Trinity 9

 TRINITY 9

2010

You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ.

Colossians 3.3

It may not have struck you immediately, but this is what you might call a ‘hang on a minute!’ text.  It’s one of those bits of the Bible which invites us to say, not, ‘Oh, how true! I couldn’t agree more’, but ‘Hang on a minute! Did you really say that?’

‘You have died’ St Paul tells the Colossian Christians, and the most natural reaction would be to say (a) ‘A bit peaky, maybe, but dead! Me?’ and (b) ‘Is this your idea of a joke? I thought the Bible was supposed to be Good News, promising life, not death.’

So we definitely need to hang on a minute, not just to nod sagely but to search ourselves and test these improbably words – just as, I think, Paul intended. So often Paul used expressions that stop you in your tracks, knowing, as he did, that as we trundle along, most of us are prepared only to hear what we already know. We need the shock of the improbably, the paradox, to see fresh truth.

Do you remember ‘Canoe Man’?  John Darwin made every effort to convince the world that he was dead, that he had paddled out to sea (off Hartlepool) and sunk without trace. For five years, as far as the world was concerned, he was a dead man, whilst, in fact, his life was hidden with his wife, Anne, in a secret flat on the seafront.

Both of them are in prison now, since their joint plot unravelled in 2007. But John Darwin’s story – a story of someone dead and alive at the same time, still fascinates.  Maybe it is a grotesque story, almost a parody of what St Paul was saying to the Colossians, but it shines a peculiar light on our calling to be ‘the living dead’.

Why did he do it?  What on earth was this elaborate pretence all about?  I expect that, one day, he will give us his own account, but this is mine.  He and his wife were willing to go to absolutely any lengths to keep hold on to personal ambitions, to keep their own dream alive.  Reflect on it and you can see that pretending to be dead was the ultimate ploy in their big life project. Things had gone wrong financially, so the life plan – the dream - was threatened. And friends and neighbours, sons and family - these were all to be sacrificed, along with the whole substance of reality, truth and integrity, in order to cling to it. That, at least, is how it seems to me.

Now, the dying about which Paul wrote is the exact opposite: it is, in fact, precisely the ‘big life project’ which has been put to death. That is the ‘you’ that has died, a you, a me, hooked on our own dream.

In traditional language we might say that it is our sinful selvesthat we have given up, they have (quoting Paul again) been ‘crucified with Christ’. But, dare I say it, that language lacks precision and concrete reality when it comes to my own Christian story.

The way it seems to be for me is like this: ever since my baptism, as a tiny baby, Christ has been alongside, urging me to hand over the big ‘me’ project – the approach to life which puts me at the centre - and to receive in exchange the freedom, the power, to live without self-concern: to share his ‘risen’, new way of life in which neither greedy ambition nor anxious insecurity inhibits my joy in receiving or my energy in giving love.

And the challenge keeps coming back – more than ever, now, in retirement.  The big me project is always threatening to take over again and to start me planning my own little canoe schemes. And this it true: I find myself, once again, beginning to arrange everything around my own life plan, my big dream or little dreams, and to let my fears for the future dictate how I live (like the farmer in today’s Gospel reading, Luke 12:13-21, trying to build security for himself).

Perhaps you recognise the same challenge – in your personal life, maybe also in the shared life of the church. There are tell-tale signs, aren’t there? You can notice that hope is being gradually shut down by fear, compassion for other people being overtaken by frustration or competitiveness.  One day you wake up and discover that forgiveness is no longer the oxygen you breathe and the atmosphere you share.  Then it is time to hang on a minute and say, ‘Yes, I have died!  That methat is dominated by fear for itself, hope for itself, provision for itself. Yes, that is dead and buried with Christ, whose cross takes away the obsessions, the false dreams, the sin of the world. And my new life – a life lived absolutely in the thick of the world’s reality – has its hidden heart in him, from him it flows freely through me and embraces all whom he loves. And that life after death has no end.

Amen.