After traveling with our Lighthouse Youth mission trip group to St. Louis last week, this sermon was written rather quickly on Saturday afternoon, but I think it turned out ok. The focus of the message is Paul’s claim that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the One who makes God known to us. God is not only the Creator of the cosmos; God is personal, knowable, and loving.
The Scripture readings for this sixth Sunday after Pentecost in Lectionary Year C are Colossians 1:15-28 and the familiar story of Jesus’ visit to Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42. As I wrestled with a direction for this sermon, I found helpful Duane Neugebauer’s GodPause devotional for July 16, 2025.
Here’s the sermon podcast audio from Christ the King and the full service livestream from Living Hope.
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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our living Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen
Today is a pastoral milestone for me. Some of you know our church generally follows a three year pattern of lectionary readings, and today marks the beginning of my fourth time through the lectionary.
My very first sermon after my ordination as a pastor was July 16, 2016, on this story of Mary and Martha, which I think means I’ve preached on this story more than on any other story in the Bible.
As I’ve been serving this week with our Lighthouse youth in St. Louis, I’ve thought a lot about this Mary and Martha, and I’ve realized I can’t think of anything new to say about this story. I’ll come back to it a little later, but mostly I’m going to focus on the first reading Deb & Stephanie read from Colossians.
I suspect this passage might be less familiar than some of the Gospel stories we’re hearing this month like the Good Samaritan, Mary and Martha, and the Lord’s Prayer next week—July is sort of a lectionary highlight reel—but there’s a lot here, and it’s worth exploring.
In this story, Paul is trying to explain who Jesus is. That’s the “He” in verse one. Paul is writing this letter a few years after Jesus’ death and resurrection and ascension, looking back at everything that has happened, writing to teach and encourage this young Christian community.
As he writes, Paul uses this grand language for God, trying to articulate how awesome, how incredible God is. The hymn we’re going to sing in a few minutes comes from this passage—listen to the words of the first verse: “Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes, most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days, almighty, victorious, they great name we praise!”
We are gathered to worship the Creator of the cosmos, the One who spoke the world into being, a God so magnificent, so holy, so glorious as to simply be more than our puny little human brains can comprehend. We can’t conceive of a God who exists outside of time; I get a headache if I think too hard about eternity.
How many of you have been in a big cathedral church? Somewhere like St. Peter’s in the Vatican, or Westminster Abbey, or even the Basilica in Milwaukee?
This cathedral in Lausanne, Switzerland is the biggest I’ve visited. The design intends to provoke a sense of awe, grandeur, a reminder of how small we are compared to God’s vastness. And that’s a beautiful thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s only part of the story.
The point Paul is making as he writes to Colossians is not just that God is big and amazing; his point is that this invisible God has chosen to become visible to us. Jesus is the image of the invisible God.
God desires to be known. God does not only want to be seen as vast and holy and incomprehensible; God wants to be in relationship with God’s people.
And so God enters the world in the person of Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God. The God who exists eternally steps into time to be born among us. We turn away from God, but God loves us too much to leave us alone.
Listen to verse 22—this is what Jesus accomplishes for us: Paul writes, “And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” (NRSVUE) Or as a number of other translations put it, “Now Christ has made you God’s friends again.” (GNT)
That’s what “reconciled” means. The “immortal, invisible, God only wise,” the creator of the cosmos, claims you as a friend. God wants to be known by you, not just as a vague spiritual force, but personally, as a friend, as your heavenly parent.
Pew Research says roughly 9 in 10 Americans believe in God or another “higher power.” About 63% of agnostics and people who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” believe in a higher power or spiritual force.
Our neighbors (statistically, at least) don’t have a problem with believing there’s something out there, some sort of invisible, unknowable spiritual force.
The challenge—the unique claim of the Church, the claim of Scripture—is that the invisible God has been made visible, revealed in the particular person of Jesus Christ.
And in Jesus Christ, God is revealed to be a God of love, a God who cares about us little puny sinful human beings, a God who refuses to leave us alone, who would rather die for us than allow us to remain separated, estranged by sin. God is personal, and God is love.
Paul goes on to say his mission—the commission God’s given to him (given to us)—is to “make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints.”
Our job as followers of Jesus, as the church, is to make known the mystery of God. Our job is to proclaim the good news of this God of love, to invite people to faith, not just abstract faith in something “out there,” but meaningful faith, trusting faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
The phrase I get caught on in this passage is when Paul writes, “[Jesus is] the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.”
What does it mean for Jesus to have “first place in everything?”
Well, if we truly believe Jesus is God with us, God in the flesh, the invisible God made known to us, then that shapes how we see the world.
Anyone know the word “hermeneutic”? I defined it in a sermon here almost three years ago… It hurts my ego a little bit if you don’t remember every word of a sermon for at least three years…I’ll get over it.
Anyway, the word “hermeneutic” means a particular lens or perspective, a way of viewing things. And as Christians, our hermeneutical lens, our method for interpreting the world, is through Jesus Christ.
Everything is framed through the lens of Jesus. Knowing Jesus is Lord, knowing Jesus is alive, knowing death has been defeated, knowing this world is not all there is. It means knowing that all people are created and loved by God—which shapes how we see the world. Putting Jesus first shapes how we treat our neighbors.
As I said a couple weeks ago, you don’t have to be a Christian to do good deeds or be a generous person. In St. Louis last week, some of the places we served at were Christian ministries, and some were secular agencies.
But as we serve, we Christians put Jesus first. We love because God first loved us, and our motivation is to let Jesus’ love overflow in and through us. You can love and serve your neighbors without being a Christian, but you can’t live as a Christian without loving and serving your neighbors.
Putting Jesus first takes practice, right? It goes against our selfish nature, so unless we focus on God, it’s easy to let Jesus slip out of first place, slide down the list. There is so much in the world around us calling for our attention. We’re busy people. There’s jobs, sports, chores, family members to take care of, town festivals, vacations; I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but between some personal things and church things like mission trips, this summer I’m gone for four weekends in an eight week period. Life is busy!
And a lot of the busy-ness of life is good things—here’s the connection back to the story of Mary and Martha. In the story, Martha is doing good things. She’s providing hospitality for Jesus, welcoming him into her home, cooking a meal for him. Those are good things!
Remember, Jesus has just told a story about how important it is to act, to live out faith. The story of the Good Samaritan is all about living out your faith, caring for neighbors, even unlikely neighbors. He’s not telling Martha to stop doing things.
But when she complains that her sister is not working enough, Jesus warns her about the many things she’s distracted by.
It’s not an either/or thing where we have to be either Mary spending time in contemplation and prayer and study or Martha doing stuff and getting work done.
But as we work, as we do stuff, we’re called to put Jesus first. Seeing the world through the lens of Jesus means we have to take time to reflect, to pray, to go back to Scripture.
On the mission trip, that meant taking time each day for worship and devotions, spending time sharing our highs and lows with each other, sharing where we saw God in that day.
Putting Jesus first doesn’t mean stopping the work; it means letting Christ shape how we act, why we work, and how we love.
We’re here today for worship not because God is only found in a church building for an hour on Sunday, but because we need to hear the good news of Jesus’ love again and again so it can sink into our bones and our souls and shape the way we live.
So hear again the good news: The God who made the cosmos loves you.
God has come into this world to be with you, to redeem you, to give you abundant, eternal life.
And God calls you to share this good news, this mystery of grace. Love as you are loved.
Let’s sing #843, Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise.