1 September 2021 - Wednesday of the 22nd week in Ordinary Time - Colossians 1:1-8

     It is the first day of the month of September.  Today we start first readings in our daily Masses from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.  This letter is addressed to Christians who were living in the city of Colossae, located on the west coast of the present-day country of Turkey.  The letter to the Colossians is closely related to the letter to Philemon and the letter to the Ephesians, as all three letters were written by St Paul while he was imprisoned in the city of Rome.  Several hundred years before this letter was written, Colossae was a major city located on an important trade route, but by the time the letter was written, the city’s importance had declined greatly.  Paul was writing this letter to address a heresy which many members in this young Christian community had embraced.  The topic of the letter is very much centered on the identity of Christ, rather than the cosmic powers of the universe which had become the center of the faith of the Colossians.  I remember in my Christology class in seminary studying the different types of heresies that came up in the history of Christianity, many of them in the early centuries of the Church.  Many of us in the modern world think that we have moved beyond these heresies, but if we look closely enough, many of them are at work in our world today and many of them get embraced by the Christian faithful.  Paul addresses this letter to "the holy ones and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ.”  This reminds us of who all of us should aspire to be.  Paul gives thanks for the Colossians in the name of God the Father and of his son, our Lord Jesus Christ.  Thanksgiving and gratitude are hallmarks of the greetings Paul includes in his letters to the various Christian communities.  We should emulate this same thankfulness and gratitude for our brothers and sisters in Christ.  As we hear the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Colossians today, may we give thanks to those who have passed down the faith to us, for those who have kept us on the right track on our journey of faith, for those who have helped us grow in the faith.