teaching/sermons/col-1-15-20/commentaries/wright_simply_christian_extracts.md

Wright on the stars-to-the-kitchen-sink arc — what Simply Christian gives Col 1:15–20

N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (2006). Wright's contemporary redo of Mere Christianity — the accessible-practical companion to his denser scholarly work on cross-as-throne (handled separately). Three-movement structure: Echoes of a Voice (Part 1: justice, spirituality, relationships, beauty) → Staring at the Sun (Part 2: God, Israel, Jesus, Spirit) → Reflecting the Image (Part 3: worship, prayer, scripture, church, ethics, new creation). The whole book is engineered for Frank's "stars to the kitchen sink" shape — cosmic claims that come home to ordinary life.

Wright references Col 1:15–20 directly once, in passing, in the prayer chapter. The book is not a commentary on the hymn. But the hymn's shape — cosmic Christology → ecclesial reconciliation, "all things" → "the church" — is the structural premise of Wright's whole project. He executes the move repeatedly at different scales.

Source file: wright_simply_christian.md (~503KB). Citations use [ch. N — title, lines NNN-NNN] against that file.

1. The one direct Col 1:15–20 reference — and what Wright does with it

In the prayer chapter, Wright proposes the 1 Corinthians 8:6 monotheism-formula as a daily prayer, and points to Col 1:15–20 as the same claim "more fully":

"For us, [...] there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we to him; and one Lord, Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things, and we through him. [...] Like the great hymns of praise in Revelation 4 and 5, it sums up the worship and praise of God as both creator and redeemer. (The shorthand phrases, 'from whom … to him' and 'through whom … through him' are dense but clear statements of the Father as the source and goal of all things, and of the Son as the means by whom all things were made, and all things redeemed. Paul says the same thing more fully in Colossians 1:15–20.)" — [ch. 12 — Prayer, lines 981–990]

Sermon use. Two takeaways: (a) Wright reads 1:15–20 as praise — a hymn of worship, not a doctrinal proof-text; (b) he reads the v.15–17/v.18–20 movement as creator-and-redeemer in one breath, the same move Revelation 4–5 makes (the Lion who is the Lamb). Pairs with the inventory's v.16↔v.20 inclusio reading.

2. "Echoes of a voice" — the opening move (justice, spirituality, relationships, beauty)

The famous frame. Wright argues that four universal human longings function as echoes of a voice we can't quite hear but can't stop straining for:

"It is as though we can hear, not perhaps a voice itself, but the echo of a voice: a voice speaking with calm, healing authority, speaking about justice, about things being put to rights, about peace and hope and prosperity for all. The voice continues to echo in our imagination, our subconscious. We want to go back and listen to it again, but having woken up, we can't get back into the dream." — [ch. 1 — Putting the world to rights, lines 178]

"You don't have to teach children about fairness and unfairness. A sense of justice comes with the kit of being human. We know about it, as we say, in our bones." — [ch. 1, line 181]

"There are three basic ways of explaining this sense of the echo of a voice [...] Or we can say, if we like, that the reason we have these dreams, the reason we have a sense of a memory of the echo of a voice, is that there is someone there speaking to us, whispering in our inner ear, someone who cares very much about this present world, and our present selves, and who has made us, and it, for a purpose which will indeed involve justice, things being put to rights, ourselves being put to rights, the world being rescued at last." — [ch. 1, lines 205–208]

On beauty (echo #4) — the unfinished Mozart manuscript:

"This is the position we are in when confronted by beauty. The world is full of beauty, but the beauty is incomplete. Our puzzles about what beauty is, what it means, and what (if anything) it is there for, are the inevitable result of looking at one part of a larger whole. Beauty, in other words, is another echo of a voice [...]" — [ch. 4 — For the beauty of the earth, line 338]

Why this matters for the sermon. Frank's series-packet move ("creation already declares; humans choose to join") has a Wright-side parallel: the world itself is broadcasting the cosmic Christ of v.15–17. The echoes are real because the speaker is real. Wright doesn't run this as a Colossians argument, but the structure is the same — the world resonates with a voice the hearer can't yet name.

Honest framing. The echoes are Wright's natural-theology entry-ramp for skeptics, not a Pauline argument. Frank's congregation isn't a skeptical audience in that mode. Use the framing for recognition ("you've heard this before; here is its name") rather than for proof.

3. The cosmic-to-personal arc, executed at the closing of the book

The closing paragraphs perform exactly the "stars to the kitchen sink" move. Wright lands the cosmic claim of new creation on the daily-life pavement:

"Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamour for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds and stewards of the new day that is dawning." — [ch. 16 — New creation, starting now, line 1358]

And earlier in the same chapter — the "echoes turning into a voice":

"When we start to glimpse that, we discover that the echoes we heard at the start of this book have indeed turned into a voice. It is, of course, the voice of Jesus, calling us to follow him into God's new world, the world in which the hints, signposts and echoes of the present world turn into the reality of the next one." — [ch. 16, line 1311]

Why this matters for the sermon. Wright's closing structure inverts the hymn's. Col 1:15–20 moves cosmic → ecclesial; Wright moves daily longings → cosmic Christ → daily vocation. Same two poles, opposite traversal. Either direction works; both confirm that the cosmic Christology lands in bodies, neighborhoods, vocations — not in abstraction.

4. "You become like what you worship" — the golden rule on imitation

This is the highest-value Wright extract for the sermon. The Worship chapter contains a tightly stated pair of "golden rules" that directly addresses the imitation-as-worship / become-like-what-you-behold thread:

"This brings us to the first golden rule at the heart of spirituality. You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship. Those who worship money become, eventually, human calculating-machines. Those who worship sex become obsessed with their own attractiveness or prowess. Those who worship power become more and more ruthless. Most people, fortunately, don't go all the way down those roads, but it makes the point. What happens when you worship the creator God, whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has been accomplished by the Lamb who was slain?" — [ch. 11 — Worship, line 885]

The second rule lands the connection to image-of-God (v.15):

"The answer comes in the second golden rule: because you were made in God's image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive. Conversely, when you give that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being. It doesn't, of course, feel like that at the time. When you worship part of the creation as though it were the creator himself—in other words, when you worship an idol—it may well give you a brief 'high'. But like a hallucinatory drug, it achieves its effect at a cost. And when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. That is the price of idolatry." — [ch. 11, line 886]

Why this matters for the sermon. Direct linkage of v.15 (image of the invisible God) to worship-as-imitation. The "image" claim isn't abstract Christology — it's the anthropology of formation. Christ is the image; humans were made in the image; worship of Christ is therefore the practice by which humans become what they were made to be. This is the v.15 → discipleship bridge.

5. The body of Christ — church as community of practice for v.18

Wright's church chapter does the v.18 ("he is the head of the body, the church") payload — the church as the means of Christ's action in the world, not merely a unity-image:

"The church is the many-branched tree planted by God when he called Abraham: the tree whose single trunk is Jesus, and whose many branches, twigs, leaves and so on are the millions of Christian communities, and Christian individuals, around the world. One central biblical way of saying much the same thing is to follow Paul and think of the church as the 'Body of Christ', the single body in which every individual, and every local community, is a limb or an organ. 'The Body' is not simply an image of unity-in-diversity; it's a way of saying that the church is called to do the work of Christ, to be the means of his action in and for the world." — [ch. 15 — Believing and belonging, line 1211]

On the church's reason for existing:

"According to the early Christians, the church doesn't exist in order to provide a place where people can pursue their private spiritual agendas and develop their own spiritual potential. Nor does it exist in order to provide a safe haven in which people can hide from the wicked world and ensure that they themselves arrive safely at an otherworldly destination. [...] That purpose is clear, and stated in various places in the New Testament: that through the church God will announce to the wider world that he is indeed its wise, loving and just creator, that through Jesus he has defeated the powers that corrupt and enslave it, and that by his Spirit he is at work to heal and renew it." — [ch. 15, line 1216]

"The messengers must model the message." — [ch. 15, line 1218]

Why this matters for the sermon. v.18 names the church as the body of which Christ is the head. Wright clarifies that this isn't a metaphor about feelings of belonging — it's a vocation: the body does the head's work. The inclusio hinge at v.18 isn't decorative; it's the operational verse of the hymn. Mission flows out of the body.

6. Cross as the place where heaven's pain meets earth's

Wright's account of the cross (Jesus chapter) gives strong material for v.20 ("making peace through his blood, shed on the cross"). Not cross-as-throne explicitly (that's the How God Became King angle), but cross-as-place-where-everything-comes-together:

"The meaning of the story is found in every detail, as well as in the broad narrative. The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God's future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation. Nothing in all the history of paganism comes anywhere near this combination of event, intention and meaning. Nothing in Judaism had prepared for it, except in puzzling, shadowy prophecy. The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the King of the Jews, the bearer of Israel's destiny, the fulfilment of God's promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns." — [ch. 8 — Jesus: rescue and renewal, line 698]

"In meeting the fate which was rushing towards him, he would be the place where heaven and earth met, as he hung suspended between the two. He would be the place where God's future arrived in the present, with the kingdom of God celebrating its triumph over the kingdoms of the world by refusing to join in their spiral of violence. He would love his enemies. He would turn the other cheek. He would go the second mile. He would act out, finally, his own interpretation of the ancient prophecies which spoke, to him, of a suffering Messiah." — [ch. 8, line 696]

"On the cross the living God took the fury and violence of the world on to himself, suffering massive injustice—the stories are careful to highlight this—and yet refusing to lash out with threats or curses. Part of what Christians have called 'atonement theology' is the belief that in some sense or other Jesus exhausted the underlying power of evil when he died under its weight, refusing to pass it on or keep it in circulation." — [ch. 16, line 1315]

Why this matters for the sermon. "The place where heaven and earth met, as he hung suspended between the two" is a direct image-bridge to v.20 ("reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven"). Wright's "exhausting the power of evil" lines up with the BP cross-as-throne thread (powers crucified at the moment of their own defeat) without forcing the throne language. Use this when you don't need the BP-strength claim but want the same payload accessibly.

7. The cross-shaped life — "with him" / dying-and-rising

Wright is consistent across the book that Christian living participates in the cross-and-resurrection shape, not merely imitates it. This is the substitution-AND-participation thread.

"Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting-point of the Christian pilgrimage." — [ch. 16, line 1303]

"This is the launch-pad for the specifically Christian way of life. That way of life is not a matter simply of getting in touch with our inner depths. It is certainly not about keeping the commands of a distant deity. It is, rather, the new way of being human, the Jesus-shaped way of being human, the cross-and-resurrection way of life, the Spirit-led pathway. It is the way which anticipates, in the present, the full, rich, glad human existence which will one day be ours when God makes all things new. Christian ethics is not a matter of discovering what's going on in the world and getting in tune with it. It is not a matter of doing things to earn God's favour. It is not about trying to obey dusty rule-books from long ago or far away. It is about practising, in the present, the tunes we shall sing in God's new world." — [ch. 16, line 1300]

"In baptism itself we die 'with the Messiah' and come through to share his risen life. The spectacular one-off events at the heart of the Christian story happen to us, not just at the end of our own lives and beyond when we die physically and, eventually, when we rise again, but while we are continuing to live in the present time. Through the water into the new life of belonging to Jesus." — [ch. 15, line 1259]

Why this matters for the sermon. Wright's "Jesus-shaped way of being human" is a phrasing the preacher could use directly. Cruciform existence is not extra-credit spirituality; it is what it means to be in Christ at all. Pairs cleanly with v.18's firstborn from the dead — Christ leads a procession the body actually walks.

"From the very beginning, in Jesus' own teaching, it has been clear that people who are called to be agents of God's healing love, putting the world to rights, are themselves to be people whose own lives are put to rights by the same healing love." — [ch. 15, line 1218]

8. Already-and-not-yet for ordinary people

Wright frames the inaugurated kingdom for normal life — not for monks, not for revolutionaries:

"We are called to live at the overlap both of heaven and earth—the earth that has yet to be fully redeemed as one day it will be—and of God's future and this world's present. We are caught on a small island near the point where these tectonic plates, heaven and earth, future and present, are scrunching themselves together. Be ready for earthquakes." — [ch. 12 — Prayer, line 950]

"Christian prayer is about standing at the fault lines, being shaped by the Jesus who knelt in Gethsemane, groaning in travail, holding heaven and earth together like someone trying to tie two pieces of rope with people tugging at the other ends to pull them apart." — [ch. 12, line 957]

On the new creation breaking in at very specific places:

"In the Christian version of Option Three, not only heaven and earth, but also future and present, overlap and interlock. And the way that interlocking becomes real, not just imaginary, is through the powerful work of God's Spirit." — [ch. 16, line 1299]

Why this matters for the sermon. v.16 says "all things" — visible and invisible. v.20 says reconciliation of "all things" — earth and heaven. The hymn assumes the heaven/earth duality and announces its reunion. Wright's tectonic-plates image lets the preacher honor the strain of the in-between: the reconciliation is real and accomplished (v.20) and the rope is still being pulled.

9. Image-of-God / human vocation as royal-priestly representation

Wright reads Genesis 1:26–27 the same way the BP material does (image = royal-priestly representative), but in plain language:

"In the ancient world, as indeed in some parts of the modern one, great rulers would often set up statues of themselves in prominent places, not so much in their own home territory (where everyone knew who they were, and that they were in charge), but in their foreign or far-flung dominions. [...] For an emperor, the point of placing an image of yourself in the subject territory was that the subjects in that country would be reminded that you were their ruler, and would conduct themselves accordingly." — [ch. 3 — Made for each other, line 316]

"In the early stories, the point was that the creator God loved the world he had made, and wanted to look after it in the best possible way. To that end, he placed within his world a looking-after creature, a creature who would demonstrate to the creation who he, the creator, really was, and who would go to work to develop the creation and make it flourish and fulfil its purpose. This creature (or rather this family of creatures, the human race) would model and embody that interrelatedness, that mutual and fruitful knowing, trusting and loving, which was the creator's intention." — [ch. 3, line 317]

On the recognition that humanity-in-God's-image is the fulfilment of creation, not a category mistake:

"What I have argued for elsewhere, not to diminish the full incarnation of Jesus but to explore its deepest dimension, is that Jesus was aware of a call, a vocation, to do and be what, according to the scriptures, only Israel's God gets to do and be. That, I believe, is what it means to speak about Jesus being both truly divine and truly human—and to realize, once we remind ourselves that humans were made in God's image, that this is not a category mistake, but the ultimate fulfilment of the purpose of creation itself." — [ch. 7 — Jesus: the coming of God's kingdom, line 720]

Why this matters for the sermon. v.15 calls Christ "the image of the invisible God." Wright supplies the anthropology: image = representative, the one who makes the unseen ruler visible in the subject territory. Christ is the true image and fulfils what humanity was made to be. The "join the song" move follows naturally: humans become themselves by reflecting the image of the one who is the Image.

10. The seven cumulative claims about Jesus that Wright says emerged in one generation

Wright's most concentrated paragraph on early high Christology — a useful background note for the historical/scholarly weight behind Col 1:15–20:

"From the earliest days of Christianity we find an astonishing shift, for which again nothing in Jewish traditions of the time had prepared Jesus' followers. They remained firmly within Jewish monotheism; and yet they said, from very early on, that Jesus was indeed divine. When they spoke about Jesus they used precisely those categories which Jews over the previous centuries had developed for speaking of the presence and action of the one true God in the world: Presence (as in the Temple), Torah, Word, Wisdom and Spirit. They said that he was the unique embodiment of the one God of Israel; that at his name every knee would bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth; that he was the one through whom all things were made, and through whom now all things were being remade; that he was the living, incarnate Word of God; that he had, so to speak, the godness of God stamped so deep upon his person that it ran right through him. The early Christians had no intention of departing from Jewish-style monotheism. They would have insisted that they were searching out its true meaning." — [ch. 7, line 717]

"And they said all this, not three or four centuries later, after a long period of reflection and development, at a point when it might conceivably have been socially or politically desirable to say it. They said it within a single generation. And they said it even though it was shocking to the religious sensibilities of both Jews and pagans." — [ch. 7, line 718]

Why this matters for the sermon. Apologetic background. Col 1:15–20 is not a fourth-century theological development imposed on Jesus; it is the earliest layer of Christian confession. Wright's "within a single generation" line is preacher-usable for those moments when the cosmic Christology sounds too high to be original.

What Wright adds to what's already in the prep

Already in project What Wright adds
Willard, "Christ in action" / "the chair you're seated on" The macro frame — Wright runs the same cosmic claim across four longings (justice, beauty, etc.) and lands it back on daily vocation
Mackie / BP on cross-as-throne and royal-priesthood The accessible-practical translation — "the place where heaven and earth met, as he hung suspended between the two"
Frank's "stars to the kitchen sink" framing The structural template — Wright executes the move in chapter 16 in the opposite direction (kitchen sink → stars → kitchen sink with new eyes)
Voice memo 05-11 "you become like what you behold" The exact-phrase Wright version: "You become like what you worship" + "because you were made in God's image, worship makes you more truly human"
Inventory thread 7: creation declares; humans choose to join Wright's "echoes of a voice" — the world is already broadcasting; humans uniquely recognize and respond
v.18 = ecclesial pivot of the hymn Wright's body-as-means-of-Christ's-action — the church isn't called "body" decoratively; it does the head's work in the world

What's NOT really here (honest framing)

Surprises worth knowing about

  1. Wright doesn't treat the hymn as a Christological proof-text. When he reaches for cosmic Christology, he goes to 1 Corinthians 8:6 first and only mentions Col 1:15–20 as the fuller version. This is a worship-prayer book, not a doctrinal one, and his instinct is to put the hymn back into liturgical use rather than parse it.
  2. The "echoes of a voice" frame is structurally identical to the inventory's thread #7 ("creation already declares; humans choose to join") — Wright just runs it through the four human longings rather than through cosmology. The preacher can use one or the other; running both risks redundancy.
  3. Wright's "you become like what you worship" is almost word-for-word the voice memo formulation. Worth flagging — the preacher's own observation has a Wright pedigree he may not have realized.
  4. Wright doesn't quite reach the BP claim that the cross itself is the throne. He lands one step short: the cross is the place where heaven and earth meet, and where evil is exhausted. That's plenty for v.20. If the sermon wants the stronger throne claim, lean on the BP/HGBK material; if it wants the accessible version, Wright is the better source.
  5. The book's three-part structure (Echoes / Staring at the Sun / Reflecting the Image) is itself a stars-to-kitchen-sink architecture. Frank could quietly use it as a sermon-shape audit: does the message move from human longing → cosmic Christ → daily vocation? If so, it's running the Simply Christian arc — which is the right arc for v.15–20.

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