Hidden with Christ in God: a message for the Aussie bloke

Texts: Colossians 3.1-11; Luke 12.13-21

You have heard the saying 'If you're too heavenly minded, you'll be no earthly good'.   Many of us have been used to taking that saying as gospel, as a word of cautionary wisdom about not getting too carried away with religious stuff.  It's a very Australian approach to life, if you think about it.   Particularly so when we recognise that what usually passes as 'Australian' is actually a caricature: the white, working-class, bloke.  This bloke likes to think of himself as a practical person who acts according to the plain and simple maxims of common-sense.  He doesn't like anything that is too way out, too unfamiliar or too foreign.  He knows what he knows, and likes what he likes.  'And that', he says, 'is good enough for me, mate'.  And that's why the archetypal Australian bloke is supremely suspicious about religion.  Religion represents everything that can't be nailed down in life.  As such, it has the unnerving capacity to call one's common-sense, everyday, view of things into question. Given too much credence, religion has the potential to up-end  the Australian bloke's sense of where things ought to be. Incredibly, the religion of Christ asks him, and all of us, to invest not in the concrete stuff of house, car, footy and a boat for going fishing, but in the rather less tangible matters of love, justice, ecology and intimacy with God.  For the archetypal Australian bloke, this stuff is too airy-fairy and too foreign.  And because we've all been influenced by this approach to life (even if we're not male, white or working-class), Paul's message to the Colossians must, at times, sound like utter nonsense.

In this part of Colossians, Paul actually rails against the common-sense approach to things, the view of life which says 'If you're too heavenly minded you'll be no earthly good'. Indeed, he pleads the opposite:  to set one's mind not on earthly things, but on the things of heaven!  And then he says some rather strange things: religious-sounding things.  He says that all Christians have ‘died’, and that our lives are now ‘hidden with Christ in God’.  He says we've taken off the old self, like you take off a coat, and put on a new self which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.  The upshot of all this appears to be that Paul wants us to stop living according to the common wisdom, and start living this 'hidden' life with Christ.  'Now what', I hear the typical Australian bloke say, 'is the blighter on about!'  What does all that mean?  And why should I take his advice anyway?  I'm quite happy with my life the way it is, thank you very much!'

Well, let me surprise you all by taking those two questions absolutely seriously.  They are very good questions.  They're good questions even if you're not a fan of the archetypal Australian bloke, which I (if you hadn't guessed already) am not.  And they're good questions for two reasons.  First, they call Christian people to give a genuine and credible account of their faith which can be understood by people who do not belong to the church.  In theological terms, we hear in these questions the call to bear effective and relevant witness to our faith in the society and culture of which we are part.  This implies a second reason. Our strange and peculiar language points to a strange and peculiar experience - the experience of finding one's true identity and vocation in Christ.  Our mate's questions are a stern reminder that unless that experience is genuine - truly, madly and deeply genuine - then we really are just kidding ourselves.   In that case our typically Australian mate would be absolutely right in dismissing us.  According to Paul, we are called by God not to believe a series of doctrines and belong to a club called The Church, but to be disciples of Jesus Christ:  to live radically new lives with our whole minds, bodies and experience . . .  but I run ahead of myself.

Allow me to return to the first of those questions the archetypal Australian bloke might ask of Paul's message to the Colossians:  'what is the blighter on about!?'  What does Paul actually mean when he talks about putting off the old self and putting on the new?  And what's all that mysterious stuff about having died but living a life 'hidden with Christ in God?'  Well, this is where I reckon the parable of Jesus about building bigger barns comes in handy.  I suspect that a lot of us are like this fellow who dreams of building bigger and bigger barns to put all his stuff in.  The modern, suburban version might talk about elegant clothes and houses, flash cars or yachts on the river.   These are the modern symbols of wealth and success, of having made it in the lucky country.  Few of us ever get there, but most of us dream of getting there.  That's why so many of this nation's poorest folk spend so much of their modest incomes on gambling and tattslotto tickets.  It's the lure of the dream they've been sold by the advertisers. 

The bad news is that this dream is killing us.  It's killing the poor, certainly, because being poor means you'll never possess the material symbols which prove you're a success.  So you spend your days feeling like a failure, battling a low self-image and wondering whether there's any point.  Or you get angry at those who do seem successful.  And you learn to hate them, or you rob from them, or you abuse or perhaps assault them.  Because you wish you had what they seem to have: the money to be free and happy.  But those of us who are relatively well off, whether rich or middle-income earners, are being killed by the dream as well.  Because the dream promises happiness if you get this stuff, but when you get it you don't feel happy.  You feel empty and ripped off.  It’s like someone stole the punchline to the world's funniest joke.  At base, you see, is the reality that all things must die.  All things pass away.  If we invest our sense of personhood and wellbeing to things material, then we're already dead.  Because material things are dead.  They don't have life, and can't give us the things which fill life with meaning and purpose.  And it doesn't matter how much of that stuff we accumulate, it won't give us the magic.  And when we face death, whether that be sooner or later, we're all confronted with that stark fact.  When you're dead, the symbols of wealth and success spell a big fat zero.  When I worked as a chaplain at the Epworth hospital in Melbourne, I met a number of high-flying business men who had gained the world but lost their souls.  It wasn't until their run-ins with death that they awoke to this fact.  And it was terrifying.

So when Paul says 'you have died', when he talks of 'putting off the old self', he's talking about this experience exactly.  Some folks are confronted with death through accident or mis-adventure.  And they are forced to change their lives, to put to death old ways of being and embrace new ways.  But Paul says to us, don't wait until that happens to you.  Put to death the deeds of common-sense wisdom right now.  Because the ‘common sense’ is a lie.  Put to death the version of success you've been sold by the advertisers.  Put to death the dream of happiness from wealth and comfort.  Put it to death.  Put it all to death.  Let it all go into the dark.  If you let it go, then you've got a shot at finding out what life is really about.  If not, you'll just be whistling in the dark until the day your body catches up with the despair and desperation you already feel in your spirit.

But where is this new life to replace the old?  And how do I find it?  Well there is mystery here.  That must be frankly admitted.  Paul says, 'you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God'.  He also says that the new self is one which 'is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the creator'.  There are clues and traces here, traces of God and of transcendence.  But not answers of the kind we've been conditioned to expect -  water-tight answers, complete answers, answers available right now, like the results of a google search.  Nevertheless, the clues are exciting!  Paul encourages us to look for the answers in a person, a person who lived and died on this earth of ours, a person who now lives in the heart of God.  Somehow he blazed a trail for us: a trail by which he suffered the dark night of death and a profound renunciation of the common way; a trail that broke through to the other side, the side where God is.  And this person, who is called Christ, the 'anointed one', somehow found his own true identity and purpose in God, and became one with God.  And so it is Christ who holds the secret of who we are in his home in the heart of God.  Paul encourages us to seek, and walk, after the way of Jesus Christ, who is the image of the Creator who made him, and made us.  In following him, we are promised a new self that, like Christ, is forged in the image of the one who made us.

But what of our Australian mate's second question?  'Why should I take Paul's advice?  I'm happy with my life just as it is!'  Perhaps there is a sense in which many of us are happy with being unhappy.  We've become so used to feeling like life has passed us by, or that we've been failures in life, that we've become numb to any new possibility.  Many of us, I suspect, find it less scary to sit in our misery than to contemplate the possibility of transformation.  Eric Fromm, the eminent psychotherapist, called this numbness  ‘the fear of freedom’.  Many of us are scared to face the new or the unknown because we're afraid to die.  There is no new person or new world without the passing of the old.  Deep down we all know that.  And many choose to stay put.  That is the greatest tragedy of life, I think. Not earthquakes.  Not famines.  The tragedy of inertia, portrayed so beautifully by King Lear in Shakespeare's marvellous play.  Here was a man who knew he was going to hell, that he was already in hell.  But he decided to stay there because the prospect of changing was too much too bear.  Here, too, the message of Christ has something to say.  'Perfect love drives out all fear'.  Perfect love drives out all fear.  We Christians believe, you see, that Christ's path through death to life was not entirely of his own making.  We believe that God chose him and loved him before the creation of the world, to be the one who would suffer and die to make a way to God for us.  God did this because of love, love for every single one of us.  So there is no need to be afraid of change.  If God is for you, who can be against you?  In the end, you see, the journey to a strange place is actually a return home.  The new identity is actually an old one.  The person you will become is simply the person you already are, deep inside.  So don't be afraid, my Australian mate.  Surrender to God and set yourself free.

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church in 2004.