How many times have you stood forsaken at the baggage carousel, watching the luggage track spit out piece after piece of luggage, but never yours? Why is it, when all chance of my suitcase ever showing up is gone, I feel compelled to stand there and watch the few remaining orphan bags circling aimlessly, as if believing that my stuff is going to suddenly materialize before my eyes if I stare hard enough? But it doesn't.
It's happened again. The airlines has lost your luggage. The good news is that eventually they almost always find your bag and attempt to send it to you. Despite all my traveling, I've never really lost my luggage. The bad news is that lost luggage has an uncanny sense of timing, managing to show up either just as you are about to head for the airport for your flight home, or worse yet, showing up about 10 minutes after you've left for a new destination. Some pieces of luggage have been known to follow frequent fliers around for weeks before finally ending up back in their owners' possession.
Losing your luggage can be one of life's most annoying, discombobulating, fuzzy-toothed inconveniences. Savvy travelers have learned never to check through crucial papers, medications needed daily, or all of their socks and underwear. It's just too risky.
But, sometime, in the days following Christmas, we should all make a conscious, exerted effort to "lose our luggage."
Most of us are far more bogged down with baggage than we may even realize. Parade magazine in their annual "The Best and Worst" carried a story several years ago about a survey conducted among vice presidents and personnel directors of the nations 100 largest corporations. They were asked to relate their most unusual experiences interviewing prospective employees during the last year. Their year-old report included:
A job interviewee who challenged the interviewer to arm wrestle.
A balding candidate who excused himself and then returned wearing a full hairpiece.
A candidate who wore headphones to the interview and, when asked to remove them, explained that she could listen to the interviewer and the music at the same time.
An applicant who interrupted the questioning to phone her therapist for advice.
A candidate who dozed off during the interview.
A candidate who muttered, "Would it be a problem if I'm angry most of the time?"
Now there's some folks carrying around some real baggage they would be better off losing.
How about you? How many extra pounds of grudges are you packing around? How many handbags of animosity? How many flightbags of resentment? How many rolling bags packed with revenge?
Many of us feel compelled to make New Year's resolutions that we optimistically carry with us into the new year. But few of us stop and consider the load we already have packed and ready to go. The worst we can do is to take these bags bursting with old grudges, unforgiven acts or merciless attitudes with us into the new year.
Let's lose that luggage.
Besides, if one of your "resolutions" is the ever-popular commitment to lose weight, what better way to shed a few of the most unsightly of bumps and bulges any of us can carry around?
I believe our text for today will enable us to understand something about how we can divest ourselves of some of this unsightly, cumbersome baggage that is killing us spiritually.
READ Colossians 3:12-17
Paul's letter to the Colossians is generally understood to have been in response to some doctrinal/behavioral errors that were beginning to plague that community. While nowhere in Colossians does Paul specifically define the nature of these errors, internal evidence from this letter (2:8, 9, 18, 23) suggests there may have been both a tendency toward rigorous, ascetic ritualism and
a rising attraction to a cult of angels or spirits. Paul's warnings and advice also seem to indicate that while some of these Colossian Christians were pushing a legalistic approach to religion, others abandoned that narrow track and gave themselves over to licentiousness ... promoting immorality (2:23).
Paul addresses particular practices and tendencies throughout chapter 2, leaving him to emphasize in chapter 3 the true Christian alternative that awaited those who had genuinely been "raised with Christ." This text demonstrates how all facets of human behaviors and attitudes have been transformed through the Christians' "death" and subsequent "rebirth" in Christ. For Paul, we are
[genuinely changed], [truly transformed creatures] by virtue of participating in Christ's death and being raised into this "new" life as Christians. The fact that members of the Colossians' community, like all Christian communities, still needed to be guided back on the track of right doctrine and behavior demonstrates the constant tension in which the reborn Christian lives. While Paul asserts that the Colossian Christians are completely "new" once they are "with Christ," they are also still under construction. In this in-between "not yet" age, Christians are not completed projects.
That is something that most people don't understand ... especially ...
new Christians, unbelievers and immature Christians ... who have never gone much farther than their salvation experience. How many times have you heard people say, "Well, I sure wouldn't have expected 'Christians' to act that way."
Becoming a Christian does not automatically unload the baggage you have accumulated prior to your salvation experience. It's a choice.
In Maxie Dunnam's book The Devil at Noonday (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1996), he tells of a place in Death Valley known as Dante's View.
From this perch, you have a choice. You can either look down 200 feet to the lowest spot in the continental United Sates, a place called "Black Water." Or you can look up to 14,500 feet and see Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental U.S. From this one spot you can choose to feast your eyes on the highest or the lowest. It's your choice. The same thing is true about the baggage we take with us into Christianity. We can hang on to it or we can discard it.
In today's epistle, Paul urges the Colossians to so thoroughly live in Christ that they can finally "put to death" old attitudes and agendas (3:5). In vv. 5 and 8 Paul provides two lists of five items each, which are wrong attitudes or behaviors. These are the human tendencies that must "die" with Christ. In the first verse of today's text, Paul lists five qualities that should be raised with the Christian reborn in Christ. Scholars caution us not to try to link too closely Paul's two lists of five vices or this list of five virtues with any particular practices occurring within the Colossian church. Selecting the number five is a common ancient literary device, and Paul may have been more concerned with recording a specific number here than relating them to the Colossian situation.
But, in this text, Paul offers Colossian Christians specific ways they can achieve this goal of putting to death old attitudes and agendas. They are to "clothe" themselves with "compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience" (vs. 12). An active expression of these attitudes is stipulated when Paul counsels them to "forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you" (vs. 13).
Forgiveness Is Not Optional
Paul states, this call to forgiveness is not really an optional request.
Forgiveness isn't something Christians should extend to one another just because it's a "nice" thing to do or because it will promote peace within the body of Christ. Paul makes the connection between divine forgiveness and human acts of forgiveness a bit more explicit than that. He designates the Colossians Christians with Old Testament terms that emphasize their unique relationship with God through their rebirth in Christ ... they are "chosen ones, holy and beloved" (v. 12), just like the Israelites. Paul insists that "...as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive" (v. 13).
Forgiveness is not something we "owe" each other. It is not something we can truly "offer" each other. We have the capacity for forgiveness only because God has first forgiven us. Without first experiencing God's forgiveness in our lives, we have nothing to offer anyone else.
Any act of forgiveness we have become capable of extending or expressing to another ... is directly related to an act of worship to God. We acknowledge God's forgiveness of us and extend this divine gift of forgiveness to others
as part of an act of worship to God. By forgiving others, we offer a genuine Christian form of worship to our God, who saves us through divine forgiveness.
Forgiveness Is Difficult
God knows that as imperfect human beings, it is hard for us to let go of our carefully guarded, well-worn bags of resentments and old hurts. Each of us has names and faces of individuals that we simply cannot imagine being able to forgive.
How can we forgive
• a relative who molested us?
• an ex-spouse who maligns us?
• a thief who has stolen precious memories from us?
• a murderer who has taken a loved one from us?
• a people who has enslaved and oppressed us?
• a corporation that uses our talents and then discards us?
• a parent who abandons us?
• a child who destroys us?
• stupidity, hatred, bigotry, cruelty, greed, war, waste, poverty, pollution, and holocaust?
How can we forgive?
We can't. In fact, we often prefer the old adage, "Don't get mad, get even."
Or as Ivana Trump put it in her cameo appearance in the movie The First Wives Club: "Don't get even ... get it all." The truth is, we can't forgive unless we remember what forgiving is not.
Forgiveness .... is not forgetting; rather, it is choosing not to actively remember; is not saying to the other party: "You're okay." Rather, it is saying, "I'm okay and I am willing to let God deal with whether you're okay; and if you're not, how you can become okay." It is not saying, "I don't feel the pain anymore." Rather it is saying, "I do not feel the need to build on to your involvement in my pain anymore."
Forgiveness is turning to our forgiving God in worship and praise and offering ourselves and all our loathsome luggage to God. It is God who forgives, and as we worship God, it is the divine forgiveness that pours through us and fills us with a forgiving spirit. We must depend on God to take our baggage and to send it to a destination where it will never find us again.
In verse 14, Paul singles out one quality that stands "above all" the rest ... love (agape). This love is literally described by the Greek as "bond of completeness." This is the crucial ingredient in the makeup of the follower of Christ. Without this element being the underlying motivation of every single action, every single element of our being, forgiveness is not possible.
It is one thing to lose the baggage of bitterness and forgive our enemies.
It is another thing to do it like the grandfather of James Thurber. When he was on his deathbed, Thurber's grandfather was asked by his minister, "Have you forgiven all your enemies?” The old man said, "Haven't got any." The minister was astonished. He said, "That's remarkable. But how did a red-blooded, two-fisted battler like you go through life without making any enemies?"
Grandfather Thurber casually explained, "I shot 'em." That's the way some people deal with their enemies. They just shoot 'em. Others are more subtle.
But that is not the way of love. Love is gentle. Look at the definition in 1 Cor. 13.
That Christian love is of a gentle nature is further implied by the admonition in verse 15. Although the translation of this verse calls for Christ's peace to "rule" a believer's heart, the actual Greek verb is less autocratic. The Greek would best be interpreted as "umpire" or "settle disputes" ... suggesting that Christ's guidance is an internalized voice that Christians listen to and allow to direct their behavior. The "peace of Christ" that results, creates "one body" ... a unified Christian community. And that is possible on an on-going basis.
God never stops desiring that kind of unity in His church.
A four-year-old boy was waiting with his mother in the doctor's office. They were discussing all kinds of great issues such as "What am I doing here?" and
"Where's the doctor?" and "Why isn't God married? ... things like that. Finally the little boy asked the ultimate question: "Why doesn't God ever just get tired and stop?" His mother thought a long time before she answered.
Then she said, "God is love, and love never gets tired." God desires peace among the people. He never tires or lets up offering the peace that passes understanding ... providing the people are willing to act in a loving and caring manner toward each other.
Verse 15 concludes by urging the Colossians to "be thankful." This thankful attitude continues to inform the advice Paul gives in the final two verses of today's text. Paul encourages the Colossian Christians to experience Christ "richly" through Christ's own "word" and through the community's teaching about Christ. That is to say, it takes knowledge of both the familiar stories about Jesus and the careful transfer of the tradition of Christ's actual sayings in order for believers to experience the full "richness of Christ's indwelling.
Experiencing this fullness will result in two bubbling over behaviors. First, the heart's thankfulness should be expressed in "psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs" (verse 16). Second, that every "word or deed" of these Christians can be expressed "in the name of the Lord Jesus" and once again, with "thanks" (v. 17).
That little tidbit of advice should bring us up short in 1998 when we find ourselves busily packing away plans for revenge or plotting ways to get even.
"Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus ..." (v. 17).
Can you really sabotage someone's plans "in the name of Jesus"? Can you honestly swear to "get even" with a liar or a cheat "in the name of Jesus"? Can you openly declare eternal hatred for one who has wronged you "in the name of Jesus"?
As this year comes to a close I want to challenge you to think of all those who have offended you in some way, people you still have a grudge against, people who spoke to you in a way that is unbecoming of Christians, people you would never have expected to act that way ... considering they are Christians. And take the time to allow the love of Christ to take away all of the baggage that has accumulated over this last year. Or maybe you need to clear what has accumulated over several years. And I also want you to understand that in some cases, you have dealt with people who may be chronologically mature, but may have never done the real work of dying to self. Some of you need to understand that becoming a Christian does not isolate you from getting your feelings hurt.
But how you respond to your critics and detractors, how you respond to those who go out of their way to offend and destroy your joy, will ultimately determine your level of maturity in Christ. No one really wants to suffer. But, unfortunately, if our desire is to be like Christ, we will all suffer and Satan will even use well-intentioned church friends and family.
Martin Luther King, Jr. in a sermon entitled "Love Your Enemies" made the following statement:
"To those who hate us we shall say, ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you ... Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at midnight and beat us and leave us for half-dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.’”
Some of you may feel that is not appropriate for this church. But if you have ever been wounded or maligned in some way, you feel just as devastated as these people felt in a time when hatred was rampant in America. Endure, persevere, and wear 'em down with love. "And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."
