 | St Alban’s Episcopal Church Bolivar, Missouri Friday, July 8, 2022 Colossians 1:1-14 |
 Colossians 1:1-14Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father. In our prayers for you we always thank God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of truth, the gospel that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God. This you learned from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf, and he has made known to us your love in the Spirit. For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may live lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving 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.  What about Colossians? Colossae was a city founded in Asia Minor, (now part of Turkey) long before the time of Christ, to serve as a stop on a major trade route through that part of the Roman empire. You can see from the map that Colossae, Hieropolis, and Laodicea were all close together, and Ephesus not far distant. The three cities closest to each other suffered from an earthquake in AD 17, and then again inn AD 60. Both Laodicea and Colossae were destroyed. Neither ever regained prominence, and by 400 AD didn’t even exist. This letter was written either by Paul during his final imprisonment, or by a disciple of Paul afterwards, but certainly not before that AD 60 earthquake. As always happens in times of stress and distress, false preachers showed up to offer some exotic method or magic, some special formula to win God’s favor, or to gain some secret knowledge that would explain why everything seems to be falling apart. And surely people were suffering, bewildered and confused. They had decided to follow Jesus – but then life as they knew it was destroyed. The author intends to reassure them that God is faithful, and that they can also be, without doing anything odd or unusual. Who Christ Jesus is, and what God has done in Christ, and how they are already “in Christ” – dwelling in that life, is the theme of the letter. Jesus the Lord is not the “object” of their faith, but the very sphere within which their faith and love are lived out. That is the meaning of the final verse in this section – God has already done it. We will be reading from this letter for several weeks.   |
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