“Rejoice
in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”
Rejoicing is the great theme of Paul’s Letter to the Church in
Philippi. But this is not the forced and
superficial rejoicing that pretends that everything is sunshiny and rosy all
the time. It’s not the hollow joy of being
in denial about what is difficult in life.
This is a letter from a man in prison, a man who does not know whether his
captors will permit him to live or condemn him to die. But in spite of that, Paul rejoices, because
of what he calls “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
Faith
in Christ is that pearl of great price for which Paul declares himself happy to
suffer the loss of everything. But his
faith is also a promise, a promise that becoming like Christ—in humility and
perseverance, in suffering for the sake of the Gospel, in patient trust in the
goodness and the justice of God—even to the point of being like Christ in his
death, brings with it the promise of being like Christ in his resurrection. So Paul rejoices, and while he doesn’t tell
the church in Philippi to ignore or avoid the realities of struggle and
suffering, he does tell them not to
worry about it.
“Rejoice
in the Lord always, again I will say rejoice,” writes Paul; “Do not worry about
anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let
your requests be made known to God.” Now
I’m like a lot of people in that I tend to worry about things. Most of them I have no control over whatsoever,
but still I dwell on them. Every once in
a while I will add something new to the list of things to worry about, and from
time to time I will take something off the list, or at least put it away in the
file marked “Not actively worrying about for now.” But mostly they are the same things that I
worry about over and over again, day after day, week after week, year after
year.
It’s
a habit, and habits are hard to break, but I have been trying to learn a new
habit, and it is exactly the one that Paul recommends to his friends in
Philippi. When I find myself worrying
about money, or the prospects for the church, or how I’m doing at my job, about
my parents, my brothers, or my wife, about my daughter’s future, or the future
of the human race and life on Earth, it makes all the difference in the world
if I turn that worry into a prayer. This
immediately shifts my focus from the bad thing I’m afraid of to the good thing
I hope for. It changes the context of
the issue from my own weakness and anxiety, to the strength and the peace that
are in God.
The
joy of Paul is confidence in that strength and that peace which surpasses all
understanding. It is also a rejoicing in
unity. Today’s passage begins with a
plea to a couple of the women in the congregation at Philippi to work out their
differences, and to be “of the same mind in the Lord.” This also is a recurring theme in the letter. In fact this is the one thing that Paul asks
of the Philippians, something that they can do for him so that the joy that he
has in them will be complete—to be of “the same mind, having the same love,
being in full accord” with one another.
And again, this unity to which he urges them is not just a sharing in
happiness and good fortune. It is also
sharing in suffering and struggle. The
challenges they face together, says Paul, are a gift from God, for in this way
they share in the struggle and sufferings of Christ himself.
Driving
back down from Oregon on Thursday, my family and I passed through the fields of
Glenn and Colusa Counties, which were teeming with combines, threshing and
harvesting rice. This is the time of
year when the long labors of spring and summer bear fruit, and it is also the
season to gather in the spiritual harvest of the year, and of years and of
lifetimes. Over the next couple of
months the Sunday gospel lessons are teachings from the final week of Jesus’
life. They are parables and dialogues that
ask us with redoubled urgency to consider what, when all is said and done, is
of ultimate value. And this is a season
centered on the great Feast of All the Saints, when we rejoice in and hope for
God’s harvest of history, with those men and women who, like Paul, counted
themselves fortunate to live and die with Christ, and were transformed by him
into lights to the world in their generations.
So
it is fitting that this is also the time when we observe our annual Stewardship
Season at St. John’s. Because when we
talk about Stewardship in the church we are not turning aside from spiritual
matters with a wink and a nudge to address the real financial “bottom line” of
our life together. But before the coming
of new year at Advent, before we begin preparing again to celebrate the
Incarnation of God in Christ, we set aside a season for rejoicing in the Christ
that abides and bears fruit in us. We
take time to consider the harvest of blessings that is our life together and to
recommit ourselves to this community of saints.
And
if we treat this as more than a perfunctory exercise, it is not without its
suffering and struggle, for there are no areas of our lives more fraught with
frustration and anxiety, with our moral dilemmas and mortal limitations, than
our time and our money. But while each
of us might wrestle in the privacy of our own families and our own consciences
with difficult reckonings of how much we have, and what we can afford to spare,
and where our gifts are needed most, still we rejoice. We rejoice because we are of the same mind,
making these hard choices together. We
all pray together for God to supply our needs, and for the faith and
discernment to make an offering that says something about the surpassing value of
knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.
This
year our Stewardship packets contain a new way to rejoice in our life together
in the body of Christ. In addition to
the form where you can estimate your 2015 giving of time, talent, and treasure to
St. John’s, you will also have the option of completing what I’ve decided to
call a Mission Pledge. This is a confidential
card which you can choose to share with me, or to keep entirely between
yourself and God. Its purpose is for you
to identify at least one, and as many as four, areas of your life outside of
church that you would like to offer on this altar for the coming year, to be
consecrated to Christ’s mission in the world.
It
can be something public, your job or some civic or social service work that you
do. Or it can be private, a creative
discipline or spiritual practice, a significant relationship or family
responsibility. The communion that
Christ renews with you when you kneel at this altar—where in your life do you
hope it will bear fruit? Into which of
your efforts and struggles will you invite Christ to enter, to make them part his
redeeming work? Which of your worries would
you like to turn into prayers and supplications for strength and peace? Your Mission Pledge is an invitation to ask
and answer these questions. It is your
opportunity to take stock of your spiritual challenges and rejoice in them as precious
gifts, and then, uniting with your brothers and sisters at St. John’s in a
single act of thanksgiving, to make them known to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment