Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 21st May 2023), introducing our new series in the letter Colossians.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘One life but we’re not the same
U2, One, Actung Baby, 1991
We get to carry each other, carry each other
One’
READ: COLOSSIANS 1:1—8 (NLT)
THE MORE YOU KNOW
Earlier this week, I was asked a rather personal question: ‘How old are you?’
How do you respond to a question like that?
You might have expected me to answer with my age (43). I am forty-three, but that would not have been the right response. When I was asked how old I was, the person wasn’t asking how old I was.
Confused? Good.
To help you out, the person who asked me, ‘How old are you?’, was my beautiful, wonderful, caring and long-suffering wife of twenty-three years: Steph. Steph knows how old I am, and she doesn’t have any problems with her memory.
Let me also tell you where this happened.
Steph asked me this when we were doing our weekly ‘big shop’. We were on a long and wide shopping aisle, that was clear of customers and all other obstructions, and I was ‘driving’ the shopping trolley.
I’ll be honest, my inner child can’t resist such temptation. So, I placed one foot on the shopping trolley, pushed off with the other foot, and sailed along the supermarket floor with panache.
It was glorious.
With the wind in my hair, I was like an Olympic athlete winning gold. I even considered copying Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Titanic, by holding out my arms wide and shouting, ‘I’m the King of the World’. But I didn’t want to look immature, and I didn’t want to lose control of the trolley (they have really sensitive steering, you know).
After a good forty feet, at least (a personal best), I brought the trolley to a controlled stop, with a stylish, sideways turn, and then looked back towards Steph with a stupid grin on my face.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe applause? Maybe a musical number, like the girls in Grease after the car races? Any kind of appreciation would have been nice.
Steph wasn’t as impressed as I was. With raised eyebrows, she looked at me and asked, ‘How old are you?’
I hope you can see that Steph wasn’t seeking information; giving a number would not have been the right response. Whereas, reflecting on my actions would have been.
I have, since, reflected on my actions … and have realised that if I was wearing less wind-resistant clothing, I would have made it a further five feet.
Context makes all the difference. The more you know about the when, who, why and where, the better chance you have of understanding what was said and how to apply it.
So, forgive me. But as we start this letter, it’s only proper that we have some background to it, so we can better understand it. I won’t say everything—there’ll be more to say, where appropriate, in the coming weeks.
I’m not wishing to be patronising this morning, but I do want to cover some basics—they’ll help.
INTRODUCING …
In the first verse, we’re told that this letter is from the Apostle Paul; he’s writing it with his brother Timothy; and this letter is addressed to God’s Holy People in the city of Colossae (Colossians), to people who are also his brothers and sisters in Christ.[i]
So who’s Paul?
Well, we first meet Paul in the first verse of Acts 8. He was a witness to the killing of a Christian called Stephen. At the time, Paul is known as Saul. They are not different names, and Paul does not undergo a name change after he encounters Jesus. Paul is just the Roman (Latinised) way of saying the Hebrew name, Saul. Saul/Paul was ethnically Jewish, born in a city called Tarsus that was in a Roman-controlled province called Cilicia (now part of modern day Turkey). This gave him a dual status as a Jew and a Roman Citizen, which comes in handy if you know his story in Acts.
Not only was Paul Jewish born, he was also very committed to the Jewish laws and customs. He was well trained in the Scriptures. And, as he describes himself, he was ‘zealous to honour God in everything’ (Gal. 1:15-24; Phil. 3:6; Acts 22:1-16). Zealous is very loaded word. In his zeal for God, Paul begins hunting Christians because they proclaimed that Jesus was the Messiah, or, to use the Greek word, the Christ.
The Messiah was supposed to be God’s anointed deliverer of Israel. The Christians were declaring that, ‘through Jesus the Messiah, God had now brought deliverance from the enemies of his people, the powers that enslave them, so that they may be freed to serve the Lord and live together as reconciled people.’[ii]
This was an insult to Paul. Jesus was crucified, for starters, an accursed way to die, by the Romans. Rome was still in power. So, if this was a rescue from enemy powers, this didn’t look like Paul had expected, and it didn’t mesh with how he understood the Scriptures. To be fair to Paul, Jesus’ own disciples hadn’t expected that, either.
Additionally, the Christians were going around saying God had raised this Jesus from the dead, and their language about this Jesus and to Jesus was ascribing honour that solely belonged to God. To top it off, these first Christians were Jews, and they should have known better.
So Paul was happy to blot out to this blasphemous nonsense among his own people, and does so in a violent way. In doing so, however, he encounters the risen Jesus, and it flips his world upside down. Paul has to rethink everything he thought he knew, about God’s purposes, about the Scriptures, all in the light of Jesus. And he transforms from persecuting people in the name of God to being willing to lay his life down for others in proclaiming what God has done, for all people, in Jesus Christ.
He is eager for people to embrace Jesus as Lord. He is especially called to take this message to non-Jewish people: Gentiles. Paul understands that God’s eternal purpose has always been to reconcile all people to himself and to each other.
This twin-theme of reconciliation—God to humanity, humanity to humanity—is key. It’s never merely just ‘me and God’.
It is worth saying, Paul never endeavours to do this on his own. He purposely works alongside others for others. Communal life is both his goal and his practice.
That’s the short and simplified story of Paul.
At the time of writing this letter, as we discover in Colossians chapter 4, Paul is in prison for sharing this news about Jesus (4:3, 10, 18).
There’s debate over where Paul is imprisoned—some argue for Ephesus, others Caesarea, and others say Rome. And where he’s imprisoned determines the date of when this letter was written: varying from the early AD 50s to the early AD 60s.[iii]
We do know, that while in prison, Paul received a visit from a Colossian called Epaphras (4:12; 1:7), who likely planted the church in Colossae, and who shares with Paul what is happening there.[iv]
Colossae itself was a city in what is today Modern Turkey. It was in the valley of the River Lycus, with two other cities: Laodicea and Hierapolis (4:13). It was both ethnically and religiously diverse place.
You don’t need to know too much this week about Colossae. But, if you’re going to read the rest of this letter—and I’d encourage you to do so—it may be helpful to know that this valley was famous for two industries: the production of clothing and the dying (baptízō) of cloth.
Paul draws from both these industries for analogies in this letter.
The valley of Lycus was also famous for its poor water quality (due to the river being impregnated with chalk) and earthquakes. Knowing this won’t help with the analogies Paul draws from in Colossians. But, it may prove helpful when reading Revelation chapter three.
After hearing about Colossae, Paul decides to write to the believers there. He sends this letter, along with another letter to the believers in the city of Laodicea (Col. 4:16). Sadly, we don’t have this other letter.
There’s no Royal Mail or FedEx back then, there’s no speedy means of travel, there’s no email or TikTok, and there’s a lot of danger on the roads. This letter is being hand delivered, by a man called Tychicus; who would have walked for weeks to get to the people of Laodicea and Colossae. He’s not just delivering the letter, and then walking away with a wave, like your postman does; Tychicus going to spend time with them on Paul’s behalf.
I want us to think about that for a moment; that’s some physical commitment to other people! Paul is passionate about church life being a physical practice, not a spiritual or religious experience.[v] Paul’s not much of a fan of an impersonal, disembodied faith. We’ll come back that.
Tychicus isn’t travelling alone. A second man, Onesimus, a native of Colossae, is with him (Col. 4:9). Onesimus is also carrying a letter; addressed to another Colossian Christian called Philemon. We do have that letter, and we’ll maybe take a glance at that situation in a few weeks.
If we were to summarise the whole of this letter to the Colossians, then we could say that Paul wants the believers to remember that Jesus Christ is everything we need. He wants them to remember that Jesus is all supreme and Jesus is all sufficient.
GNOSTIC DISEMBODIED & SECRETIVE THREATS
But what does this mean: Jesus is all we need?
We could totally misapply this, if we don’t hear what Paul is saying.
For example, if Jesus is all we need, then is it true that I don’t need to put petrol in my car?
There’s been plenty of times when I’ve been running on fumes, praying I can make it to the next service station. But, we all know cars need fuel—they can’t refuel themselves.
If Jesus is all we need, does this mean I don’t need food?
We all have stomachs and, regardless of whether we fast or not, we need to put food in them in order to live.
My body needs chocolate.
Worse still, if we take ‘Jesus is all I need’ too far in the wrong direction, we could wrongly tell ourselves that we don’t need other people and human companionship; especially in matters of faith.
Which is not true. It is not good for humans to be alone.
To understand what Paul does/doesn’t mean, we need to ask, why does Paul want the Colossians to know this?
Well, from what we can piece together from the letter, and other sources from the 1st and 2nd centuries, there appears to be other ideas drifting into the life of the church. They’re not rampant, like we find in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, but they are certainly an encroaching threat.
We’ll explore it more in the coming weeks, but the creeping threat seems to have whisperings of what later became known as Gnosticism. This teaching seemed to be a blend of Greek philosophies and astrology and pagan cults, mixed into practices borrowed from the Jewish law that were then twisted out of shape, served with a side order of angelic and elemental obsession, and topped off with a sprinkling of Christian thought.
It was hyper-spiritual, and one of its chief ideas was the idea of secret knowledge: that everything had not been revealed, and that if you wanted to know the secret mysteries of God, then you had to go through austere practices, rites and ecstatic spiritual experiences to gain and “purchase” entrance into higher and higher levels of hidden knowledge.
If you want an analogy, imagine a concert or festival.
The last large concert I went to was Bon Jovi, at Huddersfield, back in 2001—too long ago! I was in the concert, singing with everyone else. Yet, there were other areas closed off to me.
There was a special area right in front of the stage. From the stage, Jon Bon Jovi would come out singing and dancing on a catwalk that extended into this area, and if you wanted to, you could touch his trainers as he passed you by.
I didn’t want to touch Jon’s trainers, to be honest. But to have Jon turn around to me and say, ‘good to see you Tris’, that would have been nice!
Regardless, I didn’t have a ticket for that.
From where I was stood—while singing Livin’ On a Prayer—I could also see that some people managed to get a spot on the side of the stage; inches away from Bon Jovi’s guitarist, Richie Sambora!
To be fair, it was probably best not to let an avid fan like me near one of Richie Sambora’s guitars. But, I didn’t have a ticket for that.
There was even a ticket that let you meet the band afterwards. You could hang out with Jon, Richie, Bryan and Tico, chatting about old times. But—surprise surprise—I didn’t have a ticket for that, either.
So I was in, but I wasn’t in in.
Of course, you can get to these areas and the experiences they bring, if you have access.
This, in a crude analogy, is what Gnosticism claimed. It stratified the experience of God. It claimed that not everything was revealed in Jesus, the way wasn’t fully open to all. Jesus got you in, but not in in.
Like the serpent whispering to Adam and Eve in the garden, false teaching was slivering into the church suggesting there was something God had hidden from them. Something more they needed, in addition to Jesus, in order to know the fullness of salvation, the knowledge of God, and God’s will for their life.
This is hogwash.
Throughout this letter—especially the first three chapters—Paul shoots this stupid idea down.
He’s quick to take their suggestive language about ‘secrets’ and ‘hidden things’ and ‘mysteries’ and ‘fullness’ and ‘invisible’ realities, and throws it back at them:
If you want to know the whole of God, the depth of who God is, the so-called “hiddenness” of God, then Jesus has revealed it all. In Jesus is the fullness of God—there’s nothing missing or lacking or moderated. In Jesus is all the treasure of wisdom and knowledge. You are complete in your union with him. You don’t need to look elsewhere, you don’t need to do something more (Col. 1:15, 19, 26, 27; 2:2-3, 9-10). Just keep trusting, keep plunging, keep putting your roots into Christ Jesus (Col. 2:6).
Even in the few introductory verses of this letter, which we read earlier, Paul keenly emphasizes that the Good News about Jesus is spreading everywhere, to everyone (Col. 1:6), and it is transforming lives everywhere. It’s universal, in that anybody, anywhere can access it, regardless of ethnicity, colour, or social status, etc. There’s no subscription service, and neither do you have to be part of some spiritual elite to gain access to it.
With Jesus, it’s access all areas. God’s not keeping anything hidden from anybody.
If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. Full stop.
If you want to know what God thinks about you, look at Jesus.
If you want to approach God, then know that God, in all his fullness, with nothing absent, has already approached you in Jesus.
If you want to know what God’s purposes are, and how they have been working out through history, and all the way through the Scriptures, then, like Paul himself had to learn, look at them through Jesus.
If you want to know what a truly spiritual life looks like, then look at, and learn from, the embodied, physical, relating-to-others life of Jesus Christ.
Nothing is hidden! Everything is open!
EMBODIED LOVE
Wrongly, without appreciating context, we can also mishear what Paul is saying with this and respond in the wrong way.
If we mishear Paul, we can wrongly think he’s warning us against academics, theologians, teachers and intellectuals who study the scriptures, the historical context and the culture of the day. He’s not. Paul, as he encourages often, wants his readers to grapple with what God has already accomplished and already revealed, to all people, of all times, in the historical movement’s and particularity of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
I can’t speak for all us, but I’m two-thousand years away from the New Testament, longer from the Old, and I’m from a western culture. I need help in grappling with what these texts, written in another culture, are saying in their day before bringing them to my own. I thank God for those who study the scriptures, their history and their context.
Paul’s all for learning about the scriptures and grappling with what Jesus has said and done.
What Paul’s not keen on, is a so-called Christian “spirituality” that is secretive, often self-propelled, more me-focussed than Christ-focussed, and is often a very ‘private affair’. What I mean by this, is that we mistakenly think a Christian life is about personal spiritual experiences and revelations more than it is about following the spirit’s leading into expressing and embodying Jesus’ life to one another, with one another.
There’s many problems, theologically, with Gnostic inclinations, that have practical repercussions. We’ll explore more, as the weeks go on, but, it’s often full of people who claim to be spiritual or claim to have proximity to God, but who absolutely suck at having proximity to other people; especially their brothers and sisters in Christ.
I’m not speaking of people who have experienced trauma, or those who wrestle with mental health, etc.
I’m speaking of our tendency—and I include myself, here—of reducing faith to a ‘me and God’ thing.
As Paul explains it, and has understood in his own call to serve people, this not God’s plan for humanity. God’s eternal plan is an ‘us in Jesus’ thing. As I said earlier, Paul’s not much of a fan of an impersonal, disembodied faith.
It’s telling, in this introduction, where Paul’s focus goes. In verses 4 and 8, Paul gives thanks because the real fruit of faith in Jesus, the real life the Spirit has led them into, is an embodied love for one another. (We’ll see what that looks like, in practice, when we get to chapter 3).
EMBODIED PRACTICE
Paul’s no theorist; paul practices what he preaches as he opens this letter.
When Paul says that these Colossians are his brothers and sisters, we know that they are not his actual biological family. And yet, the Greek word he uses (Adelphos in 1:1 and 1:2) is the word for real siblings connected by a parent or a shared ancestry.
Paul even introduces Timothy as ‘our brother’. This is easy to overlook, but it’s telling. In other letters, Paul speaks of Timothy as his son (Phil. 2:19-22; 1 Tim 1:2, 18). Again, he’s not his real son; Paul has nurtured Timothy (who we first meet in Acts 16) in his faith and sees him as a son. But Paul, in how he introduces Timothy in Colossians, doesn’t imply any sort of ‘level’ or ‘status’ difference between himself and Timothy. They are brothers in Christ.
At the end of verse two, Paul writes, ‘May God our Father give you grace and peace.’
Note: it’s our Father. There are no uncles, aunties or grandparents, grandchildren, or great grandchildren in this family; there’s no extra levels of relationship, were some of us are closer, or differently related to God than anyone else. There’s only two levels; we’re all siblings, at the same level, with no favourites, under one Father. And Paul himself is on a par with us.
Again, it makes the point that we all have the same access. But more than this, Paul is stating that we are family. This means that my identity as a follower of Jesus is intimately tied up with yours. I am called to be with you.
I cannot, to quote something John writes in his own letter, claim to be spiritual—to love and know the God I cannot see—whilst being hostile, apathetic, hateful and distant from the brothers and sisters I can see (1 Jn. 4:20-21).
For Paul, being in Christ Jesus—belonging to Jesus—means belonging to each other. In all his writings, Paul strives to help Jesus’ followers realize that they are family and what that involves.
As Bono, the lead singer of U2 describes, ‘church is not a place but a practice.’[vi]
This does not mean that we are immune from being dysfunctional—we are not. Yes, we all have different gifts, differing roles, and are all at differing stages of maturity in different aspects of our lives. And, if you’re like me, you will have to re-sit some of those stages often. But none of us are relationally closer to God than our brothers and sisters, and none of us are an only child.
The love I have for God, the Father, is to be expressed in the love I have for his family and his creation.
So here’s a question for you, as we begin this tour of Colossians, to think about in the weeks ahead: How do you personally measure your spiritual health? Is it in your spiritual experiences, in there frequency and vibrancy? Is it in your spiritual discipline—in your length of time in prayer, or the Bible, etc., which are good things? Or, is it the health of our relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ?
It’s not an either/or. But could it be that the latter f these is what gives the former it’s context?
‘Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples. … All those who love me will do what I say.’
– Jesus, John 13:34b-35; 14:23 (NLT)
[i] There are, of course, debates over whether Paul wrote Colossians or not, or whether it was someone in the Pauline school of thought. Most of the debate revolves around the language used in Colossians and its high view of Christ, which (apparently) seems unique in comparison to Paul’s other letters, along with the absence of Pauline themes such as the law and covenant. Any good commentary on Colossians will explore this debate. Personally, I have no problems with Paul authoring this letter; like any good pastoral approach, Paul is speaking to his audience in a way they understand and which is pertinent to the issue they are facing.
[ii] Marianne Meye Thompson, The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary: Colossians & Philemon (Eerdmanns Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK, 2005), p. 18
[iii] As Thiselton: ‘Wright dates the epistle “between 52 and 55 (or possibly be between 53 and 56) [on the working hypotheses of Ephesus]. O’Brien proposes 60-61 on the assumption of imprisonment in Rome, and 54-57 on the assumption of Ephesus. Kümmel suggests a date between 58 and 60 if Paul was imprisoned in Rome, and between 56 and 58 if this was Ephesus. Harris proposes similar dating. Pao suggests 60 and 62; Moo, 60-61; and McKnight, like Wright, the mid 50s, “perhaps even 57”.’—Anthony C. Thiselton, Colossians: A Short Exegetical and Pastoral Commentary (Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon, 2020), p. 14.
[iv] It is taken that Epaphras planted this church due to Paul’s words in Col. 1:7 (that they learnt the Good News from Epaphras) , and his reference to not knowing many people in Colossae (Col. 2:1). Most commentaries suggest that Paul had never been to Colossae (as there’s no record of him staying there in Acts), and that Epaphras most likely came in contact with Paul while he was in Ephesus (Acts 19). However, regardless of where Paul originally met Epaphras, it is certainly plausible Paul would have passed through the Valley of Lycus, where Colossae, Hierapolis and Laodicea where, at some point in his travels. As Acts 18:23 indicates, Paul travelled to Galatia, East Phrygia. Acts 19:1-2 then depicts, in summary, Paul travelling through the interior provinces back to Ephesus on the coast of West Phrygia, where he stayed for three years (Acts 20:31). This journey, from East to West, through the interior provinces, if Paul used the main trade route, would have taken him through the Valley of Lycus and its three cities—the first of which to encountered on such a route, would be Colossae. Of course, we can only speculate about the level of his interaction there.
[v] Paul himself travelled a great deal, in his time, to be with people. When you think about it, the only reason we have letters by Paul, really, is because when Paul couldn’t physically be with people—because he was either caught up with people elsewhere, or he was bound up in a prison—he would write. The bodily, skin-the-game practice of Paul, as a minister and a fellow brother in Christ, is something we really need to consider more carefully in our church praxis today. Especially when I consider the amount of social-media only ministries that exist today, and the amount of effort that is spent in building a platform. Paul was not a content creator. Paul was eager that he knew people and was known by people—not merely that they had heard of him, but that he could be with them and they with him. That church-life has a very tangible, corporeal, interaction to it.
[vi] Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2022), p. 530.
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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