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First Sunday after Christmas

Colossians 3
12As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13Bear 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. 14Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. 16Let 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. 17And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.


I can't help but begin with New Year's resolutions, and so I give you the opportunity to share: what have you resolved for 2007?

More time with family or friends
Less weight
More exercise
Less smoking or drinking
More organized
Less debt

I think you can more or less see the pattern here. Many of the so-called top ten resolutions are quantitative in nature: we pledge to do more of the good things and less of the bad. Few resolve to smoke more in the new year, unless you work for a tobacco company.

I want to look at some Christian resolutions, but before I do that, I want to give you a better picture of the whole enterprise of resolution making. As with all the fun stuff this time of year, the custom begins in ancient Rome. The first day of the new calendar was dedicated to the Roman Janus (hence January) and celebrated in much the same manner as today with parties and resolutions. In art Janus has two faces, one looking forward and one back, allowing him to review what has passed and look forward to the future. He is also the god of doors, a in case you are having one installed.

We reviewed a few quantitative resolutions, suggesting more of this or less of that, but what about qualitative resolutions? For this, we need St. Paul:

12As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13Bear 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. 14Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.

Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience forgiveness, love, harmony, unity and thankfulness. And that's just the first four verses. Paul is all about quality and not quantity: the depth of our commitment to one another and our dedication to Christ.

The difficulty with this shift to a “qualitative” approach is the extent to which we quickly fall back into our comfort zone. We quantify. We hear Paul's encouragement and we could easily merge this into our traditional way of making resolutions: more compassionate, less haughty, more patient, less divisive, and so on. We quantify because it ties to the earliest lessons we learned.

Reduced to its simplest form, the parenting that most of us received can be summed up in two wishes: more good and less bad. The way we received these messages was a little more sophisticated (but not much) but the underlying message was be more good and less bad. Often, this message got carried to church. We were formed hearing much the same message: being Christian is a lifelong attempt at being good and turning away from being bad.

The problem with being good all the time is that it never ends. There are endless ways to be better. Being good is a tyrant that only points to the ongoing ways in which you fail. C.S. Lewis put it this way:

In the end, you will either give up trying to be good, or else become one of those people who, as they say, “live for others” but always in the discontented grumbling way—always wondering why the others did not notice it more and always making a martyr of yourself. (Foster, p. 8)

Having met these people, I think we can agree that there must be another way forward. Being good isn't good enough if we are going to try to sum up the Christian life and look forward to a new year. Once more, I turn to C.S. Lewis:

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says “give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you.

In other words, Jesus is saying: “don't be good—be mine.” Think of that the next time someone gives you a little heart-shaped candy. The goal of the Christian life is simply to give yourself to Christ, to be his and his alone. Be mine.

Again, the clue to doing this is found in our little passage. As Paul expands his list of resolutions he provides the metaphor that makes living these resolutions possible: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” More accurately, he provides an metaphor and a means.

The metaphor can also be found in the third chapter of Galatians, where Paul says: “all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.“ (v. 27) We are encouraged to “put on Christ” which is nothing like “be good” or “be less bad,” but a way to give the whole of ourselves to Christ.

If clothing is our metaphor, then the means is love. When we cloth ourselves in love, we have the means to live out the quantitative resolutions set before us. Every word on the list—Compassion, kindness, patience, forgiveness—finds its source in love. God's love for us is the beginning of all of these: we forgive because we are forgiven, we have compassion because we have a compassionate God.

Our response, to “cloth ourselves in love,” allows us to transcend the categories of “good” and “bad” and simply be. We become one with Christ and one with his desire for the world. We become resolutions. We resolve to “put on Christ” and walk in his way throughout the coming year. We resolve to live knowing that we belong to Christ and live everyday with his invitation “be mine.”

I want to give the last word to St. Paul:

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.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 12:08 PM