Sermon preached by Rev. Emily Tanis-Likkel, Eagle Harbor Church, UCC          

November 25, 2007

Colossians 1:11-20

Jesus Pulls us Together

              While thinking about this text I kept picturing a scene from Beauty and the Beast in which Gaston, the egotistical hot-shot is flabbergasted that Belle does not want to marry him, and his sidekick Lefou tries to help. 

[Gaston:]       Who does she think she is? That girl has tangled with

                          the wrong man! No one says "no" to Gaston!  Dismissed! Rejected! Publicly                                                 Humiliated! Why, it's more than I can bear.

[LeFou:]        Who, you? Never! Gaston, you've got to pull yourself together.

              Much of the story though is about the Beast “pulling himself together.” He used to be an ordinary prince, but when he was inhospitable to an enchantress disguised as a haggard beggar, he was changed into an ugly beast.  Redemption and transformation could come only if someone, Belle, fell in love with him, but that would mean some changes for the Beast.  The other characters in the story held him up, telling him the truth about how he had been acting and what he needed to do.  The Beast was so fragmented by his pain, it came out of him in thunderous roars.  He was angry and sad and was rude and hard to get along with.  But the inhabitants of the castle knew that the Beast had the potential for love.  They looked at a ferocious Beast and saw a tender-hearted man. They encouraged him to round out his hard edges.  They didn't give up on him.   Remember who you are!  It was love that transformed him back into the man that he could be. 

              Verses 15-20 are regarded as a fragment of an early hymn. Eugene Peterson's The Message paraphrase of Colossians 1 says, We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God's original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body.

              God does not give up on us.  When we're fragmented, God pulls us together.  Not to appear as something we're not – but to be more of who we were created to be. 

              I wonder if God ever feels toward us like I feel in feeding my children.  I just gave you something wonderful, and now you're smearing it all over the place, or letting it drop carelessly on the floor.  In feeding my baby, I've heard a line from a book echo in my head “if it hangs together, it's finger food.”  Not all finger food is as neat and tidy as a Cheerio.  Sometimes its a slimy chunk of banana that gets mushed into your hair.  You might be hanging together, but that doesn't mean your life isn't messy.  Jesus comes with a towel and basin and makes everything clean again. 

              Do you ever feel as if you're in pieces? Do you ever feel not together? Then, have you tried pulling yourself together again? Maybe repeatedly? Oftentimes, the more or harder that we try, the more we cannot. You may plan a trip, but then illness cancels it.  You may plan to be married to the same person forever, but then your spouse dies.  You try to have good relationships with your family, but the gulf between you seems so wide.  We may want to appear pulled together, but our fragments still or tumble out, our brokenness remains.  We may try to mend our lives superficially, to make ourselves feel better by eating, shopping, or watching television.  Maybe what we really need is to be held in our fragments. Colossians says that everything has its origin in Christ, that he gives all of life meaning and purpose.  He gathers everything together, sustaining life, holding it together.   Jesus isn't intimidated by our brokenness; he holds us together.

               He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. Jesus gives meaning to our mess.  Jesus gives us a purpose, to work with him to love the world.  Jesus gives us hope that our efforts are not in vain.  Jesus gives us motivation to work for change.  Jesus Gathers us – but doesn't leave us, he also holds us together, maintains and sustains us.  I'm always looking for ways to keep it together – my latest attempt is a zippered binder to keep all of my current papers, notes, contacts and lists.  For some time I have been looking for a way to keep several of the diverse parts of my life together.  How do I hold it all up, how do I contain the different roles as wife, mother of a preschooler, mother of a baby, pastor, friend, daughter, household manager?  A difficult task for a binder!  I can try to keep it together.  But then I realize that life just doesn't stay neat and tidy.  Calendars, planners and lists are an illusion of control.  It is Jesus who holds me up. It is Jesus who keeps me together. 

              Jesus holds together not only you and me, but the whole church as well.  “ He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment.  And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body. On Friday night Brett and I watched the movie Pieces of April, about a young woman who makes a Thanksgiving meal for her estranged family members.  She has no cooking skills whatsoever, even tries to mash the potatoes before cooking them.  Things threaten to fall apart all through the story, symbolized by the difficulty she has in roasting her turkey.  First she discovers that her oven, which she had formerly used  as storage, does not work, and then that finding a neighbor who will let her use their oven to roast her turkey is no easy task.  At the end of the movie there is a meal.  The barely pieced together meal gives a glimpse of the barely pieced together family.  Drug use, disease and other painful experiences threatened to rip them apart time and again, but they beat the odds and remain a family.  She had never given any of her neighbors the time of day.  Yet she realized that day that she could not pull off that meal without them.  Her mother had her own journey of realization that day as the family drove to New York to April's modest apartment.  She was struck with the thought that she didn't want to desert her daughter again.  At one point in the movie April is trying to explain the origins and meaning of Thanksgiving to an immigrant family, and she hemmed and hawed through an explanation about Native Americans and the Mayflower.  Scratch that, she said.  What Thanksgiving is about, is recognizing that people need each other.  That we can't do it alone.

              People need each other.  People need God.  We are held together by the loving Spirit of God, who gives us the grace to reach out to one another, the humility to open ourselves.  This is what the church is about.  This is what EHCC is about. We journey in faith together, leaning on each other when times are tough, bouncing ideas off one another, sharing wisdom and telling stories.  We need each other, and are held together by Jesus Christ.  We give thanks together.  We give out of our resources together.  We are pieces of a whole, just as body parts are interconnected, as each family member is important.  We are held together by Christ.  Christ is our guiding principle, our center.

              It is not only individuals who are fragmented, but society as well.  Disconnection between family members, discord in a community, war between nations, brokenness and sin. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” -- Yeats. Also the title of a book my Dad just lent me – The Center Cannot Hold:my journey through madness, the memoir of Elyn R. Saks, the story of  a law professor's struggle with schizophrenia.  In describing the disease, she writes, “This experience is much harder, and weirder to describe than extreme fear or terror . . . Consciousness gradually loses its coherence.  One's center gives way.  The center cannot hold.  The 'me' becomes a haze, and the solid center from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal . . . No core holds things together . . . no organizing principle takes successive moments in time and puts them together in a coherent way from which sense can be made.”   This is uncentered to an extreme.  Most of us do not have to deal with such a debilitating illness.  Professor Saks does, however, shed light on the need that all of us have for life to make sense, to be ordered, to have a center.  Medication and therapy helped her find some roots.  Our world could stand to get centered.  We would benefit from getting rooted in the sacred, from agreeing to hold to some basic values like love, peace and justice.  The leaders of nations could be reminded that we are all beloved, worthy, and created in God's image.  Jesus offers us hope that all will be held together in his love.

              Jesus binds us together.  Some of us attended the Interfaith Thanksgiving service this past Tuesday.  Faithful people of varying beliefs came together to honor that which is sacred.  They came to be thankful, to contemplate how we can be the change in this world.  Emily Katcher, a singer from Kol Shalom, talked about how the meaning of life for Jews is for humans to bring together the world which is splintered.  It reminded me of today's Colossians text.  We work with Christ to end suffering, to strive for justice, to hold people up and hold things together.

              When I was in Middle School, my friends and I told our teacher that we wondered what the meaning of life is.  Mr. Tuls was one of those teachers that you wish you could have every year.  He cared about his students and began every class  with a joke. He said, the meaning of life?  That's easy.  The meaning of life is love.  I was dumbfounded.  It was so obvious, I clung onto that idea: the meaning of life is to love God, love other people, love the earth, even love ourselves. I still believe that although we all have vocational meanings and callings of all sorts, our greater meaning is to love.  It is love that gathers us together, and as a Christian, I believe the source of love is Christ.   Colossians says that Jesus was present from the very beginning, when the earth was formless, when there were no people or flowers or fish.  Christ didn't come into existence with the incarnation, but had always existed.  Christ became incarnate so that he could bring together lives that were fragmented, societies that were splintered, a world that groaned like a woman in labor.  He brings us together, and holds us up.

              Despite our differences, we are united in Jesus.  Jesus sustains creation, sustains the church, and sustains individuals.  We are held together by the love of God.  We are never alone, always connected to the body.  The Church is the family of God.  We are sisters and brothers, with one another, and with all believers everywhere: past, present and future.  Jesus holds us together.  We are gathered from disparate places and united.  Maybe you felt it this Thanksgiving.  I had Thanksgiving dinner with neighbors.  We become family over turkey and mashed potatoes.  We all have our origin in God, birthed from the womb of God.  Let us be centered in Jesus who holds it all together right up to this moment and forever.

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