YOUR LIFE IS HIDDEN IN CHRIST[i]

Isaiah 40.27-31   Psalm 130   Colossians 3.1-17   John 15.1-11

August 12, 2012

What do Christians have in common with frogs, snakes, turtles and seals?    Certain frogs, snakes, and turtles are amphibian as are seals, able to live both on land and water.  Christians, as Paul tells the Colossians, live on earth; however, we must set our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.  Christians must live in two worlds—the earthly world and the not earthly world, described metaphorically as the place where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, meaning the world where Christ reigns in the power of God.      

Frogs, snakes, turtles and seals are perfectly adapted to living amphibian lives.  They seem to have no trouble living in two worlds of water and land.  But it is not so easy for Christians.  Amphibian living for Christians comes with a large dose of tension, anxiety, and struggle.  Someone has compared living the Christian life to what a rope feels like, being pulled in a game of tug of war.

Paul was keenly aware of how we are the rope in a game of tug of war.  On the one hand he exhorts fellow converts to “put to death what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry….anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk…[lying and discrimination].”  On the other hand, Paul urges, “put on…as God’s chosen ones holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, patience, [forbearance, forgiveness, love, and thankfulness].”  Christians are folk whom God has called to be holy and beloved—as earth-bound beings!  We live amphibian lives, set upon and shaped by contrary and contradictory forces, caught between sinking into earth-bound habits and rising up to godly behavior.   It is no surprise that tension, anxiety and disappointment meet us at every turn.

Those who criticize Christians are fond of pointing out our flip-flop living at every opportunity.  They take pleasure in the observation that many non-Christian folk behave in ways no different from Christians.  Their morals appear to be just as good as ours.  And sometimes better.

The story is told of a group of American and European civilians who were caught in the Far East in the early days of World War II and were imprisoned by the Japanese—missionaries, teachers, diplomats, doctors and nurses, businessmen and their families.  Harsh living conditions in the camp were eased by the occasional delivery of International Red Cross packages to the prison.  The Japanese guards usually allowed the prisoners to decide how to distribute the precious resources.  On one such occasion the packages came from the American Red Cross.  When the Americans insisted that only they get the benefits, the Europeans revolted.  Finally, the Japanese guards had to intervene and decree that the care packages be distributed equitably throughout the camp.  So-called “western” commitments to freedom and equity and fellowship and sharing of resources withered and died.  The rules of fair play inculcated by breeding and education and station melted away, and it was left to the barbaric Japanese to ensure that everybody in the camp benefited equally.[ii]  Point taken.

I’ll grant you there is a gap between what we profess and how we perform.   Surely we take up living a holy life with a large dose of tension, anxiety, and struggle.  Nevertheless, I am persuaded that God does not intend for our flawed record to make us ashamed of ourselves.    The reason why we are to live the holy life with confidence is found in a sentence of what Paul wrote to the Colossians.  “For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

Something has happened to us that fundamentally changes our relationship to this world.  You have died.  It refers to our coming to the water of baptism, the sacrament of water that dramatizes our death in Christ and our new birth in him, that sacrament every one of us has gone through who comes to the Lord’s Table.  We have died and our new life is hid with Christ in God.  We do not yet know how we will turn out.  We see ourselves through a glass darkly, but then face to face.

Something that is hid carries with it the notion that it is not available for ordinary use.  Something that is hid carries with it the notion that it is being protected for safekeeping.  Something that is hid carries with it the notion that we, at this moment, do not know everything about it.  Something that is hid carries with it the notion that you do not see all of what there is.  You cannot make a judgment upon the integrity of what there is based only on what you see.  Something that is hid carries with it the notion that it will be discovered eventually, unwrapped, brought out into the open.

Your life is hid with Christ.  That means your life is fundamentally not open to inspection and evaluation.  It is bound up already with Christ’s life. Your life is destined to match up perfectly with the resurrected life of Christ.  At the moment it is hidden away.  Kept for safekeeping.  Uniquely you, hidden away, but mysteriously growing, wonderfully repairing, increasing from strength to strength up to Christ’s full stature.  A transcendent you hidden away.

Certainly, every day is a tug of war, an awkward flipping and flopping around trying to live as amphibians.  Every day is a putting to death and a putting on.  It’s a strenuous life, yes, but a strangely relaxed kind of strenuousness.  The side that wins is already known.  The days of flipping and flopping around have a set quantity and then will be no more.  We have a gigantic surprise to look forward to.

You have died. There is nothing morbid or mournful to be taken from this statement as bald as it is.  In fact there is lots of spiritual comfort to be found here.  So you have those moments where your life does not differ in any way from death.  I’m not going to deny your pain, agony, depression, but might there not be some lessening of your fear to know that you have died already?  However bad it gets, the worst is already over.    So we can get another grip on what is going down around us and in our own life and struggle on.

And when we look upon Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech who can fail to be shocked by the horror of death on every side?  Who can fail to be alarmed?  Who can suppress the thought that we are in the jaws of impersonal and implacable forces that are out to get us?  Surely all of this is true.  But, wait a minute.  We have died already.  In that realization there is some buffer against the shock of horror, the alarm and fright, the terror that comes with death.  If when looking round, we see only death, we can make a difference in how we respond because we have steeped ourselves in the conviction that we have died already.  If the fact that we have died already buffers the shock of horror, we can respond with compassion much more quickly.  Come to think about it, because we have died, we have in it in our power to bring something extraordinarily helpful to even the most gruesome of situations.

This insight was brought home to me one summer on mission trip to Ganado, AZ, where Presbyterians have an established church and medical ministry that has existed for over a century with members of the Navajo Nation.  One evening as our youth were conducting a Vacation Bible School, I struck up a conversation with a young Navajo father and ruling elder in the church.  I learned that in addition to his day job, he was a volunteer fire fighter and EMT.  He told me that when his crew was called out on automobile fatalities, he was especially needed by his non-Christian Navajo fire fighters in dealing with bloodied and broken bodies.  You see, because of his Christian beliefs, he did not share the Navajo-way about the negative force radiating out from dead or bleeding bodies.  Thus he was better prepared to confront severely injured or dead persons and extract them carefully because he had no fear of becoming spiritually unclean.  You have died, says Paul.  Have no fear and “man-up” when the job calls for it.

If you have watched any part of the London Olympics, you cannot fail to be impressed with the fabled English imperturbability that has actually functioned as a kind of bed rock to support all that is going on.  You have probably seen on TV the signs that appear everywhere in London shop windows: “Keep Calm; It’s Only the Olympics.”  This message, as you may know, is a takeoff on the famous watchwords “Keep Calm and Carry On” that kept the British Isles focused throughout the long, drawn out years of World War II, where for a crucial time England faced alone the might of Hitler’s Germany.

I hear in both the original slogan and its updated Olympic version a strong undertone of a relaxed kind of strenuousness.  And that is just what Paul is driving at when he says, “You have died and your life is hid with Christ in God.”  The ultimate victory is banked away for you already.  That leads to the relaxed part of the picture.  But ultimate victory is the ultimate stimulus to claim as much of that victory in the here and now as you can by living courageously and sacrificially the new life of Christ in which you are hid.  The rest of what’s in store you and I will know soon enough.