“I want you to know, beloved,” says Paul, “that what has
happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel.”
Well, what happened to him? What is Paul’s deal?
The story is this: Paul was in prison when he wrote
Philippians—it’s right there in the next verse, where he says, “So that it has
become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone else that my
imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brothers and sisters, having been
made confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, dare to speak the word with
greater boldness and without fear.”
These ancient prisons were essentially holes in the ground
meant for short-term stays. The guards did not bring food or water, which meant
the prisoners were completely at the mercy of the local people to bring them
something to eat and drink to keep them alive. More than a few prisoners just
dropped dead. Nonetheless, Paul says this is all for good; that his
imprisonment was helping to spread the gospel. Paul is content because his mind
is fixed on something different than his circumstances. The conditions of the
prison could not touch the freedom of the gospel.
Paul’s life is a stark contrast to ours. Most of the time our
top priority for the day is simply getting through our busy schedules. For many
years, the church has lamented the lack of commitment to the faith, but
nowadays the schools have the same problem, and so do sports teams, and so do clubs
and organizations—not just for kids but for adults, too. Nowadays, we are
busier with everything and we are less committed to all of it, and because we
have so many things few of them can be commitments in the strict sense; we just
don’t have time to have commitments anymore. So, we’re constantly sloughing
responsibilities left and right, just trying to get by with our busy schedules.
All the while we make plans lightly, constantly on the lookout for a better
opportunity to come along. It’s completely normal to change plans on a whim—few
things are set in stone.
It’s incredibly easy to become so busy that you just don’t
have a faith life. I mean, who has time
for that? And so it is that busy-ness has become our god. To be fair, the
church deserves some of the blame for this. We who make up the church often
assign menial tasks rather than offering eye-opening experiences; after all, somebody
needs to read, somebody needs to clean, somebody needs to serve coffee hour. A
few people take these ministries on with passion; still others treat them as
tasks that they fulfill to feel good about themselves. The church can easily
become just another potential commitment that few have time for. It’s a jarring
contradiction to read Paul in a world like this; Paul, who quite literally had
his eyes opened to a new way of seeing after being blinded on the road to
Damascus.
Faith can open our eyes as well—if we allow ourselves the
commitment of attentiveness. You have to be attentive to it—there are no
shortcuts here. Faith is always opposed to busy-ness. Now, I’m not saying
that you can’t have a lot going on and have faith. Rather, faith happens when
we slow down even in the midst of doing all the things; holy moments come in
the liminal space between things.
Some of you may know that some of our Nursing Home
residents watch the services at Grace that are recorded and shown at Kittson
Memorial on a weekly basis, and for those that do it occasionally comes up in
conversation. Only this week I’ve noticed that when the subject comes up they
overwhelmingly mention one thing about the service. It’s always—always,
always!—the children’s sermon, and I suspect this jumps out to them, as it does
to me, because children’s sermons are one place in worship where we have absolutely
no idea what is going to happen. They have been lovingly called, “The speed
bump of worship,” because they will slow down, and perhaps even stop, the flow
of worship on a given week—and that feels holy to me.
We have this wonderful liturgy in our church that connects
us with the past and the future in this ever-flowing river stretching back to
Jesus himself and forward to the end of things. We have the essential
structure—confession and forgiveness, and the word, and the sacraments. We have
the rubric we need. Still, there’s a subtle difference between things being deep
and meaningful because they connect us to the past, and things being rote and existing
just to fill the time. We need to embrace the tradition not for the tradition’s
sake, but so we can embrace the mess, because if Paul is any indication, God
meets us in the unexpected, the missteps on the journey.
It’s microphone break-ups and crying babies—not cutely
crying either, more like screaming—and it’s children who aren’t babies anymore and should
know better, but they don’t and still they’re here, even if mom and dad want to
be anywhere but here at the moment. And it’s people who answer cell phones in
church, talking in what they imagine to be a whisper, completely unaware that
everybody can hear them. It’s communion mishaps, spilt wine or dropped bread—the
holy intersecting the profane—it’s wondering what to do in the face of a giant
mistake in the moment that’s supposed to be solemn, and it’s kids saying things
in the children’s sermon that make us blush—in fact, it’s kids coming forward
at all, because nothing makes us more vulnerable than our children and, God
forbid, you give them a microphone in front of the church. It’s people who
don't understand how we do things around here; it’s people for whom we are
embarrassed because they don’t understand our traditions; it is all the things
that make us uneasy about church—this is where our faith is strongest. It’s putting aside our thirst for normalcy
and finding the beautiful mess of a people committed to discovering God in the
unexpected. This is why we have liturgy at all, so that when the sermon is
terrible, and the children are rambunctious, and the hymn choice for that
Sunday is, frankly, way too 1990’s, or way too 1690’s, the words are the same so
that something grounds us while the Holy Spirit does its business, which is
always to make a mess of things.
Like Saul-turned-Paul, we have the freedom to make a serious mess of
things and still discover God’s grace meeting us when we don’t deserve it.
Paul killed people. Honest-to-goodness, you would run him out of town if he
tried to move in. Then, he made a u-turn and became the most Christian of
Christians. Now, as he writes to the church in Philippi, he is forced to rely
on the kindness of strangers who knew who he was and why he was sitting in that
hole in the ground. So, who fed him?
Was it the Christians whose families he had a hand in murdering, or was it the
Roman citizens who knew the politics of feeding a Christian prisoner? Who was
it? It could only have been people who understood the messiness of it and persisted,
nevertheless.
None of those people could bother to
be busy; none of them could make excuses for not jumping in. If we are too
preoccupied to see the world around us and the need for us to be Christ to the
world, then we are nothing; absolutely nothing. Our greatest handicap as
Christians in America in the 21st century is that everything comes
so fast, so easy, and so thoughtlessly that thoughtfulness is foreign. We fill
our lives with so much stuff that we’ve lost all attentiveness to what God is
doing. Sure, it might be nice to have God
in our lives, but seriously, have you seen our schedules?! So we treat
church like we treat the rest of our lives, like a thing to get through, like a
structure that shouldn’t be upset—just an hour of peace, and much less when we
have no communion!
We laugh sometimes when we hear
about other people who are lining up to serve. Ha! If only I had the free time! we think, as if we are the only
people who have lives filled with family, work, and responsibilities. We need
to stop and consider that what sets “those people” apart from us is not the
amount of free time they have but an ability to be something other than busy in
spite of a world that tells them that’s what they are supposed to be. People
who become exceptional at anything understand this, whether it’s schooling, or
athletics, or their faith—you can still be committed nowadays, it’s just easier
not to be.
We have ministries that exemplify this here. Whether it’s
quilting, or Cornerstone, or youth trips, or Bible studies, or even committees,
there is joy in committing to something that matters. These things tend to be a
lot of work, and they tend to be time-consuming, because everything meaningful
takes time. This isn’t an either/or; you can be joyful and serve. In fact, if
Paul is any indication, the two go hand-in-hand. Sometimes I think a conversion
on the level of Paul’s is what it would take for us to actually let go, finally
forced to confront the fact that the things with which we fill up our lives do
not matter if the faith that once gave us meaning is now just another chore.
I’ll close with what Paul actually
said in today’s reading. This is a prayer for all of us—something to reorder
our lives, and a hope for tomorrow. Paul writes, “This is my prayer, that your
love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to
determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and
blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through
Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God” (Phil 1:9-11).
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