“Christ Is All and In All”
“Christ Is All and In All”
Year C Eighth Sunday after Pentecost July 31, 2022
City Beach Service
Psalm 107:1-9, 43 Colossians 3:1-11 Luke 12:13-21
Pastor Andy Kennaly, First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho
Don’t you love looking out over water? There’s a reason waterfront property is expensive. It’s very nice to live near this type of shore and have lake access for boats, swimming, and fishing. Unobstructed views of the water and waves offer a relaxing sense of calm, peace, and rest. To take it easy in a lawn chair by a lakeshore is what many people would call, “Living the dream.” City Beach, parks, and other public spaces like this help ensure that everyone has access to waterfront. Not only reserved for the wealthy few, public lake access gives everyone a way to experience part of life that can only be felt by doing what the choir sang about, “Wade in the water.”
As lovely as the shore is with amazing scenery of mountains, river, and sunshine sparkling on the water, in our western economic system there’s that old saying, “You can’t eat the scenery.” Money, property, and possessions translate into power and privilege, and it’s been this way for at least 4,000 years. Our society still protects the wealthy few. Yet 2,000 years ago Jesus himself warned the crowds against this type of system. This morning we read about the rich fool coming to him over an inheritance issue with his brother. He likely wanted more, and Jesus wouldn’t go there.
Earlier in Luke, in chapter 9, Jesus is praying in private, away from the crowds, but his disciples were with him. He asks them some questions and Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah of God. Then Jesus shares about the cost of discipleship, and how this humble path involves suffering. Then he asks in verse 25, “What good is it if someone gains the whole world, yet loses or forfeits their very self?”
That someone’s essence, being of God, could be corrupted by greed, is tragic. It’s rather easy to “forfeit their very self.” Now, in chapter 13 Jesus warns the crowds that “life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Tell that to the American dream, a culture based on consumer spending, the very materialism people like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. resisted as he echoed the teachings of Jesus in his ministry.
But it’s not only greed that can trip us up. Paul has quite the lists in Colossians, things like fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth, along with greed which he equates with idolatry, replacing God in ones’ life with lesser things. And we didn’t even read the lectionary’s passage from Ecclesiastes about “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” These passages point to selfishness and the limits of an unhealthy ego that promotes what we might call, “the false self” rather than our True Self in Christ.
Our True Self has no need for greed because we find satisfaction in God alone. God’s grace is sufficient, grace alone. It’s like that last line of this parable from Jesus about “those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” To be “rich toward God” indicates an awareness, an awakening to grace that snaps us out of those idolatrous traps and reminds us that our essence isn’t opposed to God, but is of God. Our True Self is “rich toward God,” like Paul talks about to the Colossians, to “those raised with Christ,” that set their minds on higher things and realize they “have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Christ is our life and is revealed through our living to God’s glory. This unity is so amazing that it exposes false narratives of dualism, dialectical thinking, judgment, and binary either/or models. He says, “you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.” Now as we look out at this view, just this small piece of creation tips us off that God’s image is dynamic and diverse and collaborative and perpetual even through finite expressions. In that ‘renewed knowledge’ that Paul talks about, Christ is all and in all.
As Franciscans put it, “Christ is in all things and all things are in Christ.” Now look out at the scenery only rather than view it through economic lenses as a commodity or something that gets filtered through profit and loss, which is to view “it” as an object; rather, invite God to open your heart to see in ways that subjectify, that look for Christ’s very presence as the subject getting expressed through the diversity and amazement of all things created in and through Christ. With your heart vision, you can see into the water, and beyond the blue sky. This is a cosmic vision that notices gravity, planetary rotation, movement through the universe, ice ages that come and go and shape these very mountains as we participate in Earthly ways with Spirit that gets expressed through matter over eons. This is a type of renewing for our mind, to experience connection, relationship, and the Love of God at the core of covenant life that is not constrained spatially and has found time freedom emerging in ways that integrate all of life together.
As we sit along the shore, we come alongside the Psalmist who helps us declare, “O give thanks to the LORD, for the LORD is good; for the LORD’s steadfast love endures forever. Let the redeemed of the LORD say so,” those the LORD gathered in from the lands. Notice in the passage about the rich fool, the land is abundant and produces an amazing harvest. The fool sits back and selfishly hoards this abundance and loses his life.
May we continue to learn how to open our hearts to God and claim our True Self in Christ. May we continue to learn how to see beyond selfish limitations and self-imposed barriers that blind us to God’s glory given in Christ, who “is all and in all.” May we be “rich toward God” and turn attention and awareness to the Spirit’s living Presence in each moment; and learn spiritual disciplines to help us do this. May we pray that humanity not be foolish, that culture gets freed from selfish greed and cycles of destruction as blinded hearts view the Earth as a resource to be exploited for short-term profit. May we wake up, especially as so much hinges on what we do in the immediate future for a healthy world.
May we, like the Psalmist, be delivered from distress, led directly to healthy habitation, to give thanks to God for steadfast love, and wonderful works. May we not only have renewed knowledge, but may we be wise and give heed to these lessons that are thousands of years old. And as the Spirit shares heavenly vision in Christ, may God be glorified, now, even as forever. Amen.