“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
(Luke 18:9-14)
British theologian David Ford dubbed our era the ‘age of overwhelmedness’, and this seems wonderfully apt to me. I find myself getting overwhelmed rather often. I found myself getting overwhelmed trying to prepare for this sermon as a matter of fact. The whole day in fact just overwhelmed me.
I started early, getting up with the baby, I dealt with the little ones, I downloaded my emails and started working my way through my to-do list.
I tried to co-ordinate the tech support team for the Skype interview with Father Elias this morning. I tried to organise print-outs for the group of us who are heading down to Melbourne next weekend to support Solomon Egberime in his title shot. I tried to organise the memorial service for today and a meeting with a documentary film maker about another possible community screening.
Then I had to start driving children around to various events – in Burwood and then in Canterbury – and I took my laptop and my phone with me, of course, and I worked while I waited. I tried to give pastoral support to someone in distress on the phone, I emailed my condolences to the family of a friend who has just died, I finished work on my address for next week’s community forum on “Is banning the burqa racist?”, and I finished editing the church bulletin. I got back, printed and photocopied the bulletin, and then turned to the sermon, by which stage I realised that the Saturday evening party, which I’d very much been looking forward to, had already started, and I felt overwhelmed.
Overwhelmedness is of course a very personal thing. No doubt there are any number of people here who in that situation would not have felt overwhelmed. Conversely, I’m conscious of the fact that in my household there are some who get overwhelmed more readily than I do. The baby, for instance, seems to find mum putting her down for a moment to be completely overwhelming!
But I don’t think it’s even this sort of overwhelmedness that Ford was actually talking about. I think his concern was more with the amount of information that we are being pumped with, that’s going on all the time in the background.
Once upon a time, if something tragic happened on the opposite side of the world… well, you’d probably hear about it, eventually. Nowadays, every flood in Pakistan, every bomb that goes off in Kabul, every death in Haiti, and just about every boat of medical supplies that is turned back from Gaza is beamed straight into our living rooms via the courtesy of the streaming media!
And if you miss it on the evening news you’ll catch it on the podcast. Such is the flow of information with which each of us is consistently bombarded to the point of egregious overload. And the result is that we feel overwhelmed.
And I think that Ford is right and I suspect that all of us – to one degree or another – carry with us some degree of overwhelmedness, either by virtue of personal pressures that are weighing on us or simply through this information overload that burdens each of us with a small portion of the world’s collective pain and guilt!
And that’s why it is so fitting that today we celebrate “Christ the King Sunday”, which is the annual “don’t worry, be happy” feast in the ecclesiastical calendar
And I don’t mean to be facetious by saying that. Today is in fact the last Sunday of the ecclesiastical year. Next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent – the period leading up to Christmas, which makes today is the last Sunday of so-called ‘Ordinary time’. And a particularly ordinary Sunday it might have been had not Pope Pius IX some 75 years ago proclaimed this Sunday to be the celebration of “Christ the King” – a day for reminding ourselves that no matter how bad things look, it is Christ that is ultimately in charge!
And we celebrate this great truth today by listening to this very ancient hymn:
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Now I appreciate that the text we have here, translated as it is into English, has neither rhythm or rhyme, yet scholars do believe that the original text here was part of an ancient piece of liturgy that may well have been sung.
If that is correct, then what Paul is doing in this letter is not simply sharing his thoughts in hit own words, but doing so instead by quoting a well-known hymn – something that had a heartfelt familiarity to it. This would suggest that this piece of liturgy may be amongst the earliest Christian songs ever published, which makes it all the more extraordinary, as the song makes some very bold claims about the identity of Jesus!
Now, forgive me if I’m getting ahead of myself, but we all know that the theology of the church was an evolving thing. It took the church hundreds of years, for instance, to come up with the term ‘Trinity’ as a way describing the nature of God, and this raises the question as to how the very first generations of Christians used to speak about God and Christ?
If we didn’t know better, we might assume, for instance, that the more cosmic theories about the nature of Christ and His relationship with God had started to develop some generations after the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry.
That would be our normal human expectation – I think – that those who were contemporaries of Jesus would have spoken of Him more in terms of His humanity, since they were familiar with Him as a man of flesh and blood, whereas the further in space and time people were removed from Jesus, the more fantastic their theories about His person might become!
This, as I say, is what we might have expected in terms of the evolution of the theology of the church, but it turns out not to be the case at all! On the contrary, what we have here at the beginning of Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae is an early Christian piece of liturgy or song that may well have been sung by the Apostles themselves, and it speaks of Jesus in the most extraordinary terms: “He is the visible image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.”
As my old friend, the late great Clifford Warne, used to translate this passage, “He is the spitting image of His dad!”, and if you know the history of that colloquialism it’s a rather good translation, for a ‘spitting image’ doesn’t actually have anything to do with ‘spitting’.
It was Clifford who taught me that, historically, the term ‘spitting image’ is simply a colloquial abbreviation of the term ‘spirit and image’. Jesus is the ‘spirit and image of his Father’ says the hymn, and indeed that’s exactly what it does say. In Jesus we see the Father – both in spirit and in image!
And indeed the hymn says more than that – claiming that Jesus not only resembles God but that He was involved in the creation of the world as God! “For by him all things were created… and in him all things hold together.”
Now, as I say, we might have expected these bold statement to be made some generations after Jesus, the man of flesh and blood, had been dead and buried, but the fact is that these words were probably being sung by the Apostles. This was at the heart of the Christian message from the beginning!
I appreciate that these high-sounding theological claims about Jesus might seem out of character for a church that was not particular academic at that stage and surely wasn’t interested in codifying it’s insights into systematic dogmas, but I actually don’t think these big statements about Jesus were initially put together with a view to being used as a foundation for theological dogmatics! I think they were intended more as a cry of hope in a dark world!
Christ is King! That was the message. And for the people of Colossae – living through a time of great political volatility and undergoing persecution themselves – they needed to be reminded of who was ultimately in charge!
That was a volatile time, and when we look back at the year 1925, when Pope Pius IX first declared this to be “Christ the King Sunday”, that was a volatile time too!
In 1925 the world was in the grip of ‘The Great Depression’, Mussolini had just celebrated his third year in office in Italy, and a young, charismatic rabble-rouser by the name of Adolf Hitler had got out of gaol and was rapidly gaining popularity for himself and for his ‘Nazi party’ across Germany.
They were volatile times, and Pius, I think, had a sense of where things were going, and he decided that it was the right time to call Christians everywhere to prayer and to refocus their faith and hope on the rule of Christ.
We live in volatile times today too of course, and those who heard the disheartening prophecy given here by Norman Finkelstein a few weeks back – such that Israel will soon attack Lebanon again, and that Lebanon will hit back this time, and that Israel will then most likely escalate its attack and that this will mean that Iran will almost certainly get involved – recognise that another world war could be just around the corner!
And so it’s time for us to pray again and to refocus our faith and our hopes once again on the kingship of Christ – the only ruler to whom we can truly pledge unquestioning obedience. For “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created… and in him all things hold together.”
I don’t think I need to say anything more on this passage this morning.
I’m sure there are multiple other theological insights to be gleaned from this passage, and when I first looked at it in detail again yesterday I did (in my overwhelmedness) think of giving it a far more detailed and comprehensive treatment. But then I almost heard a little voice say to me: “don’t worry, be happy! Christ is King!”
So I apologise today if the sermon is a little short, the message a little simple, and the delivery a little unpolished, but I figured that Christ is king, and that if He wants to communicate something else to you through the text today, I’m sure He can do that.
For in the end it’s His Bible and His message, and if I don’t get things right all the time, I’m confident that He is big enough to make allowances for that!
In the little things and the big things. When it comes to the future of the world, and when it comes to us struggling with our own personal overwhelmedness, Christ is King! His is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen!
First Preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, November 2010.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker,
martial arts master, pro boxer,
author, father of four.
