For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus. And 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.
— from Paul’s Letter to the Phillippians
FIRST, IF YOU identify as Christian, and you’re ever feeling a bit gloomy and think, “I just want to feel better about things,” here is a best practice for you. Read Paul’s Letter to the Phillippians. It’s great stuff for those days when the sky’s too gray or you’re struggling with those things that just seem to come back again and again, or, maybe even worse, you’re struggling with your priest or another Christian (or, God forbid, a deacon), then that is just the thing to read through slowly.
We’re through till about this time next year with dire predictions of the end of the world; we’re done with Christ the King Sunday, two Sundays ago. Those are the hard texts to read. They call us to worry about the times to come and what the end of the world might look like and being judged. “On his account, all the tribes of the earth will wail.” Ouch. Time to get your ducks in line, right? But Phillippians?
It’s short and it’s joyous. It’s an easy read and I guarantee you will be uplifted. There’s only one reference to being part of “an evil generation,” and you can gloss right over that. And technically, it’s two letters crammed into one, known as Letter A and Letter B. Don’t worry about that either. Letter A is a thank you note for the gifts received from the congregation; Letter B is a thank you note to and for the congregation itself. Read ’em together. Or not. It’s all good.
You can glow in your own sure belief that God is on your side and that everything will be just fine — good news indeed in these times, right? Phillippians tells us we will be OK.
And we will, all of us. I mean that, sincerely. I do. (Writing, rather than saying a sermon aloud, makes it really easy to be misunderstood. Ask anyone who’s ever gotten in trouble because email has been wrongly read.) It’s a problem that text-based production has had for millennia. As Socrates warns Phaedrus in Plato’s dialogue of that name, writing can be problematic — you can’t check the audience’s response as you go along. You just have to hope for the best and hope it doesn’t all blow up in your face.
No, this letter from Paul is safe territory. For one thing, he was in jail at the time of its writing and he knew his task was to cheer up folks worried about him (other letters from Paul are more troublesome). But he also knew, both from his own experience and from the words brought back to him by other workers in the Kingdom, that the congregation in Phillippi was good to go, that they wouldn’t get off track. In one of the other congregations he founded, he had to reprimand a man living in sin with his own mother-in-law. Boy, did that get under Paul’s collar.
But why was Phillippi such a good place to be? Because the folks there got the idea of church right. They worshipped together, they shared their material goods, they ate together. When a church gathers around itself and around Christ, things tend to work out. People love one another (agape love, love of the Spirit as seen in the people). These are folks who visited each other in jail, who fed each other, who gave clothing to wear when necessary. That’s the sign of a healthy community.
So, if you’re Christian, you’re told you have to bear each other’s crosses. Helping each other is part of the package. And if you’re alone, you’re at risk of not being able to help one another.
You can (I’ve done this, so I know) find yourself putting too heavy a load on others in your life. You don’t want to do that to anyone, even if they’re a good friend or even a spouse. So — even if it isn’t the church, which doesn’t always welcome all equally as it should — go find a community, people who can help you bear your problems and you theirs.
Then you’ll find yourself living in and amongst a place in which love flows. You’ll be better for it.
Living in a community modeled after Phillippians is even better than just reading about it.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Dr. Keith Dorwick is a deacon resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia.
