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Sunday, July 09, 2006
Christians Under Construction
1st in a Series on the book of Philippians
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Philippians 1:1-11
1 Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,
To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons:
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
3 I thank my God every time I remember you, 4 constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, 5 because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. 6 I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.** 7** It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God's grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. 8 For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus. 9 And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight 10 to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, 11 having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
What if I told you we are going to be learning over the next few weeks from someone who is a jailbird, a reformed legalist, and one of the most controversial, simultaneously hated and admired leader in all of Christian history—one whom many people find appalling and others find appealing and who some people claim has shaped the Christian faith and life even more than Jesus himself?
That person is, of course, the apostle Paul who grew up as a very good Jew, was trained as a Pharisee, the epitome of Jewishness, and who spent part of his adult life hunting down and persecuting this new sect of Judaism called followers of the way or Christians—that is until, while he was on his way to Damascus to hunt down more of these heretic Christians, he was blinded by a light and had a vision of the risen Christ that turned his life upside down. He spent time learning from the Christian leaders he had been demonizing and then became himself the most influential missionary in all of Christian history.
Paul, after his conversion, made several journeys across the Roman world to invite and persuade people to join the Jesus movement and to trust and follow Christ and his teachings. On his second missionary journey he traveled into Europe for the first time and started congregations in the cities of Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalaloniki and Berea. He tried in Athens as well. But the first place he began was in the Greek city of Philippi, and after a very rough start there, the Philippian congregation became his favorite of all the congregations he founded. And to that congregation he wrote his warmest and most intimate and personal of all his letters we have now in our Bible.
Philippi was a Roman city in the far northern part of Greece called Macedonia. It was named after Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. Paul went there after a dream encouraged him to travel to Macedonia. He met a woman there named Lydia who was a trader in expensive cloth and after she heard him tell about Jesus, she chose to be baptized and she was the first Christian ever in Europe. When we go to Greece, we can still see the stream that flows through the town of Philippi and we take time there to remember Lydia and to use the stream to renew our own baptismal vows.
Paul ran into trouble with some of the town leaders in Philippi and was thrown into jail. In the excavated remains of the town there is only one jail and this is the place were Paul would have been sequestered until an earthquake around midnight tore the jail door off its hinges and he and Silas were set free. The jailer was so impressed that he too wanted to be baptized, and he was along with his whole family including, we assume, his children—the first reference in the Bible to infant and child baptism.
Paul was eventually driven out of town and went down the road—the road was the famous Egnatian Way which is still present and can be traveled on.
But Paul stayed in touch with the small, committed congregation in Philippi and the letter we will be studying for a few weeks is his warmest and most personal, most intimate of all his letters. We know parts from this letter if we have had any church experience, but we may not know that these familiar verses come from the Philippian letter: for instance:
Ø I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Ø I have learned in whatever state I am to be content. I have been full, I have been empty.
Ø Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is pleasing or commendable—think on these things
Ø Continue to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,
We said this letter is the most engaging and warmest of all of Paul’s letters and we will see that together over a few weeks. Scholars agree on seven letters that Paul wrote; there are others that are falsely attributed to Paul but the style and the wording is different, and the theology is different. The seven letters everyone agrees are Paul’s are Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philemon, I Thessalonians, and Philippians—the one we will study. In these letters we see a Paul who affirms women as leaders and ministers, who encourages the freeing of one slave, and who can be angry and blunt. In Galatians, his angriest letter, he takes on the legalists who have come into the Galatian churches to take apart his work and to demand that Christians become Jews first, and he says about those who want to encourage circumcision that he wishes they would just castrate themselves. Paul can be blunt and earthy.
In the letters that are not his but are falsely attributed to him, the letter writer encourages slaves to be obedient to their masters and just be good slaves and encourages women to just be submissive and subservient. That is not Paul’s theology and those false letters have earned Paul the mistaken reputation of being anti-women and pro-slavery.
In the Philippian letter we will see how affirming Paul is of women leaders and we will remember that the first member of the Philippian congregation was a woman business leader named Lydia.
When Paul was writing his letters, did he know that he was writing scripture that would be placed in the Bible and we would be reading today? Of course not. He thought he was just writing to a specific group in each place and that they would read it aloud in worship and perhaps pass it around to another congregation later on. So when we hear this letter, it is sort of like eavesdropping on his dialogue with this group of maybe thirty or forty people who come together weekly in someone’s house for “church”
One more thing about Paul before we look at some of the verses. Did you hear where he is writing the letter from? He is writing from prison—or perhaps from being under house arrest. He is a criminal, according to the Roman authorities. We don’t know exactly where he was in prison and it is possible he was writing from Rome (where he was taken in the end and where he was executed) or from Ephesus—now in modern Turkey—or from Caeserea where we know he was imprisoned on his way to Rome.
The point is, he had been arrested for being a Christian. What length would you and I go to be faithful to God and to the causes of God? We have people here in our church who have suffered for our faith and we have people who have been in jail before and perhaps we find comfort in remembering that Paul had been in jail several times as well. We can also see that this Christian life is one that is controversial and is subversive of the conventional ways of thinking and practicing and doing politics and government.
In fact, the Christian faith is the only religion in the world where the two most influential leaders—Jesus and Paul—were arrested and then killed by the governing authorities for subverting the established governments. We may be reminded of some of those other subversives we honored last weekend on America’s Independence Day whose vision of justice and freedom and liberty for all put their lives in jeopardy as well.
Meeting Paul in this and other letters can call be embarrassing to us if we still are just consumers and spectators when it comes to religion and faith in God. Paul has done what most of us say we have done—committed his life to following the example and teachings of Christ—even to the point of going to jail for that faith. He is willing to take risks and stand up for his life’s commitments.
If we are still just admirers of Christ and not followers we may feel, as we read Paul, embarrassed or inspired or perhaps threatened.
I have told us about Dr. Clarence Jordan who started in Georgia in the 1950’s an interracial farming community that was so threatening to the racists and Ku Klux Klan members that bombs were thrown into the house and Klan members harassed them constantly. There was one occasion when Dr. Jordan and the Koinonia farm needed legal representation in court and Jordan approached his brother who was a prominent attorney in Atlanta for his help.
Clarence Jordan’s brother told him that he was not willing to represent his brother Clarence because what Clarence was doing was so controversial and risky that it would hurt his brother’s law practice if he took on their case.
Clarence asked his brother, “Now wait a minute. You know that what we are doing to combat racism and bigotry is the right thing. Weren’t we raised to do the right thing as Christians? Weren’t we both raised in the same Baptist church, and didn’t we both get baptized in that church and didn’t we say yes in that baptism service when we were asked to be followers and disciples of Jesus Christ?”
His brother said all that was true. Clarence asked him, “Well, aren’t you now still a follower of Christ?”
His brother said that he was—up to a point. Jordan asked if that point was when it got close to a cross—risking something, costing something. His brother said, “Yes, that’s right.”
Clarence Jordan told his brother, “Then you had better stop calling yourself a follower of Christ. You are just an admirer of Christ. You are not a disciple or a follower; you are an admirer.”
The good news is that Jordan’s brother thought about that remark, changed his mind, and represented the Koinonia community in court. He went on to continue his success in his Atlanta law firm and was later a judge in the Georgia state court system.
Meeting Paul and seeing how his commitment gets him in trouble with the authorities time after time can help us to move from admiring Christ to following Christ, move from being consumers of religion to becoming disciples of Jesus Christ.
Paul shows that commitment in so many ways. Remember he is writing this from prison, but his attitude is one of complete joy and confidence. He will tell us the secret to that in chapter 4 but we can preview it; “I have learned in what ever place I am to be content, whether I have much or have little. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” That can be your memory verse for today.
Two other things about this important letter as we begin to look at parts of it over the next few weeks. Paul says he is writing this to the saints in the church at Philippi. He does not mean that saints are perfect and flawless. To Paul, the saints means the church members—people like us who are unfinished and incomplete and still on the way. Are you in that group?
Saints, for Paul, are ordinary people who let God show through their words and deeds. The child in the children’s sermon knew this when the minister asked if anyone knew what a saint was, and the child, looking at the pictures in the stained glass windows, said, “Yes, those are the people that the light shines through.”
The final image from these first eleven verses will get reinforced several times in the next few weeks. Paul says, “”I know that God who began this good work in you will bring it to completion.” It is not complete yet; it is still in process. We are on the way to wholeness and perfection, John Wesley said; it is important that we keep moving that direction.
He says in today’s verses that he prays that our love will keep on overflowing and not just stabilize. He prays for God’s harvest of right living to come forth.
And he says later on that we are to keep on working out our salvation with fear and trembling. Keep on moving and working and growing. Don’t stagnate. Don’t fall asleep. Keep letting Christ be at work in your heart and your mind and your life to change and renew and form you into his likeness.
One church when it was building its new building ran a newspaper ad with the picture of the building being built and titled it, “Christians under construction.” That is who we are. We are on the way, being formed and built and not finished yet. What is important is that we put ourselves in experiences where the construction can go on happening.
Lovett Weems, former president of St. Paul School of Theology, tells about his child who was just entering the first grade and his excitement. The boy, reflecting on the experience of school, said, after the first grade, I’ll be in the second grade, and then the third, and then…” Weems said a look of mild panic crossed the six year old’s face and then mild resignation, and he said, “I’ve sure got a long way to go!”
Paul would echo that. Stay with us these next few weeks as we let Paul’s letter to the Philippians form and inform us and keep us moving ahead.