Colossians 1:15-23 • Abbot Chris Sorensen and Rev. Mary Ferguson • 10.04.2025

Our scripture reading today is from Colossians chapter 1, starting in verse 15. "The sun is the image of the invisible God, the first born over all creation, for in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together, for God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior, but now he is reconciled you to by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation. If you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel, this is the gospel that you have heard that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant." This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Please stand for the reading of the gospel. Our gospel reading for today is from the gospel of Luke, starting in chapter 15 verse 20. "So the prodigal son got up and went to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. The son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But the father said to his servants, 'Quick, bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate.' For the son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found. So they began to celebrate. The gospel of our Lord. Well, good evening, everyone. My name is Chris, and it is an honor and a privilege to open up God's word with you here this evening. And today we are continuing on our fall sermon series in the book of Colossians. I have to tell you that one of the coolest parts of my job, one of the coolest parts of leading this church is actually just leading the staff. You have an amazing staff that is serving you, an amazing group of pastors and leaders that care so deeply for you. And we are so blessed to have so many passionate, caring, talented and skillful people in our midst. And one of the places I feel this most acutely every single week is in this meeting that we have called the preaching team meeting. Maybe you've heard about it, but every single week a bunch of these pastors gather together around the table and we study the passage together that will be preached that week. It's really pretty profound. Our clergy and some of our MSM teachers, they all bring unique perspective. They're all very well educated. And so when you hear someone preach from this pulpit, you're actually hearing the collective voice of the whole preaching team. Now imagine the most intense and most scholarly Bible study that you've ever attended, and that's what this feels like every single week. Everyone in the room is an active ministry. Everyone has advanced theological and biblical degrees. It's really awesome. It's so awesome that one week I plan on actually having everyone come up and sit on the platform together and just doing preaching team in front of you because I think it'll just blow your mind. My mind is blown so often. And this week when we were looking at this passage in Colossians, I found myself completely in awe of the wisdom pouring out of people's mouths. I couldn't type my notes fast enough to keep up with all the good things being said because I only type with two fingers. I do it very quickly, but it's still just two fingers. But the truth is in this particular preaching team, I was learning things for the first time. I was hearing some things that I'd never heard before and I have a master's degree in this stuff. And it turns out that the more they were speaking, the more I was learning. And the more I was learning about some aspects of theology that I think have been largely forgotten in the American church. And so I kept asking them to prove it and then they were like throwing out St. Augustine and they were throwing out St. Thomas Aquinas and they were throwing out like giants of the early church that agreed with what they were saying. I was like, "Okay, well, I guess it's true." And it was really, really brilliant. So I left that preaching team feeling pretty overwhelmed, excited about what I needed to preach, but pretty overwhelmed. And then I ran into Mary the next day in the hallway. And Mary was one of the people that really had a lot of wisdom in this particular preaching team. And I asked her if she wanted to co-preach tonight with me. For those of you who don't know Mary, Mary is one of our teachers in the Mission School of Ministries. Specifically, she's focused on the St. Luke's Institute, which is a year-long Bible training that happens every Sunday night. A series of what, six different courses throughout the year? Four different courses throughout the year. The next one's coming up, so you could try to sign up for it. She's a really gifted teacher. If you've never had a chance to hear Mary, you're in for a treat. And so I'm going to pray for us and then I'm going to invite Mary to come up and dig into this passage with us. And then I'll come up and finish the sermon. Sound good? Something a little bit different. Let me pray for us. Father, I pray that the words of my mouth and the thoughts and the meditations of each one of our hearts would be holy and pleasing to you, Lord our Rock and our Redeemer. Holy Spirit, come. Move in this place. Move in our hearts. Help us to be able to focus. Paul is bringing us to some deep places. Help our hearts to go there. And Jesus, let me pray. Amen. Mary Ferguson. Thanks, Chris. This is so fun. And I love, one, I love that people let me talk about things that I love. And I love that I get to do it here with you guys on Saturday. It's so rare that I get to be at the service, so I'm so happy to be here tonight. So today, the passage that we read, it included the Christ hymn, which if you were here last week, Micah did just a brilliant job preaching through that passage. And as that passage concludes, Paul tells us that in the physical body of Christ, God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell and through Christ to reconcile to himself all things. All things in heaven and on earth by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. So this gorgeous hymn ends with a picture of what the whole Bible, or the whole story of the Bible is actually about. And that is the union of heaven and earth, God bringing heaven and earth back together again. And we're going to do something today that we do a lot in our St. Luke's Bible courses. We're going to see how this passage is woven into the whole story of Scripture. And we're going to start at the beginning. So giddy up, get ready for it. Go there with me. So we're going to start back in Eden before the fall. So humans were walking with God in the garden and everything that God is, life, light, abundance, goodness, love, was ours. The Bible describes these two realities, these two spaces. We have an image here as heaven and earth. Heaven, whenever you see this in the Bible, it's not just talking about the sky and the land, sort of in the biblical framework and the way that they viewed the world. Heaven is God's space and earth is human space. But the thing is, what made Eden so incredible is that these two spaces completely overlapped. And you're going to see this in the next image, that blue and that pink, it's all purple. Do you have that, Shana? Yeah, there you go. Garden of Eden, look, boom, they're both together. The problem is that in our rejection of God, these two spaces that were perfectly overlapping are torn apart. Heaven and earth become separated. And this is simply the natural consequence of not listening to God's voice. I mean, think about it, if God is the source of all life, of all love and joy, then to step outside of God's fear is to step into death, into suffering, to step outside of the source of life. The theologian John Calvin put it this way, he said, "Our happiness consists of being one with God, and there is nothing more miserable than being alienated from Him. There is no worse hell than feeling separated from God." And this is what Adam and Eve experienced when they listened to the voice of the deceiver instead of listening to the voice of the lover of their souls. This is important to notice, by the way, Adam and Eve don't feel this way because God punished them. Notice if you read the story, again, you will see it's after they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but before God comes on the scene that they feel awful and ashamed. They notice they're naked and they hide, they cover themselves, they are afraid. But friends, God who knows everything still shows up. He shows up and he meets them there, exactly where they are. Now, there are many consequences that come from listening to the deceiver, but one of the most devastating outcomes of this is that they no longer feel safe with God. They feel shame and they fear punishment. And so fear and hostility and blame creep into their relationship with one another too. There's this scarcity mindset that creeps into human experience. And there's this moment in the garden when we see God do something that looks like utter punishment or cold justice, but which is actually an expression of his deep mercy. And it's this, God exiles Adam and Eve from the garden. He sends them away. He exiles them because within the garden is the tree of life, the tree that gives them eternal life. And for them to eat from this tree and to live forever with shame and loneliness and evil, the knowledge of evil living inside them, that would be no life at all. It would be a form of living death. God wants them to live forever with him, but not like this. And we see this throughout the story of the Bible that God's justice and God's mercy are always intertwined. There's no act of justice where God's mercy does not preside. But it's still God's plan for us to be with him. And so the whole story of the Bible is about God making a way to do just that, to be with us and to bring a little bit of heaven onto earth, to make those spaces overlap again. You know, there's a common half-truth that is often said about God and which is dangerous in the ways that many half-truths are. And it is this. It's that God cannot be in the presence of sin. Have you ever heard this before? Is this like something you've heard? That God cannot be in the presence of sin. And what's true in this statement is that God and sin are in utterly different spheres. Like God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. There is no evil, no sin in God. But the real problem is actually that fallen humanity can't stand in the presence of God. Fallen creation is too weak. It's kind of like our relationship with the physical sun. The sun is all light. It's a massive ball of fire. It's so powerful. And we actually don't have the capacity to stand in the presence of the sun without getting burned, right? That is not the sun's fault. We're the ones who are too weak. We are too different, too fallen to handle the full presence of God. But when we walk through the whole story of Scripture, including the whole Old Testament, what we see is this, that God wants to be with us in his fullness, but he also wants to keep us safe and to accommodate us in our fallen state. And so this is what the temple is about. This is what the tabernacle is about. It's a way for God's presence, his full, awesome presence to be with his people, but with these layers of protection. It's protecting us because we are too weak. I also, I love, I always think about that wonderful story where God hides Moses in the cleft of the rock so that his presence can pass by. It's this way that I'm saying, I want to be with you. I want you to experience my presence, but I also want to keep you safe. And this is what we see God doing throughout the whole Old Testament. And his long patient journey with us comes to an incredible culmination in the person of Jesus. Jesus is a walking tabernacle. He is the place where heaven and earth completely overlap. And this is why the angel of the Lord says, give him the name Emmanuel, God with us, God with us. And that is what Paul is proclaiming to the Colossians. I bet you thought at this point that we were never going to get back there, but here we are. We're here back at Paul in the Colossians and Paul says, Jesus is the image of the invisible God. So Jesus reveals the heart of God, the Father. When God made us, he knit us into his heart with an unbreakable knot. And though we wander, he still longs to bring us home. The heart of this passage is one word and that is reconciliation. You know, William Tyndale, the famous Bible translator, he just made up a wonderful word to translate this word reconciliation. And his word was atonement. And in case you've never noticed, look at it. Atonement. Atonement. Atonement. It means to be made one again, to be made one. To be reconciled to God is to be one with him. Now to be clear, a lot of things happen on the cross. It's like a diamond with many facets. And in the next chapter, Paul touches on a different aspect of atonement. And Abbot, Chris is going to be preaching on that in a few weeks. But here Paul is shining light on one facet that I think we sometimes have a hard time accepting. Paul shows that one of the major problems that the cross is addressing is our alienation and our shame. In other words, friends, the problem lies in us, not in God. God sees our problems clearly enough, but he loves us anyway. The problem, we are the ones who have a problem with God. Paul says it this way. He says once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. Paul says we were enemies in our minds. You know, our very own Dr. Preston Hill is, he's writing y'all a really brilliant book on the atonement. In our preaching team, he put it this way. He said we have a tendency to think that Jesus' death changes God's mind toward us. But Paul is saying that Jesus' death changes our mind toward God. It's our minds that need changing. You know, there's a rather unhelpful telling of the story of the cross that makes it seem as though God the Father is primarily angry with us. And that God the Son loves us and pacifies the Father's anger so that he can like us again. Have you ever kind of felt or heard sort of a flavor of this? This is not new by the way. In almost every religion in the world, there is a belief that the gods are angry and there are corresponding rituals to pacify their anger. And that's honestly friends, that's a result of the fall. That's our fear. That's our shame showing up. Now to be clear, God does hate sin, but he hates it because it hurts us, because it makes us hurt one another. And God pays an enormous debt and he satisfies justice and he does all kinds of incredible things in his work of atonement. But Paul is saying there's more and it's so good and it has to do with the heart of our Father. The Father did not hate us. This was his plan all along. Paul says it this way. He says for God the Father was pleased. God was delighted. God was chuffed. You all know that British word? I love that word. God was chuffed to have the fullness, his fullness, dwell in the body of Jesus and through Jesus to bring back into union everything in heaven and on earth by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. Friends, I just want you to hear this, that the anger and the alienation is not in God, it is in us. We were enemies. We were hostile. And when we feel the consequences of this alienation, we feel punished. We feel far from God and we feel far from one another, even far from our own selves. We don't want to see how we are deceived. We don't want to see how we've hurt others. And that shame, there's a brokenness even in our very own selves. But as Henry Nowan says, when Jesus makes us like him, he transforms our hearts from hostility to hospitality. The movement of our heart is from hostility to hospitality because our God is hospitable. That is his heart. Is God so angry with our sin that he is incapable of being with us? No, for the Father was utterly pleased to have his fullness dwell in Jesus and to walk upon the ground that we walk upon and to touch us even in our brokenness. The fourth century saint, Gregory of Naziansus, he wrote about why it was that Jesus became fully human, why he became human and why he died. And he said it this way, he said, "What Christ has not assumed, he has not healed." But whatever is united to him is saved. What Christ has not assumed, he has not healed. And Christ came to heal all of us, to heal every bit of our brokenness, which means that on the cross, Jesus does not only deal with our blame, but also with our shame, with our alienation. So when Jesus is on the cross, is the Father far from him? Is the Father angry with Jesus when Jesus is on the cross? No, for this was the plan of the Father and the Son all along. The Father and the Son are doing this together. I love this painting. It's kind of a close-up of a little piece of this really famous painting of the crucifixion. And I love that we see the Father's arms open wide around the Son and the Spirit hovering over the cross between them. The whole trinity is one. Their spirit of love is one in the work of the cross. But you might ask, "But why does Jesus cry out from the cross? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" We hear this from Jesus on the cross, and it goes back to this because in the cross, Jesus assumes all of our pain, even the very worst pain we experience, which is the hell of feeling far from God, the feeling of forsakenness. And if Jesus assumes it, He also heals it. He is with us, even in our feelings of forsakenness. In becoming one with us in our death, Jesus pulls us out of that pit of death and shame, and He makes us one with Him in the resurrection. I had to throw this up. This was my late husband, Ben. This was his favorite icon. I think he just loved it so much because you see Jesus is pulling Adam and Eve out of the grave. This is a really famous Orthodox icon. And Jesus looks, he's just so strong. He's so powerful in this image. Again, our own Dr. Hill put it so beautifully in these words. He said, "God doesn't love us because He atoned for us. He atoned for us because He loves us." His love is always prior. But until we believe God loves us, union and love is not achieved. And Jesus tells us this in the story of the prodigal son. I think we all love that story because it is Jesus showing us the heart of the Father. Remember, the Father in the story loves his two sons. He loves them from the beginning of the story all the way to the end of the story, like no matter what. No matter what they do or don't do. And the truth is we often act like one of those two sons. We either believe that we could never earn our Father's love and we run away, or like the prodigal, or we believe that we have to earn our Father's love, like the older brother. And we hide in the field, feeling bitter and angry at every show of grace and mercy. And both are so far away from knowing the Father's heart. But it's when the Father comes down from His house, when He puts His sandaled feet on our soil and runs, when He disregards all of His own honor and gives up everything to be with us to pay the fullness of our debts, when He throws His arms around our broken bodies and showers us with His good gifts, this is how we begin to believe that we are truly at one with God again. Until we believe God loves us, union in love is not achieved, and the Father wants us to believe His love and to receive it and experience it. And this is why Jesus holds nothing back. You know what something is worth because of the price a person will pay for it. And Jesus says, "Look at my cross and see how much you are worth to me and to my Father." There is nothing that the Father loves more than His Son. And that is what humanity is worth to God. We are worth the price of His Son. Friends, if there is an antidote to that old burden of shame and fear, it is this. And so, I pray that you would behold your God, beholding you with the eyes of love. So, I was 14 years old when I first saw my dad cry. My dad, who was and still is my hero, was sitting on a little cot with tears streaming down his face. In his tears, I discovered beyond a shadow of a doubt how much he loved me. It all happened on this Father-Son trip. Just me, my little brother, and my dad. It was a trip that my dad had planned for a long time. We grew up in Central Florida. My brother and I went fishing almost every afternoon, and my dad decided to plan a fishing trip of a lifetime up into these remote lakes in Canada. This was a big deal because my dad was a self-made businessman who worked a lot. It always felt special when he found the time to spend with us. And the fact that he had planned an entire week to go fishing with us was maybe the most special thing that he had ever done, that I remembered as a 14-year-old. And the day came, and we flew from Florida to Canada, taking smaller and smaller planes. And all throughout that trip, my dad carried the heavier bags with all of our gear. And on that day, everything seemed fine. But the next morning, strangely, my dad encouraged my brother and I to go out fishing without him. And as it turns out, his back was hurting. When I asked him why, he said, "My back's hurting. Just go fishing without me." He didn't want us to worry, and we were young enough to not worry at first. We were just excited to go fishing. But over the next few days, I overheard him talking to different people about hospitals and how far hospitals were. The situation went on like this all week. I think he maybe tried to fish once or twice. Finally, one day, I walked into the little room within the cabin where we were staying, and I found him on his cot crying. It was such a powerful moment for me. He was in so much physical pain that the man I looked up to more than anyone in the world was crying. This is a man that I thought just was the strongest, bravest, most admirable man I'd ever known, still feel that way about my dad. So to see him crying was just very disruptive. I didn't know exactly what to feel about it. I asked him why he was crying. He says, "Well, my back is hurting." And then he actually broke down and said how disappointed he was that he thought that he was ruining the trip for my brother and I, that he wasn't fishing with us. I just stood there stunned, and then I think I started crying. But friends, I have never forgotten that moment. It was sealed in my heart forever in my darkest moments, even in those times when I rebelled against my parents. It was that moment that kept drawing me back. Seeing my dad in pain for me made it so clear how beloved I was to him. He needed a hospital. He went to the hospital when we got home. When we consider the cross and we look closely at God's deep love for us, it changes us forever. Do you see it? For God so loved the world. He so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Look closely now and know that you are loved. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you for tuning into the Mission Chattanooga Podcast. We pray this has been a blessing to you. We would love to welcome you to any of our three services on a weekend, Saturday at 5 p.m., Sunday at 9 a.m., or 11 a.m. We are located at 806 East 12th Street in the heart of Chattanooga. We hope to see you soon. In the meantime, may the Lord bless you and keep you as you follow Him this week. [Music]