pentecost 7 year C

Amos 7: 7-17 NRSV text
Psalm 82 NRSV text
Colossians 1: 1-14 NRSV text
Luke 10: 25-37 NRSV text

Stop Press!
Lis Mullen has pointed out that Jesus is himself on the road to Jerusalem - a strong indiactor to support the reading that the priest and Levite ought to be thought of travelling in the same direction!  It highlights the contrast between how they understand the purpose of their trip and how Jesus understands his.  See her comment on this post.

“What does God require of you, O mortal, but to do do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). This is not part of this week’s Lectionary texts, of course, but the Micah question is what underlies the texts today. What is it that constitutes love of God? That is the question at issue between Jesus and the lawyer in the parable of the Good Samaritan. What is it that constitutes covenant faithfulness? That is the question at issue in Amos and in today’s psalm. What does it mean to inhabit the truth of the gospel of grace? That is Paul’s beef with the Colossian Christians. In the gospel passage and in the Old Testament texts, it boils down to this: what is the relationship between loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving neighbour?

The Parable of the Good Samarian: a key text
The picture of Jesus vs the Pharisees that we’ve probably inherited from Sunday School days is of the Pharisees as a legalistic, self-righteous bunch of heartless hypocrites whose self-interest and corruption masquerades as piety – understood as scrupulous observance of the minutiae of the Law. There’s something in this. There’s no doubt that some of the clashes between Jesus and this group are clashes over an apparent righteousness that covers up corruption and exploitation – particularly of the poorest members of society. Religious authority and power over the lives of others went hand in hand, and the Pharisees (or, more accurately, the Pharisees, scribes and lawyers) come in for some pretty blistering prophetic denunciation by Jesus.

But that’s only part of the picture. Jesus isn’t just concerned with the abuses of power – the corruption and the exploitation. He’s not just calling for a more consistent holiness among the religious leaders: he’s challenging the very notion that God ought to be understood primarily in terms of holiness and Law-observance altogether. It’s a clash, in other words, between fundamentally different understandings of who God is and what God requires of us. And what that boils down to is the question of how we are to understand the two greatest commandments – to love God and to love neighbour.

Jesus, you see, reserves his particular vitriol for the Pharisees because they are the group to whom he is theologically closest! It’s like Steve Biko and the white liberals in Apartheid South Africa: Black Consciousness didn’t see its primary opponents as the hardline racists of the Apartheid regime, but the white liberals who professed equality of all people while enjoying all the benefits of being white in an Apartheid state. They had the luxury of making all the right noises, going on demonstrations, and then returning to their homes in the white suburbs, safely segregated from the heartache, poverty and misery of the majority of the South African populace. They appeared to be on the same side as the Blacks, but they were not – and that, thought Biko, made them more dangerous to the cause of liberation and a non-racial democracy than all the rantings of the hard right, who were unmistakably The Enemy.

Jesus and the Pharisees were agreed on the two great commandments. They were agreed that faith meant that God should infuse and affect every aspect of life. They just saw God differently – and that made all the difference in the world!

The Pharisees were engaged in an admirable project. They wanted God to be Lord of the whole world. In particular, they thought that observance of the Law would hasten the Day of the Lord, on which Israel would be freed from Roman tyranny, the resurrection would happen and Jerusalem would become the centre of the world to which all the nations would stream. On that day, “the earth would be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea”. Like Jesus, in other words, they had their own vision of the Kingdom of God – a world worshipping its creator and living in right relationship to one another. How to achieve it, though?

The Pharisees’ answer was “Holiness!” God, it was known, “lived” in the Holy of Holies. God could do so only because this was where the laws governing ritual purity were most stringent. This was, if you like, the “centre of holiness” and required the most scrupulous standards of ritual purity. The closer you got to the Holy of Holies (literally), the fewer people could approach, and the more difficult it was to be ritually pure. That is why the purity laws got progressively tighter, until the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies only once a year and after going through the complex rituals of cleansing and purity. The further away you got from the “holy centre”, the dirtier the world became and therefore was a no-go area for God. God, in other words, was cooped up inside the temple, inside the Holy of Holies, because of the risk of contamination by human sinfulness.

So the Pharisees came up with a fiendishly cunning plan (to quote Baldrick of Blackadder fame): why not make everyone obey the purity laws as though they were the High Priest? In other words, why not treat the whole world (and if that seems unreasonable, let’s start with Jerusalem and the rest of Israel, at least!) as if it were the Holy of Holies? Then God would be able to “go” everywhere!

That is where the drive came from to observe the minutiae of the Law. It sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? It’s a good motive. So what’s wrong with it? The problem is that it condemns people who don’t do the necessary to being perpetually ”outside” God’s presence. These are the “sinners” – the people whose jobs, lifestyles and morals put them firmly on the outside. They were condemned. They were lost. There was no hope for them.

Jesus’ position is the classic “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here!” The motive might be great – but the fundamental premise is wrong. God’s overriding concern is not holiness, but compassion. God’s passion is not to condemn the sinners, but to seek and to save the lost. It is not holiness that fulfils the Law, according to Jesus, but love. And that’s because God’s like that!

Luke is particularly keen to make this point. His gospel begins in the “holy centre” with John’s father, Zechariah – in the presence of God. His passion narrative concludes with the temple curtain torn from top to bottom – to say, “Surprise! God’s not here!” And where is God? God is on the hill of Golgotha – the place where a holy God has no place being – communing with Jesus and enacting forgiveness!

The problem for Jesus is that the holiness code creates a conflict between the two great commandments. Look at the stories of Jesus and the Pharisees in Luke. Whenever he’s tested on the Law, it’s over an apparent conflict of loyalties: love of God, or love of neighbour. This fundamental conflict comes to a head in today’s parable. This is where the difference between the two theologies – understandings of God – comes to a head. This is a parable that is crucially important, because it exposes the differences in the understandings of who God is and what God requires of us.

Drawing the battle lines (Luke 10: 25-29)
A lawyer asks Jesus the ultimate biggie: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” We need to note the surprising thing about Jesus’ answer – surprising for those of us who live after Easter and after St Paul: “Do he Law!” Both he and the lawyer are agreed on what the Law requires: “Love God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself”. If we do that, we will live, says Jesus. So what’s the argument? The lawyer knows that he and Jesus use the same words, but that they mean radically different things to them. Jesus’ practice shows that. A common theology (expressed in quoting the Bible or doctrinal statements) hides a radical difference that is exposed in the way the each lives out their theology. It is in the practice of faith that we learn what people actually believe, not simply in theological statements or biblical quotations. So he presses Jesus: “Ah, but who is my neighbour?” This is what gives rise to the parable.

A shocking parable – but not in the way we think!
Jesus tells a story that sounded very different to his hearers than it does to us. If you’re like me, you’ll assume that the priest and the Levite who pass by on the other side of the road are obviously heartless people who haven’t an ounce of pity in them – examples, in other words, of the worst sort of religiosity. Not so!

Imagine, for a second, that the priest and the Levite are en route to Jerusalem – to do temple service. Here they are, confronted by a real dilemma: a man needs help. Their neighbour is in trouble. The Law – and human decency – requires them to stop and help. But there is an apparently higher Law that has prior claim on them – the Law to love God with absolutely everything they have and are. And loving God means going to the Temple (where God is) and worshipping – carrying out their religious duty. They cannot do that if they stop, because they will risk contracting corpse impurity! Remember: from a distance, it’s not at all clear that the man on the roadside is alive rather than dead. The laws around corpse impurity were complex: you couldn’t touch a corpse; you couldn’t go within a certain distance of corpses, because of the “contamination zone”; if the corpse was in the shade (of a tree or overhang, for example), you couldn’t allow the shadow of the tree or overhang to fall on you either!

In other words, the priest and the Levite were doing only what Jesus’ hearers would have expected of them! They were religious people who had a duty to God to be pure enough to carry out temple service. It was regrettable that they couldn’t stop, but perfectly understandable and entirely unblameworthy. And so they do precisely what is expected of them – they give the man a wide berth and pass on their way to carry out their duty to God.

Do you see how Jesus has set the situation up according to the purity laws? Yes, the two commandments to love are the most important, but, at the end of the day, the law to love God takes precedence – even if it’s at the expense of the neighbour!

It’s a common sort of “What if?” ethical dilemma for Jesus’ hearers. What they expect, therefore, is that the next person on the scene will be a Jewish layperson, who is not bound by the need to serve God in the temple and is therefore free to be neighbour to the man on the roadside. But what Jesus does is to introduce a Samaritan! It has the same sort of shock value as saying, “The along came Osama bin Laden”! Samaritans were utterly despicable. They had bastardised the faith. They wouldn’t know the true faith – the Covenant – if it jumped out and bit them on the nose!

This is the shock value. No way could a Samaritan be held up as an exemplar of the Jewish Law! This, remember, is a debate about “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” – and everyone knew that Samaritans were way, way beyond the pale!

The boundary question
The lawyer’s question (“Who is my neighbour?”) is a boundary question: “How far does my duty of love for others extend?” Look, though, at the way in which Jesus turns the question on its head: “Which of these three proved neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” In other words, Jesus’ question is, “To whom are you prepared to be neighbour?”

And look at the answer that the lawyer gives: “The one who had compassion”. The question “Who is my neighbour?” is a demand to limit compassion. Jesus wants to know how far compassion will drive us.

Loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength
For the lawyer, loving God means that there will be times when that observance apparently brings us into conflict with loving neighbour. Jesus admits no such distinction. What really fries his hearers is the clear implication that we fulfil the law to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength by loving our neighbours. What does God require of us? God requires that we be holy – but “holiness” means “being like God”. To be like God – to be holy – is to share God’s compassion. And, like the Samaritan, it is the unbounded scope of compassion that says we are God-like.

Of course, being Luke’s gospel, there are undoubted foreshadowings here of the spread of the gospel to the Gentiles. God’s love and compassion means that God’s loving, saving purposes have no boundaries or restrictions. They are for everyone. God’s love and passion to save is as extensive as creation. His grace is not limited to a few, nor is his saving presence going to be confined to the Holy of Holies!

But there is something more going on here. The debate, as far as the lawyer is concerned, is about the second commandment to love neighbour as self. Jesus, shockingly, uses a hated Samaritan as an exemplar of the Jewish Law of duty to neighbour. But if Jesus abolishes the false distinction between love of God and love of neighbour, then we must realise that the deepest shock to his hearers is that Jesus is holding up the Samaritan as demonstrating what loving God means! In other words, the priest and the Levite are wrong! We don’t have to suppose that they are compassionless – in fact, we ought to suppose that they were wracked with the conflict that they felt. The point is that they were wrong in supposing that God wanted them to deny their compassion in favour of some supposed higher duty of love for God expressed in ritual purity. God does jot place that sort of demand on people, because God is not like that!

That’s a sobering fact to think about in the light of much Christian teaching on holiness. We suppose that sanctification and Christ-likeness and “being Christian” is expressed in being “good” – in being holy and free from contamination. We’re more worried about our reputation than we are about lost people. God isn’t like that. God’s grace – God’s loving compassion – take God into the very places where God has no business being: into the darkest depths of human evil and lostness, and into death itself.

Unpopular messengers (Amos 7: 7-17)
It’s not easy to be told something about faith by someone on the “outside”. That’s what Jesus’ hearers found so difficult to swallow. Centuries before them, in the 8^th century BCE, the Israelites had to hear of their impending exile and destruction from a Judean prophet named Amos, and it didn’t go down well, either!

Amos was a shepherd from Tekoa, a small town in the border region of Judea and Israel. He’s the earliest of the writing prophets, antedating Hosea and Isaiah only slightly. His work as a dresser of sycamore trees apparently takes him over the border into neighbouring Israel – and it’s to Israel he’s sent to announce Yahweh’s judgement. “Jeroboam [the Israelite king] will die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile” (Amos 7:11).

It’s not a popular message. It’s unpopular because Israel has inoculated herself against Yahweh. A system of wealth, privilege and oppression is in full swing – but so is the cult! Yahweh is being worshipped, sacrifices are being offered, so how can anything possibly be wrong? But it’s also unpopular because of the messenger. Amos is a stranger – and how dare a stranger presume to pass judgement on Israel?

The truth is, though, that Amos has been commissioned by Yahweh. He is speaking the truth. However unlikely it is that the truth of God is going to come from the outside, the reality is that it does – and does so because Yahweh is not a God confined by boundaries. Jeroboam may be king in Israel, but Yahweh is king of the whole earth. Israel may define itself ethnically and nationally, but all peoples of the earth belong to Yahweh. Israel may understand itself as God’s only son, but God’s family embraces all the peoples of earth.

Although Yahweh’s word comes from the “outside”, it is only “outside” to a people who have lost sight of the God whose kingdom is the cosmos. There is no “outside” for Yahweh – whether “outside” be defined as Judea, Samaria, Persia, Assyria, Muslims, Hindus, humanists, communists, people of other “races” or genders or sexualities. The warning for us as communities of faith is that we have a God who speaks in unexpected ways and from the places and through the people that we least anticipate or want to hear from! One of the tasks of faithful living as God’s people is to have our ears open wide for God’s voice – however strange and offensive the accent in which we hear it.

Resistance (Amos 7: 10-17)
Quite what the significance of the plumb line is, no one is absolutely sure. Presumably it was the plumb line used by builders to check which bits of a building needed demolishing – either for wholesale clearance or in preparation for repair. Whatever it was, it signalled imminent destruction – something not lost on either Amos or his hearers!

Note where Amos is prophesying. It is in Bethel – the sacred site where Jacob wrestled with the angel. There is a temple there, and it is the royal sanctuary (7:13). In other words, Bethel, the place of God, has become a Jerusalem to Israel – indelibly associated with royal power and with the cult. It is the place where Yahweh is worshipped. But the whole power system is corrupt. Yahweh is singularly unimpressed with the cult (cf 5: 21-24). For the people, the regular worship of Yahweh (according to Yahweh’s regulations) is the guarantee both of the divine presence and of Israel’s protection. It is inconceivable that Yahweh, the national God, can be pronouncing judgement on Israel.

Israel has constructed a religious and political guarantee of security under Yahweh. They assume that the fact that Yahweh chose them alone to be Yahweh’s people is a guarantee of Yahweh’s favour; in fact, the prophet tells them in an ironic inversion of the doctrine of election, it is the guarantee that Yahweh is going to punish them (3:2)! Famine, drought, plague, infestations and military defeat should have acted as warnings that Yahweh was trying to tell them something was wrong; instead, “you did not return to me, says Yahweh” (4:6ff).

The false security that Israel has constructed for itself is nowhere seen more clearly than in their prayers for the coming of the Day of the Lord (5: 18-24). In this dramatic piece of prophetic poetry, which culminates in the glorious “But let justice flow like rivers, and righteousness like a never-failing stream”, Amos tears aside the veil of false consciousness that they have erected. “Woe to you who desire the Day of the Lord!” he warns them. “It ain’t what you think it will be! You assume that it means the day of your deliverance – the day on which Yahweh steps in on behalf of Yahweh’s favourite child like a partial, vengeful parent. In fact, because of your sin, and your resistance to any correction by Yahweh, it’s going to be the Day of Judgement … for you!”

Ultimately, Israel will be going into exile because of its refusal to hear the prophetic word from Yahweh. Instead of recognising the voice of God, Israel (in the person of Amaziah, the priest at Bethel) mobilises itself against Amos (and therefore against Yahweh) by closing ranks. Amaziah sends a message to Jeroboam, accusing the Judean infiltrator of treason. Cultic and royal authority are mobilised against Amos and on behalf of the status quo. Amos is deported. The voice of criticism and resistance is silenced – but Amos isn’t going quietly!

Prophet vs priest: challenging the status quo
The doctrine of election is dangerous, because it’s so easy to divorce election from the way in which we live with and treat our neighbours There is an enormous drive to lay claim, not to Yahweh’s grace, but to Yahweh’s favour and partiality. It’s a notion of God that hearkens back to the old beliefs that Yahweh was simply one tribal god among many; that Yahweh’s job description was to prosecute Israel’s interests against all-comers. Yahweh thus becomes (on this reading) an instrument of the state – the guarantee of the success of aggressive foreign policy (Yahweh guarantees military victory) and the legitimation of the - socio-economic order. Yahweh, the true King of Israel, becomes the puppet of court and temple.

What is significant here is the role that religion plays in an ideology of the status quo. The assumption is that worship of Yahweh – the God of the Exodus, liberator of slaves and champion of the oppressed – will act as a corrective to ensure that reality on the ground will correlate to the character of God. In other words, worship (via the priest, the temple and the cult) will ensure that socio-economic arrangements will be just and reflect the character of Yahweh.

That’s the assumption. The reality is that socio-economic forces have an ideological power that all too easily enlists religion in the service of the status quo – a status quo in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and that’s apparently okay. It’s the “All things bright and beautiful” syndrome, with that appalling verse that goes ”The rich man in his castle/the poor man at his gate/God has made them high and low/and ordered their estate”! It is terrifyingly easy for the gospel of grace and justice to be dragooned into service of its very opposite – to give credibility, legitimation and justification to horrendous injustice and oppression. That is what happened in South Africa under Apartheid, and in this country in respect of the slave trade.

This is where the role of the prophet comes in. The prophet is the “voice from outside” – the voice of Yahweh that is able to break into the self-enclosed circle of oppression and ideology and expose it for what it is. The prophet’s role is to create the space for Yahweh’s word of liberation and salvation when the status quo has managed to silence not only other dissenting voices, but even the capacity to imagine things being any different!

This is the role that Amos plays in today’s passage. Amaziah, the priest at Bethel, is totally in hock to Jeroboam. There is no liberating word from slavery and oppression coming from the temple at Bethel: the temple is “the king’s sanctuary”; the place where the king can go in absolute comfort to find Yahweh’s “Yes” to a system that is unjust and exploitative. Yet the temple should be the very place that an oppressive ruler fears to go! This is where he should expect to hear Yahweh’s “No!” to such policies. But that is not how it is. Even the cult has been sucked into the system and silenced – indeed, it has become the apologist for the regime.

We ought to stop and look at ourselves. We as churches are very fond of talking about “us” and “them outside” – as though being Christians somehow inoculates us against the ideologies of the day that discriminate against the many on behalf of a few. I hear the churches in this country wringing their hands about the pervasive and bad effects of consumerism, without recognising the extent to which we have all drunk deeply of its wells! We lament the breakdown of community and social cohesion and the rise of a selfish, shallow, materialistic individualism – yet the churches as a whole provided no consistent, alternative, prophetic vision to Thatcherism and the emergence of free market eco-politics. The question that demands our vigilance is “Where is the prophetic voice of God to come from? Where must we listen to hear it?” That vigilance is demanded by the recognition that human beings have a remarkably dangerous capacity to shut out the critical, liberating voice of God that challenges our socio-economic arrangements. Faith is no guarantee that we will get it right. Being the Church is no guarantee that we are always part of the Kingdom: we can, with devastating ease, become part of that from which the world needs saving.

Religion and justice: Amos/Psalm 82
Religion tips into ideological legitimation of evil when worship is divorced from the practice of justice and righteousness – when love of God is set against love of neighbour. And the key is how we treat the very least in our society. Yahweh cannot be worshipped while we do injustice. When that happens, worship becomes an offence to God. Look again at Yahweh’s words in Amos 5: 21-23. The psalmist, in today’s psalm, echoes God’s anger: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked” (vv 2-4).

Worship is always a celebration of who God is. It is the place of orientation and re-orientation for a people whose citizenship is not of this world. “This world”, however, does not mean some other place! It means that we are not citizens of the world as it is, but of the world as God intends that it should be. We spend our weeks in a world constructed without reference to the God who hears the cries and groans of the slaves, the weak, the needy, the orphans and the widows – the One who hears the voices of the voiceless. Daily living dulls our senses and paralyses our imaginations. Worship is the time to re-mind ourselves of who God is. It is the space in which to hear God’s declaration that things do not need to be the way they are. It is the place of nourishment – through worship, Word and sacrament – to feed and prepare ourselves for the daily task of transforming the world into what God intends – for the task of doing God’s will on earth.

Re-minding ourselves: Colossians 1: 1-14
“Hearing”. “Comprehending”. “Learning”. “Knowing”. “Understanding”. Look at how Paul’s opening greeting to the Colossians is peppered with these sorts of verbs. You would be forgiven for thinking that what Paul is doing here is a bit of concentrated theological education – a sort of “Christian Beliefs 101”! It sounds academic, theological and cerebral. It sounds like much of the “theological-speak” in which we couch some of our Church policy statements – a sort of “tipping the hat” to language about faith, in order to get down to the nitty-gritty of what we actually want to say.

If we read Paul like that, we’re missing the point. What he’s doing is engaging in an exercise of re-minding the Colossian Christians of what it’s all about. Not only “reminding”, but “re-minding”. Faith is not primarily about a set of beliefs (though clearly, there are things we believe); rather, it is about an orientation – a way of being in the world. It’s about how we think about God, worship God, view ourselves and the world in the light of who God is. What Paul has in his sights is not theological statements they might come up with if asked to put up a notice of “What this Church believes”, but how the Colossian Christians actually live – how they interact with one another, treat one another, live in society, deal with one another, how they are part of their local communities, how they do politics, what message they want to give about Jesus to others, what makes them tick.

Paul recognises that life takes a toll on faith. If Christian faith means living in the here-and-now by the standards of the “not yet” of the Kingdom, then faith is sometimes hard to sustain. It’s not that we might suddenly give it all up as irrational nonsense, so much as have the edges blunted and rounded until it’s indistinguishable from everyone else’s everyday. Then faith becomes just one cultural expression of being Colossian – or British, or whatever.

The Colossians have slipped into a sort of “pick-‘n-mix” faith – a blending of Christianity with Gnosticism and other belief systems that were going round at the time. And they’re very comfortable with it, thank you very much! They aren’t the sorts of people who are heresy-hunters – the Grand Inquisitors and self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy who are always looking for signs that people aren’t “sound”. But then, neither is Paul! Paul isn’t concerned to have an academic argument about Christianity vs Gnosticism or anything else: what he is concerned about is the dynamic between faith/beliefs and actual living. What we believe about God has enormous significance in shaping how we live and act in the world – and Paul is passionately committed to the difference that Jesus makes. “Tell me your politics,” said Dorothee Solle, and I’ll tell you what god you believe in!” Paul would be right with her!

Paul’s purpose, then, in rehearsing what is important about Christian faith, is to re-mind the Colossians about what really matters. It’s about re-orientating themselves – getting back on track. Not for the sake of orthodoxy, mind, but in order to live as God intends they should! And that’s not about slavish obedience to some set of divine rules and regulations, but in order that the Church at Colossae could engage more faithfully in God’s saving mission.

It’s only actually in the final verse of today’s passage that Paul begins his theological re-minding, actually: the preceding verses are fundamentally a prayer that the Church will bear the fruit of the seed that has been planted – the Good News of Jesus Christ. Note that this is an organic image. Christian faith is not a “philosophy” or “human tradition” (cf 2:8) (by which Paul means that the primary purpose of preaching, for example, is not to startle and amaze people with academic brilliance) but a seed – something living that has been planted in order to germinate, grow and bear fruit. In other words, the purpose of faith – discipleship of Jesus Christ – is to make a difference in the world and to the world. In the words of the United Reformed Church’s Catch the Vision statement, it is so that we become “God’s people, transformed by the gospel, making a difference for Christ’s sake”.

Faith does make a difference. Whether we realise it or not, says Paul, to choose to follow Jesus Christ is to become part of a struggle between competing powers. There is what he terms “the power of darkness” – all the things that drag us down and trap us in cycles of despair and death. He terms these elsewhere “principalities and powers”. They are the ways in which we make our world without reference to God. Human experience says that we create monsters: we discover that our own creations have powers to trap and enslave us. God’s mission is thus a rescue mission – a mission of redemption and liberation. “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (v14).

Discipleship, therefore, is enrolling in the power struggle for Life over death. Faith is not some comfortable, academic, individualistic realm of the head; it is a public engagement in God’s salvation project of transforming the death-dealing world we have made into the Life-giving kingdom of his Son.

Paul uses “head-language” because he is ministering in the Hellenistic world in which this was the public discourse. The Hebrew world language is “heart-language”. If we translate what Paul is saying to the Colossians into the heart-language of Amos and of Jesus, he is calling them back to their first love: “You are shaped by what you love. You fell in love with God-in-Jesus: do not be seduced by the other clamouring voices that want to turn you into someone else altogether. Watch out – these voices have power! So let me remind you about the great Love of your life!”

How do we do that? How do we keep re-minding ourselves, week by week, about the faith in which we are to grow? How do we keep that faith alive, and not be seduced, or allow it to become the justification for “this world” rather than the proclamation of the hope of the Kingdom? The problem is that we forget who God is. The answer is the constant rekindling and nurturing of memory – of the stories of God. We rehearse again and again the stories of salvation – the God who hears the groans of the slaves in the brick pits of Pharaoh; the Exodus God; the God who is with God’s people in exile; the God who brings them back; the God who comes in compassion and grace in Jesus Christ; the God who enters into the deepest darkness of human existence to seek and to save God’s lost children; the God who dies on our behalf; the God who speaks a Word of resurrection into the nothingness of our chosen godforsakenness. These are always stories of people – people who are victims of the ways in which we make our world. God’s passion is for these people first. It is God’s compassion and grace that has found us and saved us: we cannot allow our neighbours any less. We cannot live in any other way than to do justice, love mercy and follow humbly after our God.

Amen.

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