel like scattered, dried-up old bones, but we live.  We may ask how?  We’re quite aged and don’t have the energy to do the things we used to do as a congregation that made us look and feel alive and vibrant.  That is certainly true and it’s ok.  It is ok.  Aging and it’s effects are a fact of life in everything that lives.  There’s no need to feel like we’re failing God.  You see, the new life in Christ is not found so much in what we do as it is in our relationship with God and with one another and with others.  

Here’s what I think new life in Christ looks like.  A woman came up to me last Sunday at lunch after church and got down close to may face to speak candidly to me.  She and her husband are what we call a bit up in years.  His health is a major concern and most of her time and energy goes towards helping him.  That’s beauty of love among the aging.  She said, “I just want you to know I pray for you.  I pray for you.  I pray for these churches.  At night when I can’t sleep, I lay there and I pray for you, for this ministry.  We don’t have the energy or the health to do much, but I pray for you.”  I couldn’t say much more than “Thank you” as I was getting a bit choked up and didn’t what to get weepy at the table.

Praying is at the heart of what it is to be raised in new life with Christ and seeking the things that are above.  Prayer.  Praying to God.  Praying for one another.  It is in and through the helpless, desperate, humble, and so often tearful task of prayer that we live the new life in Christ who is seated at the right hand of God the Father.  Prayer is the ultimate act of dying to ourselves; of relinquishing control of our lives and submitting to the will and care of the God who has loved us all our lives and proved himself faithful time and again.  Prayer is letting God be God so that we don’t have to be God ourselves.  It is in and through prayer that the bone-rattlin’ God who gives life rattles them bones, enfleshes us, and breathes the life of his Spirit into us.   Prayer teaches us patience for rarely does God answer our prayers right now in the way we want especially those prayers that involve relationships and the hearts and lives of others.  Some prayers take a lifetime and simply serve to teach the painful lesson of endurance.

Prayer is how we take off the clothes of the old life and clothe ourselves with the new clothes of the new life in Christ.  Paul writes later in Chapter three of Colossians telling us to clothe ourselves were certain qualities of character that are indicative of those who are alive in Christ.  He writes: “Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.  And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:12-17).

Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing with one another, forgiveness, thankfulness, and most of all, love – unconditional, unselfish, sacrificial love; these are the marks and ways of the new life in Christ that God breathes into us with and by his Spirit while we pray.  I’ve been with you folks nearly nine years now (and I can say this about all four of my churches and the two I served previously), you are very much alive with the new life in Christ.  You bear the marks of the new life in Christ richly.  Who knows what the future holds for us four churches and this cooperative arrangement, but as long as we are praying, we are alive.  Seek the One who is above, humbly trust in God’s will and care.  Our God is the Bone Rattlin’ God who gives life anew.  Pray!  What more can I say?  Amen.

Raised with Christ

Text: Romans 6:1-14; Colossians 3:1-4
Audio Recording

We disciples of Jesus Christ have some statements to make about reality.  I call them statements rather than beliefs because if you call them beliefs they are immediately thrown into the world of comparative religions and Christian faith is not religion.  Christianity can certainly be called religion, all the pomp and circumstance we have created and dogmatized around Christian faith, but Christian faith is not that.  What God is doing for his Creation in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah or Christ is not a matter of personal religious belief.  It is reality, real historical and indeed physical reality.

At the top of that list of these statements is that God is Trinity – the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  In, through, and as Jesus Christ God has revealed God-self to be Trinity - three Persons who give themselves so utterly completely and unselfishly indeed sacrificially to one another in unconditional love that they are One.  If we miss this, that God is loving communion of Persons then we miss what it is to be humans created in the image of God and certainly miss what it is to be the Church.  

Another statement about real historical and scientific reality that we followers of Jesus Christ have to make is that Jesus Christ is God the Son become human flesh.  This was a hard one to believe from the very start.  For a Jew, it was blasphemous to say the God became human.  Gentiles didn’t buy it either asking, “Why would divinity, which is pure and perfect, become human?  We are weak, dull, sickly, routinely break out with fungi, stinky, and we die.”  It wasn’t until the 300’s that the Christian church stated definitively that Jesus is God the Son become human with neither his divinity nor his humanity being diminished.. The reason we state this as fact is as Gregory of Nazianzus said back in the 300’s, “What was not assumed is not healed.”  To heal his fallen Creation and us humans of the futility of sin and death, God had to take upon himself our fallenness and die with it so that it would be once and for all dead.  Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection has opened up a new way to be human that will come to its fruition when Jesus returns.  The Apostle John in his Gospel liked to call that new way Eternal Life, a new human form of being in which we are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit through whom we are in union with Jesus the Son to share his relationship of steadfast love and faithfulness with the Father to the Father’s glory.  In, through, and as Jesus God has brought human being, history, and even physical matter into his very self, into the loving communion of his very self, and therefore he has and will heal it.

A third Christian statement that is readily dismissed these days is that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead.  Many not just scientists and philosophers but even Bible scholars today are resolute that this did not happen.  Many will say that Jesus' body was simply stolen by his disciples and buried elsewhere and then they made the whole thing up.  If that was the case, then why did the disciples of whom we have historical record live lives of poverty and die horrible deaths just to continue a lie.   If you are a fan of the DaVinci Code, then you say Jesus' disciples staged his death and he went on to live a long and happy life marrying Mary Magdalene and having children.  If you are bent towards psychology and looking for a quasi-scientific explanation, you will say that the post-resurrection experiences that his disciples had were just communal experiences of grief that involved a common hallucination of Jesus caused by mass hysteria among twenty-some people.  To my knowledge, such a hallucination has never been documented as ever happening among any group of people.  Most people just fall back on reason and say that Resurrection is impossible.  Therefore, it never happened.  Yet, they believe there was something God-special about this Jesus and so they follow his teachings and enjoy private spiritual experiences.  And finally, there are Christians who wholeheartedly believe in re-incarnation because for some reason that seems more plausible than resurrection.  I could handle re-incarnation as long as I come back as a roach in the kitchen of a kind old grandma in rural Mexico; all-you-can-eat real Mexican food.  Sign me up.

The Gospel proclamation is that God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit raised Jesus, God the Son become human, from the dead.  Jesus in his resurrection has a real human body that could eat and be touched.  Yet, his body was a resurrected body and that leaves us hanging a bit.  What is a resurrected body?  According to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, it is a spiritual body that is immortal and imperishable.  That's a bit misleading for us, for whenever the word spiritual comes up, we start thinking ethereal or ghostlike wisps of energy.  But, by a spiritual body Paul meant not only a person who is personally related to God, but also a body that has been made alive by God that will indeed never die; a body in which every particle is infused with the life of God.

As Christians, the resurrection is at the heart of our very real hope.   Resurrection means that death is not the final answer; that though we die, we will not die.  We will live again in bodies; not as angels with harps sitting on clouds in heaven or as stars, none of those lies people tell their children.  Even though this physical fallen body will and must die, we will not experience death, complete cut-off-ness from God.  As Jesus told the thief on the cross, when we die we will be with him in Paradise, a (I presume) bodiless state, until the resurrection when we will be given resurrection bodies, bodies of real human flesh in which every particle about us knows the living and loving God and will never die again.

So, since it is the case that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is where this Creation is heading, we should therefore begin to live the resurrected life now.  Let’s talk about Baptism for a minute.  Paul says that if we have been baptized into Christ, we have then been baptized into his death.  Basically, we are already dead.  This old self of ours has been crucified with Jesus, in his crucifixion in order that this body of sin might be brought to nothing, that we may no longer be enslaved to sin for a person who has died has been set free from sin.  Hear this, in our union with Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit at our Baptism (and it doesn’t matter whether we were an unknowing infant or even how it was done) we died with him and we are now raised with him to share in his resurrected life now by means of the Holy Spirit.  If his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living, loving Communion of the Trinity lives in us, then the state of our being, our very existence is that we are free from death and our enslavement to sin and are now free to live in and for God. 

Therefore, Paul instructs us in Colossians to seek the things that are above where Christ is for our lives are hidden in God with Christ.  Live according to that hunger to be with your brothers and sisters in Christ in worship, in study, in fellowship.  Live according to that hunger to pray and read the Bible and hear the Trinity speak to you.  Live according to the hunger for seeing justice happen in this world, of seeing the poor fed and the sick healed.  Live according to the hunger to know oneself as always being in the presence of God.  Live in constant reminded that no matter what, you are a beloved child of God in whom he takes great joy”.  Live this way and you will be living Eternal Life.  Amen.

This Resurrection Sunday marks a new beginning in the life of this congregation and three others, a new way of shared ministry that I personally think resembles more what the New Testament Church may have looked like.  But, I am reluctant to can say that doing Church a new way is an example of Resurrection.  Resurrection is what happens when each of as are enlivened by the Holy Spirit to live our life in Christ.  So, today I think it is important that we remember our Baptisms and reaffirm our vows to be his faithful disciples.  It is in the midst of faithful discipleship that resurrection becomes evident.  Let us gather to the fount.

Meaninglessness vs. the Hidden Life in Christ

Text: Ecclesiastes 1-2; Colossians 3:1-4

          As I thought about all these passages of Scripture that we read this morning, I suddenly imagined myself speaking to a graduating class at a university, a group of young adults just starting out.  What would I say?  “'Meaningless!  Meaningless!  Utterly meaningless!  Everything is meaningless!' says the Teacher" (Ecc. 1:1).  The Teacher in Ecclesiastes has done it all, everything there is to do under the sun, and found it all meaningless.  He's seen it all and had it all and found it all to be meaningless.  He took the route of learning and understanding wisdom, which in his day was what science is to us today.  He found it to be a mere "chasing after the wind", unattainable futility.  He even tried to explore madness and folly and those also turned out to be "chasing after the wind".  He denied himself nothing, indulged himself in all pleasures.  Even more, he says that in his heart he truly enjoyed all his work, but it was all still void of any real meaning.  Why?  Well, he found it doesn't really matter whether you're wise of foolish, the same fate overtakes everyone.  You die.  You pass everything on to someone else and who knows what they will do with it.  Then, (dramatic pause) you are forgotten.  That realization drove the Teacher to the point of hating life.  Why love something that is simply a meaningless waste?  Fortunately he then concludes, the best a person can do is eat and drink and be satisfied with your work realizing that it is all from the hand of God.  Indeed, without God no one can live or find enjoyment.  

          The Teacher, as we know, was King Solomon, son of David.  Solomon is legendary for being the wisest man ever as well as the richest king of Israel and maybe of his day.  He built the Jerusalem Temple and many other important cities in Israel.  He had a fleet of ships that may have gone global.  He knew no war.  His reign was a remarkable feat of what humans can accomplish when there is peace.  How did he accomplish this peace one might ask?  Well, he had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.  We may fail to see the wisdom in that, but…consider that those wives were the daughters of all the neighbouring kings and warlords.  He simply made all who could be his enemies to be his family.  That’s…brilliant.  Yet, Solomon was not perfect.  He was still a man, a man with many wives, and in order to keep all his wives happy he had to allow their idols into the land and go worship with them as a good husband should.  That was not so brilliant.  That move had its price in the next generation when Israel became divided into two kingdoms, but it kept peace at home.  Solomon was short-sighted when seeing the needs of the next generation.  So anyway, it is Solomon the Wise, who tells us to eat, drink, and be satisfied with our work knowing that it all comes from God.  Our food, our celebration, our work though toilsome all comes from God to be enjoyed even though in the end, sin and death have made it all meaningless.  Without God there is no joy in this life.  

          Well, I suspect that Solomon was also a skilled writer because there seems to be a bit of a word play going on here with the phrase “chasing after the wind”.  You see, in the Hebrew the phrase is literally “striving after wind”.  The Hebrew word for wind is ruach which is the same word used for breath and for spirit.  So, hold on to your seats.  Genesis 1:1-2 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit (the ruach) of God was hovering over the waters.”  The ruach of God, the Spirit or Breath or Wind of God, was hovering over the waters ready to bring order to chaos.  I think Solomon is making a word play that says, on the one hand, that life is meaningless in the end because of death, a striving after wind or ruach; wind that we cannot contain or control and thus the effort is futile.  Yet, on the other hand, he is prodding the wise among us to remember the beginning of Genesis where the ruach of God hovered over the waters of chaos ready to create.  Therefore, it is after the ruach of God that we should strive.

          Moving on to Colossians, Paul says as much by using an image from the act of Baptism into Christ, the image of taking off the clothes of the old self and stepping into the waters of Baptism to die and be raised with Christ and then putting on the white robe of the new self who will be fully revealed when Christ returns bringing glory with him. Paul writes: “If then 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" (Col. 3:1-4)  The ruach of God the Holy Spirit isn’t just hovering over us now.  He is in us raising us to New Creation life in Jesus own risen and ascended life which is the new humanity that is in Jesus, in him the one in whom the fullness of the Divine nature was pleased to dwell bodily, the one in whom, through whom, by whom, and for whom all things have their being.  We are to seek that which is in and of him.

          The word for seek which some Bibles translate as “set your hearts on” means to zealously seek or strive for with all of one’s passion.  Therefore, if we have been raised with Christ from the meaninglessness of life that is infected by sin and death, then our moral, ethical, religious and even civic best choice is to strive after the higher life in Christ with all earnestness.  Death no longer has hold on us.  We will be raised as Christ Jesus was raised and we will stand with him in glory.  And, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:58, the work we do in the Lord now is not in vain.  It will endure into the New Creation.

          Now, returning to my opening thoughts, if I were to speak to a graduation class of university students and to all in attendance, I would proclaim to them oddly much the same thing I would say at a funeral…in the end you will be raised from the dead.  Whether you have faith in Jesus or not because he was raised from the dead, so also will you.  Whether you know it or not, the Spirit of God is hovering over the chaos of the waters of each of your lives working to open up space in you for Jesus to sit enthroned.  Everything you do with the life that God has entrusted you with will amount to nothing more than vanity unless you realize that everything you eat and drink, all the work you do, and what you work for is from God and is a gift with which it is possible for you to be satisfied.  So, as Solomon the Wise prompts us, strive for the Spirit of God otherwise you are simply chasing after the wind.  As Paul says, seek and be minded towards that which is above where Christ sits as Lord.  Who you are and what you will be is hidden with Christ in God…in the very self of the loving Communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!

          Paul goes on to give a long list of how to do this and all of them deal exclusively with how we relate to God and to one another.  He says, “Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgive each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.  And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Col. 3:12-17).

          So, whether Jesus has made it so that you know him or not or whether or not you have acknowledged him as your Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ is the Lord of all of Creation and we will all be raised to stand before him in the New Creation because he has saved this entire creation and will make it utterly new.  Therefore, we do best not to make our lives a waste with nothing to show that will endure.  Rather, let us strive to live together in the love that he has poured into our hearts.  Forgive. Forgive.  Forgive!  Be thankful.  Be kind.  Be compassionate, meek, humble.  Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ not your own or someone else’s.  Show me a better way to live than as a disciple of Jesus Christ.  Show me something better to seek than Jesus Christ.  Apart from him and the new humanity he is making us to be by placing his own ruach in us and in our midst, everything is meaningless.  I tell you good news today.  Jesus is Lord and his way is the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we all seek.  Take it up and walk accordingly and know peace.  Amen.