Colossians 1:1-14
My dear preaching colleague,
If you’re preaching from Colossians 1, that means you’re either (1) starting a new sermon series in Colossians or (2) realizing with exhaustion that the Gospel text from the lectionary has you preaching the Good Samaritan story, and you simply can’t bring yourself to do it again.
Either way, you’re going to want to give your people some context. For the average congregant, the introductions to the Pauline letters can seem to bleed into one and sound the same: Paul sends greetings, Paul is thankful, Paul sends grace and peace, etc, etc. They know nothing of genre, form, and structure, historical context, ancient rhetoric—none of it. It will be up to you to determine how much they need to understand in order to grasp the basic premise of this passage. (Unless your congregation is very unusual, I don’t recommend addressing authorship in the preaching moment. Accepting Paul and Timothy as co-authors of this letter isn’t likely to affect interpretation at this level, and it might even give you an opportunity to discuss the benefits of partnered leadership in the church!)
Still, there are several “technical” details that can yield some really helpful interpretive paths.
Paul addresses his letter differently than he usually does. Rather than containing an address “to the church or churches,” Colossians is addressed to “the holy and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae” (CEB). This is especially interesting in that the authors imply that they have never met the believers at this church (v. 4). Why would this letter contain such an endearing form of address? Perhaps the answer lies in the intent of the letter. The authors of this letter are seeking nothing less than the fruitfulness of the church. They want to see the church live into their identity as “holy and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ.” Perhaps, pastor, this is an opportunity to speak to your congregation proleptically (look it up: it’s a great literary word for preachers!): you can provisionally address your congregants in terms of what they may not yet quite be—holy and faithful brothers and sisters. For whatever reason, they came to church on the Sunday you preach this message. Perhaps, whether they know it or not, the Spirit is gathering them in anticipation of their faithfulness and fruitfulness.
Verses 3-8 and 9-17 are noted for being massively long, grammatically exhausting run-on sentences. They occur in the form not of prayer—but of the report of a prayer. In other words, this isn’t a preacher subtly casting shade on particularly troublesome congregants during prayer time (what an abuse of the pulpit it can be when pastors do this!) but rather of Paul and Timothy enlightening Colossae to the content of the prayers. Pastor, does your congregation know how you pray for them? What are you praying for your people? What theological concepts characterize the content of your prayers? Truly, there are not specific “right” answers to these questions. What we see in the first several verses of Colossians is one example of how a pastor might pray for a congregation. Your congregation needs their own prayers. Maybe this week they need to know specifically how the Spirit has directed you to pray for them. There may be someone who has never known the unique love of being prayed for—what a gift it would be to give them the words of that prayer this Sunday!
Faith, hope, and love—these concepts are most familiar from 1 Corinthians 13. Many members of your congregation will vaguely remember sitting in a wedding ceremony in which Paul’s words are intoned with the expected rejoinder, “but the greatest of these is love.” What a surprise it will be, then, when you point out that in Colossians, Paul wants to emphasize the primacy of hope! He creates a triad. Paul and Timothy have heard rumors of the people of Colossae:
because of their faith in Christ Jesus (v. 4)
because of their love for all God’s people (v. 4)
but this faith and love are because of the hope reserved for them in heaven, which they heard through the gospel (v. 5)!
In other words, faith and love are grounded in hope for the people of Colossae.
Pastor, there are some congregations who do not love well. There are some congregations for whom faith is a struggle. There are some congregations to which you will be assigned in which the only possibility for God to create new life will be nothing less than the hope of the Gospel. If this is your congregation, then perhaps you are ministering in Colossae! Perhaps your people are grounded in nothing less than the hope of heaven—the hope in which the Spirit of God has called her people together in the same faith and love which is bearing fruit among the whole world. It’s not a generic faith and love, but rather the faith and love that only comes because Christ is Lord in this world full of God’s surprises.