When I think about ‘giving thanks’ – and reading the book of Colossians you are prompted frequently to think about giving thanks, I am reminded of a short poem by American writer and children’s author Judith Viorst. It’s called ‘Thank you Note’ and it goes like this:
I wanted small pierced earrings (gold).
You gave me slippers (gray).
My mother said that she would scold
Unless I wrote to say
How much I liked them.
Not much.
And I wonder if – if you or I, if we were to sit down and write the book of Colossians – a book that is effectively a ‘thank you note’ for the gift of the church, would we also feel like writing, “Not much.”
We might be thinking about the appalling revelations of the past few decades, that not only was abuse perpetrated by people in trusted positions in the church, but this abuse was also systematically covered up by the church. Or thinking about the 2021 Census data revealing that those who identify as Christian are now in the minority, down from 52% in 2016 to 44%; that the dominance and the influence of the institutional church is waning. We might be grieving the changes in church life – smaller congregations, fewer volunteers, a narrower range of church programmes. We might be thinking about people we know – LGBTIQ friends and family – who have been hurt by the church or drawing on our own experiences of communities that have been less than loving.
We wanted, God, small, pierced earrings (gold) and you have given us slippers (grey). How then do we give thanks for the church?
There are some differences between us and the church in Colossae. We live in the 21st century and Christianity has grown, as the passage predicted, throughout the whole world. They lived in the first century, in south-east Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and Christianity was very very new. Much of this letter then is dedicated to working out what it is to be Christian, to be the church. Did it mean becoming Jews or, as Jonathan Miller famously said, “not really a Jew – just Jew-ish” – or is it entirely new?
But for Christians in Colossae and for Christians in Canberra, the writer has the same message: You have received the word of truth. You have the heard the gospel that Jesus came in human form and in his death on the cross reconciled all humanity, all creation, with God. In that message you have all you need for forgiveness of the past, maturity in the present and hope for the future.
We have all we need to be the church. This gift has been given to us to be the church, and now we are to respond with thanks – in our worship and in our living.
Firstly, the writer (who I am going to assume is the apostle Paul) encourages us to give thanks regularly. Verse 3 says; “In our prayers for you we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ…” A better translation here than ‘always’ is ‘when we pray for you…’ (When I was 16 years old, I went through a stage of interpretating this phrase literally and trying to pray continuously; to pray without ceasing, as it says in 1 Thessalonians 5:17. We were in London, and I remember sitting on the train and trying to pray for every person I could think of and every person in the carriage and every person getting on and every person getting off! It was exhausting, and not humanly possible!) Tom Wright writes, “It is likely that the word ‘always’ indicates regularity, not that such prayers occupied all Paul’s waking hours; he does not haphazardly or only when the mood strikes him, but keeps regular hours of prayer (probably morning, noon and evening), and the church in Colossae is always mentioned.”
Is the church in Canberra – this church – always mentioned in your prayers? Do you pray regularly – not haphazardly or when the mood strikes you – but in some consistent way for us? Can I suggest that being thankful regularly for this community might be a way to becoming more thankful for this community! Can I encourage you to give thanks to God for this church?
Secondly, we are encouraged to give thanks for the church because the church is God’s work! Verse 11 onwards: May you… “joyfully [give] thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”
There is a little book I come back to often. It was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer while he was director of an illegal (i.e. not part of the church that was recognised by the Nazi government) seminary for young pastors in Pomerania. There, until the seminary was closed by the Gestapo, they shared a common life and Bonhoeffer writes about it in – Life Together.
“Christianity,” he writes, “means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ…. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of years Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.” And he outlines this thought in three ways:
Firstly, to be a Christian is to recognise that we need Jesus. In Christ we find, as we just read, redemption, forgiveness of sins, a future in the kingdom of God. Or as verse 21-22 says, “You who were once estranged and hostile…he has now reconciled…” But we need others, Bonhoeffer writes, because “the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s word to him/her…[who is the] bearer and proclaimers of the divine word of salvation.” We need others because others speak to us of Jesus. We need the church because it shares Jesus with us. We give thanks for the church because we need Jesus.
Secondly, we can only come together as the church because of Jesus. “Through him,” verse 20, “God was please to reconcile to himself all things….” “Without Christ” Bonhoeffer writes, “we would not know God, we could not call upon Him, nor come to Him. But without Christ we also would not know our brother [or sister], nor could we come to him [her]…Now [we] can live with one another in peace, [we] can love and serve one another, [we] can be one.”
Thirdly, through Jesus our communion with God and each other is of eternal quality. Through the incarnation, Colossians 1 says, Christ has become one with us, and has made us one with him. Verse 18: “He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead…” Verse 19: “In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” Now that we are in Christ, this fulness also dwells in us.
Bonhoeffer writes, “Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ…we enter into [life together] not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what He has done for us. We thank God for giving us [brothers and sisters] who live by His call, by His forgiveness and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily.”
We are to give thanks daily, regularly for the church and give thanks because the church is God’s gift to us – a place where we can discover all that God has done for us, a place God reconciles us with Godself and each other and a place where our eternal future begins.
There is a story that has been retold many times, that was originally written by a Christian hermit in 1979, Francis Dorff, O. Praem.
It is the story of a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. Once a great order, because of waves of anti-monastic persecution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth, all its branch houses were lost and all that was left were five monks in the decaying mother house: the abbot and four others, all over seventy in age. Clearly it was a dying order.
In the woods surrounding the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for a hermitage. As he agonized over the death of his order, it occurred to the abbot to visit the hermitage and ask the rabbi if he could offer any advice – any at all – that might save the monastery. The rabbi welcomed the abbot. But when the abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the rabbi could only commiserate. “I know how it is,” he exclaimed. “The spirit has gone out of the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore.” So, the old abbot and the old rabbi wept together. Then they read parts of the Torah and quietly spoke of deep things.
The time came when the abbot had to leave. They embraced each other. “It has been a wonderful thing that we should meet after all these years,” the abbot said, “but I have still failed in my purpose for coming here. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give me that would help me save my dying order?”
“No, I am sorry,” the rabbi responded. “I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.”
When the abbot returned to the monastery his fellow monks gathered around him to ask, “Well, what did the rabbi say?” “He couldn’t help,” the abbot answered. “We just wept and read the Torah together. The only thing he did say, just as I was leaving— it was something cryptic— was that the Messiah is one of us. I don’t know what he meant.”
In the days and weeks and months that followed, the old monks pondered this and wondered whether there was any possible significance to the rabbi’s words. The Messiah is one of us? Could he possibly have meant one of us monks here at the monastery? If that’s the case, who? Do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes, if he meant anyone, he probably meant Father Abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas. Certainly, Brother Thomas is a holy man. Everyone knows that he is a man of light. He could not have meant Brother Elred! Elred gets very crotchety at times. But come to think of it, even though he is a thorn in people’s sides, Brother Elred is virtually always right. Very often right. Maybe the rabbi did mean Brother Elred. But not Brother Phillip! Phillip is so passive. He does nothing. But then, he does have a gift for always being there when you need him. He just appears by your side. Maybe Phillip is the Messiah.
Of course the rabbi didn’t mean me. He couldn’t possibly have meant me. I’m very ordinary. But supposing he did? Suppose I am the Messiah? O God, not me. I couldn’t be that much for You, could I? As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah.
Now it happened that people occasionally came to visit the monastery to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along some of its paths, and every now and then go into the dilapidated chapel to meditate. And as they did so, without even being conscious of it, they sensed an aura of extraordinary respect that began to surround the five old monks and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling, about it. They began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray; to bring their friends to show them this special place. And their friends brought their friends.
Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the started to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while one asked if he could join them. Then another. And another. And within a few years the monastery had once again become a thriving order and, thanks to the rabbi’s gift, a vibrant centre of light and spirituality in the realm.
We give thanks for the church regularly because here we find God at work in us.
There is one final, practical note on giving thanks for the church here in Colossians and that is the example of Epaphras, describes as Paul’s ‘beloved fellow servant’, ‘a faithful minister of Christ’ (Colossians 1:8). He was also. Colossians 4;12 tells us, a native Colossian, one of them. What is the example of Epaphras? It is to be a person who, verse 8, makes known to others the love of Christian brothers and sisters, who, verse 4, tells stories about “the love that [Christian brothers and sisters] have for all the saints.” We need these stories. We need the Epaphras’s amongst us.
The stories they tell might not be about spectacular acts of love. They might be very small things. Bonhoeffer writes, “We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thank for daily gifts….. If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty…if we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, [so grey slippers rather than gold earrings!] then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”
Can we take a moment now to thank God for the acts of love in the Spirit that we have experienced in this church? Can we take a moment now to thank God for this church which is a place where we can learn God’s love, be reconciled with each other, and taste an eternal home? Then can we do this regularly and always!