Christ Is All, And In All Of Them

He has counted, without meaning to, because that is what a man does when he has nothing to do with his hands. Eleven. Eleven times in one evening.

"This is him, he's the one from the old country."

And every single time it is meant well. That is the thing that makes it impossible to say anything about. Nobody is being unkind. They are proud to have him. They say the name of the place carefully, the way you handle something breakable, and then somebody asks about the food, and he answers about the food, because he always answers about the food, and it is a good answer and it works every time.

Then the conversation goes back to the thing everyone else already has. A show that finished before he arrived. A road that used to run somewhere. A man called Denny who apparently did something in nineteen ninety two that is still funny. He laughs at the right point because the timing of a laugh is not language, and he follows, honestly, about a third of it.

And he could stand up right now and every person there would say he is one of them and mean it entirely, and he would go home and lie in the dark and know that he came in through a door with his origin written over it, and that he goes out through the same door, and that in nine years nobody has once introduced him by anything else.

You know the comma before it lands. You have heard your own name and then the small pause, and you already know the shape of what is coming after it.

Paul writes the list and then abolishes it

There is a sentence in Colossians that has been read for two thousand years as a nice thought about unity, and it is not a nice thought. It is a demolition, and it is done in one clause, and you have to see the list first for the clause to do anything to you.

Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.Colossians 3:11

Look at what he actually lists, because it is not a list of nations. It is a list of the ways his world sorted a man the moment he walked in.

Greek or Jew is culture. Circumcision or uncircumcision is religious formation, the thing you were raised inside. Bond or free is your station, which is what everybody in that room already knew about you before you spoke.

And then there is Barbarian, and I want you to sit with this one, because it is your word and Paul knew exactly what he was doing when he set it down.

In Greek it was not a nationality and it was not an insult about intelligence. It was a word made out of a sound. It is what somebody else's speech was said to sound like to an ear that could not follow it, a run of syllables that meant nothing, bar bar bar. It is the label for the man in the room who is following about a third.

Paul puts that man in the middle of his list. Then he takes the whole list away.

You are inside the clause that says Christ is all and in all, and no sorting survived it, including the kind that is done gently and with real affection. That is not my generous reading of a nice verse; Colossians 3:11 names the categories one at a time in order to end them, and the Holy Spirit placed you inside that clause rather than politely alongside it.

Notice too that Paul does not say the differences are unimportant, or that everybody should try to become the same. He does not tell the Barbarian to work on his Greek. He says the sorting has no standing any more. The man is not asked to stop being from anywhere. The room is asked to stop being a court.

You have full membership in a people, not a warm welcome from one, and the difference between those two is the whole of what that verse settles. Scripture is where that is written down rather than in anybody's manners, and His Spirit does not seat a man at the edge of a table He has already put him at the middle of.

Nothing between you and God is routed through the idiom

Here is the quiet fear underneath the counting, and it is worth pulling into the light, because it is not really about a potluck.

If I follow a third of the room, do I follow a third of God.

No. And the reason is not encouragement, it is architecture. What passes between a person and God does not travel by idiom. It never has. The oldest praise in the world was sung in languages that have been dead for two and a half thousand years and not one syllable of it has expired. A man in a field with no words at all has been heard perfectly. There is no register of God in which you are the beginner.

And when the Spirit came at Pentecost, the arrangement is worth reading closely, because God had every option available and chose this one. He did not give everybody one language. He did not require the crowd to learn the speakers'. Every man heard in the tongue wherein he was born.

You were given a share in a people that was never issued in a single language, and the tongue you think in is not the accommodation, it is the design. That is written into the record of the day the church began, when every man heard in the tongue he was born in, and the same Spirit who arranged that morning is not working harder on the people who follow all of it.

Now put that back on the room. If Christ is all, and in all, then the people who talk over each other about a road and a man called Denny are not the standard you are failing to reach. Christ is in all of them. They are not the examination. They are kin who happen to have the shorthand, and you are kin who happens not to, and neither of those is a rank.