Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 2nd July 2023), continuing our 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).
‘’Chaps who did taps aren’t tapping anymore
They’re doing choreography
Chicks who did kicks aren’t kicking anymore
They’re doing choreography
Heps who did steps
That would stop the show in days that used to be
Through the air they keep flying
Like a duck that is dying
Instead of dance, it’s choreography”
Irving Berlin, Choreography
READ: COLOSSIANS 2:8—3:4 (NLT)
FREEDOM FROM RULES?
“Don’t handle”
“Don’t eat”
“Don’t touch”
“These are man-made rules”
What do I do with that?
There’s a bottle of bleach under our kitchen sink. The label on the bottle clearly states that I shouldn’t drink it. It’s a man-made rule. But, I’d be an absolute idiot if I quoted this text and then drunk a gallon of bleach.
There’s an electric substation at the end of our street. On the fence around it, there’s a huge sign that reads, ‘Keep Out! Danger, High Voltage’. It’s a man-made rule. But I would be rightly classified as insane if, on the basis of this verse, I proceeded to climb over the fence and played tag with a cable carrying a thousand+ volts of electricity.
There’s a big fence when I visit the lions in the zoo. It’s there to stop me handling them, and to stop them handling me. This text is not, in any authority, giving me consent to climb over that fence and snuggle a 400-pound carnivorous cat. I would rightly deserve the welcome that lion would give me.
I know I’m pointing out the obvious: there’s a context to these words from Paul.
Paul is not against rules, per se. Paul is not saying that there are no good behaviours and no destructive behaviours. In the next section, he will speak about putting away rage, malicious deeds and lies, and putting on kindness, gentleness, peace and love.
Paul is also not against ceremonies, or expressions of faith, either. He prays. He encourages others to pray. He sings. He encourages others to sing. He breaks bread, he talks about baptism, he even, and this may shock us, in the book of Acts, takes a Nazirite vow and assists four other Jewish Christians in completing their Nazirite vows (Acts 18:18; 21)
Paul knows there are activities that, if used in the right way, can aid us devotionally.
So what is this passage about?
Well, let’s start somewhere else.
STARTING POINT
A number of years ago, the late catholic writer, Brennan Manning wrote a book called Abba’s Child.
It had nothing to do with a Swedish pop group. Sorry.
Abba is an affectionate Aramaic word for Father, akin to daddy. And father is a description of God’s character throughout the scriptures.
Manning in this book suggests, like I did last time, that many people struggle with self-worth and seek validation and acceptance from external sources, such as achievements, possessions, or the opinions of others, which are fleeting and ultimately unsatisfactory. Our true identity, Manning argues, is not determined by what we do, what we have, or what others think of us. Instead, ‘define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is an illusion.’[i]
He is a raw and vulnerable writer, transparent about his flaws, his brokenness and, in his own words, his own un-lovability. And yet, in the midst of his mess and mayhem, he experiences a love that embraces him.
It’s not that his brokenness qualifies him for such love. At the same time, he came to see that his brokenness and imperfection didn’t disqualify from that love, either. God loved him regardless. The knowledge of his brokenness created opportunity to experience God’s grace more deeply, in a way that was truly transformational.
He wasn’t saying his life was right. He realised that the starting point was not about trying to get God to love ‘me’. Instead of striving to obtain something in his own strength, he acknowledged his weaknesses and limitations, and let God’s strength act on him.
If you want that another way, we could say he realised he was ‘dead’. He thought God’s love couldn’t reach that far and wouldn’t reach that far. He discovered it did, and he surrendered to God’s unconditional love and the life-giving work it produced in him.
In another book, Manning writes, ‘My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.’[ii]
Unlike the writers I mentioned last time, Manning wasn’t attempting to convince irreligious people of their need for God. He wrote to religious people because, as he says elsewhere, many of them find it easier to believe that God exists than that God loves them.[iii]
Manning recognised that unless we grasp hold of an identity that is rooted in the fact that God loves us, unconditionally, as embodied in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, then, in its place, we grasp hold of a negative self-image that ‘views ourselves as moral lepers’. Until we do something, we feel untouchable by God.
In turn, our lives are then shadowed by low self-esteem, we become enslaved to shame, remorse and unhealthy guilt, and find ourselves constantly under the accusation of self-hatred.[iv]
This is how Manning originally felt about himself. If there is a God, he reasoned, he would not want anything to do with someone like me. Because he saw God as some fickle, easily irritated, legalistic, small-minded accountant who would only befriend those in positive credit, Manning wrongly assumed he was personally responsible for reducing what he thought was the gap between his self and God.
So, he would try to be good. He would try to promote his self, change his self, and lift his self. Of course, he would fail, again and again, to hit the standard his idea of god, an idea he inherited and heard from certain preachers and priests, demanded.
When he failed, because he thought God would not want anything to do with a failure, he would sink deeper into guilt. His guilt would lead him to seek solace in his alcoholism and his womanising, enslaving him more into his problems. In turn, he’d feel more guilty. Which meant, he’d try even harder next time, setting up a higher standard that he would then fail to achieve.
Manning certainly knew that there is a healthy way to experience remorse and guilt. But this wasn’t that. As Manning puts it, he had this myriad of fictitious ideas about ‘god’ that imprisoned him in a house of fear.[v]
He didn’t experience freedom, and neither did he experience transformation. This way of thinking played into his self-indulgence, it didn’t conquer it.
It was only grasping the unconditional love of God that pulled him out of this miry clay of human thinking. He let go of his impoverished human perception of God, he stopped trusting in his self-effort, and began to trust in the love of God embodied in Jesus Christ.
As Manning reminds us, ‘Our religion never begins with what we do for God. It always starts with what God has done for us, the great and wondrous things that God dreamed of and achieved for us in Jesus Christ.’[vi]
And so, I have to ask, when it comes to God and you, what is your starting point?
Is it about you trying to get God to love you, you trying getting God to notice you?
Or, is it a response, a participating embrace of the love God has embodied toward you in Christ?
CHOREOGRAPHY OR DANCE
There’s a big difference between the two. It’s like the difference between choreography and dance.
If I were to give a name to Manning’s self-propelling approach, when his starting point was his own efforts, I’d call it Human Choreography.
What I mean by this, is that, in his thinking—which is common thinking—like a strict, choreographed dance routine, experiencing God is all about making sure that you put all your feet in the right place at the right time. You are not following the music, per se; you follow a set of strict instructions and rules.
In this frame of mind, we think of God as a judge on a judging panel, like in Strictly: if we do well, God gives us a good score; if we do bad, we’re disqualified. In Human Choreography, everything is dependent upon human footwork. You dare not put a foot wrong.
But grace is different. It has to be, to be grace!
Unconditional love is nothing like Human Choreography, it’s a Dance.
Dance isn’t about following a prescribed set of instructions, it’s not about rules as such. This is not to say that anything goes. But, whereas choreography is reliant upon footwork, dance is about responding to the music.
In the Divine Dance, God is not sat behind a judge’s panel. God is on the dance floor, wanting to lead us in the dance. In grace, regardless of how terrible or how fantastic our footwork is, God approaches us and invites to take hold of who he is and what he does—to entrust ourselves to his ability, his movements—and learn to move in rhythm with the music of his character.
Instead of leaning upon my own understanding, my footwork, I acknowledge God and let him direct the steps (Prov. 3:5)
I learn trust through dance, as I allow the movement of my dance partner shape and purpose the steps of my life. In short, I am transformed through God’s life.
Being in Christ is not Human Choreography, it’s a participating dance. To put it another way, our faith is not about trying to attract God with our fancy footwork. Our faith is an embrace of God’s movements.
The problem is, human choreography, like it did in Brennan Manning’s experience, is a self-driven project. It often props up our twisted ideas of God, and it often leads our steps to being directed by fear and guilt, not inspired awe and delight.
In short, because we, in our guilt and fear, think we are responsible for attaining God, we cut God out of the solution to our problem. As I said the other week, the problem is that we seek an identity outside of God in the first place. Cutting God out of the solution is just a repeat of the problem. It’s more self-indulgence.
The other problem with choreography is that you can be good at it. You could even add in extra levels of instructions and routines, and you could out shine everybody else with how immaculate you footwork is. But it is not dance.
I can do the Macarena … But that doesn’t mean I can dance.
I used to be able to do Whigfield’s Saturday Night with my eyes closed … But I can’t dance.
You can know the moves and rules. You can keep the religious footwork perfectly, even the extra flourishes you’ve added. You can do it so well that you can do it without the music, without God. The reality is, again, that even without guilt and fear, even with religious passion, spiritual choreography remains a self-maintained, self-disciplined performance. It’s not dance. It’s self-indulgence.
The Hebrew prophets, in the Old Testament, at times challenged Israel on their choreography. It wasn’t that they failed to keep the rules—though, they failed there too. At times, the problem was their footwork was flawless: they kept the Sabbath rules, the sacrifices, the festivals, and even their extra-added fasts. Yet, their hearts were far away.
They learn’t rules, but they did not grasp God; his heart for mercy, justice and love.[vii]
Paul, who wrote this letter, as I said the first week, was zealous with his footwork. His steps outshone those around him and his ability to follow rules was flawless. His footwork led him to help exterminate those whose footwork didn’t measure up! And then, he got knocked off his high horse (literally), when he realised he wasn’t dancing with God at all, and that his fancy footwork was treading on God’s toes.
So, again, what is our starting point?
Am I learning to dance with the Divine, or am I doing Human choreography?
LORD OF THE DANCE
My analogy could easily be misunderstood and it will break if pushed too far, but I think it has merit.
In verse 19 of this passage, Paul, as he did in chapter 1, reminds the Colossians that Jesus is the head of the body, the church. Paul says we only grow in our connection to him. We only grow when he is the starting point, the source of our nourishment.
There’s a Greek word in verse 19 that is often translated as nourished or supplied; Epichorēgēo.
The root of that word (Chorēgōs) is where our word choreography comes from. Which, doesn’t really help my illustration. However, in the ancient Greco-Roman culture, a Chorēgōs was a wealthy patron who would lavishly supply everything that was needed, from his own expenses, for a stage production.
If you want a modern equivalent, we’d probably say an executive producer of a TV show or film.
They would purchase and supply the costumes, the scenery, and the music. Literally, Chorēgōs means ‘leader of the chorus’.
Or, as latter generations would word it, the ‘Lord of the Dance’.
Paul wants believers to learn how to move in rhythm to the music, staging and clothing Jesus lavishly supplies at his expense, not our expense. Follow Jesus’ lead, dance to his beat, Paul is saying. You don’t need to follow the choreography of the past, which was a shadow of the reality that is Jesus. And you certainly do not need to be enslaved by the mere human footwork claiming that you need to debase yourself, deny yourself, harm yourself, and worship angels etc.
Again, to use Brennan Manning’s words, Paul wants them, and us, to remember that, ‘Our religion never begins with what we do for God. It starts with what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.’
Actually, it only continues with what Christ supplies, too.
And, I add, it only ends with Him.
Jesus is, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, the Author and Finisher of our faith (Heb. 12:2)
BEING AN ASS
Paul is saying this because other voices are creeping into the church. Whisperings of what became known as Gnosticism. A blend of other religious ideas were mixed into practices borrowed and twisted from Jewish law, and served alongside an obsession with angelic and elemental powers.
As I’ve said in previous parts of this series, gnostic thinking denied the supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus. They thought you needed more than Jesus to encounter more of the divine. You had to go through rigid practices and self-debasing rites to “purchase” entrance into higher and higher levels of hidden knowledge.
They weren’t keen on the human body, either. They thought it, like the rest of creation, was an evil material prison to be released from. So, they were happy to put human bodies through some rough stuff in order to “purchase” their wrong idea of freedom.
Adding to this problem was also the presence of ‘mystery cults’. The ancient world, including Colossae, certainly had its fair share of mystery cults. They’re as old as Ancient Egypt and still exist today.
There would have been early gentile Christians who had some experience of ‘mystery cults’ before hearing about Jesus.
Mystery cults are big on initiation rites, keen on ‘choreography’ in order to enter a higher, closer levels of union with their gods. And the more ‘gods’, ‘angelic beings’ and ‘elemental powers’ you appeased and had union with, the better.
An example of this kind of thing can be found in a 2nd century story nicknamed The Golden Ass.[viii]
The story follows a character called Lucius, who is transformed into an Ass because of his greed and lust. He is later restored, by the goddess Isis, and is chosen to join her cult. Which means going through an initiation process: He has to immerse himself seven times in the sea to purify himself; he has to abstain from certain foods and strong drink; he has to purchase new garments—all at his own expense. He also had to spend hours ‘setting his sights’ on a statue of the goddess Isis, as well as learning ‘secret’ texts, and going through a very physical simulation of entering and returning from the realm of the dead.
Sound familiar?
Shockingly, after he goes through all this, and enters the cult of Isis, he receives another vision telling him he’s not there yet. He has to go through a second series of choreographed steps—again at his own expense, and again requiring self-denial of various kinds. ‘Don’t touch, don’t eat, don’t handle.’
Lucius thought he was enlightened the first time, but, apparently, that was just stage one. You need stage two if you want to know more. Unsurprisingly then, after getting through stage two, Lucius then discovers he has to go through another third stage of ‘trials’, this time into the cult of Osiris.
He’s troubled by this. But at the same time, he is told that he is only asked to this because he is deemed to be worthy. If he was unworthy, he wouldn’t of been asked.[ix]
It’s these sort of mystery cult ideas, with their false theology and choreography, that is the background to what Paul writes in this passage.
There are people trying to entice some Christians into so-called “deeper” spiritual truths by saying they are worthy to know. At the same time, they are condemning other Christians by saying they are unworthy to know these “deeper” things. So, there are those that are being led astray (2:8), and those they are separating (2:16) and disqualifying (2:18).
And, if you wanted to know the ”deeper truths”, like with Lucius, you would have to foot the expense. In the minds of these false teachers, Jesus was not only not supreme, but also insufficient. He was not the Chorēgōs.
Unlike a few commentators, I don’t think the problem in the Colossian church was Jewish Christians telling Gentile Christians they need to become Jewish through circumcision (like we find in Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Philippians).
The issue is individuals from mystery cults thinking the church of Jesus is another mystery cult, seeking to collect Jesus alongside Isis, Osiris, Mithras and whoever else.
To be honest, with its language of immersion in water, and new nature, new garments, and it’s history being in Judaism, which had its ceremonies and food laws, I can certainly understand why some would think the new-born Christian faith was like a mystery cult.
But, this is not that.
But, if you are the kind of person who previously had a choreographed approach to ‘god’, then I can understand how you would take elements from your own cultural backgrounds, and misappropriate Israel’s Sabbath laws, food laws, and even circumcision, and twist them into ascetic initiation rites, thinking that doing such things gets you closer to God.
I need to add, here, that none of these Jewish practices, in their original context, were ever about getting closer to God. Their original intent was to remind, retell and rehearse what God had done and what God would do. They were ways, in their own time, of saying ‘our religion begins and ends with God’s work.’[x]
Of course, there’s a bigger complex conversation about this, but, for Paul, distorting these things and imposing these things as steps to get to God is all man-made, man-centred and self-indulgent religious nonsense.[xi] This is ass-like behaviour.
There is no need for ‘steps’ to God. God has stepped to us.
As Paul has made clear right from the opening of this letter, nobody is saved because of something they know that no one else knows. The gospel is not a ‘secret’ that only a few people, with the right footwork, can access. It is a public announcement. It’s good news that is going out to all people, everywhere. And it is the gospel that is changing lives as people receive it, not people changing their lives in order to receive the gospel (Col. 1:1-6).
As theologian, Marianne Thompson puts it, ‘Faith in Christ is open to all, indeed, to “every creature under heaven” (1:23), not just to those few devotees who can afford the time and money to seek higher mysteries.’[xii]
In Colossians chapter two, Paul makes it clear once more, that nobody is saved because of what they did or did not do. What matters, is not our man-made initiation rites, or our self-indulging, self-denying and, really, God-denying choreography, but Jesus’ self-emptying, victorious, embodiment of God’s gracious and forgiving approach to us.
EXPRESS YOURSELF GOD
‘When you came to Christ you were circumcised,’ Paul writes, ‘not by a physical procedure, but a spiritual one, the cutting away of your sinful nature. For you were buried when Christ was buried and you were raised to new life when Christ was raised.’
Think about those words. Paul, writing to people thinking they need some sort of initiation rite, is saying it’s already happened. It didn’t involve harming your body, it didn’t involve your movements, or any cost to you. It came through the ’mark of death in the [flesh] of Christ’.[xiii]
Every other ‘god’ expects you to go through an initiation rite for them. This God, the real God, has gone through it for you. In doing so, he’s stripped and exposed all these faux, book-keeping, accusatory powers of their masks and their sham authority and shown them up to be the frauds they’ve always been.
You didn’t coax God to forgive you. The fullness of God was in Christ reconciling you back to him.
You did not, and do not, need to convince some book-keeping idea of god to clear your record through your fancy movements. God, under God’s own movement, destroyed the charges against us.
You do not have to liberate yourself from all that enslaves and accuses you. God, stripped and disarmed all those things of their power and authority over you.
All you need do is stop following your choreography, stop clinging to self. Instead, let your self be swept up in the dance of God. Meet his invitation to intimacy with a participating embrace. ‘Define yourself radically as one beloved by God.’
I know that’s a weird way to put it. But I’m basically saying, stop trusting yourself. Trust Christ.
Faith is an expression of trust in God’s character and God’s work, not a means of coaxing God to do something. We do not live a life of legalistic rituals designed to twist God’s arm for special favours and special secret revelation. In rooting ourselves in Jesus (Col. 2:6-7), in setting our sights on the realities of the supremacy and sufficiency of his nature, reign and saving work (Col. 3:1-4), we instead allow our lives to overflow with thanksgiving for all he has done.
We don’t give in order to get God to give. We give because God has given.
We don’t forgive in order to be forgiven. We forgive as God has forgiven us.
We don’t pray to get God to open up his ears. We pray because God’s ear is already bent toward us (Psalm 116:2; Matt. 6:7-8)
We don’t love in order to be loved. We love because he first loved us.
We don’t serve in order to be served. We serve because doing so retells his service and compassion, his physical, incarnate, life of self-emptying.
We don’t empty ourselves in order to obtain some holy union. We have, through His sacrifice, been unified to his self-emptying nature and are realising that this was real life all along, the image we were made to reflect.
We don’t live a different life in order to get God to give us life! We are learning to live differently because we nourish ourselves in the life that God, through Christ, has won for us and freely given to us.
Please, don’t get it the wrong way around!
‘For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, “Abba, Father!” ‘
The Apostle Paul, Romans 8: 15 (NAB)
[i] Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
[ii] Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel
[iii] Brennan Manning, quoting Cardinal Basil Hume, The Furious Longing of God (David C. Cook, Sussex, UK, 2009), p. 76
[iv] Ibid, p. 77
[v] Ibid, p. 37
[vi] Ibid, p. 126
[vii] For example, see Isaiah 58:2-10; Amos 5:21-24; Micah 6:6-8; Hosea 6:1-6.
[viii] Apparently, St. Augustine gave the story this name. It’s original title is the Metamorphoses by a Roman author called, Apuleius, and it’s supposedly based on an older Greek tale.
[ix] Marianne Meye Thompson, The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary: Colossians & Philemon (Eerdmanns Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK, 2005), pp. 62-63. Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, Religions of Rome: Volume 1, A History (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK), pp. 287-288.
[x] For example: Abraham did not circumcise in order to woo God into making a promise to centre His redemptive purposes of blessing the world through his offspring, his seed. He did it afterwards as an expression of the supernatural undertaking that God had promised to bring about through Abraham’s own natural inability. Ergo, Circumcision wasn’t some blood sacrifice to appease a blood-hungry god, it was a fore-shadowing, through the removal of the foreskin, of what God would bring about beyond and regardless of human capacity.
Baptism was an expression, a retelling, in Israel of how God had brought Israel out of Egypt. How God had delivered them out of darkness, like a baby being delivered out of womb, through the waters. Water was originally utilised to drown their offspring, to bring about the death of Abraham’s descendants (and God’s promise to bring about blessing the world through the seed of that nation). But, God usurped this intent and used waters to birth the Hebrew nation. God brought life out of the instrument of death. When the people of Israel later got baptised they didn’t do so to get God to do something, they did so to express their claim in an identity God had given, to retell what God had done.
Before Israel sacrificed a single bull or ram or goat, God had already delivered them from Egypt! God didn’t need compelling. Actually, as a number of Jewish theologians and Christian ones have noted over the years, God didn’t even institute the sacrifices until after the Golden Calf incident—a tangent of a conversation I’ll avoid here. Still, it’s important to see that the offerings, festivals and ceremonies came about as a means of reminding, confessing, and celebrating what God had done.
[xi] I say complex, because Paul’s relationship to Jewish customs and Torah is not as straight forward as some suggest. Yes, as Paul states here, and elsewhere, things like food laws are but shadows of the reality in Christ. In Galatians and Philippians, Paul certainly hits back at those teaching that gentiles ought to be circumcised, and in Acts 15, it’s Paul and Barnabas who spur on the edict of not placing the burden of the law (including circumcision) on gentile believers in Jesus. And yet, in Acts 16:3, Paul has Timothy circumcised. In Acts 18:18, Paul appears to shave his head in completion of a Nazirite vow (Num. 6:1-21), and in Acts 21, under the suggestion of the Jerusalem church’s leadership, Paul agrees to accompany four young Jewish Christians to the Temple as they complete their Nazirite vows. Paul is certainly no hypocrite in this. Paul is consistent in his approach that being part of the people of God is not a matter of Torah fulfilment but faith in Christ. However, pastorally and missionally, Paul became all things to all men. One could say, that Paul was neither for circumcision (in the case of circumcising gentiles), nor against it (in the case of telling Jews they need not do it). Rather, for salvation and sanctification, circumcision did not matter; Christ’s cross, and the spiritual circumcision it provided, mattered.
[xii] Marianne Meye Thompson, The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary: Colossians & Philemon (Eerdmanns Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK, 2005), p. 64
[xiii] Ibid, p. 56
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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