So What?

Yesterday's daily lectionary text included a verse I have always found important. Colossians 1:13 says "For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son (NASB). This text uses rescue as a metaphor for salvation, which adds an element of urgency to faith. The idea of faith as having been rescued from danger is often missing in Presbyterian churches. We need to revive it in order to recover some vitality for the missional church.

"The Domain of Darkness" sounds like a fundamentalist vision of culture, which is why I shied away from this for many years. The NRSV translates the phrase as "the power of darkness," but I think the concept of dominion is a more accurate description of what we are up against. Walter Wink's foundational work on spiritual powers, and Brian McLaren's recent book Everything Must Change call upon us to think of ourselves as living in an empire, a dominion system that seeks to define and control us for its own ends. This system is so pervasive that is unnoticed. It looks "normal." No one wins in the dominion system; in the end, even the most successful and powerful people are beaten by it.

It takes something disruptive to open your eyes to the domain of darkness. It takes something decisive to force you into an alternative way of being. We could call that disruption "conversion." We can conceive of it as being transferred into the Kingdom of God.

The great story of Christmas is the ultimate disruption of the dominion system. It is the story of God's insertion of God's own self into human history and society. It happened in the most subversive of ways, and it embraces the harshest of human circumstance. The story we celebrate at Christmas becomes the narrative by which we live in this world. No longer are we to be dominated by anything other than God's vision for how our world is to be.

Later this week the Christmas decorations will start coming down. For our culture, Christmas is over. For those of us who have been rescued, the reality of it goes on. It is our way.