In the novel James, Percival Everett enlivens the story we may have first encountered as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by telling it through the eyes of Huck’s travel partner Jim. It is a powerful reimagining of Mark Twain’s novel, demanding the reader question what they think they understood about the book and the broader themes Twain sought to explore through it. Race and class are brought into sharper focus, and we are forced to wrestle with what the truth really means. Everett does a masterful job of keeping the broad framework of the narrative familiar while challenging what we think we know about the story. An example of Everett’s genius and artistry is the backstory he provides for a tale told by Huck in Twain’s novel, where he recounts a steamboat incident. Everett opens the aperture to give us a more fulsome view.
A paddleboat packed with passengers, including Jim and Huck, races up the Mississippi River pushing its steam engines to their limit as it moves urgently through the night to its destination. The boiler eats coal moving the boat faster and faster until it can no longer take the pressure. With a final gasp, it belches fire, then explodes, blasting everyone into the murky, fast-moving water and creating a gruesome spectacle: people and debris strewn across the water like a careless child might hurl unwanted toys. Cries of desperation and anguish echo through the dark. As he gains his wits about him after the powerful jolt, Jim is faced with a gut-wrenching decision: save a friend with whom he is traveling or save Huck. He chooses Huck. Swimming the boy to a sandy beach, Jim resuscitates Huck by clearing the water from his lungs. When the boy finally awakens from the ordeal, he is befuddled by Jim’s decision and questions him.
"Question" is a polite way of naming the interaction. If you have ever encountered a thirteen-year-old like Huck, you know that the experience is more of a barrage of comments, questions, and pleadings for an answer, all soon followed by endless commentary on said answer, immediately resulting in another line of inquiry. Jim does his best to evade Huck’s onslaught. Then, with much consideration, finally shares the basis for his decision. It is a life-altering response and Huck is stunned by what he hears. He pushes back, mounting a second storm of questions. Through it all, Jim continues to hold firm in the truth he shared. A confused Huck tries to shut down the conversation saying that he simply cannot and will not believe the revelation. Jim responds, “Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like.”[^1]
Beliefs, as Jim knows, come in a variety of flavors. We may believe that our favorite baseball team will win the World Series this year, or believe that our mother’s chili recipe is the world’s best, or even believe that our church is the only one where God is truly worshiped. We hold firm in these beliefs even as the evidence mounts against us: our team is in last place, seconds on that chili are rare, and our church attendance is dwindling. Beliefs can be muddled by the believer’s own assumptions and motivations. Truth, as Jim teaches Huck, turns our beliefs upside down.
The distinction between truth and belief may be exactly what Paul was trying to teach the Colossians in today’s epistle lesson. They had a set of beliefs that placed Jesus as one among many of the spiritual authorities to be venerated. Moreover, they were attempting to weave together a Hellenistic understanding of deity with what they thought they knew about Christianity. They had developed a complex set of beliefs, but none were grounded in the truth of Jesus Christ. Paul, therefore, turns to a key teaching tool to begin his work: a hymn.
Augustine observed that hymns are intended for the praise of God and any arrangement that purports to be a hymn, but does not praise God, should be considered a sacrilege.[^2] It is precisely in this blasphemous condition that the Colossians find themselves. They have taken a widely revered song and perverted it to serve their distorted beliefs about God. Specifically, they thought that God was a distant spirit only accessed through emissaries and an ascetic lifestyle that prepared one for the encounter.[^3] Paul seeks a corrective, brilliantly turning to a familiar song to instruct. Verses 15-20 in today’s lesson predate Paul and scholars teach that the foundational components of these lines were part of a popular hymn. While the lyrics may not be original to Paul, he has edited them to share the truth of Christ’s life and work on the cross in order to rectify the Colossians’ malformed beliefs.
Martin Luther understood hymns to be a powerful tool for teaching theology. Think of his strong Trinitarian instruction in “A Might Fortress is our God.” In those soaring stanzas we are reminded that God is a “bulwark never failing,” who has no equal; Christ is God’s own who will “win the battle” for our salvation; and the Spirit is God’s gift who is present with us.[^4] Charles Wesley recognized the practicality of hymnody for imparting Biblical truths. His hymn “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing” is a primer on Christian formation, with references to scripture that both instruct and reinforce teachings on grace, mercy and love. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that singing allowed for the church, in heaven and on earth, to come into unity, sharing one voice in their proclamation and praise of God that is “bound to God’s revealing Word in Jesus Christ.”[^5] Hymns, as John Wesley wrote, contain “all the important truths of our most holy religion.”[^6] Paul, therefore, taps into the full potential of the form to redirect the Colossian church from their beliefs about the religion they had distorted to the truth of Jesus Christ. Through singing, he understood that “one comes to know the truth by doing the truth.”[^7]
The primary truth Paul addresses is that Christ is not one among many objects to be worshiped, as the Colossians thought, but that Christ is “the one who reveals God most fully; he is the one in whom God is encountered as the gospel is proclaimed and heard.”[^8] Today’s reading reveals that the Colossians need to be reminded of this truth. Their beliefs muddled their understanding of the person and work of Jesus creating distance from God. To address this gap, Paul’s teaching offers a master class on who Jesus is and the significance of Jesus’ work.
Using the hymn as his teaching tool, Paul first establishes Jesus’ identity. In verse 15, he names that Jesus is the “image of the invisible God,” beginning his lesson with the foundational truth that Jesus is the self-revelation of God. Unlike the other deities and beings that the Colossians included in their worship, Yahweh became human. God chose to reveal Godself through the second person of the Trinity. In doing so, God the Father offers a revelation of himself through God the Son. In Matthew 11:27, Jesus teaches that “no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” The Colossians did not and could not believe that God sought to be so close or so easily revealed.[^9] They thought a set of intermediaries were the only way to God and therefore revered those lesser beings. God’s very revelation in the Son obliterates any notion of God’s distance from us. Instead, God turns towards us by taking on flesh and becoming one of us: fully human while remaining fully divine. What we learn about God through Jesus’s life, death and resurrection is that God “so loved the world that he gave his only Son” so that we “may not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:26). This remarkable claim is the truth of Christ, and it means that God seeks relationship and reconciliation with God’s creation now and for all time.
So, in answering the question, “who is Jesus Christ?,” Paul professes that He is God incarnate. Paul then reinforces his proclamation by naming Christ, as “firstborn of all creation” who created “all things in heaven and on earth” (Col. 1: 16). Karl Barth observed that this revelation from Paul announces Christ as “the first and eternal Word of God delivered and fulfilled in time.”[^10] Christ, then, is both the cornerstone and capstone of creation. The “thrones, dominions, rulers and powers” that so enthralled the Colossians were added to the hymn by Paul so that he could drive home the lesson that these beings are no match for Christ. As created, they are inferior and are unworthy of adoration.
Christ, Paul declares, is also the head of the church, a clarification that he added to the hymn to remind the Colossians of the redemption offered through this visible presence of God.[^11] Their practice had turned the church into a place of judgement based on a set of human-made rules for living (Col. 2:20-23) rather than the extension of God’s love into the world. We can empathize with the Colossians; it’s easy to get confused about what the church is and is not, obscuring truth with our beliefs just as Huck did. The 1963 film Lilies of the Field offers us a glimpse of how that might happen. In it, Sydney Poitier plays Homer Smith, a journeyman contractor who is making his way across the west. In Arizona, he encounters a small group of nuns living off the land at the edge of the desert. He is there by necessity. His car overheated. The Mother Superior, Maria, believes him to be sent by God.
Mother Maria wants a chapel built on the convent’s land. Without it, the nuns, a priest and their small flock are forced to worship outside a local store using the tailgate of a truck as their alter. Mother Maria has a grander vision for her community. Her dogged pursuit of a completed chapel ultimately wears Smith down, and he agrees to build it. From the moment an elated Maria announces the building’s future, the small church takes on a big life of its own. Smith’s condition for construction is that he built this place of worship alone. For him, the structure becomes the realization of an unfulfilled dream to become an architect. For Mother Maria, the chapel becomes the entire end of her theological pursuit. The physical space is THE church to her. For Juan, the business owner whose parking lot serves as the congregation’s current home, the chapel represents an insurance policy. He isn’t sure if God is real, but just in case, he’s helping build God a permanent home hoping it protects him from eternal damnation.
The church, in other words, has become what Smith, Mother Maria, and Juan believe it to be. Their beliefs are motivated by the particularities of their own lives. Those beliefs drive them and become the primary focus of their attention during construction. Once the chapel is complete, the camera widens to show the joy of the priest and nuns, who recognize the church as the visible presence of God in the world. That scene is juxtaposed with shots of Smith, Mother Maria and Juan who, individually, recognize that though they completed the task, they had lost sight of the intention. The long silence accompanying their reflection is broken by a hymn. The nuns begin to sing the Amen chorus, which recounts the life and work of Christ, inviting the hearer to: see the little baby in the manger, see him teaching in the temple, see him at the Jordan, see him making disciples, see him marching in Jerusalem, see him in the garden, led before Pilate, crucified, risen to save us. Each phrase punctuated by Amen, Amen, Amen![^12] Hearing the truth of Christ’s life, death and resurrection in these lyrics, Smith, Mother Maria and Juan are remembered into his body, the church. Paul uses the same strategy of calling on verse to help the Colossians reclaim the reconciliation offered to them through Christ’s church.
Having thoroughly recounted who Christ is, image of the invisible God, firstborn of creation, and head of the church; Paul moves to the work of Christ on the cross. He teaches that by his death and resurrection, Christ reconciles all things to God. This is a remarkable statement. In the crucifixion, humans rejected God. Yet, God remains willing to suffer for our sins. What we know on this side of Easter is that Christ’s death is not the end of the story. Fredrick Buechner wrote that the resurrection means that “the worst thing is not the last thing about the world.”[^13] Christ does not stay in the tomb and that means that we do not have to stay in sin. We are reconciled to God.
Lately, when I think of the resurrection, I think of the men and women leading Deep Time Coffee, a social enterprise in western North Carolina borne out of and housed in Trinity United Methodist Church. Its mission is to be “a community of faith that celebrates, employs, and creates a spiritual community with people impacted by incarceration.”[^14] Called Sojourners, the members of Deep Time have created a grace-filled community rooted in God’s unfailing love. They are living witnesses to Buechner’s observation that “the worst thing is not the last thing.”^15 They roast coffee beans to perfection and have recently opened a welcoming café in the church. When you are in Asheville, please visit Deep Time for some delicious coffee and soul changing fellowship. In the bean roasting room and at the espresso machine, you will find people who have absorbed all that the Colossians missed. The Sojourners are rooted in Christ, who was himself a participant in the carceral system, and they can teach us the truth. They do not have to be reminded that we have been made new through the body and blood of Christ and are invited into new life with him. They have witnessed it firsthand and can sing of the life changing results. If we follow their lead, we may find ourselves reconciled with once estranged family members and friends; we may find ourselves living into a freedom from the things that kept us trapped; we may find ourselves in full relationship with God; we may find that, by the grace of God, our worst thing will never, ever be our last thing. All of this is available through Christ’s loving work on the cross.
Like the Colossians, we can easily find other places to point our adoration: work, school, possessions, or status, or wealth. But when we do, we take our eyes off the only One worthy of our worship. Barth wrote of Christ that “When we look at Him, we have all conceivable clarity and certainty.”[^16] In other words, we have found truth and that is something to sing about.
Amen.
[^1]: Percival Everett, James (New York: Doubleday, 2024), 257.
[^2]: Augustine, “Psalm CXLVIII”, in Expositions on the Psalms, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), 677.
[^3]: Ralph P. Martin, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon, ed. James Luther Mays (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1991), 92 and Charles B. Cousar, The Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 169.
[^4]: Martin Luther, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” in The United Methodist Hymnal, ed. Carlton R. Young (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), 110.
[^5]: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1954), 57-58.
[^6]: John Wesley, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists, London: J. Paramore, 1780, iv.
[^7]: Thomas A. Langford, “Charles Wesley as Theologian,” in Charles Wesley: Poet and Theologian, ed. S.T. Kimbrough, Jr. (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1992), 104.
[^8]: Arland J. Hultgren, “Colossians,” in The Deuter-Pauline Letters: Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1-2 Timothy, Titus, ed. Gerhard Krodel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 30.
[^9]: Martin, 85.
[^10]: Karl Barth, “The Doctrine of Reconciliation,” Volume IV, part I in Church Dogmatics, eds. G. W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010), 48.
[^11]: Martin, 106.
[^12]: Jester Hairston, arranger, “Amen” Lilies of the Field Soundtrack, 1963, website: https://genius.com/artists/Jester-hairston
[^13]: Fredrick Buechner, The Final Beast (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1965).
[^14]: Mission Statement of Deep Time Coffee, www.deeptimeavl.org/about-us
[^16]: Barth, “The Doctrine of Reconciliation,” Church Dogmatics, 48.