© Hemant Jain
Proper 13
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday, August 4, 2019
Year C
Sometimes we can feel like holiness is a buzzkill. I know that before actually coming into the faith in college, I regarded Christians as vapid killjoys. I liked doing things that they didn’t do and my own experience proved the idea that there must be something compelling about sin for us to keep doing it. I would have taken Paul’s list of earthly things in Colossians 3:5, fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry) as a pretty good time. At least at first. At a certain point, we might begin to see how destructive these things are, how our apparent good time can leave a swath of personal destruction behind us; again, that’s what happened to me prior to my conversion. The things that were fun at one point became terrible burdens, causing conflict and drama, especially as everyone’s supposed fun bounced off each other like atoms in some kind of moral nuclear reaction. That which had seemed so compelling before had sent me headlong into disaster.
By the time we read yet more things that vex us, things even more disastrous in human relationships like anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language, by the time we see them for what they are, we might even feel like there’s no return. What can help us from that ruinous condition of being an angry idolater? You’re reading a blog post on a church website so you’ll likely be able to intuit the answer and Paul actually leads with who can help us from the wasteland of our sinful affections. He reminds the Colossians, and therefore us, that “if we have been raised with Christ” that we should “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” By the time I had set my eyes on our Lord Christ, a new joy abounded, one that went far deeper than the fleeting pleasures afforded by the earthly things that seemed so fun before.
Bumsted
Paul reminds us that in Christ we have clothed ourselves “with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator,” going on to say that “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” Our earthly habits and desires, which had caused such alienation between ourselves, not to mention between us and our Creator, are shown for what they are as the new self seeks reconciliation and true heavenly peace: a far more compelling prospect than continuing in the old ways!
– Fr. David Bumsted is rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Orlando.