Rev. Doug Floyd

Pentecost +9 2025 – Christ is the center
Rev. Doug Floyd
Colossians 2:16-23

Last week, Fr. Les reminded us of the center of Colossians. In chapter 2, verse six and seven we read, Therefore, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and firm in your faith just as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. (Col. 2:6-7, NET)

Jesus is the center.

Jesus is the center of our Christian faith and life.

Jesus is the center of Scripture.

Jesus is the center of all creation.

And yet, He is often displaced. As simple as this may sound, there are all sorts of ways that He is displaced. Politics can become the center of our lives. Finances can become our center. Children can become our center. These and other areas can easily become the focus of our lives instead of Christ. We don’t have to ignore any of these areas. Instead, we must learn to think of them in light of Christ. The late theologian Ray Anderson speaks of the inner logic of the Gospel. The Gospel helps us to see how all things are ordered in relation Christ.

It is easy for churches to de-center Christ. I love all the various streams of our Christian faith and have learned much from various streams. Yet, I’ve also seen some people can so focus on one aspect of their church that Christ becomes secondary to one key trait. I love Eastern Orthodoxy and have read deeply in it. Once I ate lunch with some Orthodox friends, they asked me, “Knowing what you know, how can you not become Eastern Orthodox?” My answer wasn’t too impressive. “I never felt like I was supposed to.”

In the late 80s, I worked for a Black Pentecostal church. Many of us had the strange idea that we were the only ones doing the work of Christ in the city. Our particular form took precedence over Christ. I used to think my passion and fiery preaching would reform the Southern Baptist Convention. I had to learn the hard way not to think more highly of myself than I ought.

But Christ my Savior is worthy to receive glory and honor and power. He is moving in the lives of people and churches and schools and government in ways that I cannot begin to grasp.

I have worshipped with Christians across this community and have discovered my Savior is there, working in the lives of the people, shaping the community as a dwelling place for His glory.

Over these last few weeks, we’ve emphasized how very ordinary was the church of Colossae. It could very well be that their ordinariness is the secret sauce of their community. They know that they “once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds.”[1] But Jesus “has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present [them] holy and blameless and above reproach before him.[2] In their ordinariness, they recognize their dependence on Christ.

Jesus is the center.

Other groups and false teachers might try to decenter Christ. They may mean well, but they emphasize ideas and rituals and experiences that refocus the life of faith. In one way or another, humans are really good about finding ways to worship ourselves above all. Eugen Rosenstock Huessy used to emphasize that the great gift of Biblical faith is God’s “No to humanity.” No we are not God. No we are not superior because we have knowledge. No we don’t get special recognition for practicing Sabbath, for fasting, for following the rituals of Anglican worship perfectly. We are not more important because we make good money, and we are not more holy because we’ve chosen the path of poverty.

Our spiritual experiences don’t make us more celestial than our neighbors. Our disciplines of faith may enrich us but do not make us more holy than the person beside us. It is Christ alone for the glory of God alone.

In today’s reading, Paul’s explains that turning to heightened spiritual experiences through fasting, beholding and worshipping angels, and having great visions beyond the veil can puff us up and separate us from the body, “not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.”[3] Imagine if your arm started growing and growing and growing. The body couldn’t support it. The arm could no longer function in conjunction with the body. If anything, this giant arm would become a disability. This is what happens when one trait or one gift is emphasized above all the gifts within the community.

This image of the body of Christ appears in other letters. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul writes, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” [4] All the various parts of the body need one another. All the members of the body are one whole.

Even as Paul describes the body of Christ, he is helping us to see the mystery of the Triune God. One God, Three Persons: Father, Son and Spirit. When we speak of the work of the Son, we are not ignoring the Father and Spirit. For all three work together as God. Gregory Nazianzen writes,

No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any One of the Three I think of Him as the Whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking of escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of That One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the Rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the Undivided Light.[5]

Our Triune God has welcomed us into this communion of love.

At the same, He puts us into family, the church. We say Christ and acknowledge the work of the Father sending Christ, and the movement of the Spirit going before Christ and coming after Christ. This communion of love helps us to understand how we live in a communion of love with God and one another.

Christ is the head of the church, the life of His Spirit enlivens us corporately. As Paul writes in Ephesians,

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.[6]

He gathers us up as slaves from Egypt and breathes new life into us. We are no longer dead in sin but living children. And get this, He has “made us alive together with Christ.” Made alive together. He has raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.The inner communion of the Triune God shapes the inner communion of the people of God. We are raised together. We are seated with Him together. One Body. One People.

Now and in the ages to come, He will reveal the immeasurable riches of His grace in us together. One Body. One People. One Church. As a local expression of the church, we are bound together. When writing the Corinthians, Paul responds to some who want letters of recommendation. That would be like recommendations people write about us on LinkedIn.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians, “You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all.”[7] If you can hear this, we also are the letter of recommendation for Paul’s ministry. We are bound to him through the wisdom God has spoken to us in him. In that sense are evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are a living witness of the Risen Lord and we are being changed from glory to glory.

As a local body of believers, we are bound to Christ. He is our center. In and through Christ, we are bound to one another in love. At the same time, we are bound to the communion of saints across the ages in Christ. He is the head. Christ is the center. We are not trying to find ways of getting ahead, getting more glory than others. In fact, we are look for ways to celebrate the people around us.

Thus, Paul can exhort in Philippians, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”[8] Each of you are gift and Christ is revealing his glory in and through you. At the same time, He is calling you and me to honor and serve those around us.

As we refocus Christ as center, as our head, we see our world as a gift of Christ and as a revelation of His glory. Whether we participate in politics, arts, music, film, and of course our children and grandchildren, we can see all these in and through Christ.

The Celtic peoples have a long history of writing praise poems to people. They saw it as worship of the Lord. Here is part of a mid-thirteenth century poem defending praise poems;

“To praise man is to praise
the One who made him,
and man’s earthly possessions
add to God’s mighty praise.

All metre and mystery
Touch on the Lord at last,
The tide thunders ashore
In praise of the High King.[9]

Thus the 20th century Welsh poet, Bobi Jones, can write praise poems to the people around him and consider this praise of God. Here is an excerpt from his poem “The People I Have Loved.”

Come breeze’s breath, that I may praise the people I have loved so freely,
The children with children’s ignorance gift for possessing wonder,
The lads and the lasses in their heathery summer of fun and in earnest
Their beauty of believing. I know they can be nothing always but
Right. Come help me in the presence of my countless loves:
Middle-aged people who have turned the ideals of their youth
Into the trenches and fashion their lives, and old people
I have loved patriots, philanthropists, saints. Once in a while
My hearts sobs within me after them
From loved of their singing and sorrowing. When their merriment
And their grief beat over me, I knew I could do no less than sweat for a time
That the magic that made them a net might remain for always.

So let us rejoice in Christ’s redeeming grace. He has rescued us from sin and death and opened our eyes and ears to the glory of God all around us. Let us give thanks for the people here today, for our families, our parents, our children and our grandchildren. Let us rejoice in our country, our leaders, and all the ways God’s blesses us. Let us rejoice in all these people and things as reminders of the abundance of God’s love revealed in Christ.

Christ is the center. Christ the head. Christ is our all in all.

[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Col 1:21.

[2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Col 1:22.

[3] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Col 2:19.

[4] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), 1 Co 12:12–13.

[5] Gregory Nazianzen, “Select Orations of Saint Gregory Nazianzen,” in S. Cyril of Jerusalem, S. Gregory Nazianzen, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, vol. 7, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894), 375.

[6] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Eph 2:4–7.

[7] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), 2 Co 3:2.

[8] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Php 2:3–4.

[9] A.M. Allchin, Praise Above All: Discovering the Welsh Tradition, University of Wales, Cardiff, 1991