Seeing the Invisible

Text: Colossians 1:11-20

Focus: Christ The King Sunday

Function: To help Hope COB interpret Jesus to this culture.

Form: Bible study

Intro: I guess in one sense, next week, it would be appropriate to celebrate the New Year since this is the last Sunday in the Church year and next week starts Advent, already!

Today, the last Sunday in the Church Calendar year is titled “Christ the King” Sunday.

Today, is a day set aside for the global Church to focus on the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Our highlighted verse of Scripture also ties in to the theme of Christ the King, the idea of Thanksgiving celebration.

I love a feast. Feasts are a biblical act of worship. They are a time for us to remember that God is the one who provides. I love the faith and spirit of that first Thanksgiving when after a brutally hard winter where many of those first immigrants arrived and the American nation welcomed us so generously by sharing that feast with us. That feast was an act of faith that even though the last year winter was extremely harsh, their trust was in God for this next winter.

And it was in the faith of Christian love as we, the foreigners were welcomed by people of a different religion and given succor.

Praise God when people live our Christian values across the faiths!

So, I have this dilemma this morning to prepare us for the worship celebration that we will share with loved ones on Thursday so that we can all have more meaningful worship celebrations as we feast together.

By worship celebration, I don’t mean coming to church and singing songs, praying and giving. No, we worship God by living just and grateful lives. We can worship by our attitude of gratefulness and that is why Thanksgiving celebration is so important to us.

And we know the history. I preached a community Thanksgiving service over 30 years ago with the title “Our most Christian Holiday.” I preached it because it was initially a Christian witness to people of a different religion to show them how we as Christians believe in the value of sharing and community for the welfare of everyone instead of for our own selfish interests.

It was the age of modernity and people were laughing at the idea of believing in God. Christians were spending more time defending the idea of God to a skeptical world than they were today. And my thesis was “to whom are you grateful?” It must be a god, so why not join one of our Churches on Sunday? Of course, at a community Thanksgiving service, one is already preaching to the Choir.

I don’t need to preach that message any more. When I preached last year in Hastings, I preached a message about relationship. People don’t want to know if there is a God, they want to know, based on what they hear, if God either loves the world, or if God hates the world. Or, more importantly, people outside the faith want to know if people in the faith will welcome them. The premise came from whether or not we would be as welcoming today as the Native Americans were that first Thanksgiving. I compared how we are supposed to be a Christian nation and they were not.

So, I get President Lincoln’s precedent that we Christians have a witness to those who serve Christ in name only when he called Christians to lay aside the feast and pray for healing.

We didn’t know, at the time, that the Native American culture valued community to the extent where almost everything was held in common by the community. All tools, food and community resources belonged to the entire community. It was a different and very Christ like way of living.

We also know that Thanksgiving celebration started around the time of the Civil war.

The nation was bitterly divided and President Lincoln instituted a national holiday, the last Thursday of November as a day for prayer for our nations healing.

And here we are, half way into the sermon about Christ the King Sunday and all we are talking about is US history and the issue with worship on this morning. Do we join the entire world and celebrate Jesus Christ, the King of heaven? Or, do we join the faithful in our own nation and either commemorate the faith of our forefathers and the generosity of the first Americans or spend the time in prayer for healing?

Can we do both?

And maybe that is the problem with empire and confusing faith with patriotism.

Or, we can frame the question this way, Christian community over Patriotic community?

What happens when both are calling for a good thing?

Like many, over the last several weeks, I have had to examine my own priorities about the second line to the Lord’s Prayer.

Let me remind you, It starts with “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy Name,” and then it is: “...Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done...”

God’s will, not mine.

God’s Kingdom, not any kingdom of men, not even the US.

God has reminded me that as a Christian, I can never vote “MY NATION first” if it causes hardship in another country or damages the planet.

Our first priority is that we constantly pray this: “God, establish the Kingdom of heaven on earth.” This is our regular prayer. That is what Jesus taught us in the Lord’s prayer.

Based on that prayer this is, or should be, if not explicitly stated, at least implied in the spirit of our requests to God: “God, establish Your love, mercy and justice on this earth.”

That is why President Lincoln asked for a Thursday to be set aside to pray for healing and or worship with a feast.

When the Church focuses on Jesus Christ, the King of Heaven and remembers to place Christ at the position of supremacy, then politics and the fears related to it begin to pale.

We do not know what God is doing in the world.

But, it was a reminder to pray.

We do not have to compromise the Christian calendar to continue to pray and be a blessing to our nation. We use this Sunday to remember that Jesus is King of heaven and no nation state, no matter how powerful is going to change that.

So, let us focus a little bit more on Jesus Christ this morning. Let me re read our text starting at verse 15: ¹⁵Christ is the visible likeness of the invisible God. He is the first-born Son, superior to all created things.

The visible likeness of the invisible God. When we hear the words: “The Word of God” we find a big change in the New Testament. Up until the gospels, it was the OT scripture. After the gospels, whenever they preached “The Word of God” it meant that they were preaching about Jesus.

You see, John calls Jesus “The Word made flesh.” Jesus is God’s self portrait. We cannot comprehend the infinite God, so God gave us a sort of finite picture of God’s own self when God became the man, Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus is the Supreme description of God

Let us read on as we read that Jesus is supreme in all of His own creation:

¹⁶For through him God created everything in heaven and on earth, the seen and the unseen things, including spiritual powers, lords, rulers, and authorities. God created the whole universe through him and for him. ¹⁷Christ existed before all things, and in union with him all things have their proper place.

Different translations render these verses different ways. The Jehovah Witness bible says that Jesus was the first thing created and is a created being. But the context seems consistent with the rest of scripture that Jesus, there at the beginning of creation, was in partnership with the rest of the Trinity in the creation of the world.

Jesus is supreme in Creation because He too created the universe and all that is in it.

And then we read how Jesus is supreme in the realms of the Church:

¹⁸He is the head of his body, the church; he is the source of the body's life. He is the first-born Son, who was raised from death, in order that he alone might have the first place in all things.

Perhaps more focus has to be on this verse for us to keep proper perspective. Jesus is the head of the Church and the Church must reflect the Spirit and love that Jesus showed to humanity.

We live because of Jesus. And we place Jesus first.

Christ is supreme in the Church.

And Christ is supreme in the universe:

¹⁹For it was by God's own decision that the Son has in himself the full nature of God. ²⁰Through the Son, then, God decided to bring the whole universe back to himself. God made peace through his Son's blood on the cross and so brought back to himself all things, both on earth and in heaven.

“Through the Son, then God decided to bring the whole universe God to Himself.”

God’s purpose was to make peace and reconcile the world to God and each other.

It was so simply put to Jesus, what is the greatest command and Jesus answered with a twofold answer that He equated as one answer:

Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself.

In John 13, He said it like this: “A new and singular command I give you, Love each other.”

Jesus said in very plainly in Matthew 25 when He says that when we love the worse of humanity, we love Him. We love God by loving others.

And my thesis this morning is that we can better do that when we focus on Jesus and His calling in our own lives. His calling? Love one another.

When people see us do that, then they too will see the invisible God.