Tag: Grafton Cathedral

Christ Church Cathedral
Pentecost 19(A)
15 October 2017

 

The Mind of Christ, 4: Peace and Joy

Background | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three |  Video

Here we are—already—at week four of our four week mini-series on Paul’s letters to the Philippians.

A lot has happened in all of our lives during those four weeks, so let’s catch our breath for a moment and think of those key moments in our own lives, those critical points where God seemed more real (or perhaps more distant) than at other times.

How has it been with you and God this past month?

In a sense, that is what Paul was asking his friends in Philippi: How has it been with you all and the Lord lately? Are you happy? Do you have a sense of peace? Are you energised for ministry, or struggling to battle through?

As you will recall (I hope), in chapter one Paul celebrates the compassion that they felt for him, and that he in turn felt for them. He described a visceral stomach-churning kind of compassion, that is deeper than a big idea and warmer than a nice feeling.

Mother love comes to mind.

Then he turned to the humility seen especially in the person of Jesus: a mindset that puts others first, and does not seek power or self-interest.

Last week we saw that Paul was also celebrating the idea that Christian life is a gift, not something we achieve by hard work or persistent belief. The person whose faithfulness counts is Jesus himself. He is not just the object of our faith, but is himself the ultimate believer. Jesus trusted God. That is enough. Because of the faithfulness Jesus demonstrated, we simply have to open our hearts—even the tiniest wee bit—to God, and all is well.

This week, in the final section of this ancient Christian letter from the first century, Paul unpacks what “all is well” might look like in everyday terms.

 

Overview of Philippians 4

Let’s engage in a very brief overview of this final chapter.

1: Paul begins by underlining the affection they have for each other

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

2–3: He then appeals for his friends (including two named individuals in the community of faith) to get over their conflicts and to have a common mind, or a share in the mind of Jesus

I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.

4–7: Paul affirms that being upbeat (rejoicing, in his terms) is the key to personal peace, and you may have spotted in this text the biblical basis for the traditional blessing at the end of our Eucharist

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

8–9: Paul encourages them to focus on the positives, and not to dwell on the negative aspects of everyday life

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

10–14: Trouble is real and inevitable, but it will not deflect us because with the help of Christ (v 13) we can do anything

I rejoice in the Lord greatly that now at last you have revived your concern for me; indeed, you were concerned for me, but had no opportunity to show it. Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. In any case, it was kind of you to share my distress.

15–20: Paul recaps the experiences they have shared, including lots of tough times they faced together

You Philippians indeed know that in the early days of the gospel, when I left Macedonia, no church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving, except you alone. For even when I was in Thessalonica, you sent me help for my needs more than once. Not that I seek the gift, but I seek the profit that accumulates to your account. I have been paid in full and have more than enough; I am fully satisfied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent, a fragrant offering, a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God. And my God will fully satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. To our God and Father be glory forever and ever. Amen.

21–23: Paul wraps up his letter with some personal greetings

Greet every saint in Christ Jesus. The friends who are with me greet you. All the saints greet you, especially those of the emperor’s household.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

 

Glimpsing the inner experience

In this letter we have been glimpsing the inner experience of Paul and the Philippians. We do not have a detailed picture. We would like to know more. But we catch a glimpse of what faith and life was like for them in their own time and place.

As we look back, we are seeking wisdom for now and for the future.

For them, as for us, life was not all smooth sailing.

But for them as for us, compassion is at the heart of a life lived well.

Paul urged them (and us) to be upbeat. We are not selling fire insurance! We are daring to believe that we can live the blessing if we simply say YES to God’s love. How hard is it to say, Yes to the love that beats at the very heart of the universe?

As people of faith we choose to focus on what is going well.

We could dwell on the dark stuff, but what would be to give Evil a power over us that it does not deserve. Make space for the good, because God in Christ has demonstrated an investment in our well-being that Evil has never once shown.

We know in our heart of hearts with Christ on our side we can do anything.

And that is the basis of the deep peace we have as people of faith:

• The peace that comes from being who God wants us to be.
• The peace that comes from being where God has placed us for now.
• And the peace of being engaged in the work God wat s us to do.

Not for our sake, but for God’s sake—and for the sake of our city and our world.

 

Christ Church Cathedral Grafton
Pentecost 18 (A)
8 October 2017

This week our series of passages from Paul’s letter to the Philippians brings us to chapter 3.

Background | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Video 1 (0800 Liturgy) | Video 2 (0930 Baptism Liturgy)

Having considered compassion as a key attribute of the Christian life, and then an authentic humility that causes us to live for others rather than for ourselves, this week our focus us turns to faithfulness.

 

Spiritual pedigree

Earlier Paul has praised the Philippians for their unstinting support for him. He then urged them to get beyond petty disagreements as they discover a deep unity grounded in the mindset of Jesus himself.

Now he turns his attention to some very direct advice.

We can begin by noting how Paul lists his personal pedigree as part of a dispute about the claims of various people to have a status that guarantees them a hearing. In response to these self-serving claims to privilege, Paul cites his own personal pedigree as an observant Jew.

It is an impressive CV:

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. (Philippians 3:4–6 NRSV)

We could spend a long time unpacking each of those claims, but we will not do that. The point is clear. Paul had an impeccable Jewish legacy.

But Paul has discovered something very important: None of that stuff matters!

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. (Philippians 3:7–9 NRSV)

 

The faithfulness of Jesus

Already in that excerpt from Philippians 3 we catch a glimpse of the big idea that lies at the heart of this passage.

What matters is not who we are, what we have done, or even what we believe.

None of that matters at all.

Zip!

For Paul, the one things that matters is the faith of Jesus.

For the last 500 years in our part of the Church this has been understood as us having faith in Jesus.

But the original sense is more likely to have been the faith of Jesus, the faithfulness that Jesus demonstrated.

In other words, what mattered most to Paul was not what he had done, said, or believed; but what Jesus had done, said, and believed.

What makes all the difference for us is the faithfulness of Jesus, not what we think about Jesus.

Paul develops this idea in several of his letters, and perhaps most notably in Romans—which is his most considered and intentional theological statement. There he parallels the faithfulness of Abraham, which generated blessing for all his direct descendants, with the faithfulness of Jesus, which generate blessings for all humanity.

It is a simple and elegant idea.

What matters is not what we do, not even what we believe.

What matters is what Jesus did, as he lived out his own faithfulness to God.

For 2000 years the Church has constructed a religious system that tells us how we must think right, believe right, and act right.

But within the Scriptures there has always been this clear statement that the only thing which really matters is that Jesus got it right, and so we can ride on his coat tails.

Our job is not to believe stuff about Jesus, but to cultivate the same attitude towards God’s call on our own lives.

Once we realise that the faithfulness of Jesus is enough, more than enough, we can stop trying so hard.

Instead of thinking of ourselves primarily as sinners, people who need to do better, we can live into the blessing that God offers us as a result of the faithfulness of Jesus.

That was a radical idea in Paul’s time, but is an even more radical idea after 2000 years of Christian focus on sin and guilt.

Of course it matters how we act, and we want to have our ideas clear and cogent.

But none of that is about seeking God’s blessing,

The blessing is already ours. It is a gift.

It flows from the faithfulness of Jesus.

We are people who live into the blessing, not people who manipulate our thoughts, feelings and actions to win forgiveness and approval from the God we encounter in Jesus of Nazareth,

For that we can truly give thanks as we gather at the Table of Jesus today.

Christ Church Cathedral Grafton
Pentecost 17 (A)
1 October 2017

 

Video of this sermon is now available online.

This is the second in our four week sermon series as we take the opportunity to explore the key themes of Paul’s letter to the Philippians.

For those who were not with us last week, let me just offer a brief recap.

The sermon from last week was recorded and the video is online, along with full notes for the sermon. You can find both the notes and the video in the Cathedral web site and under the DEAN’S BLOG.

During this series of four Sundays, the lectionary offers us a rare opportunity to read a complete book of the Bible.

We mostly hear brief excerpts from the Bible, but I think it does make a difference when we get to hear the whole document.

In this instance, we get a better feel for the relationship between Paul and the people of the small Christian community at Philippi as we read the whole letter over these four weeks.

There are also some background notes for this sermon series online, so I encourage you to look those up and get a deeper sense of the history of Philippi, and of the relationship between Paul and the small church that he founded there.

As best we can tell, Paul was only into the city for a couple of weeks before he was forced to move on to another location. Yet in that brief time he founded a new Christian community in this city, and formed such a close relationship with them that they stayed in close contact with him for many more years.

As we saw last week, the bonds were so close that they supported Paul when he again found himself under arrest. This time they sent money as well as one of their church members to be his personal assistant.

The bonds were incredibly close, as we saw last week when we explored the theme of compassion.

 

Make my joy complete

In chapter two of Philippians, Paul is seeking to promote harmony among the members of this young Christian community.

He is appealing for them to put each other’s interests first:

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. (Phil 2:1–4 NRSV)

Notice that he is not suggesting that they resolve their differences by a majority vote. Rather, he is raising the bar much higher. They are to operate by consensus and seek total agreement between everyone:

be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind

That kind of unity is not achieved by voting, but by a willingness to listen, to understand, to put our own interests aside, and to put the interests of the other person first.

That is not how our world works, but it was also not how the world worked in Paul’s time either. The model for this kind of outlook is not to be found in the ways most people act most of the time.

Rather the model for this kind of attitude comes is found in the person of Jesus.

 

The Mind of Christ

Now we come to the crown jewels of this brief personal note sent by Paul to the Christian community in Philippi in the northern winter of AD 54/55.

Paul backs up his appeal for the Philippians to treat each other well by quoting an early Christian hymn known to them from their Sunday gatherings.

In these lines we are delving back behind even the letter itself to an earlier stage in the emergence of early Christianity.

This was presumably a song that Paul taught them while first explaining what it means to be a Christian. More than that, we can presume the song to have originated in the church in Antioch. This is the where Paul gained so much of his own Christian formation as he served alongside Barnabas for a year (Acts 11:25–26) prior to their first missionary journey as emissaries of the Antioch congregation (Acts 13:1–3 and 14:26).

These words we focus on today take us back very close to the start of Christianity.

Interestingly, Paul does not ask people to believe a long list of things about Jesus, but to act in the same way that Jesus acted.

That is a lesson the church soon forgot, and we have since become quite skilled as assessing people on the basis of their beliefs.

But Paul appeals for them to have the same mind, the same sense of self, the same outlook as we observe in Jesus himself.

Here are the key lines again:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness … (Phil 2:5–7 NRSV)

We could spend a whole sermon series exploring this ancient Christian song, but today I just want to focus on the key point that Paul himself was seeking to highlight when he used this song as part of his appeal to this friends in Philippi to put each other’s interests first.

There are just two phrases I want to underline for you today.

 

• [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited

This is actually a verb difficult phrase to translate, and might be better translated as: he did not think that equality with God was about grasping

If we hold that idea in mind for a moment, we may recall that it fits well with what Jesus himself is remembered as saying about his own mission:

The son of man came not to be served,
but to serve.

This song also resonates with the scene in John’s Gospel where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples at the beginning of the Last Supper.

Divinity is not about power, but about service.

That is not how we usually think about God, but it is the way Jesus teaches us to imagine God. More importantly, it was how Jesus embodied God: as love in action, not privilege seeking recognition.

The God who comes among us in the person of Jesus, is a God who serves, heals, saves, restores, and unites.

 

• but emptied himself

This important insight is then reinforced by the example of Jesus himself.

He did not just understand divinity differently, he acted in a way that showed us a different side of God.

In Paul’s original Greek he used the word kenosis, which means to empty something out so that is becomes of no value at all.

Far from grasping at privilege and power, Jesus gave it all away.

We see this most powerfully in his death.

No claims to privilege or status, no demands for special treatment, but a willingness to pour out his very existence for the sake of others.

 

Baptised into Kenosis

This morning we are baptising Theodore into our part of the amazing Christian movement that took root in ancient Antioch and whose first European community was founded in Philippi by Paul about 20 years after Easter.

There will be things Theodore needs to learn, and there will be beliefs that he will embrace for himself as he grows into the faith that we claim for him today.

We all have a stake in that process of faith formation, but the responsibility rests especially with his parents and godparents.

More important than any knowledge or beliefs that they will share with Theodore is the supreme importance of assisting him to have the same ‘mind’ that we see in Jesus.

As a follower of Jesus, Theodore will learn to put others first, and pour out his life in the service of others. We wait to see just what form that will take in his case, but we give thanks for the gift that he will be—and indeed already is— to other people.

And today we renew our pledge to spend our own lives that way as well.

To live for others, and not for ourselves.

If we can do that, the world may yet be transformed