At Work In You

 

Sunday, September 28^th, 2008

Proper 21A/ Ordinary 26 A/ Pentecost +20

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Philippians 2:1-13

Theme: Letting God change you

 

 “¹If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, ²make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. ³Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, ⁶who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, ⁷but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,⁸ he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. ⁹ Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,¹¹and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  ¹²Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; ¹³for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

 

As some of you know, the first part of this week I attended a preaching and worship conference at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond.  From Monday evening through Wednesday midday I was able to hear some wonderful speakers and engage in breakout sessions dealing with anything from how to welcome visitors to how to be a missional pastor – that is, one who engages the local church – the local congregation – in mission opportunities in addition to connecting to those established missions efforts that we as part of a denomination have engaged in so well and effectively over the years. 

I was able to reconnect with a few friends from my past, as well as meet new friends.  One, Jim Everette, who is Associate Pastor for Missions at First Baptist Church, Wilmington, NC, I met after the breakout session on being a missional pastor.  In the course of the session, I had mentioned that I had been on the receiving end of that ‘well-organized and prayed for mission effort on the denominational level’ as the son of missionaries.  When Jim and I began to talk afterwards, he asked where I had been an MK.  When I told him that I’d grown up in Chile, his eyes lit up, and he asked me if I knew Clara Huff, a retired missionary to Chile.  Growing up I knew her as Aunt Clara Brincefield.  She lived in Temuco, in southern Chile, and focused on working with the WMU’s in the churches in her area, as well as (I think) teaching in the Baptist School that has been established in Temuco since 1922. 

 

As Jim described everything Aunt Clara was into – Hispanic ministry, outreach, all kinds of activities and mission trips, he basically said that you really can’t keep up with her – which tells me that she hasn’t changed a BIT since I knew her as a child! 

 

There has always been a joy in Aunt Clara, a ready laugh, a joke.  We could always count on her to bring the house down at the Talent Show at the end of our Mission Meetings.  She either had a song, or a skit, or something that ended up with people rolling in the aisles.  Her joy is infectious.  You feel better when you are around her, more alive, more able to DO things and present things in a way that makes it clear that why you are doing them is because of the joy of the Lord in you.    

 

We pick up this morning right where we left off last Sunday.  Paul is continuing in his exhortation to the church at Philippi.  He continues to call them to unity, and he continues to break down what that looks like – what that CAN look like, in a community of believers who are intentional about following the example of Christ.  And it is there, with Christ, that Paul settles, as it were, in describing the ultimate example – but what is interesting about the passage is that in his wording, Paul is being redundant – he is telling the people of the church at Philippi that they already HAVE what he is telling them to GET.  In the English translations, it doesn’t come across quite as obviously, but in the Greek, he is, in fact saying “have this mind in you that you already have because you are in Christ Jesus” – it’s a little clunky, but I hope you get the idea.  Paul is basing his plea to the Philippians on the fact that they ARE indeed IN Christ – and by inference,   that Christ is in THEM.  In fact, that is the whole point Paul is trying to make – that it is because of the fact that we have Christ in us that we are able to now take on Christ’s mind as our own. 

 

But is it an easy task?  Not at all.  Paul describes what Jesus did in the Philippian hymn – called the Kenosis Hymn – from the Greek ekenosen – which we translate as ‘he emptied’ – in speaking of Christ’s emptying himself – of being obedient and lovingly submitting to the will of God the Father and making himself, first, a human, and second, a slave – to the Father’s will – and third, submitting to the death on the cross. 

 

The image the Philippians were presented with was laced with wording by Paul that evoked the need to serve one’s community – in this case – the Christian community in Philippi – as part of one’s duty as a member of the body of Christ primarily – but in a subtle way, Paul colors his language with the language of the civic duty expected of a citizen.  Yes, he is specifically speaking of that being carried out by those who were members of the body of Christ, but he was using words that they, as citizens of a Roman colony, and most likely proud Roman citizens – proud at this point more of their citizenship and the standing it brought than of what being a citizen of the empire meant for them in terms of the allegiance they were expected to uphold. 

 

Paul was calling on these proud Roman Citizens to do what goes completely against the grain of what they had up until then understood to be the duty of a Roman citizen – they were to follow Jesus’ example and empty themselves – to in no way claim the rights and privileges that they were assured as citizens of the empire – to in fact SHUN that privilege – in order to be in fellowship and communion with each other.  It is pretty much a given that the church was made up, as most of the churches that formed early in the expansion of the followers of Christ – of people from all walks of life – Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.  In ways that we cannot fully comprehend, the body of Christ cut across barriers and boundaries that had been in place for centuries, and in a very real way, shook Roman Society – and the existing structures of the day – to their core. 

 

There is a radical aspect to the call of the Gospel, to the example of Christ, that we are hard pressed to identify with – especially here, especially now, in 21^st century still for the most part accepted-as-the-norm Christian America.  I know there is a general movement in our culture away from the mores and teachings of the faith, but in all honesty, that was to be expected.  I heard a quote from Stanley Hauerwas, professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, where he said “the world has gone back to being the world.  The church can now go back to being the church.” 

 

We have, for too long, been co-opted by virtue of being ‘accepted.’  You’ve heard me say before, the worst thing that can happen to Christianity is that we gain a position of power in the world.  Jesus could have thrown his weight around as the son of God, but didn’t.  He COULD have rallied the people of Israel and formed an army alongside angels to overthrow the empire that was oppressing them, but he didn’t.  He could have gone straight to the halls of power and shown the men sitting in those seats that he was the incarnate God, capable of miracles and wonders, of creation as well as destruction, but he didn’t. 

 

What he DID do was what they call ‘play against type’ in the acting trade.  He presented himself as the antithesis of who he truly was.  Equal with God, yes, but was born as a baby in a backwater village in a backwater country in a far-flung end of the known world, far from the centers of power and culture.  Remained for the most part obscure, except to the folks in the immediate surrounding area, and only kept a small group of followers close to him throughout a brief, three year period of time during which he itinerantly preached around the country he was born in. 

 

He knew, as the time drew close that he was going to wind up arrested, beaten, and most likely killed by the authorities.  He saw it coming and yet didn’t do anything to stop it.  Didn’t stop preaching the Gospel, didn’t stop facing down injustice, and tyranny, greed and hypocrisy in those who set themselves up as worthy of being emulated – copied – even to the end.  And he never stopped touching lives in the most significant way possible – on a personal, intimate, one-on-one level, not only with his twelve disciples, but also with lawyers, scholars, leaders of the Sanhedrin, and, at the other end of the societal spectrum, Samaritan women and despised tax collectors.       

 

So what does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

You’ve heard the illustration of a frog in water – if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out.  The abruptness of the change alerts the frog to something being wrong, and it takes action to get away from the danger.  But if you place a frog in a pot of room-temperature water, and then put the pot on a low burner, the frog will stay in the pot until it is too late, and it will die. 

 

We live in a culture that has become known for its greed and rampant materialism.    Understand me when I say that even though I believe there is still much that is good and noble and honest and worthy of upholding in our society, it does not take much to unravel that goodness and render it ineffective for the purposes of maintaining a witness for Christ in the world. 

 

So we are called to do that on both an individual and a congregational level.  I will go out on a limb here and say that I don’t believe can go much further beyond that and maintain our effectiveness in our witness.  Perhaps on a state association level, MAYBE, but on a national level we lose our power to influence, to convince, to persuade on an individual basis – which is how Jesus Christ did it.  Yes, we DO belong to entities, as I mentioned a couple of Sundays ago, that go beyond what we do locally, but that does not exempt us from DOING locally what we participate in on a larger scale … oddly enough – even in participating on a large scale as we do with missions funding, what that reverts to is at the other end, a personal, individual one-on-one engagement with people on the ground – through people like Aunt Clara, through people like Alma Hunt, or Lottie Moon, who emptied HERself just as Christ emptied himself.  I know we’re a little early to talk about Lottie, but it speaks to the point being made. 

 

We are, as a church, as members of THIS church, as members of the body of Christ meeting here and now, called by Christ to follow his example, to adopt his mind and make it our own – in giving of ourselves no matter where we are, no matter who we are with.  And to do it in such a radical, against-the-grain way, that the radical selflessness of the Gospel of Christ will change that part of the world that we happen to be living in and touching right here, right now.  And we do it through letting God work through us.   

 

¹²Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; ¹³for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

 

Think about that.  It is God who is at work in us.  God!  who came to earth in the person of Jesus, who created the universe, who raised Jesus from the dead, who knows us down to the very core of our beings – God is at work in us – and working out our salvation with fear and trembling is part of what that … partnership involves.  God is enabling us to will and to work for his good pleasure.   Let’s pray.