To do anything these day, you have to fill out a form. Have you noticed? To get anywhere with anything you want to do, you have to fill out an application.
Some of you have been job-hunting. So what happens? You go to the personnel office, you pull out your beautifully polished resume, the one printed on marbleized paper with a laser printer, the one which describes your career aims in very high-sounding language, the one which reeks of success ... you pull out your resume and hand it in, and they say, "take a seat and fill out this form." Right?
And it doesn’t matter that all the information asked for on the form is exactly what you wrote on your resume. It doesn’t cut any ice that on your resume you have been able to describe in fulsome detail how you helped XYZ Company achieve its goals by expediting the timely acquisition of vital materials ... which means you were a delivery boy! It doesn’t help, all that glorious language. They just want you to fill in the blanks. They just want you to complete their form.
Let me tell you, it’s even true here at the church. If you come forward to join, we give you a card and ask you to fill in the blanks. If you want to reserve a room, fill in the blanks. If you want to change your address in our records, here, fill in the blanks. If you want to get married, our secretary has several forms with lots of blanks to fill in. Lots of blanks. The only one we somehow didn’t put on that form is the one that would ask, "Why would you even want to get married?" But I guess we reserve that for the counseling sessions!
And if you die ... well, for that one we will fill in the blanks for you!
The apostle Paul speaks of filling in the blanks left by Christ. It’s a peculiar and puzzling passage. It’s something the scholars have played with for a long time. Paul speaks about the all-sufficient Christ, the Christ who is lord of all things. And then he turns right around and speaks of Christ as lacking some things; he speaks of the work of Christ as incomplete. When did you ever think of Christ as incomplete?
Listen with me to these verses from the first chapter of the Colossian letter. Notice first how many times Paul speaks of the all-embracing lordship of Christ. Just listen for the uses of the words "all things" or everything. Colossians 1 :15-23
But now notice how he turns the tables and suggests that we are going to have to fill in the blanks even for Christ.
Colossians 1: 24 ... isn’t that strange language? "I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." Something is missing. There are blanks to be filled out, even in the work of Christ. And somehow you and I have to fill in those blanks!
Continuing: Colossians 1: 25-26, 29
I want to begin this morning by affirming, with Paul, the all-sufficiency of Christ. The Christian faith is built on the solid foundation of Christ as the one in whom all the fullness of God came to dwell. He is the word made flesh, come to dwell among us, full of grace and truth. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
And Jesus Christ is the one who has done all that is necessary for our redemption. The death He died He died, once for all, to wrest our lives from the grip of evil. The cross is the epicenter of the world’s history, an unrepeatable event. Full and perfect sacrifice. Through Him God was pleased to reconcile to Himself all things, by making peace through the blood of His cross.
And more, Jesus Christ is the first fruits of those who sleep. He is risen from the dead, He is alive, He is whole, He is stronger than all human strength and greater than all mortal greatness. He is the firstborn from the dead, so that He might come to have first place in everything.
The early Christians summed it all up in three stark, simple Words. The earliest Christian statement of faith: Ihsous Xristos Kurios, Jesus Christ Lord. He is the all in all.
And yet, there is something more. There is something yet to be done. There are blanks to be filled in. There is something left to do. The framework is in place. The basic work is done. Christ has done what He came to do. But now for things to happen, we will have to fill in the blanks. We are called to complete the work of Christ by giving of ourselves in and through the church. Look at what it says, "In my flesh completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church".
For a few minutes this morning I want us to look at what it means to fill in the blanks in and through the body of Christ. What is it, precisely, that we are called to do and to be in order to complete the work of Christ?
The most compact summary of discipleship I know of is a well-known verse in the prophecy of Micah, given some seven hundred and more years before Christ came. It is compact, and yet it is also comprehensive. It is short and memorable, and yet we could go on and unpack it for hours. It will help us to know how to fill in the blanks of Christ’s work.
I’m going to recite it and then I am going to ask you to repeat it and memorize it. This is one of those Scriptures you ought to be able to bring up out of your memory banks and use:
"He has told you what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
Let’s fill in these blanks, one at a time.
I
First, the Lord requires of us that we do justice.
"In my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." Do justice. We are to fill in the justice blank. Do justice.
Doing justice means we recognize that this world is not yet what God wants it to be. That this world still perpetuates a thousand different ways in which men and women are treated with disdain, hate, and inequity. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the world of justice which God intended.
I need not regale you with illustrations of injustice. It is not necessary to speak at length about prejudice or racism. Most of us have had plenty of experience with that. We know what that feels like. In fact, it astonishes me sometimes to realize how close up injustice comes. On Friday night, at the close of the D. C. Baptist Convention session, I heard our new president, Mrs. Mattie Robinson, speak about her childhood in Virginia. How just a few years ago, really, there were no jobs for African-American young people; and how, if there was a school bus, it was segregated. But most of the time, there wasn’t even a school bus! Injustice. It’s not in the dim and faded past. It’s right here.
I need not recount the crime statistics or paint the scene in Bosnia or talk about the neglect of children. These are things which come to our attention every day.
But let’s think about whose responsibility it is to do something about injustice. Let’s find out who it is that cares enough to make a difference.
The Bible says it is the church. The Bible says it is Christians, acting as the body of Christ, who are to do justice. It is the body of Christ which is to bring wholeness to humanity. It is the church which is to offer justice in the middle of an unjust world. That is part of the unfinished work of Christ.
Think about how much Jesus was a victim of injustice. Think about the way in which He died. He died because political leaders felt they could throw Him away, and no one who mattered would care. What is one more Jew to the legions of Rome? Nothing. A throwaway. That’s not justice.
And the religious leaders .. the religious leaders thought of Him as a threat to their privileged positions. The words of the high priest are so telling. It is expedient that one man should die rather than a whole people should perish; except that that isn’t what he meant. What he meant was I’d rather get rid of this irritant than lose my fat cat position!
No question about it. Jesus died as the victim of injustice. But, strangely and mysteriously, His death was also in the plan of God, and His sufferings are not complete as long as anyone suffers injustice. Christ suffers the injustices of this world along with those who are the victims.
Perhaps some of you have been to Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Even if you have not been there, you know this as the place where one fine Sunday morning, a bomb went off, deliberately placed, consciously timed, so that it would hurt children attending Sunday School. In that terrible, searing moment, that moment of supreme human injustice, four little girls lost their lives, not to speak of others who were injured. Injustice!
But when the church was rebuilt, right over the place where the bomb went off, a stained glass window was installed. It was a gift from Christians in Wales, part of Great Britain. The window depicts the Christ, stretched on the cross, His eyes brimming with tears, looking down at four small bodies. How exactly right! Injustice not only hurts children; it hurts Christ. Injustice not only attacks families; it attacks Christ Himself. Christ Himself suffers because justice is not yet complete.
He calls the church to do justice. He calls His church to fill in the blank of justice. We are called to be salt and light and leaven in the world. We are called to change things.
We are not called to sit in an ivory tower somewhere. We are not summoned to live out our lives in splendid isolation. We are to do justice. We are to roll up our sleeves and get about the business of working for the things that make for justice.
If somebody cannot read, then we the church ought to do something to see to it that he can read. If somebody’s home cannot be sustained, then we the church need to teach them about how to make a marriage work. If somebody has no job, then we the church ought to network and strategize and coach and do everything we can to help them find work. Doing justice is filling in the blanks. Filling in the blanks in people’s lives, once we have learned that
Jesus loves them and has died for them.
I wish I could spend the entire sermon on this theme. I wish I could develop this more fully. We haven’t done enough toward doing justice. We’ve been scared of public issues. We haven’t thought enough, prayed enough, spoken enough, or surely haven’t done enough to be credible as a church when it comes to doing justice. I’m afraid that we have hidden behind the skirts of piety and have said, "Oh, that’s controversial, wouldn’t want to touch that. Somebody might get upset, you know.”
And that’s right. Doing justice means targeting the oppressors. Doing justice means telling it like it is. Doing justice means some very unpleasant stuff sometimes. Just read your Hebrew prophets, Micah among them, if you don’t think so. Doing justice ... it’s tough business, and we will have to spend more time with it in the months to come.
Right now, let me just ask you to respond to doing justice in one small but significant way. The rice bowl offering. These rice bowls we call our world hunger offering. But I want you to know the kinds of projects this offering goes for. It doesn’t just go for soup kitchens and castoff clothes. It isn’t just charity. It goes for self-development. It goes for things like well-digging and seeds. It goes for family life education and for nutrition clinics. It goes to things that help people, teach people to feed themselves. The world hunger offering, small though it may be in the face of the world’s vast hungry population, is a candle of hope lit in the awesome darkness of starvation.
As someone has said, "If you give a hungry man a fish, he will be hungry again tomorrow. If you teach him to catch fish, he will be able to sustain himself."
I invite you now to make a beginning, however small, to doing justice.
II
Micah again: "He has told you what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Do justice and love kindness.
"In my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." The church must fill in the blank of kindness, mercy.
I wonder what has really happened with our feelings. Our emotions seem to be hardened. We seem as a nation to be unable to comprehend what it feels like to hurt. We seem to be so eager to blame those who are hurting. We revel in stories about so-called welfare queens. We get off on the get-tough rhetoric that gets politicians elected. It seems we’ll vote for anybody who will promise family values, whatever that is, and who will sound like he carries a big stick.
And I know there is some truth in all of that. I know enough about human sin to know that if there is a way to make a dishonest dollar, somebody will find it. I know enough about human nature to know that if there is a way to cheat, somebody will figure it out.
But I also know that for every story you read about some welfare mother, soaking up a few hundred of the taxpayers’ dollars to feed her habits as well as her children, you will also read about somebody in or close to congress kiting checks worth thousands and even millions of dollars.
I also know that for every account of able-bodied men hanging out in the cold at the door of the liquor store, you will also hear of highly placed officials spending the big bucks to polish their images or fuel their self-important limousines. We have somehow become unable to feel outrage at the truly outrageous, and unable to feel compassion for the truly defeated.
God’s call to the church is to love kindness. To fill up what is lacking, what is incomplete in the suffering of Christ by loving kindness in the church. I think of that moment on the cross when He looked down, feeling all the agony of His cruel death, knowing that His life was ebbing away ... a moment when anyone, anyone would be entitled to be focused on himself. And in that moment of horrible torture our Lord looked down on his mother, and saw her pain. "Woman, behold your son. John, son, behold your mother." Look, the two of you, take care of each other. You need each other. Kindness. Even in the day of His pain, Jesus loved kindness.
And, you know, kindness is really so simple. Just that word of concern must have meant the world to Mary and to John, both of them. Sometimes all we have to do is to love kindness so much that we will go ahead and do the simple, uncalculated, spontaneous thing, and it will make all the difference.
Just a few days ago I was feeling down, mildly depressed. I don’t have a real problem with depression, but every now and then when things pile up and there seem to be too many things to be done all at once, and there are those unforeseen emergencies that pile up, I get down. But on this particular day, I don’t know why, but now I can see it had to be the Holy Spirit’s leadership ... on this particular day, with about ten big tasks looming in front of me, I chose to do a little job. To make one phone call. By the way, that for me is an effective remedy for the paralysis of depression … if I cannot get at the big things because I’m a little depressed and then I find I’m getting more depressed because I cannot get at the big things ... and round and round it goes, deeper and deeper … if that happens, then I just start doing a few little jobs, so that I can feel some accomplishment, and I begin to come out of my downward spiral.
So on this day I was getting at some of those little jobs, and I made a call to one of you about something I wanted to ask you to do. We exchanged pleasantries, we did our business, and then, like a bolt from the blue, this member asked me, "Dr. Smith, are you taking care of yourself?" I mumbled some sort of noncommittal response, to which she practically shouted into the phone, "Dr. Smith, don’t you know we love you!" She doesn’t know it, but I wept a little when I hung up that phone. Just a little gesture of kindness in the church ... and what a long way it goes! How powerful it is!
If we are going to be His body, then we must fill in the blanks of kindness. We must stop asking so many questions and coming up with so many sophisticated reasons why not to help. We are going to have to take some risks, some simple risks, and help.
I am still haunted, as I have told you on several occasions, by the vision expressed by a church group whose leader I heard many years ago. This church group, located in the inner city of Chicago, set as its goal to meet every possible human need within one square mile surrounding its building. Think of it; incredible, yes! Impossible, maybe so. But Christian, yes! Compassionate, yes! Focused on Christ, yes and yes.
There are times, men and women, when we just have to let our hearts be melted by the needs of the people and serve them, whatever it costs. Filling in the blank by loving kindness.
Today we can respond to that call too, in a small way, but a concrete way. Some have brought food. It’s the simplest and most essential of the ways to help the desperate. Yes, they will be hungry again. Yes, some of them do not "deserve" what they are getting. But then you and I do not deserve what Christ suffered on the cross for us either.
And so, church, love kindness with your gifts of food for the poor and the lonely among us. Someone is coming now with a symbol of your gifts, and we will need for them to continue to come throughout the coming weeks, so that we can offer at least a gesture of love for at least a few of God’s children. Christ has been suffering because some of His own are hungry and thirsty and cold and homeless. Let’s help fill in the blank of kindness.
III
But we are not finished yet. Doing justice and loving kindness, these are important. Finding ways to change this world, seeking out the hurting and the hopeless, these things are valuable, of course. They fill in the blanks of the suffering of Christ.
But there is another blank to fill in. There is something else which may not look as dramatic or may not feel as immediate. But it is.
Micah once again: "He has told you what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" To walk humbly with your God.
There is another task to do, there is another blank to fill in. And that is to walk with the Lord, to be reconciled to Him, to be in right relationship to Him. I submit to you that this is the most important blank of all ... that unless we are prepared to be in relationship with the Lord, nothing else that we do will count for much. I submit to you that without authentic fellowship with the living God, all our fighting for justice and all our giving for charity, all of it will be for naught.
"In my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." We are to fill in the blank of the walk with God. We are to encourage fellowship with Him. We are to share the good news that in Christ there is forgiveness, in Christ there is reconciliation with God.
I am afraid, men and women, that in our time we have devalued evangelism. We have somehow decided that it isn’t all that important to lead people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. What has happened to us that in our time it has become unfashionable to suggest to others that without Christ they are dead in their sins? What has happened to our convictions when we feel it is too private, too personal, and too exclusive to urge Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life?
I don’t know why that is such a problem for us. But I do know that at the heart of all our human problems is the sin problem. And that at the heart of all our human need in the need to know Christ and to know the power of His resurrected life. A world of nearly six billion people; and many, so many, who knows how many, do not know Christ. A community, right around us, and, though there are churches on every corner, still many, so many, who knows how many, in your very neighborhoods, do not know Christ. These things are part of the suffering of Christ, that there would be any ... any ... who are separated from Him.
And so, today, if you would fill in the blanks of Christ’s suffering, if you would complete what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, then be a part of the redemptive work He has called us to do. Be a part of missions; be a part of outreach and Christian education and all the rest. Fill in the blank of a walk with God.
Now I must call you to notice that when the Bible speaks of fellowship with God, it also speaks of the church. It speaks of the church as the body of Christ. It insists that if we are going to be reconciled with God, we are also to be reconciled with one another, and that community of reconciliation is called the church.
There is no room for lone ranger Christians in the New Testament. There is no such thing as being a Christian apart from the church. There is no way to be in Christ without being a part of the body of Christ.
And so I have no hesitancy whatsoever this morning in asking you to sign on for Christian service and for sacrificial giving. You cannot do the humble walk with God without sharing in the work of His body, and that takes resources. That means a commitment of your finances and it means a commitment of your time and your talents. It is not sufficient to come and be filled and fed; the walk with God means giving and serving as well.
Representatives are coming to receive your pledge cards and your service survey forms.
Conclusion
But we are not finished, not quite. Because, you see, it is not enough to affirm justice ... alone. Nor is it enough to act out kindness ... alone. It is not even enough to give money or to give time to the church ... alone. There is one thing else. There is one more dimension of filling in the blanks.
I must ask you this morning if there are blanks in your life. I must ask you if there is a void in your own life that needs to be filled.
Our God wants us, in fellowship with Him. He wants you, He wants me.
Ahead of my money, God wants me.
Ahead of my time and talents, God wants my heart.
More than my work for justice, more than my charitable acts, God wants my very soul, my inner being, my core.
And so this morning, I ask you again, what are the blanks in your own life that need to be filled?
Do you feel adrift, without direction or purpose? Jesus Christ will bring you meaning.
Do you feel alone, with no one to care for you? Jesus Christ is a friend who loves at all times.
Do you feel confused, not knowing what the truth is? Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.
Do you feel empty, uncertain, unloved, unwanted? Jesus Christ is the living bread, who feeds every hunger. Jesus Christ is the living water, which, if anyone drinks, he will never thirst again.
Fill in the blanks. Set aside your fears, and trust Him. Set aside the doubts, and believe Him. Set aside your inhibitions and your shyness, and let Him have control. Set aside waiting until you feel just right, and let Him embrace you.
There is a blank in the life of Christ which only you can fill. There is a place in the body of Christ which only you can belong to. There is a void in this fellowship which only you can supply.
And He is not yet Lord of all. He is not yet Lord of all things. He is not yet King of Kings and Lord of Lords, not if He is not yet your Lord. Will you crown Him Lord of all?
