“What Model Do You Have?”

• Scriptural Reference: Colossians 1:15-28
• July 22, 2007

There’s a scene in the movie “A Mighty Wind” which renders its humor and then cruises on. A stereotypical ditsy “babe” dressed in provocative clothing stands at a dinner party with a drink in one hand and a plate of hors d’oeuvres in the other. A man hovers around her ogling her physique. He happens to have model railroading as a hobby and – sadly for the poor man – uses this aspect about himself as his opening line. As he surveys the “babe,” his eyes sweeping up and down, he says, “I build model railroads. What do you think of model railroads?”

“Oh, I like model railroads,” she says, eyes wide and blinking. “If we didn’t have model railroads, where would be have gotten the idea for the big ones?”

The baffled look on the face of the would-be hit-on man says it all, and the moment passes and folks are into the next scene before the laughter gets going.

Now obviously, the model railroads we have today don’t serve as our protocols for the big ones. The big ones and the fascination some people have with the big ones led to the smaller ones. But in Colossians, the dumb babe’s sentiment is dead-on. If we didn’t have the model of God-in-flesh – Jesus – where would we have gotten the idea for the “big” God?

In this passage from Colossians, we have what one of my seminary professors called, “The Cosmic Christ.” Peter Rhea Jones taught the first seminary class I took in New Testament, and I can still see and hear him as he spoke of this passage from one of Paul’s later letters. With his long, slender fingers splaying out in a sweep of the air, Dr. Jones would say, “Paul s-s-s-sought to remind the Chris-s-s-s-teee-ins of Colossae that if they wanted to know what God was like, they were to look to Chris-s-s-s-t.” With that, Dr. Jones introduced me to the whole concept of the Cosmic Christ, or the notion that nothing in our world will ever make sense, will ever completely succeed, or produce an unmitigated good unless it is purely rooted in the character of Christ Jesus. Why? Because in the life and character of Jesus we see the very logic of the Creation itself lived out. Everything God intended for human being Christ lived out. If you want to know what God intends for every single human being on the planet, look at the life of Christ – and for that matter, how he died and was raised from the dead.

The fact that on the day Dr. Jones introduced this concept from Colossians he did so with his zipper down didn’t lessen the impact of the idea. It just made me realize that wisdom always comes with a healthy dose of irony.

Several verses leap to mind when I consider Christ as model. First, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” We can’t see God. People did see Jesus. You and I can’t possibly conceive of a Person unbounded by the constraints of time and space, a consciousness simultaneously present to 1066, 2007, and 2439 and in Mechanicsville and Shanghai. That sounds like the stuff of science fiction. We can, however, imagine a thirty year-old man, lying prone on cushions, reaching out his hand, dipping a morsel of lamb in gravy. We can’t possibly imagine the dynamics of producing the energy and power that called forth billions of galaxies each of which would take you and me 23,000 years to traverse IF we could devise a craft that could travel at the speed of light. We CAN imagine, though, a dark haired young man with dusty, sandaled feet, pointed down at an angel so that the toes nearly drag in the dirt as he rides a gray donkey-colt, swaying back and forth and bobbing up and down, hair bouncing traversing the distance from the Mount of Olives to the main gate of Jerusalem.

And can we possibly know what it would be like in the heavenly realms as millions of newly dead people approach the throne of Grace, how the eternal God greets each and pronounces judgment? We have no clear idea of that beyond occasional poetic biblical images. But you and I can clearly imagine an olive skinned Palestinian Jew rising up from a crouch and reaching out a hand to a humiliated woman perhaps clutching a robe to her chest. We can see the dark hairs on the hand, the tendons beneath the skin, the dark crescents under the fingernails left over from when he doodled in the dirt. And we can see the penetrating sparkle in those brown eyes and hear the inflection of that question, “Where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?”

And we can hear the stammered answer: “No one, sir.”

Perhaps we can hear a gentle laugh when the young man responds, “Then neither do I condemn you. Go now, and leave your life of sin.”

And we can definitely see the look of astonishment in the woman’s eyes looking back, for that look is our own.

Christ is our model. We can’t imagine what the Cosmic Judgment will be like when Created Spirit meets Creator Spirit. We CAN, though, understand a hand clasping a hand, an embrace, a touch on the shoulder. We CAN see arms wrapping around a child. We CAN see hands tearing a loaf of bread. We CAN see the fiery gleam in the carpenter’s eyes and see the pointing finger and hear the strength in the voice as he speaks truth to power and says, “You might know the letter of your law; you might know your doctrine up and down; you might go to worship services and scripture studies on a regular basis, but you don’t raise a finger to live out its spirit.” We can see that, can’t we? We can hear it. And I can even imagine what it might have smelled like, but we won’t go there.

When you imagine Jesus doing all that, remember, God’s fullness was dwelling in that. If you want to know what God intended for human beings – and that includes you – then study with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength what Jesus did, said, and lived, and you’ll know beyond a shadow of a doubt how you are to deploy your own talents. And when you follow Jesus, live according to that model, that is, persist in that faith, it saves you.

And following Jesus even has the extra added benefit of saving the entire planet, if we would all just follow Jesus.

The problem is, though, we have all sorts of competing models and in every case they’re versions of the ancient Adversary. When you see commercials portraying a marine climbing a rock butte out west, you see the 21 st century version of the Warrior idol, a model that has competed with the Christ model since the days of the Roman legions. (I guess they show a marine climbing a rock butte wearing light athletic clothing out west rather than a marine trudging through the muck of a Baghdad street wearing 90 pounds of gear because the former is more effective in recruiting. Models that compete with Christ always have to lie a little.)

And when you see that twenty-something woman tossing her long, silky hair in a sensuous circle – in cinematic slow motion – and looking at the camera with botox enhanced lips, one eye-brow seductively raised proclaiming the virtues of this or that hair conditioner, you’ve seen the tip of the ice berg that is the 21 st century version of the Goddess of Fertility idol, a competing model that even bedeviled King David and his son Solomon. But when we see the beautifully thin models (they even call them that) and surgically enhanced actresses that populate the screens we stare at in huge numbers, we aren’t told of the epidemic of eating disorders, crushed spirits, and aimless lives that result when people base their self worth on that kind of image, that kind of model.

When I was in high school and into college, though, another model seized my imagination. When I heard “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” and heard that cool guitar playing, I wanted to be like Stephen Stills. I wore straight legged blue jeans, I grew my hair out and parted it in the middle, and even tried to grow mutton-chop side burns though my genetics worked against me there. After a couple of years, I even bought a Martin D-28, which Stills had laying in his lap on the cover of that album with David Crosby and Graham Nash sitting on either side of Stills on a couch on a porch somewhere. On the basis of that model, I imagined a life of success, fame, fortune, and fun.

And then I got into the music business and started meeting the people. I played in countless smoky clubs to audiences that didn’t give a rip about what I’d written. All they wanted to hear was “rock and roll.” “Play something we can dance to! Don’t play that wimpy ______!” Disillusion set in.

That’s one of the biggest problems when we assume models from the culture around us: they always lead to disillusion when we begin to live them out.

But some of the models we assume come from a deeper level than even the ones I have mentioned so far.

My sisters and I used to make fun of my dad. You see, he and mom both worked full time jobs. Mom got in earlier than my dad from work, so she’d cook supper. We’d eat together and then dad would always wash up. It was a fair bargain, it seemed to us. Often, I’d be impressed to help dad, but he loved to smoke a cigarette as he washed and cigarette smoke would give me a headache, and I’d complain, and dad would sullenly tell me to “get away.”

Then you could hear him standing at the sink mumbling under his breath as he pulled dishes from soapy water, smoke curling up around his Vaseline slicked hair. “Dadburn-it. I work a tough job. Seems I’d get to come home and rest ever’ now and then. Kids these days don’t do squat.” O, it was so funny and my sisters and I would imitate him behind his back.

You know what happened? I was standing at the sink washing dishes some time ago – heck, it’s only been a couple of months – and I found myself saying under my breath to myself, “I work a tough job. Seems I’d get to come home and rest ever’ now and then. And kids these days don’t know anything about keeping a house clean.” There I stood, mumbling under my breath, JUST LIKE MY DAD.

It’s humbling to think that our parents live on in us, whether we like it or not. You see, we absorbed the emotional patterns our parents used long before we had any critical capacities of our own. Long before we had any power of discernment, we assumed that the way our parents operated was the way the whole world operated – and in fact, should operate. As we grow older, some of us begin to wonder if, indeed, everyone lives this way, but by the time we do that, we’ve already internalized a whole host of habits that were modeled for us when we didn’t know any different.

That’s why the Bible places so much emphasis on behaving like Christ. And it does so with its eyes wide open. Behaving like Christ will be tough because of the competing cultural models and even more so because our parents modeled behavior to us – and our friends’ parents modeled behavior to them that wove the culture in which we live and leads us to believe that things like holding grudges and meeting violence with revenge is natural.

But that’s not the whole story. Here we are, in a group of people who recognize that our cultural models, even the models our families handed to us, are flawed. Here we are in a group of people who hold up, instead, the model of the only complete human, the one in whom the fullness of God actually dwelt.

And you know what, the very people who passed along to us negative modeling also managed to model good stuff to us, as well. Our job is to discern which conforms to the image of Christ and which doesn’t and devote ourselves to the behavior that follows Christ.

A few weeks ago while you were listening to Mark Biddle preach, Julie and I were on our way back from a reunion of the cousins – I think they were just about all there – from her mother’s side of the family. Julie’s mother’s side is the sunny side of the family and these cousins were nothing but a huge delight to be with. One of the cousins is a man named Bud.

Bud is a real-live horse whisperer who has developed some tremendously innovative, humane bits for horses. Before he moved back to Alabama to open a horse farm, he lived as a rancher in Colorado and Arizona. Bud has a bushy, red mustache, skin that looks like a well-cured saddle, wears flared blue jeans with a belt buckle embossed with a Colt-45, pointed-tip cowboy boots, and a dingy, faded hat with the side rims folded up tight. When he talks, he looks directly into your eyes and you know he doesn’t pull any punches, though if he threw one at you, you’d be on life-support for a week.

One afternoon some years ago, Bud was riding his horse on his ranch, looking for strays up in a remote canyon. It was an area he rarely went into, covered as it was in cactus, sage brush and dry creek beds that only flowed when the occasional thunder storm came. He hadn’t been in the area for over two years, in fact, but he could hear a heifer bleating somewhere up a dry water course. He turned his horse up toward it, but as he rounded a clump of mesquite trees he saw tire tracks in the dirt. He knew they were pretty fresh because he could make out the tread. He followed the tracks and there, parked beside the creek bed, was an old camping trailer.

Bud called out, “Anybody home?” When there was no answer, he rode a little closer and caught a whiff of that tangy smell of marijuana. Feeling anger rising at the trespass and now at the use of contraband on his property, he loosened his pistol in its holster and knocked on the door.

He was shocked when a young, perhaps 13 year old girl opened the door. In an instant he took in the picture: stringy, oily hair, dirty face, chipped fingernails, and the sharp angels of bony shoulders poking through a dress that hung on her like an old laundry bag. Her eyes were wide and fearful.

“Your mama and daddy at home?”

She didn’t respond but Bud heard a groan from inside the trailer. “Whosit?”

Bud looked past the girl and saw two people slouching on a couch. He saw right away the long hair, the ragged t-shirts, the holey jeans – these were ex-hippies. Around the trailer were empty bottles of beer, some liquor bottles, and dozens of roach clips.

Bud looked at the girl and back at the couple. “These your parents?”

She nodded her head.

That night, Bud couldn’t get much out of the parents. He called the sheriff and since the couple was too stoned to move, they were easily taken into custody. Bud learned that the girl hadn’t been to school in three years, that the couple had towed that trailer from place to place, doing just enough odd jobs to buy fuel and pot, and had been all over the west.

So, Bud decided to take the girl in, get her out of that environment. The only problem was that he was single. But he knew he had to take her in. There wasn’t any option.

So he called his parents, Julie’s Uncle Bud and Aunt Peggy. Bud junior told his mom and dad the story. They said, “That girl doesn’t stand a chance. Send her to Alabama. She can stay with us.” After considerable wrangling of the legal sort, Bud was able to get the rights to send the girl – her name was Charity – to Alabama.

And Bud senior and Peggy took her in, made her as their daughter, and Charity lived with them until she graduated from high school, made great grades, and moved on through the challenges of getting a job and securing a career.

Get this: when Bud and Peggy took in that 13 year-old girl, they were 80 years old.

As Bud told that story, all of us sitting there expressed our astonishment. That’s when Kristy Pollack made an observation. “You know something? Grandpapa and grand-mama did that, too.” Julie and her sister Carol remembered. Bud senior’s mom and dad, the patriarch and matriarch of all those cousins, took in a 16 year-old girl they remembered by the name of Patsy and raised her as there own. Sure, she was unrelated, but she was in desperate need. “They were doing that all the time,” several of the cousins said.

“Well,” said Bud junior, “I guess I come by it honest!”

That’s what happened. Tom and Athena Collins took great risk and practiced huge generosity. Bud senior saw it. Then, when Bud junior was out in the desert, thousands of miles and forty years away, he took great risk and Bud senior and Peggy responded with lavish hospitality.

Our models get passed on, so it’s real important to have the right kind of model.