Shane Hughes 9-28-25

It's good to see you here. My name is Shane Hughes, I am one of the ministers here. We're in a series right now where I want to turn your attention over to this wall. And you can see those five signs over there, that is our pathway. If you're new to Highland or you've never understood what those signs are for, this is what we're asking you to do.

The vision of Highland is partner with God in the restoration of the world of Abilene and, and of Highland. And so if you've ever wanted to know what does the church expect of me to do here, that's your guide. There's four things that we want you to experience over and over and over. They're. They're sacraments of a sort.

These are the places where we encounter God. This is the places where we experience God's grace. We want to begin with worship. We want you to gather here in this space so that we can be together as the assembly to worship God. Because we believe when we come together, see something happens in the spirit within us.

But also we want you to have a spirit of worship outside of this place that you can experience the wonder and the awe, the beauty of God outside of this building. We want you to experience table together as we shared this morning as Gretchen led us through the Lord's Supper. But more important, or equally as important, outside of this space, we want you to gather in small communities. We want to ask the question, who are you inviting to. To your table?

Who are you growing and being shaped by and transformed by? We want you to experience the power of baptism here in this place on a. On a Sunday or maybe a Jacob's dream if the smaller venue is better for you. But more than that, we want you to also continue growing in your relationship with God so that not only do you know Jesus as Lord as you meet him in the waters of baptism, but also you grow as in your faith to maturity, to fullness. We want you to experience the joy of self emptying, service.

And we do that together. There's lots of opportunities for you to bless others that are here in this building or in our city or in the world. But also we want you to live a life where you consider others interests above your own, in your work, in your family, all around you. And our hope is as you experience these four sacraments over and over and over as we weave through them, as each of them transform us and shape us, it makes us look more together, like the image of Christ. That's how we experience our Restoration.

And so a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the cross and how that functions in our community together and as individuals today. I want us to think about baptism. And so we turn our text to. To Colossians, chapter two. And basically, the big idea of the book of Colossians, the author is writing, is that Jesus is the fullness of deity dwelling in a body.

And this is what the church in Colossae receives, and this is what they continue to live into. And as Paul writes the letter, he's concerned about some things that are happening to that church. And so I want us to begin by the hymn in Colossians Chapter one. It's almost. It's so beautiful.

It must be a song. Jesus, he is the image of the invisible God, firstborn of all creation. For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers, all things have been created through him and are for him. Jesus, he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church, and he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have a place in everything.

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 heaven or on earth, or by making peace, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And the fundamental theme in Colossians is Paul's reassurance that these powers cannot defeat the Church because Christ has already conquered the powers. Will you pray with me? Heavenly Father, we're grateful to be gathered together in this place. I'm grateful that the worship that we have offered rises to your nose like a scent offering. It is a beautiful thing to praise you with.

My brothers and sisters, I'm grateful that we were gathered around the table, that we remembered your son and his life, his death and his resurrection. Father, now, as we turn our minds to your word, I pray that you pour through me the gift of preaching that I might speak your truth and love to these, your people. It's together that the Church says Amen. So in chapter two, Paul moves from this broad, beautiful, cosmic understanding of Christ to what's happening in the church in Colossae. And there's some in the Church.

We believe that making the argument that those who are added to the Church, the Gentiles, they need to be circumcised like the Jews were. And Paul wants to make the argument this is not necessary because God has already set aside the church for God's own purpose. Paul does not simply argue that the Colossians will rise from the dead. He asserts that in their baptism they have already risen from the dead. And here at Highland, when I explain to people that don't know what church of Christ is and I, I talk to them about it, I try to tell them what they are and then I explain our church and then inevitably the question that comes up is like, hey, your church doesn't look a lot like what you just explained of churches of Christ.

And I say, yeah, but actually I think we, we rest in the heart of the church of Christ in terms of our beliefs and our focus. We might have a few different expressions of what that looks like, but we're still a church of Christ in our hearts. And here's a part of the church of Christ kind of heritage that I deeply value. It's when you are baptized, you are baptized into the church. Now you're baptized by in the name of Jesus.

And the good faith confession that you offer is that you believe Jesus is the son of God, but when you're baptized, you're baptized into the church. In Acts 2, it says they were added to the church and it's. And what Jesus saves is the church. And that might be a sharp contrast from what you might have heard and other churches or evangelical or otherwise that tend to emphasize the personal relationship with Jesus. And they might emphasize that so much so that they can't imagine why they would need the community of faith at all.

If what mad with what matters is my personal relationship with God and that's what really sustains me and that's what really saves me, then what difference does it make if I go to a community of faith or not? Well, I want to push back and churches of Christ push back against that idea that getting saved is only a moment where you meet Christ and it's not a lifetime of being formed and shaped and matured into the image of God. That's why baptism is a two fold grace. It's a moment of your confession, but it's also a lifetime of your growth. And I can't imagine someone that experiences a lifetime of growth outside of the church that is as deeply formational as it is inside the church.

If the church matters as a means of salvation, what it means is we just can't do away with each other. Despite my inkling at times to want to do so. Right. It'd be a lot easier. This sermon would be a lot better if this room was empty because I would be the only witness.

It would be amazing. It would be perfect, right? No, we need one another. And. And let me tell you, I think the best example at Highland of how that works, it was a few years ago.

If you're new to this church, you may not know this story. It was a few years ago that we were discerning our leadership, like who gets to. Who gets to serve in leadership. And we. We search Scripture and we study that together as a leadership, and then we engage the whole community in conversations.

And you could come to a listening group and you could say, this is how I see the text and this is how I read this situation about who can be leaders. And you would be surprised. As you sat in those listening groups, you might hear a different voice or a different perspective from someone else on the other side of that circle that was the exact opposite of yours who. Whom you deeply loved. And I think we all, who we experienced that, had to wrestle with that.

Ultimately, our leaders had to choose, which way do we go? We have to choose a path. Which way are we going to go? I think the deepest commitment of what it means to be church are the leaders who disagreed with the decision, yet chose to stay anyway.

They weren't comfortable with it. They read their Bibles differently, but they chose to stay because they knew there was something about this community that was greater than the sum of our doctrinal opinions.

Early in Christian history, we know because of archaeological evidence that baptisteries had eight sides. They were shaped like octagons. And there was a reference to the eight people that were saved on the Ark. It was Noah and his three sons and all of their spouses, those eight people. And the church functions like the Ark.

In fact, in a lot of Church of Christ architecture, especially in the Midwest and Tennessee and Kentucky, even the auditorium looks like a boat that's been flipped upside down. And that's intentional. That's by design to remind us that it is the church that carries us through the storm. Early Christian leaders saw baptism like through the lens of the Exodus. John Chrysostom, who was an early preacher and writer, he writes, nothing is more blessed than this burial, whereat all are rejoicing, both angels and men.

And Lord of angels. At this burial, no one there is need of vestments, nor a coffin, nor of anything else of that kind. Would you see the symbol of this? I will show you A pool wherein the one who was buried, the other raised in the Red Sea, the Egyptians were sunk beneath, beneath it, but the Israelites went up out of it. And in the same act, he buries one and generates another.

Early in Christianity and the New Testament agrees that they understood their baptism as a death, like traveling through the reed sea. And there were some things that didn't stay with you in Christ. The community of faith is raised with Christ through faith. Thus baptism is the first act of obedience which a Christian participates in the salvation of the world. And so there's two verbs that I want you to key in on.

If you have your Bible In Colossians chapter two, I want you to look at this with me. The first is that Jesus erases the record and he wipes it clean. In the first century, if you had a bad credit score, that report was always on public display because in cities and villages and towns there was a pillar and somebody could go up to that pillar and nail into it a, a notice that said you weren't paying your debt. Now this served two purposes. One of those purposes was to kind of shame you into paying it because everybody knew it was happening.

The other was to warn everybody else, hey, this guy is a credit risk because he's not paying his dues. And so on this poll, there was a record of all your mistakes, all of your failures. And Paul uses that metaphor to say Jesus erases the record and wipes it clean. He says Jesus has taken all of those records off of that pillar and nailed them to the cross and you are free and clear. And then he moves to another metaphor and it's even more powerful.

And you see, Common says such power makes Christian sovereignty over the rulers and authorities of the world inevitable. Through Christ's death and resurrection, he has supreme power. Paul does not merely claim that Christ defeated the powers of this world. He asserts that Christ humiliated them by disarming them literally. In the text, that means disrobing them, making them a public example of feebleness of their power.

But the threat in the text is that they might be caught up in meaningless philosophy and minutia related to Christianity. This is what Paul calls empty traditions. And scholars have debated about this. Some think that that's the Jewish expectations creeping into the church of, of how what you can eat or if you must be circumcised or not. Others see it as, as an accusation that there were some sins that were unforgivable.

And if that's the case, that's pretty destructive. If you have something in your past that you think is unforgivable, that kind of shame is going to drive you away from the body of Christ. It's going to drive you away from Jesus. If it was some act of bad judgment haunting you like Jacob Marley at night. But it's another thing if we put that on somebody else.

You know, Jesus tells Peter, you will be able to bind and loosen things. He gives that power to the church. And that's something we have to hold carefully. If you bind a sin on someone else as unforgivable and, and that drives them out of the body of Christ, we need to hold that very carefully. We need to be very mindful of the power that we possess.

Because more often than not, what I found is that someone, someone drives somebody else out for something that they did, that person's often a scapegoat. But there's bigger issues at play in that system. So do you see why this is so serious?

If the church is the ark that God uses to save us now I'm going to admit there's an invisible church that we can't see that exists outside of these walls. I'm not making some church of Christ kind of old school sectarian move that only the ones in here are the ones that save. We're not even sure about any other church in the city. That's not what I'm saying. If the church, small C Catholic, the church universal, is how we are saved.

And if we are raised to new life because the community is around us, disrupting that unity is lethal. If one person or one church or one denomination gets into the mistake of thinking we're the right ones, or we're the good ones, or they're the wrong ones, or they're the evil ones, that kind of stereotyping refuses to see our own culpability toward harm while simultaneously refusing to see the imago DEI in the other.

Later, Paul tells them that their baptism sets them free from meaningless festivals and slavish obligations to establish rituals. It's not the calendar that saves us. It's Jesus through the church. Because the church holds its identity rooted in Christ. It's Christ who was our head.

So here's the truth. The truth is, is that we have all died in our baptism. That all of us have come through the water and were saved through the church. All of us had quite a bit of Egypt within us, if we admit it. And it is now deadened at the bottom of the sea, that deceitful philosophy can no longer stick to us.

That through the grace of God, we are raised with Christ to new life together in the body. Christ is the head of us all, and death shall have no more dominion. There's a book that I got Ashley Sturman recommended it to. She mentioned it a couple weeks ago. Recommended to us.

It's called the Patient Ferment of the Early Church. It's by a guy named Alan Kreider. And he writes this history of the first three or four or five centuries of the church. And he tries to explain, like, what was it about them that caused them to go from just 12 disciples hiding, huddling in an upper room, to becoming so influential in the Roman Empire three and a half centuries later that the emperor himself decides to become baptized. Like, how did that.

How did we get there? And he writes that Christians could form this countercultural community of that lived strange and attractive lives to their pagan neighbors. And he introduces this new term, or at least he coins it, he calls it habitus. And it's from the Latin word that we get the word habit. And habit's not far from the idea that he's trying to describe that habits are these deeply ingrained patterns of behavior.

They're things that we do instinctively, without thinking. I think I've said this before, but when you go to brush your teeth tonight, try to begin brushing your teeth on a different tooth than the one you always do. Since I'm left handed, I always start back here, top right molar, and I work my way around. If I were to change that, I would jab myself in the gums, right? It's almost impossible for us to change that.

Have you ever driven home and you pull up into your driveway and you've been thinking about something so serious that you don't know? You have no recollection of whether you stopped and at any red light on the way home. What you've been relying on in that moment is your habit. Our habits are formational, and so we have to be very intentional about how we choose them. Let me give you a personal example.

There's been times where I'm at my house and I hear a cry from one of my sons. One of my sons has gotten hurt. And so I stop what I do and I go in there. To see my instinctive habit right now is to be more focused on who caused the problem and why they did it than the son that's injured. In fact, my kids have picked up on this and they know that's going on.

Because when I get into the room where one child is hurt, the other two children are usually like, gone, right? Or at least the guilty one is gone. But because they have learned, when dad comes into the room when this event has happened, his instinct is going to be to blame somebody Way more than it's going to be to help somebody. And I gotta tell you the truth, that's not the kind of habit that I want to have. That's not the kind of dad that I want to be.

And so I need to do some action that counterforms that habit so that I can be a better father to my sons.

It changes the way that we see the world. It's not just our instinctive behaviors, but also our instinctive emotions, also our moral judgments. It can change everything. It's the way we see the world. And so the early church had these counter formational acts of patience.

They had counter formational acts of greeting one another. One of the things we miss in the New Testament, at least we gloss right over it, is when Paul commands churches to greet one another with a holy kiss. And that's awkward because not all of you brush your teeth in the morning. So I don't do it. And what we've done instead is to say, well, obviously what Paul is talking about there is handshaking, so we should greet one another appropriately, right?

That's not what Paul means at all. And when we miss the point of that, we miss this transformational act that was happening in the first century. Because in the first century, kissing one another and greeting was was about as socially complicated as bowing is in Japanese culture. In fact, they will try to teach you how to bow in Japanese culture. At least they tried to, but eventually they just told American businessmen, just stick out your hand and offer a handshake, because you cannot understand what's going on in that moment of just bowing to another person because somebody has higher social status or lower social status.

The length of your bow, the depth of your bow, it all depends on the room. Not just who you're greeting, but who else is in the room. Because if they have more status than the person you're at, then you have to acknowledge that in the way that you do the motion. Eventually people are like, this is too complicated. Let's just shake hands, right?

The same is true in the first century about kissing. Am I able to kiss somebody on the cheek? Do I need to kiss their hand or their ring? Do I need to kneel as I do it? All of that greeting wrote into it, who's on top of and who's on bottom?

And. And Paul says, you know, when, when Christians greet one another, it's all on an even playing field. We're going to introduce a whole new idea, a holy kiss that is fundamentally different than everything outside. And so when the outsider came in that was of low station. And they were greeted by somebody of high station with the holy kiss.

It transformed the way that they understood society. It was a counter form act that changed the way the church worked. But there's a shift that occurs about 400 years in, and it's a shift of faith toward a posture of believing the right things, from a posture of embodying the right things. One way to say it is that the church moved from orthopraxy doing the right things, to orthodoxy believing the right things. And part of the reason is because they were challenged with a lot of ideas about the Trinity, about the nature of Jesus.

And these were big, serious questions that had to be answered. But that shifted the way that people were trained into Christ. Before that moment. You would spend three to seven years as a catechumen, as a, as somebody that was preparing to enter the Christian life because they had to be very careful that you could do those instincts, those moral instincts in the right way. And so they were training for three to seven years to get to that place.

And part of the reason why was because there was persecution happening at the time. And it wasn't just your failure if you couldn't say Jesus is Lord, it was the failure of the church. And so they were so very careful. But after about 400 years, it just became to a checklist of the right things.

And I think, I think we're lesser for it, I think we're the worse for it. Our spiritual formation matters way more than we realize. And I wonder if what would happen if we as a church spent time focusing on those instincts, those habits, the people around you at work, the ones that annoy you or irritate you. What does it look like when your instinct toward them is grace rather than irritation your family? What does it look like when your attitude to your children is, is grace rather than, you know, you bother me because you disrupted my time.

What does it look like in your life when your spouse or those around you that you have a Christlike moral reflex?

What would it look like to work to train ourselves for a Christ formed position? The kind of life where kindness and patience for others are instinctive, moral than more than just the, the ethical question of what would Jesus do? Or what's the right thing to believe? What's my, what's my moral and behavioral reflex? And does that look like Christ?

I think that's what Paul is talking about when he talks about the way that we are grown up into the body of Christ.

And I believe a group of people, a gathering. A church, an assembly, I believe. A church dedicated to that. Well, I know it was a church dedicated to that 2000 years ago. Changed an empire.

It changed the world. And I believe the spirit that was in them is the spirit that's in us. And that kind of commitment just might change me. I think it would change you, too. Would you please stand for our benediction?

Highland. May you never grow weary in your spiritual formation. May you never get tired of hearing Jesus voice and allowing it to pierce your heart. May your. May your soul never become calcified, but it always is tender so that you can grow deeper, rooted into the love of God that you may be form every ligament of the body of Christ.