Good Asceticism: Training to Name What Should Be Renounced

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning again, friends. It is great to see you this morning. Happy August, if you can believe it. I am so delighted to be here with you and to see some new faces. I'm looking forward to meeting you after the service, so please stay and have coffee and snacks with us. But thank you for being here this morning.

I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, and over the last several weeks, we've been in a series on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians. Today ends that series, and next week, Steven Myles will be preaching, and we'll be getting into other things.

And so, last week we looked at chapter 2, and one of the things that was the main theme in chapter 2 that we got into was rooting ourselves in the tradition that was passed down from Jesus through the Apostles to avoid drifting back into spiritual captivity. And then this morning, we're skipping over a small section that is pretty important, so when you have some time, go read through the rest of chapter 2.

In this small section, St. Paul's outlining some of the problems that are happening in this church. There are matters of avoiding certain food or drink. Teachers are encouraging them to avoid certain food or drink, presumably as clean or unclean; observing certain feast days, new moons, Sabbaths—sort of a return to the Mosaic Law in some ways. And he mentions the worship of angels in that passage and dwelling on certain types of visions. So we're getting a window into the things that are arising in the Colossian church that he's addressing. And he also talks about not submitting themselves again to elemental principles, which we mentioned a few weeks back.

These teachers had set up rules that were creating a false sense of humility for the congregation—that if I could keep these rules of self-abasement, obedience to Torah, mystical experiences, then I can increase and have a higher knowledge of God himself. And I can rid myself of the things that make me unclean or that keep me from understanding God more deeply. He argues that all of those things pale in comparison to Christ.

And so, this is a very Christocentric letter—that Christ is in all, through all, he's over all. It's all about Jesus and who he is. And what he's saying is that those teachings from those teachers who are coming into your midst—they're of no value when it comes to keeping yourself, to keeping your self-indulgence in check, and to knowing God more deeply. They're of no value. Christ himself is the valuable one for keeping our self-indulgence in check and knowing God more deeply.

And there's an important word that he brings up in the letter, and it's helpful for us to know too. I'm sure it's something that doesn't get thrown around a lot, and this is the word ascesis, or asceticism. Kids, if you have your little papers here, and you say, "What did I hear today?" you can write down ascesis—A-S-C-E-S-I-S, ascesis or asceticism. It's an important word. And it refers to how you train for something. How are we training in a spiritual life? What are the results of our training?

And there is a dark and useless type of asceticism that exists, and that kind of asceticism keeps someone bound to the kingdom of darkness through pseudo-spiritual habits and other kinds of practices—and this is what he's arguing against. There is another type of asceticism that is good. It produces virtue. It produces the love of God. And he's arguing for an asceticism based on knowing Jesus Christ as Lord—training in the right things, not in the wrong things; training ourselves to put on virtue and to put off the old life of the old age. And doing that type of asceticism together in community makes the Word of Christ effective among us. It allows the peace of Christ to reign over us as a community, and it binds us together in the love of God.

So we begin our passage today, Colossians 3:5, where Saint Paul says to "put to death whatever in you is earthly." Different translations have different things here. The first one's fornication or sexual impurity, then just general impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness or greed, which he calls idolatry. We don't often think of greed or covetousness as a form of false worship with a false god as its object, but he calls it that.

He starts with a specific kind of sin—a misuse of somebody's body in improper physical relations, fornication. He moves more broadly to impurity, and purity would include fornication, and it moves more broadly into moral evil. He mentions passions, which have to do with disordered loves and affections, and then he mentions the very desire or intention to do evil. And then he concludes with greed or covetousness, which he calls idolatry, because when the object of your affections becomes something other than the Lord—something you're desiring that is less than God—it shapes your desires, and that's why it becomes an idol.

So he's calling the church to become who they are. He's calling them to live out the thing that they've been made positionally in Christ. Our bodies had been an instrument of sin. They've been bound to the present evil age through distorted affections and loves, through perverted truths fueling unhelpful thinking and immoral behaviors. All these things put us in misalignment with the God who created us and loves us. And that old life was put to death in Christ when we were baptized with Christ. And each one of us then died, and we were raised to new life again as we shared in the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

And so, good asceticism trains us to live out the resurrection, and it involves putting off those ways of life that had been part of us when we were bound to the present evil age. St. John Chrysostom compares it to a statue that had been filthy, covered in rust, and somebody comes along and they scour the statue clean. And then after that, somebody has to regularly come through and clean the statue so that no rust or anything is allowed to grow on the statue over time.

St. Paul's commanding the church—and I love the way Janet did such a great reading—he tells them, "Do not lie to one another." The church is called to not lie to one another. And this is because I think self-deception and deceiving others is associated with the life of the old age that we died to, where we were in solidarity with Adam. But instead, we now live with Christ. We live in him. And this new self—if you go back to verse 10—he says this new self is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its Creator.

And that word image is worth dwelling on for a second. The image of the Creator—the word image comes from a Greek word where we get icons, iconos. And this phrase is an allusion back to Genesis, back to the creation account in Greek. And the Greek Old Testament says that male and female were created in the iconos—in the icon of God. We don't often read that in Greek—our translations are from Hebrew. Anybody remember—any of the kids remember—when it says God created man and woman, he created them in his… what do we say in English? "Image and likeness." That's right. Selem and demut, which are very important words to know as well. But in Greek, it's an icon. We are icons of the Creator, and this is what he is restoring us to.

So asceticism is good when it trains us to name those things that we need to renounce. Unhelpful asceticism trains us to avoid dealing with sin, and as a result, it ends up incurring more filth, and it distorts the image of God in us—it distorts us as icons.

Doing the work of prayer, engaging with Scripture, with the community of faith, the Church's tradition, locating ourselves in the story and in the plan of God, and listening to the Holy Spirit prepares us to receive God’s grace. And when we're prepared—when we have this disposition of preparation to meet God’s grace—we can risk naming things honestly, to renounce the ways that we’ve been bound. Those things that potentially humiliate us—we can risk confessing them to the Lord, because we expect grace to be abundant. Christ wants to rightly order our loves. He wants to restore his image in us. He wants to bring us to a greater knowledge of his love and his peace. And he wants to reveal his new creation work in each one of you to the world, as a compelling argument of what he can do in a life that’s being transformed by the Gospel of God.

So why are we tempted to lie to one another? Why do we avoid telling the truth? It's a good question that I've been thinking about this week, and I think children provide a helpful example. This is not my child—in fact, this is probably me. This might be me, hypothetically. But let's say a child breaks something in the house. They break a lamp or something, and the child doesn't generally immediately go to a parent and say, "Mom, I broke the lamp. It was me. I take full blame, and I apologize." Genuinely. Sincerely.

It's not that forthcoming, generally. And why is this? You know, there's often an attempt to hide evidence. "My sister did it." You know, it's the sibling who did it. Or, "It just broke itself. Weirdest thing. I have no idea." You know, maybe Mom or Dad had told them not to play ball in the house, or to wrestle near the lamp, or to lean back in their chair near the lamp—or period. And the child's brain then, as they've broken this thing, is just flooded with this deep sense of guilt and humiliation. And their minds and bodies can't bear this feeling of humiliation.

Now, if the parent comes in and they're super dysregulated, and they respond to this child with verbal attacks and rage and shaming insults like, "How could you do that? How could you be so dumb?"—right, that would be a horrible thing to say to your child—but by shaming the child like that, they reinforce the child's need to lie and to protect themselves, to avoid having that kind of reaction again from their parent.

So, if however the parent comes in and they connect with the child, they say something like, "I see your tears. I see a broken lamp. I wonder what those tears are for." The child might cry more, but the child is now humanized. They are given respect and honor as an individual, and they're invited into a conversation about the events that have just transpired. The parent might say, "You know, it sounds like you did something that you knew you probably weren't supposed to do. And I think something that we both loved got broken, didn’t it? Thanks for being honest with me and telling me that. You know what, I also don’t like feeling guilty or sad. Sometimes I do things, and I immediately realize I shouldn’t have done that. And I hate that feeling too. That doesn’t feel good, does it? I wonder what you might do differently if you were able to do it over again."

Now the child feels connected to the parent. There’s a bond of love that’s happening, and they've named what they feel and why. It’s not weird to feel that. They've explained it. And that child begins to metabolize humiliation. It runs through their body and makes its course through in a way that teaches them, without shame, that they can join you as the parent in the solution.

And so, there might be some natural consequences, right? Like, you might say, "You know what, we need to clean that up. I'm going to ask that you do that." Or, "Yeah, it's going to cost some money to buy a new lamp, and so over the next few weeks, we'll be taking some money out of your allowance to help pay for that so we can get a new lamp, and we can all enjoy it."

But from a formation standpoint, this child has now learned the usefulness of that feeling they want to avoid. "Maybe I ought not do those things that make me feel this way." There’s a usefulness as a guide to moral virtue. And they've learned that you still are connected with them in this bond of love and familial relationship. They learn—because of the way that you reacted—that they don’t need to hide the things that they do wrong when they feel that thing. They can come to you honestly and name that, because the parent is safe.

Now, that is really hard as adults, because we often don’t have that capacity even with one another, right? And so sometimes the default is rage or shaming one another. But imagine if our asceticism—our training in the spiritual life—trained us to be honest and metabolize those feelings of guilt and humiliation because we trust that Jesus wants us to heal, and he wants to make us fully human again as image-bearers, right? Like, Jesus wouldn’t come to us when we’ve done something wrong and say, "How can you be so dumb?" Instead, we would expect Jesus to come and say, "Yeah, that doesn’t feel good, does it?"—and to invite us into a new way of life.

So the person who knows this kind of love, has experienced that love and forgiveness, that peace and grace, has the capacity to offer that kind of peace and love to one another. And so the Church, when it’s at its best, is a training ground for this formative kind of truth-telling and renunciation of the old self, with the hope and the expectation of receiving the grace of God in community, as we're in relationship with one another.

And what can often happen, though, is people—because of their own stories—learn to hate part of themselves or shut it off because that part of themselves was never welcomed. It wasn’t even allowed. And so they protect themselves by weaving together webs of self-deceit. And I think this is part of the root of lying to one another. I generally don’t come to somebody looking to lie—it just happens. And why is that? It’s more insidious than just my own will to be evil. It’s something that’s been built up over time.

So rage starts to take over in the name of holiness, right? "We do things the right way here," right? And there’s an anger associated with that. Immorality is swept under the rug in the name of saving face. And the result is a stunted kind of discipleship training that’s based on self-deception. And the image of God—the icon of God—is dimmed in us. The result of that kind of discipleship is that someone becomes less human. But good asceticism makes us more human, because it renews the image and the icon of God in us. This is verse 10.

And so, later on as he goes along, St. Paul tells us to clothe ourselves in virtue, and he names these: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience—a discipleship that’s aimed at virtue formation. It’s an invitation to explore who Jesus is and what he’s done. Jesus is the perfect image—the icon—of the invisible God. And so, as we make habits of stillness, silence, prayer, service, giving intentions to the rhythm of our day, we can ask how God’s coming to us in those moments, how he’s showing himself to us, how he’s renewing us, and how he’s actually creating a seminal desire in us to hold on to those virtues that reflect his character.

Where do we see God cultivating virtue in our souls? This passage mentions forgiveness. Forgiving one another is a characteristic of the Christian life, because we've been forgiven by God, and it's so important.

And I also want to give a little bit of a caveat on forgiveness, because I've heard about it misused. So forgiveness is not bypassing sin. It's not overlooking things, ignoring harm—that’s not forgiveness. There are situations where I've heard of, let’s say, just powerful or emotional abusers coming to church authorities and saying, "Well, I said I’m sorry to this person," and then someone in ecclesial authority responding with, "Well, look, they’re repentant, so you’ve got to forgive them." Not so.

Unless harm is accurately named, that its implications are teased out with sincerity, then forgiveness can’t really be offered with integrity, because we haven’t named all the harm. So in the absence of somebody’s genuine repentance—because I think this happens a lot, where we've been harmed and someone just won’t admit it to us or name it—what does forgiveness look like?

I think forgiveness can look like naming the harm accurately to ourselves and to Jesus, and then releasing to God our own contempt or our desire for vengeance. "Oh, that person would fail in life," right? To be able to say to God, "Oh, I wish that they would change. I am really hurt by them. But I trust that I don’t have to hate them anymore—I release them to you." That’s what forgiveness can look like in the absence of someone’s genuine repentance.

Now, aside from that caveat, even in healthy relationships—whether it's the household or in the Church—we're going to experience various levels of rupture. It's true in the house; it's true in the Church. And when it happens, we need to practice naming the hurt accurately to one another, and then to do the hard work of repairing with one another in relationship, with integrity. And this is because we’re bound by the love of God.

So I want to hear when I have hurt you. That is valuable to me, because I love you. And vice versa, right? This is how love works. I want to create capacity to hear those things without judgment. This is because love is the grace of all graces. And so we need to be a community that’s bound together in the love of God.

Paul tells them to let the peace of Christ rule over their hearts. Then he tells them that this peace, as it reigns over one another—this is the kind of peace that allows one another to flourish without the fear that we’re going to be dehumanized or cast out by one another. He finally tells them to let the Word of Christ dwell in them richly. When you create this kind of love, Christ’s words are effective in community. I can say to somebody, “Christ invites us into this,” and this is valuable to them. They can say it to me, and I receive that—even if it’s admonishing—and I can receive it as a word from Christ, because we are bound together in a secure relationship and in love.

So Christ’s words are effective when the community is bound by the love of God.

As we finish up the book of Colossians together today, consider your asceticism. And how are you training to be renewed into the image of your Creator? How are you training to be God's image-bearer in the world? We need to renounce the evils and the self-deception of the life that we lived before we took hold of the grace of God in Christ. We need to put on virtue, and then do the hard work of knowing ourselves accurately and truly, and knowing God's love accurately and truly, so that the Spirit might begin to bear fruit in our hearts, and we might come to know more deeply the grace and love of God.

And as image-bearers of God, we have to become a community where Christ’s word is effective among us, where the peace of Christ reigns, and where the love of God binds us together.

And so, I want to end today’s sermon with a quote that I found really helpful in my reading this week. One writer sums up this passage, and he says it this way:

“The Christ who lives in each of his people is the Christ who binds them together in one. This restoration of the original image of creation will yet be universally displayed. But how good and pleasant it is when here and now that day of the revelation of the sons and daughters of God is anticipated, and our divided world is confronted with a witness more eloquent than all of our preaching, and feels constrained to say as they did in Tertullian’s time, ‘See how they love one another.’”

May that be so for us.

Let me pray.

Almighty and merciful God, it is only by your grace that your faithful people offer you true and laudable service. Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.