Seek Christ Above

Good morning.

Okay, mic is on.

Okay.

Um, scripture reading for today is Colossians 3, 1 through 4.

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

And uh just wanted to also give a thanks to Matt for uh leading us in worship this morning.

Yeah.

It's a kind thing to do.

Uh I'm gonna take a sip of coffee.

I went to a concert last night, and uh it we got home at midnight.

I haven't seen midnight in a long time.

It was very late.

All right.

So thanks again for joining us this morning.

We're continuing in Colossians, and uh before we get started, let's pray.

Holy Father, we praise you for your love towards us.

We praise you that you are the God who sought us and who came to make yourself known.

Lord, we pray that this morning we would see clearly what the implications of you seeking us are, and that by your grace we might come to be able to seek you, and that our lives might be shaped by that, that we would no longer seek the things of the earth, but that we would seek the things that are above where Christ is.

Lord, help us to understand what that means and to receive that call.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So last week we looked at Paul's warning to the Colossians, and he was saying, do not add anything to Christ.

Make no additions to Christ for your salvation.

Christ alone is sufficient.

And if ever we do add things to Christ for our salvation, then we're denying who Christ is.

Christ is the all-sufficient Savior, so that it is by faith in Him alone, in Him only, that we find our hope in our salvation.

Now, this sort of leads into this week, where the question is, okay, if we know not to add anything to Christ, then what are we to do?

We're not to play around with self-made religion, ascetic practices, or some rituals or things that would seek to just divide the church and puff ourselves up with pride.

What are we to do then?

We are to seek Christ who is above.

Now, that's the command that Paul gives in this part of the letter.

He tells us to seek Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is.

Let our whole lives be in this pattern of seeking Christ.

Now, I may just be tired, but when you hear the phrase seek Christ, does anything come to mind?

For me, it's a word, and I know what those words mean.

I know what it is, and to be told or compelled to seek Christ, I don't exactly know what to do next.

It's being in church, you know, that's probably a good start.

So you might have thought, well, you know, I'm in church, that's that must be seeking Christ.

But then tomorrow life will be full of all that life is full of.

Probably even tonight, Sunday nights, things will get scary.

And you'll look towards the week ahead and you'll consider, well, what does it mean to seek Christ here?

We could try it right now.

Okay, everyone seek Christ.

Who do you think did it the fastest?

It's hard to tell from up here.

Well, in the letter today, Paul tells us why we seek Christ.

Why is it that we are called to seek Christ?

And then he'll show us how to seek Christ, which will be helpful for a room like us.

And then he's going to give us the results of seeking Christ.

So why, how, and the results.

I was joking when we were praying with the volunteers that there's nothing like an outline like why, how, and results.

That gets the blood pumping.

Okay, so why we seek Christ?

Now, let's not get too complicated.

Why do you seek anything?

Why do you seek?

To find, yeah.

So why do we seek Christ?

To find to find, yeah, it wasn't a trap.

It's a little bit of a trap.

Those of you who have gone here long enough know that I'm probably going to do something weird with this.

But yeah, we are here to seek Christ, and we seek Christ to find him.

That's why we seek things.

Now, I thought perhaps if we look at this through the lens of an old problem of seeking and finding, we might be able to see it with a bit clearer eyes.

There's this old problem of seeking and finding that's described in one of Plato's dialogues called the Mino.

And in his dialogue with uh Mino, he describes what has come to be referred to as the paradox of inquiry.

The paradox of inquiry.

It's this paradoxical reality of whenever we're seeking anything.

And it can be described in just three premises, which you know philosophers have done a lot of work to get something down to three premises.

A premise, premise conclusion, that's the dream.

So here are the three premises.

If you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary.

So imagine I uh you you uh uh are grabbing lunch with Newton uh just before he takes his afternoon nap under an apple tree.

And you say, What are you gonna do this afternoon, Isaac?

And he says, Well, I'm I'm looking for gravity, of course.

I'm I'm looking for gravity.

And you'd say, gravity, well, what's that?

Well, gravity is this thing that uh accomplishes movement uh for bodies of mass, even at great distances.

So if he already knows that, what is he going looking for?

What is he inquiring about at that point?

See, there's this strange sort of paradox.

So if uh you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary.

Now the second part of this is if you don't know what you're looking for, inquiry is impossible.

Because imagine somebody wandering around a room and you'd say, it looks like they're hunting for something, and it looks like you're hunting for something.

And you'd say, Well, what is it that you're looking for?

And say, I don't know.

Well, then if you don't know, how will you know?

You per you could have found it already.

How do you know what you'll find?

So there's this paradox of inquiry, which is if you already know what you're looking for, then there's no sense in looking for it.

And if you don't know what you're looking for, then it's impossible to look for it because you can't even have found it, Plato and his riddles, right?

So therefore, Plato concludes inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible.

Now, this was a big threat to scientific endeavors, and this is the type of thing that Aristotle would be really frustrated by and why he would start his own school of philosophy after Plato.

But Plato solves this problem in a really interesting way.

He develops this myth of recollection.

And what he says is that the way that we're able to inquire and participate in the world and ask questions and get answers to those things, the reason that inquiry works is because your souls, before you were born, went and mingled among the deepest reality, which is Plato's forms.

And in mingling among the deepest reality, they encountered the deep truths of the world.

And so when we are inquiring of things, what we're actually doing is remembering.

We're remembering a past experience we've already had with reality.

Now, Plato's myth, that's not true.

At least very hard to prove, anyway.

But before we just write it off completely and say, no, there is such a thing as knowledge and discovery.

It's not just remembering.

I want to tell a quick story of uh me trying to hang a barn door.

So we just bought a new house and uh it's just a couple of blocks away.

It's a very old home.

Um, it it had all of the things that we needed, including being strange enough for us to be able to afford it.

And one of the things that it has is uh several rooms with no doors, including a uh bathroom.

We haven't put a door on the bathroom yet.

Uh we're close family.

But my daughter's room uh also didn't have a door, so I had to hang a I bought a barn door to uh so that she could have a door.

Uh so that we could be noisy while she slept.

Now, the walls, it's a very old home.

So the walls are they're not um uh w sheetrock, they're lathan plaster.

Has anybody ever dealt with a lath and plaster home?

Oh, it's brutal.

So I'm just suffering trying to find a stud to hang this barn door in.

I'm taking like a little nail and I'm hitting it in, and it well, first of all, I just started with a stud finder.

Do you know stud finders don't work on lath and plaster?

I know that now.

And then I bought I watched a couple couple more YouTube videos, and I bought a magnetic stud finder, just a magnetic stud finder that didn't work either.

And then I just took a nail and I'm hammering in, and the nails, uh, they like bounce off of the lath, and so you just can't, you can't find, you cannot find a stud.

Okay, so my friend came over, uh, his name's Ryan, he's right there.

And uh this is day two now of me just being conquered by this barn door.

And he recognized, and we kind of like realized this together as we were talking, that I'm hanging a long horizontal strip that will cover any holes I make.

So I'm we like realized it like just start drilling, just pick a spot and just start drilling in in a line, one inch at a time, one inch at a time.

And then we eventually it worked, and we found the stud.

Now you would think that this next stud would be about 16 inches away from that stud, but no, it's just like the length of whoever's forearm was making it in 1895.

You know, there's no standard whatsoever to what it was.

So anyway, we just kept on drilling.

Now, here's the point that I want to make.

When uh Ryan and I realized together, just start drilling, my reaction wasn't, wow, wow, this new, there's there's something new here and novel and strange.

This is a whole new world that we're entering into.

No, my reaction was, of course.

How did I not see that before?

It felt the point that I'm making is an insight like that often feels like memory.

It often feels like being exposed to something before.

And so Plato is not completely absurd in saying this.

So we see this problem and we see that the way that it gets resolved of how can we seek something that we don't know, and how can we seek it meaningfully so that we know when we find it?

Here's how the scriptures solve this problem right away in our seeking of Christ.

In Colossians 3 1, Paul writes, If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

Do you see that initial condition for seeking?

The yeah, someone's playing music.

I hear it too.

Do you see that initial condition of someone seeking of Christ?

It is this if then you have been raised with Christ.

Okay, now this is a New Testament way of speaking in which something that hasn't happened yet, but is so certain that it will happen, is written in the past tense.

And so Paul is saying, look, you are of such absolute certainty that you will be raised with Christ at the final resurrection, that I can speak of it and say, You have been raised with Christ.

So if you have been raised with Christ, then seek the things that are above, where Christ is.

Here is the gospel turn that answers this question.

How are we able to seek who Christ is?

This is not uh recalling some ancient memory of our souls.

We are able to seek who Christ is because Christ sought us.

Because the one who we need to know, we it is not just that we needed to find, we needed to be found.

It is not just that we had information that was lost, it is that we ourselves were lost, and Christ himself sought us so that now we can say we are raised with Christ because of what he has accomplished.

And so it is the gospel that answers this question.

It is not that we are seeking Christ because we don't know, it is we are seeking Christ because he knows us.

And so when Christ, when Paul tells us to be seeking Christ and seeking the things that are above, he is not describing for us a way to merit our way to God or a way for us to accomplish or earn the presence of finally finding Christ and finally knowing him and finally discovering him.

That's not what Paul is talking about.

What Paul is saying is you have been found by Christ, therefore seek him.

Now, this is the strange reality of the gospel.

Paul doesn't say seek Christ so that you may gain new life in him.

Seek Christ so that you may earn or accomplish being raised with him one day.

He says, you have been raised with Christ.

New life is not the aim, it is the starting point.

New life is the starting point of seeking Christ.

And so this is a very long and complicated way of saying we seek him because he first sought us.

We love him because he loved us.

So what is this initial reason?

Why is it that we seek Christ?

We seek Christ because he came and found us.

We are the ones who are lost.

But since he has found us, we know we can seek him.

This is not like discovering a new principle.

This is not like discovering some new rational argument or some even some new practice or anything that might gain us enlightenment.

Don't you see what this is like is knowing a person.

Knowing a person who has entered into relationship with us, and that is who we are seeking.

So now that we see why we seek Christ, we seek him because he sought us.

Let's turn to see how we seek Christ.

Colossians 3, uh, Colossians 3, 1 again, saying in the same verse.

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

Okay, so how do we seek?

Well, this word seek is in the present imperative, and that means that it could be translated as be continually seeking.

Be continually seeking the things that are above, be continually seeking Christ.

So that means this is not an appointment.

This is not something that you can just pencil into your calendar or put right in between your workout and your half hour in the Headspace app as part of your self-care.

That's not what that's not what this is.

It doesn't work on an appointment basis like that.

Instead, to be continually seeking means that we are adopting a mode of being which isn't just a new thing put on our calendar, but it would inform the whole way that we craft every part of our calendar.

All of our lives are a process of continually seeking the things that are above where Christ is, continually seeking Christ.

Now, in one sense, that's a relief because you're all very busy and don't want one more thing on your calendar.

But in another sense, there's this incredible weight of responsibility in this, where we see that all of our lives are to be shaped as a mode of being that continually seeks Christ.

Now, you may have noticed that I'm playing a little fast and loose with this language of seeking Christ, because the text itself doesn't say seek Christ.

It says seek the things that are above where Christ is.

Now, that, the things that are above where Christ is, is a general reference to some particular qualities that Paul will expound on uh later in the chapter, which we'll look at in the next couple of weeks.

But I'm gonna skip ahead to those so that we can put some meat on that, the things that are above.

Now, here's the list that Paul gives to us of the things that we should be seeking.

These things are compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, love.

Imagine your calendar.

What if your calendar, if somebody would look at it and think, I think this person's aim is kindness.

I think what this person is seeking with their life is humility.

This person seems to be shaped by love.

It may not be the type of thing that you can look at on a calendar, but I I I want us to kind of stretch our imaginations to imagine what are the decisions that we're making and how we're engaging with people, how we're uh how we're crafting our lives to be seeking something, to be seeking some end.

What would it look like to have a life where the end that you are aiming at is a compassionate heart.

Scripture says that these qualities are where Christ is.

Seek the things that are above, where Christ is.

And he is seated at the right hand of God the Father.

What this means is that he is in the position to give us these qualities.

What does it mean that Christ is at the right hand of God the Father in this context?

Means that he is ascended into heaven and he sits in the seat of all authority and power in the world.

And these things, love, kindness, compassionate hearts, forgiveness, these qualities, which our lives are so often not defined by in any way, these qualities are his good gifts to give to us.

Because he is the one who is seated at the right hand of God.

He is the one who holds.

Holds these things which are in the heavenly places, the things that are above, the highest things, the highest aims that we could aim at with our lives, these are Jesus', these are in Jesus' authority to give to us.

So just as with our call to seek Christ, we seek Christ because He sought us, so too with our seeking the things that are above, seeking compassionate hearts, seeking kindness, seeking love.

Why is it that we seek those things?

Because we trust that Jesus will freely give them to us, that they are within his authority to give us, and that he desires to give them to us.

And so what is Christ giving us then?

He's giving us the very mode of being, the very transformed hearts that allow us to be the type of people whose lives are continually seeking him.

That is a different type of person.

That's a different type of inquiry.

You see, the reason Plato misunderstood the nature of inquiry is because he operated in a completely impersonal reality that could never seek him.

But the truth of reality is found in the person of Christ who seeks us.

So that means we relate to these qualities: love, kindness, forgiveness.

These are not just mere ideals or empty ideals.

These are the personal characteristics of who Christ is.

And he gives those to us so that we might become a people who are transformed.

It's why Paul will say things like: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old things have gone.

Behold, new things have come.

We have a new mode of being, a new aim for our lives.

We are continually seeking the things that are above, not out of a spirit of striving or fear, but out of a spirit of I am seeking because I know the one who freely gives them to me.

So I probably misused the word striving there.

So we there is this striving towards something which we have because Christ has accomplished it, and towards something which we know we will receive, because Christ is the one who has the authority to give it.

Okay, now let's get a bit more practical.

I'll take a drink of coffee.

Colossians 3 2.

I sang a lot last night, which you might be able to hear in my voice.

All right.

Let's get practical.

For the first time in my preaching career.

All right, I didn't have to laugh that much.

Colossians 3 2.

Set your minds on the things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

Set your minds.

Now, this is something that you could.

This is another thing which is in the present imperative.

It's a be continually setting your minds, be continually thinking about the things that are above, not the things that are on the earth.

So you are to be continually thinking.

You know, I think it's it's God just being accommodating to us in his word by saying things like kindness, love, forgiveness, because those are qualities that we can begin to participate in.

If he just said seek Christ, it kind of paralyzes your mind and you don't know where to go.

But he gives you these qualities to be contemplating, to be considering for your life.

What does it mean to seek having a compassionate heart?

Set your mind on that, a compassionate heart.

And how do we know that?

It's a personal quality.

How do we know what a compassionate heart looks like?

Well, we look at Jesus.

We learn how to receive from Jesus these very qualities which he is calling us to embody.

Because think of this.

Let's scroll back up to this list quickly.

Compassionate hearts.

You know, this is something that Christ isn't just calling you to do.

This is something that Christ has towards you.

Christ is compassionate with you.

Has your week been full of suffering?

Has there been difficulty in betrayal?

Have you disappointed others or disappointed yourself?

Christ is compassionate towards you.

Do you fear that if Christ were to walk into the room, that he would have nothing but terrible things to say about you?

He is kind.

He's kind to you.

Would he terrify you with the strength of his power and overwhelm you with the authority which he wields?

He is humble.

He is meek.

Has he grown tired of your failed attempts at holiness?

He's patient with you.

Do you think that the way that you have lived and the repetition of your sin in your life has written you off from his presence, he forgives?

Do you think that he doesn't really see you?

That he doesn't really care to know you, that instead he just wants to abuse you into some sort of obedience.

No, he loves you.

Now, when we learn to receive those things from the Lord, now we are positioned to be able to seek those very qualities ourselves.

Because this whole pattern, and it is the pattern of the whole gospel, the whole pattern of our seeking Christ is this.

And in receiving how he sought us, he is transforming us to be able to seek him more.

You know, it's a strange thing about uh relationships and and friendships.

If the relationship is progressing in a real and legitimate way, you almost can't be known more than you know.

They seem to pace each other, where the depth of the relationship is you know your, it's easiest to put it in the context of marriage because it's a covenant relationship.

You know your spouse and they know you, and the depth of that knowledge of one another seems to grow in this equal way.

Well, that is a picture of our relationship with the Lord, where we know him in our being known by him.

So I said I'd get practical, and then I didn't.

So I'm going to get practical.

How can we set our minds on the things that are above?

Participate in the seeking, which is a recognition of his seeking of us.

Three things.

The first one, come to church.

Now, preaching to the choir.

You guys are all here, I can tell just by looking at you.

But we this is one of the best things that you can do to set your mind on the things that are above.

We sang together.

We recited creeds together where we didn't begin with I believe.

We began with we believe.

We learn how to embody and experience these characteristics together as we become friends, entering in relationship with one another, so that we are able to experience and participate in things like love and forgiveness and kindness and humility.

Those things you can't really do forgiveness alone in your prayer closet.

It takes other people who harm you.

And we we've got those in spades in the church.

We've got so many.

So this is a perfect place to practice forgiveness.

Okay, so so attend church.

You're you're weekly setting your mind on the things that are above.

This is a pattern that the Lord has built into creation, a pattern of rest and reflection and looking up to God and remembering the things that are above and re-centering our hearts, singing and worshiping these things that capture our affections, learning to hear the word and rejoice in it.

So uh attend church.

This is a low bar.

I mean, great job getting here, you know.

I don't want to undersell it.

The second one is that I want to offer to set your mind on the things that are above.

Bible reading, I'm sneaking into Bible reading and scripture memory alongside of that.

Now, many of you have probably never memorized scripture before, but I'll tell you what, it's it's the prerequisite for meditating on it.

Because you can't meditate on it if you don't if you don't know it, it becomes very hard to meditate on.

And sooner or later you're meditating on something that you know isn't even in the Bible, it's just like a hallmark card or something.

And then that won't won't be particularly useful for setting your mind on the things that are above.

Now, here's the way that I like to think about this Bible reading and scripture memory.

Uh, have any of your parents ever read the book The Whole Brain Child?

We're talking about it um last night over dinner.

Uh and that book describes how our our mind, it should just be called like whole-brained people and how your own brain works, because it's very helpful.

Uh I remember reading it and thinking like that's why I'm like that.

Um that's why I throw all these temper tantrums.

Um so the way that they describe a healthy brain working is by the stories that it carries around become integrated uh across uh multiple regions of the brain.

And when there's disintegration, you experience uh stressors and uh you know these painful, difficult feelings and comes out in all sorts of negative ways.

And so what it's helped, like Megan and I, for example, do as parents is things where I'll notice like my son is nervous about something.

And I would have thought before, like, all right, let's just not bring it up and just kind of ignore that type of thing.

But this book uh has encouraged us and been helpful in terms of like, oh no, let's actually talk about that a lot, or let's talk about the you know negative experience you had at swim lessons, uh, which is real.

Uh, and we'll will process that fear.

And and what happens in that processing is your brain becomes integrated.

Okay, now Bible reading.

Many of us, when we're not living and setting our minds in the scriptures, it is as though our our biblical worldview, the our understanding of the scriptures themselves, are disintegrated.

These it's not it's not unified, there's not a wholeness to our understanding of the scriptures.

And so we aren't able to participate in it in a healthy way.

But if we memorize certain scriptures, then what happens is in our just reading of it, we're able to make these connections across the whole of scripture.

And as more and more connections are able to be made in our brains, it's like our view of the Bible is becoming integrated and we are being taught how to think in the way that the Bible is.

And the Bible is the truth.

These are such incredible statements that we get to make about our scriptures and the word of God.

The Bible is the truth, so that means that as our minds are rested on scriptures and become more conformed to the patterns of the way that scripture is, we are becoming integrated people.

Integrated into the narratives of scripture, the understanding of it, integrated into how this plays out into our lives.

So I we have a Bible reading plan in our church's app.

Just start reading.

And to memorize scripture, start with ones you kind of know already.

Go to Psalm 23 and memorize it.

You're probably like, you know, like three sentences away from having all of Psalm 23 memorized.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

I mean, it helps.

Whatever works.

And you can get it, you can get it into your mind.

And then what that allows you to do is when scripture is memorized, then you can meditate on it.

And that means you're setting your mind on the things that are above.

And that starts to reframe your world.

What if my aim with my child?

What if I was aiming at patience rather than efficiency?

For this, for this time, what if the aim of my life was patience, not just efficiency?

Especially when we're getting in or out of cars, which is the most frustrating part of my life.

With a five-year-old.

Okay.

Read and memorize scripture.

Set your minds on those things.

And thirdly, this is not going to be a surprise.

Prayer.

In prayer, with scripture memory, especially, we we get to participate in a communion with Christ.

You know, we hear Him say things to us, just like verses that are just baked into my head do not fear, for I am with you.

Do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God.

I will strengthen you.

Surely I will help you.

Surely I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

And then you add, stop calling me Shirley.

It's a little way, another way to help that.

Help remember that.

I'm experiencing his presence and care.

And when I'm experiencing his presence and care, I see that I'm able to seek because he sought me.

And then I know what my aim is.

And it reframes my aim.

The results of seeking Christ.

Prayer.

Prayer.

Spend time with the Lord.

Because the way that the Bible shapes your view of what reality is, prayer allows you to look out into the texture of your own life and draw it into this narrative of scripture.

So now your experience of the world and the way that reality is described in the Bible have become integrated.

So prayer allows you to do the results of seeking Christ.

That's how you seek Christ.

Here are the results.

For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Here's the result.

When Christ appears, he's coming back.

When he comes back at the final resurrection, at the wedding feast of the new heavens and the new earth, when he separates those who are in him towards eternal glory and restoration, and those who are outside of him towards eternal damnation, the absolute disintegration.

That moment, when he appears, we will appear with him in glory.

The image is almost too lofty.

But we can say that we are so united to Christ that his death is ours, that his resurrection is our resurrection.

And then this is where I start to get nervous, his glory is our glory.

His inheritance is our inheritance.

We are co-heirs with Christ.

And so although we are hidden now, when he appears, we will appear with him in an unthinkable glory.

And so what you are seeking this is all kind of woven together.

And he knows us.

We can't know him.

But in his knowing us, he makes us capable of being able to know him more and more.

And when we know him, we become like him.

I heard this wonderful definition of love.

I read this wonderful definition of love this week.

Love is imagining someone's destiny truly.

Imagining what someone could be.

It's like agreeing with God's intentions when he created a person for what he hoped for them.

That's what it is to love someone, imagining someone's destiny truly.

When we're seeking Christ, part of what we're doing is we're imagining his destiny for us.

And then we're able to do that for one another.

Now, I wanted to prime our imaginations a bit and end with this.

Because what does it mean when we're imagining someone's destiny truly?

Well, there's this wonderful image of what someone's destiny might be that captures both the hiddenness of it now and the revelation of it later.

Right now, the hidden life is the one that is colored by compassion and kindness and humility and forgiveness and love.

If those displace the values of self-actualization or absolute freedom from any sort of restraint, the freedom to self-define, if those values are displaced by a humility that receives ourselves before a creator, then your life will be a hidden one.

A glory that isn't clearly manifest now.

And the a picture of this is written so well in C.S.

Lewis's book, The Great Divorce.

So I wanted to end by reading these couple of pages.

Now, uh, the main character of this is give being given a tour of some place like hell and someplace like heaven, and shows this kind of overlap and uh has all of these wonderful insights as to what the character of those places might be.

And he's led by his guide, and he spots this gleam.

Flowing river.

And then he sees a woman who's just unthinkably beautiful.

And it turns out that the light was coming from her and coming from her companions in this parade that was walking.

It's just this immense, incredible beauty that he saw.

He writes, but I have forgotten, and only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.

Is it, is it?

He's fine, he's trying to think of who it who this person might have been before they had died.

Is it, is it?

I whispered to my guide.

Not at all, said he.

It's someone you'll never have heard of.

Her name on earth was Sarah Smith, which to C.S.

Lewis must have been a generic name.

Her name on earth was Sarah Smith, and she lived at Golders Green.

Next to Delboca Vista.

She seems to be she seems to be, well, a person of particular importance.

Aye, she is one of the great ones.

Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on earth are two quite different things.

And who are these gigantic people?

Look, they're like emeralds who are dancing and throwing flowers before her.

Haven't you read your Milton?

A thousand liveried angels lackey her?

And who are all these young men and women on each side?

They are her sons and daughters.

She must have had a very large family, sir.

Every young man or boy that met her became her son.

Even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door.

Every girl that met her was her daughter.

Isn't that a bit hard on their own parents?

No.

There are those that steal other people's children, but her motherhood was of a different kind.

Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents, loving them more.

Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers.

But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer to their own wives.

And how?

But hello.

What are all these animals?

A cat?

Two cats?

Dozens of cats, and all these dogs, why can't I count them?

And the birds and the horses.

They're her beasts.

Did she keep a sort of zoo?

I mean, this is a bit too much.

Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love.

In her they became themselves, and now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.

I looked at my teacher in amazement.

Yes, he said.

It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further, who knows where it will end?

Redeemed humanity is still young.

It has hardly come to its full strength, but already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

Loving someone is seeing them according to their true destiny.

You don't know a person here who in Christ has a destiny that's less glorious than the one I was just described.

Seek the things that are above, where Christ is.

Set your minds on the way Christ has shown those things to you.

Let that be why you seek him.

Okay, let's wrap up there.

Are there any questions today, Carlos?

Great.

Let's move into our time of communion.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13.

Excuse me, eleven.

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it, and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

This is a method of our receiving and knowing the way that Christ has loved us, been compassionate towards us.

We're able to participate in it as our nourishment, as in a meal.

As we take the bread, which is his broken body, as we take the wine, which is his poured out blood.

We are remembering the depth of his love towards us, the one who came and sought us.

Because he sought us, we seek him.

So cast off those things that you are seeking that are of the earth.

Have your values changed, become a new creation as you see what Christ has done and what he might make you, as he loves you according to who he made you to be, as he more than anyone loves you according to your fullest, truest potential.

Holy Father, I pray that as we take communion today, you might bless this meal, that we might receive it.

Lord, before you you ate this meal with your disciples on the night when you were betrayed, you said you had eagerly awaited this meal with them.

Because it was the establishment of your covenant with us.

You entered into a relationship with us, which we receive only by faith, and it is unshakable, as you are the one who sought us.

Lord, let us respond to that by your power as the one who gives good gifts, like kindness and humility, and compassion and love and forgiveness.

Lord, let us seek those things that are above.

In Jesus' name, amen.