Christ, Our Center
The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King The Church of the Good Shepherd
Text: Colossians 1:11-20 The Rev. Ross M. Wright
William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming” gives voice to the feelings of distraction and fragmentation of modern life:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Does this in any way describe life as you experience it? Is your life simply a random series of events? Or is there a deeper reality which holds all the rags and patches? When the center of our lives no longer holds, existence itself feels threatened. We experience the “fear of non-being.”1
Contrast Yeats’ vision of modern life with Paul’s description of Jesus Christ in the first chapter of Colossians:
He is the image of the invisible God
the firstborn of all creation
for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created,
things visible and invisible
whether thrones of dominions or rulers or powers
all things have been created though him and for him.
He himself is before all things
and in him all things hold together.
There is an integrating point of the universe, and that center is Jesus Christ. Christ is “the still point” at the center of the universe, in the words of T. S. Elliot.2 The universe was created “in him and through him.” At the beginning of the universe, when God said, “let there be light,” Christ was there as the agent of creation. Jesus Christ continues to preserve what he has created: “in him all things hold together.” He is the integrating center of the universe, at the subatomic level, and the center of our lives. Our life as believers is life “in Christ.” Our existence is in Christ. Therefore, we have a center. And that center will hold.
There are two experiences in our lives where this centeredness becomes concrete. The first is life in the congregation. By that, I mean baptism, participation in the Holy Eucharist, fellowship with other believers, and service – washing the feet of others in Christ’s name. This is expressed well in the baptismal covenant, which we say whenever there is a baptism:
Question: “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?” Answer: “I will by God’s help.”
Question: “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” Answer: “I will with God’s help.”
When we come to church on Sunday morning, we may come distracted, grumpy, and ambivalent about the things of God. But as we sing the hymns, listen to the word of God, and participate in the prayers, a transformation may occur: God gathers the scattered forces of our souls. In the act of worship, we are reintegrated. Life in a congregation reveals to us that there is a pattern to our lives, a beginning, middle and end: baptism, confirmation, Holy Eucharist, the call to follow Christ; and finally, at our death, the “sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The second place where we experience Christ as our center is in reading and meditating on Holy Scripture. By meditating on the word, I mean reading a short passage and prayerfully asking God to show us what it means for our lives. As God addresses us from the word, we rediscover our center, our existence in Christ. Daily meditation on the word of God and prayer “is like a magnet which draws together all the forces in our life that make for order.”3
So much of modern life pulls us apart. Life goes at a frantic pace. Demands come from all sides. Other ages had their own temptations and difficulties. For us, it is distraction, born of so many choices. Deep down, there is a longing in many of us for single mindedness, what Kierkegaard called, “the purity of heart to will one thing.” It is a deep longing to discover again this still point, this integrating point. Jesus Christ is that “point of crystallization” in our lives that gives as “an inner sense of order; which preserves us in the midst of all kinds of unrest.” “Have we not all a deep, perhaps unconfused, longing for such a gift? Could it not become for us once more a source of health and strength?”4
Christ is the center of the universe. Christ is our center. It is possible, of course, to try to substitute something else for the center: work, a relationship, recreation. This is the story of us all. Jim Fixx, who ushered in the first wave of the running fad in the late 1970s, described in The Complete Book of Running the feeling of well-being that comes from running every day. He said: Many of us have found that the discipline of the daily run has become the center of our day, the central, unchanging reality of our lives. It is an attractive proposition. But when Jim Fixx collapsed and died of a heart attack on a long run at the age of 37, many of us in the running community had to face just how fragile this center can be.
Here is the great paradox of life in Christ. Christ is our center at the same time that we know our lives to be in disarray – our finances our sexuality, and our cravings. The riddle is solved only in Christ, in the promise that we have been reconciled to God through the blood of his cross. Christ is our center, our integrating point, even when there is so much in us that remains disintegrated and resists his will. We are forgiven; we are washed in the blood of Christ; we are reconciled:
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Jesus Christ is our center, and the center will hold.
1 The phrase, originally coined by Heidegger, is employed by Reinhold Niebuhr in The Nature and Destiny of Man.
2 The Four Quartets.
3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a letter to a friend on the front lines, March 1, 1942. Meditating on the Word, trans. and ed., David McI. Gracie (Cambridge MA: Cowley, 1986), 51-52.
4 Ibid.