30.05 | Home
Colossians 1:1-23
‘He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son’
Colossians 1:13
For a few months of 2012, I was laughed at every morning by schoolgirls.
We were spending some months in Juba, South Sudan, teaching at a theological college. The college was a short walk from our home, and so each morning, me, Lydia, and our then six month old daughter, Estie, would walk to the college together.
But there was one unique part of our walk that got the schoolgirls giggling.
I carried Estie on my back.
In South Sudan, it turned out, carrying babies on your back was not culturally normal for a man. It was understood as something mums did, but never dads.
And yet, motivated by a mixture of chivalry and belligerence, I kept going. Three months of hilarity at my expense, as a cultural norm of the UK bumped into a cultural norm of South Sudan.
Any of us who’ve travelled will know this dynamic. We look to learn and adapt to cultures we visit, but we invariably also carry our culture with us wherever we go (maybe none more so than the Brits). Where we are from shapes how we live. It shapes our choices, our words, our body language, our dress, our decisions, and our very sense of who we are. We are shaped by the culture of home.
Today we’re starting out on the letter to the Colossians. Paul is the author, alongside his mentee, Timothy, writing this particular letter out of his imprisonment in either Rome or Ephesus. Colossae itself sat in the ancient Lycus valley—a region in Asia Minor, surrounded by mountains rising form the northern and southern banks of the Lycus River. As a city, it was once large and significant (named after the Greek word kolossos, where we get the word ‘colossal’), but had since diminished, with neighbouring Laodicea and Hierapolis both being larger and wealthier. An assumed inferiority complex is likely accurate.
It is to this little community in this little city that Paul writes, aiming to reorient their ways of thinking and being around a crucial theme:
Home.
He wants the Colossians to know their origins.
We need the themes of this letter far more deeply than we can possibly imagine. Our cultural narratives put our spirituality on the sidelines of our being—understanding matters of religion to be peripheral to our inherent sense of identity and belonging. Our culture would have us believe our Christianity to be an add-on to our pre-existent sense of homeland.
Paul wants the Colossians to understand that the revolution of Jesus is entirely greater than this. He wants them to know and see and feel that their acceptance of Jesus has led to a total repositioning of who they are, where they are from, and where they are going.
He wants them to know that, through Jesus, they have a new Homeland.
God has … transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.
Where are you from? Where are your origins?
The Christian is born of heaven, reoriented to live from the heavenly world of God. The Christian lives, learning to think and feel and act and speak from the values and culture of that land in the very midst of this one. In the world but not of it. As Paul prays for them, this yearning emerges from his words—that their knowledge and wisdom and walk and fruit and works and power all be derived and inspired from the Kingdom of the Son. That the humility and beauty and peace and pace of that place inform our every step and word and thought in this one.
It’s going to look different. It’s going to be distinct. People may be surprised, inspired, critical, or amused. And yet, the culture of that world is the precise yearning that every sinful and broken heart of this world longs for. It is the culture that is perfectly embodied in the one through whom all things were created, and who is the firstborn of this inbreaking way of resurrection life, the true Homeland that is the trajectory unto all eternity to come.
Reflect:
Your home is now God’s Kingdom. Your growth as a follower of Jesus means that the culture of heaven now increasingly becomes your home culture.
Spend some time with this today. How does this affect how you live and work and rest and act today?
Pray:
Father in heaven,
What you have already done for me,
Is beyond my imaginings.
The completeness of my reconciliation to you;
The totality of my repositioning;
The wonder of my future.
And yet, Father,
In honesty,
My heart takes a while to catch up with a measure of wonder
Fit for this reality.
And so, Father,
Would you send your Spirit afresh upon me;
Renew me in the things of knowledge and truth;
Transform my ways of thinking and speaking and being,
That all that I am
And all that I understand
And all that I desire
Be from and for the wholeness of your Kingdom
And that the beauty of my Homeland
Would inspire and invigorate
My every dream and choice
And the very atmosphere of my soul.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
1 Kings 14:1-16:28 | Psalm 70