Several years ago, my extended family took a
big family vacation to Ireland, the place of the
ancestors (or at least some of them), a place that
my grandmother had dreamt of visiting for many,
many years.
In hindsight, it was an amazing vacation, but a few
days into it, after our large, intergenerational group
had spent a couple of nights in Dublin in a badly
chosen hotel perched above a pub and meandered
our way across the country on cliffside roads,
where many of us mused over fish and chips, “it is
unfathomable we don’t hear about more of those tour
buses falling off of them,” we arrived at our “home
base” for the duration of the vacation. We arrived jet
lagged, motion sick, newly aware of our new fear of
heights, and mostly having already lost our filters.
And it was raining, and it was chilly. We were a rather
curmudgeonly group.
So, while the menfolk stayed at home, researching
biking and hiking excursions that we wouldn’t take
(because grandma), the womenfolk stomped around
town in their rain boots, trying to get acquainted.
Most of us were in baseball caps having already given
up on our hair, eyes and heads cast down, looking no
more than a few feet in front of us, bickering about
silly things and still moaning about the clouds and the
rain, wondering why we didn’t go to Italy or the south
of France instead.
And then with a stroke of luck—or providence
perhaps—my teenage cousin, Anna, caught sight of a
little cottage-like shop just a ways off the beaten trail,
and we made our way down this little cobble road
to what turned out to be a little art gallery. Peering
in, we saw the painter and her easel, both covered
in paint, mostly blues and purples and blacks. It was
set up in the corner. One more step inside and we
were immersed in brightness. Bright, white walls
full of vivid painting after painting after painting of
water: shallow water, deep water, calm water, raging
water. All the colors water could possibly reflect from
sunrise to high noon to dusk to sunset and in any
given season.
We were transfixed. Our gazes softer. Our tongues
softer. Our feet softer. It was a place you were
compelled to move about slowly, sort of suspended
in time. We had spread out, each of us taking our
own path around this room, our attention captured
by different paintings, but our hearts captured by the
totality of the space and the way that it transported us
somewhere else.
When my aunt and I bumped into each other, her
shaky voice betrayed her as she struggled to name
the surprise and the embarrassment that she felt at
being so deeply moved. “I don’t know what is going
on here, Sara, but I feel like I’m going to cry.”
Moments later we were deep in conversation with
the artist, Carol, whose warmth and ease and depth
reflected her paintings. She was native to Dingle,
Ireland, and had spent many years abroad painting
landscapes, but the water itself kept calling her back
until she submitted to its claim.
We probably lingered for an hour in that gallery
and only peeled away after promising Carol that we
each planned to have one of her paintings hanging
above our fireplaces just as soon as we pay off the
trip to Ireland itself. For now, she would need to
accept payment in the form of our accolades and a
few self-conscious tears.
Transported as we were in that space, the biggest
blessing was found as we moved on. The paintings
that were so transcendent in fact were paintings
of the waters that physically surrounded us. So,
as we moved out of the gallery and back into “the
real world,” we did so with a shifted perspective.
The images of water pointed beyond the water and
beyond the moment of beholding the image. The
paintings captured a measure of the beauty that
surrounded us. Beauty that our sulking, bickering
group was apparently worthy of. We left with a new
lens. It’s a lens that the author of Colossians offers to
us as a gift, if we would receive it.
Often, we read lofty scriptural language of the type
we encounter this morning with a deep breath,
prepared to do some real mental gymnastics as
we parse the theology and the philosophy and the
ecclesiology—all of the ologies—of the text. And
we exhale once we have figured out exactly what it
means. (Or we just never exhale.)
The irony is that a text like this one wasn’t meant
to function that way, at least not primarily. It was a
hymn of the early church—or at least it was a liturgy—
known in the bones of the people and sung or
spoken not as a theological treatise to intellectually
master and repeat, but more as a piece of art to
behold and to be moved by. Old Testament Scholar
Walter Brueggeman, oft quoted from this pulpit, has
said that while doctrine closes and closes, biblical
poetry opens and opens, which we all so desperately
need. We need to “relish the images; make them our
framework of life and faith.”
The text we encounter in Colossians gives us such
an image by offering up the supreme one: “He is
the image of the invisible God. The firstborn of all
creation…” It’s known as a Christ Hymn. With the
others in Philippians, Romans, Ephesians, John,
Hebrews, and Revelation, it paints a picture of Christ
that is expansive, even universal. Timeless, even
eternal. A picture that takes us beyond the Jesus of
history—the man that some could touch—and to a time
before him and a time after him. Echoing the Gospel of
John which begins with the Word—which was with God
and was God long before it ever became incarnate in
the baby born in Bethlehem—the author of Colossians
also points to the Christ who existed beyond and
before, who exists beyond and before time. Today we
come to the end of our journey through “Scripture’s
Greatest Hits,” and we do so appropriately with a song
and a text that takes us right back to the beginning.
Christ, the firstborn of all creation. Christ, the one
in whom all things in heaven and on earth were
created. Christ, the one who is before all things and
the one in whom all things hold together. Christ, the
firstborn from the dead. Christ, the head. Christ, the
one in whom the fullness of God is pleased to dwell.
Christ, the one in whom God reconciles to God’s
self all things. Christ, the beginning, and Christ, the
end. The Word of God by which we were created,
redeemed, and are now sustained in the hope
that we might become co-creators in creating and
redeeming and sustaining. If this language sounds
even a little bit funny to you, it’s because the Western
Church has a long history of neglecting The Cosmic
Christ that is witnessed to over and over in scripture
but not bound by it. Writing in 1988, Theologian
and educator Matthew Fox said that “theologians
responded to the enlightenment by putting aside
the concept of the Cosmic Christ, and with it most
other attempts to see the world and faith in nonanthropocentric ways.” Indeed, theology “went in
search of the historic Jesus,” not a meaningless quest
in and of itself, but it was undertaken at the expense
of the Cosmic Christ. Father Richard Rohr put it a
little more starkly when he told an interviewer, “We
kind of overdid the Jesus thing.” “We” being the
Church. We might know a little more about the world
that Jesus of Nazareth lived in. We might know a
little more about such-and-such parable and how
it has been misused and misunderstood, not at all
based on the context in which it was told. We might
claim Jesus as “my Lord and my Savior.” But we can
scarcely conceive of the Christ that permeates all
things—visible and invisible, inside the church and
outside the church, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
“I believe,” Fox said, “the issue today for the third
millennium of Christianity—if the earth is to survive
into the next century—is the quest not for the
historical Jesus but for the Cosmic Christ.”
Can we recover, I hear him asking, a Christian faith
that moves us beyond the intellectual ascription?
Beyond the ethical imperative? Beyond the
therapeutic? Beyond the possession of Jesus?
Can we recover a Christian faith that seeks, finds,
and celebrates Christ in all things? Not so we can
arrogantly claim a monopoly on the truth but for
the sake of joy planted and beauty beheld and love
known? A Christian faith that is cosmic in scope?
Where do we begin? I think it has to do with the way
that we see. He is the image of the invisible God. While
the author of Colossians uses the metaphor of an
image, Jesus himself used a similar one, claiming the
title “Light.” I am the Light of the world.
But while we tend to imagine the candle shining
in the darkness, as if the light itself is the thing to
behold, Richard Rohr says, “Remember, light is not so
much what you directly see as that by which you see
everything else.”
So, maybe we begin by training our eyes to see
both God and the world around us through Christ.
Christ, the image of God, and a snapshot of
ourselves in any given moment; the good, the bad,
the ugly, the redeemable. Christ, the light by which
we see everything.
For all of its seemingly esoteric language, the letter to
the Colossians is actually quite practical. The Cosmic
Christ is always and at the same time drawing us out
of ourselves by illuminating the particularities of our
days. All those thrones and dominions and powers.
We’re drawn out in order to go back in as more faithful
versions of ourselves. If Christ is our image of God,
our light, our lens through which all is seen, how then
do we live?
I’ve been carrying around an image with me for
about ten years now. It’s of two men whose names I
do not know but whose faces are forever etched on
the backs of my eyelids. When I lived in New York
City for a year following seminary, I loved to go to the
diners—the ones that are like the one on Seinfeld.
I actually went to that one on Broadway and 110th
many a time. While they are of course open to anyone
who happens to be passing through, they tend to be a
microcosm of the neighborhood in which they reside.
Fewer tourists, more 22-year-old actresses just trying
to make it, and families sitting down for a quick bite
to eat as they juggle their careers and soccer practice
and ballet, and a lot of 80-year-old men that sit for
hours, drinking coffee and eating cake, thanking God
for rent-controlled apartments and flipping through
The New York Times.
On this particular day, I was sitting at the counter,
probably inhaling a turkey sandwich on my way
to the gym, my mind already on the next thing,
when an interaction a couple of seats down from
me caught my attention. I hadn’t noticed him until
then, but there was a man—clearly homeless—who
had just been handed a standard breakfast plate
from behind the counter: eggs, sausage, toast, hash
browns, the works. He didn’t say anything, but his
eyes bespoke gratitude.
And then in a moment imperceivable to me, the
waiter behind the counter picked up on something,
some inkling of disappointment in his recipient, and
he asked, “Is there a different way that you prefer
your eggs?” The receiver of the meal just waved him
off, but the waiter persisted. “It’s really an easy thing
for us to redo them. It’ll only take a moment. Overeasy? Sunny side up? Poached?” The man didn’t
understand these terms, and he didn’t talk much,
so this interaction went on for a bit as the waiter
described what each label meant. “Kinda runny.
Really runny. Not runny at all.” Together, they came
to the conclusion, and the waiter took the scrambled
egg plate away. And minutes later, he emerged
with a new one with eggs that were sunny side up.
Runny. And a smile spread across the receiver’s face
in recognition.
This was a diner that was known for its hospitality.
It frequently let houseless folks inside to use the
restrooms. It let them linger as they sipped on their
house coffee. The man a couple seats down from me
may have been sitting there for an hour already, just
resting his feet in the air conditioning.
But this exchange was new to me. I couldn’t recall
ever seeing one like it before—at this diner or at any
restaurant, or anywhere. It really was an easy thing
to do, as the waiter insisted. It wasn’t like a ribeye
steak was being sent back. And it may have been
an easy fix, but the moment was more about what it
communicated: I see you. You matter. As an individual.
As someone who has preferences. As someone who
probably has childhood memories around food. As
someone whose mouth waters when certain foods
are presented and whose stomach heaves when
others are, no matter how hungry you are. And we
want to get this right for you.
The man who liked his eggs sunny side up probably
received a thousand paper cuts a day from people
who only saw dirt. And laziness. And ingratitude.
People who thought they knew everything they would
ever need to know about him—except that they would
never know how he liked his eggs. The waiter must
have been using a different lens.
When Christ is Cosmic, and not just “my” Christ, or
the Christ of comfort, or the Christ of culture, but
when Christ is most truly the image of the invisible
God—the light by which we see, the lens through
which we filter it all—I believe our God rejoices.
Whether the lens adjusts our eyes and our hearts
to the beauty of the world and its creator—like the
paintings in a gallery— or enables us to see “the least
of these” as the fully human beings that they are, or
moves us to work for a world that better reflects the
God who made it, I believe our God sings. And we are
invited to join that song. Amen.