Lectionary Scripture – Colossians 2:6-10 NRSV
"As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. 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."
God’s Dream
Chris Haslam of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal provides commentary noting that Colossae was a city in what is now southwestern Turkey. In his commentary, he also notes that Colossae had flourishing wool and textile industries and a significant Jewish population. It seems however that most Christians in Colossae were Gentile. Although this letter to the Colossians was long thought to be written by Paul, today it’s considered by a number of scholars to have been authored by someone else. There are a number of reasons for this. The most compelling is that it emphasizes what God has already done for God’s people and what God is going to do in the future. The author then goes on to provide detailed descriptions of teachings incompatible with this future as well as being a follower of Jesus. Problem is that the things the author speaks of were promulgated after Paul had died. So for many scholars, this represents evidence of later authorship. It also fails to reflect the broader more inclusive view of God’s love that Paul espoused -- a love in which I am deeply grounded and which I hope will one day heal our troubled and distressed world.
The day of God’s great inclusion for all souls is what I believe the Apostle Paul saw in his own dreams and visions. For me, I have seen such a day in my own dreams and visions, but there’s a dreamer and visionary who many of us know of and whom I’ve had the pleasure of listening to twice in person through my ecumenical and interfaith work. His name is Archbishop Desmond Tutu and it’s his dream I’d like you to be aware of today.
Specifically, the Archbishop put it this way in his book God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time. He puts it this way in terms of the Spirit’s inspiration to him, “I have a dream, God says, please help me realize it. It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness are changed into their glorious counterparts, when there will be more laughter, joy, and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing. I have a dream that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, that My children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, God’s family, my family. And in God’s family, there are no outsiders. All are insiders. Black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, Jew and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Serb and Albanian, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian – all belong.”
And then Tutu shares some unsettling thoughts, “Sometimes we shocked them at home in South Africa when we said, the apartheid state president and I, whether we liked it or not, were brothers. And I had to desire and pray for the best for him. As Jesus said, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all to me” Not just some would be drawn, Tutu says, but all. And then he goes on to say what a radical thing it is that Jesus says, that we are members of one family. We all belong for God tells us that all are his children. It’s a dream Tutu says that has been passed down through all the prophets and great humanitarians of our times. In particular he points out the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior who at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 shared his dream that one day the children of former slaves and the children of former slave owners would be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood; and then Mahatma Gandhi who in 1929 wrote that his goal was not just the brotherhood of Indian humanity but rather the brotherhood of all human beings. The truth, Tutu says, is that we need each other and that we cannot survive nor thrive without one another.
To that end may we engage in the work of God entrusted to us all -- for you are called, and each and every one of us is called according to the gifts of God to us. For soon comes God’s Peaceable Kingdom and all who believe shall be redeemed.
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Resources for this post:
• New Revised Standard Version of the Bible
• Tutu, Desmond – God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time, 2004.
• Lectionary commentary for Colossians 2 by Chris Haslam at http://www.montreal.anglican.org/comments/
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