“In This I Rejoice”

A Sermon based upon Philippians 1: 1-19

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Second Sunday after Easter, April,28^th,  2019

There was a church secretary who took a most unusual phone call. The caller asked if he could speak to "the Head Hog." Well, she quickly defended the dignity of her pastor, and with an irate tone said, "I want you to know that our pastor is held in the very highest esteem around here, and we address him as Rev. H. C. Herald. Currently Rev. Herald is not available to speak with you."

The man then responded, "Well, I am sorry. I just learned about your new building program and my CPA recommended that I donate $1 million to provide a good tax shelter for me." The secretary quickly responded, "Wait just a minute, I believe I see the fat pig coming down the hall right now."

When we care about each other, we can ‘kid’ each other.  Years ago, Dale Carnegie wrote a best-selling book, in fact, one of the best-selling books of all time, entitled ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’.  In that book he says the most important thing about running a successful business, is how well we relate to people.   

This relates well to church work too; maybe even more so.   The church, is the quintessential ‘people business’.  So, the greatest way for a church to be a church, that is to be ‘winsome’ and ‘influential’ as a church, is to really care about people.  And caring about people starts when we really get along with and care about each other.

Today, we begin a new series of messages from the New Testament book of Philippians.  Philippians is one of Paul’s most personal and passionate letters to one of the churches he founded.  Philippians is a joyous, optimistic, happy letter that gets ‘up close’ and personal with people.  That is quite ironic, since at the time the apostle Paul wrote this letter he was sitting in a prison somewhere, probably Ephesus, warmly remembering the people in his life.    

‘I thank my God every time I REMEMBER YOU.  (v. 3)

Recently, I had the honor of preaching back at a church in Shelby, N.C, where I had served as pastor in the late 1980’s, just prior to going overseas.   I got to see people I hadn’t seen in many years, and we all spent time together, catching up with each other and sharing memories.  That was such a special time together, and it made me realize more and more that ministry is much less about what you accomplish, than it is about caring about and caring with people.  The most important thing I did, was not preach, but to get to ‘sit down’ and share stories of life past and life present.  Stories about surviving cancer, about living alone, about recently retiring, about a child being ill, about a daughter going off to college.  Being with ‘people’ is the work of the ministry.  People with people is what makes it all worth-while.

It is the ‘joy’ of working with people that causes Paul to ‘pray with joy’ (4).  Now, that’s not always the way it is, with Paul or with us either.  Sometimes, working with people can be quite challenging, stressful, and depressing too.  “What do you love about your work?”  a business owner was asked.  His answer: people.  “What do you hate about your work?”  His answer was also: people.  And it was sometimes that way for Paul too.  Just read 1 Corinthians.  But here, in Philippi, Paul remembers a church he has known ‘from the very first day’ (v. 5) and it brings him warm memories, along with a deep sense of joy.

When I was at that church in Shelby, they had old photographs of the past; and it one of those photographs, Teresa and I were sitting in the front of a ‘river raft’, along with 4 other church members, getting ready to plunge down an 8 ft. waterfall head first.  If you could have only seen the concentration, or was that ‘fear’ on my face.  Today, I’d call it ‘terror’.   But even now, God has turned that ‘terrifying moment’ into a joyful memory that I got to share with some wonderful people who still have a special place in my heart.  Oh, yes, when Teresa first looked at that photograph, she asked, ‘Who was that handsome young man sitting beside of her in the raft?’

In this world, filled with so many new gadgets and preoccupations, it’s easy to forget that the most important part of our lives is not the places we go, the possessions we own, all the possibilities we have, but the most important part of life is the ‘people’ we get to share and spend our time with. 

Humans, in a way more sophisticated than any other creatures on this planet, are ‘social’ animals.   We are not made to be alone.  We cannot survive or thrive very well alone.  We were not made to ‘live on an island unto ourselves’.  As the Joan Baez song goes, (one of the first songs I sang in High School choir based on the 17^th century poem of John Donne).

“No man is an island,  No man stands alone,

Each man's joy is joy to me ,Each man's grief is my own.

We need one another, So I will defend,

Each man as my brother, Each man as my friend.”

“I thank my God upon every remembrance of you." (v.3)   Every time Paul thought of the people in Philippi, his song could have been: "What a fellowship, what a joy divine….  When these precious people, those sweet saints came to mind, an attitude of gratitude welled up in Paul’s heart.   People who loved and cared made up the church.  It was a church the Holy Spirit produced.  When people lived in fellowship with God’s Spirit, people had a sweet, sweet, fellowship with each other.  Dwight L. Moody once said, "There are different ways of being together."  We can be rusted together by ritualism, frozen together by formalism, linked together by liberalism, or even chained together by conservatism.  But what we should be is melted together by the fire of the Spirit because we have a blazing love for the Lord and those Jesus loves.

“…Because of your PARTNERSHIP IN THE GOSPEL (Phil. 1:5 NIV)

This ‘living’ love ‘in the Lord’ is not a self-centered love, but it is an ever-expanding love that starts at home, but reaches out into the world.  Paul writes: “I am happy because you have joined me in spreading the good news.”  (Phil. 1:5 NIRV). 

Paul’s point is that Christian love is a reaching, enlarging, including, and embracing love.  If you live in fear of being with others who are different from you, it is about your own weakness in faith rather than theirs.  The love of God is a love that moves out toward the world, toward the neighbor, whoever that neighbor might be.  The heart of a true Christian breaks when we, like recently, hear of a white man who was on trial because he shot at a black teenager who simply came up to his door, after his car broke down and needed to call for help.  You might understand caution with a stranger, but why did the man have to shot toward him, while he was already running away?

Maxie Dunnam, a Methodist evangelist, recalled the time thirty years ago when he and his wife, along with their two small children, were driving from Gulfport, Mississippi to his parents' home, about one hundred miles away. It was sleeting and the road was becoming icy on that unusually cold night. It was close to midnight out on a dark, lonely highway, when it happened.  Their car stalled.

There wasn't much hope of anyone stopping to help them at that hour of the night. The children were getting colder, and Dunnam and his wife were getting anxious. After what seemed an eternity a car came to a screeching halt beside them. Maxie told the driver that their car had stalled, and without asking any further questions, the stranger told them to get in his car. The stranger even helped them with their luggage, and went out of his way to take them to a friend's home in the nearest town where they could spend the night.

Dunnam noticed the man's accent was different from his own. He obviously was not from Mississippi. The man who helped the Dunnam family that night was David Ben-Ami, Rabbi of Temple B'Nai Israel in Hattiesburg.   A few months later Dr. Dunnam read an article in the newspaper about the trials and tribulations of Rabbi Ben-Ami. His troubles began when he befriended ministers of other faiths. The Rabbi visited pastors who had been thrown in jail for demonstrating against racial injustice. He befriended a white Presbyterian minister who had been involved in this struggle for equality, and he had assisted in distributing turkeys to needy Mississippi families of all races.

Rabbi Ben-Ami's congregation was upset and had asked him to leave.  Can you imagine a congregation asking their Rabbi to leave because he, by example, was teaching them to love people?  What was that congregation so afraid of?  If you recall, Jesus was a Rabbi who was run out of town for the very same thing.  What were the people in Nazareth so afraid of?  Many good people today, who are in Synagogues, in Churches, and in Mosques too, are good people, but are people who live in fear of each other.  What are they, we afraid of?  Is it about them, or is it about us?   (Maxie Dunnam, PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), pp. 62-63).

A reporter once asked a white teenaged girl in Philadelphia why she participated in a riot to run a black couple out of her neighborhood.

"I wouldn't want my kids to get to know the blacks," she said.

"Why?" the reporter asked.

"Because they might get to like them!" she answered.

That's the danger, isn't it? There is so much fear, unfounded fear, in our world even today. We see it in the Middle East, in Central America, in Europe, and we see it in our own neighborhoods too. Recently I watched the story, July 22^nd on Netflix, which is the story of how a right-wing radical in Norway, just before 911 in the U.S., terrorized Norway by exploding a Fertilizer Bomb at the Prime Minister’s headquarters, killing 8 people, and then driving to a Summer Camp to shoot and kill 85 children at a Summer Camp.  Why did he do it?  He believed that he was saving Norway.   He believed that Norway was just for the original Norwegians, and not for anyone else. 

How sad is such a narrow-minded, bigoted belief!  Why can all people believe, and I mean really believe, at least one truth that is found in all our Bibles, The Torah, the Old Testament, or in Kor’an, and is also found in secular science.  Why can’t we realize how we are all descended from one mother and father. We are all part of one, big, human family?  We are not Norwegian, German, French, English, Russian, Asian, Greek, Arab, Jew, African or American.  We are human.  We may not all be from the same tribe, but we are all from the same human family; the family God loves.

Since I’m adopted, and don’t know my ‘birth family’, my wife once considered giving me a gift of having my DNA tested to discover my ancestry.   After watching how general most of the results are, she changed her mind.  She said she’d support me me doing it, but she now thinks its worthless.   She thinks people who search out their unique Ancestry are not using science or money most productively.   She reasons, “Who needs to know who their most recent ancestors are, when in the end, we all come from the same human family”? 

She makes a good point.   Benjamin H. Alexander, Research Chemistry Professor at The American University in Washington, D.C., notes that through molecular biology research and DNA tracings scientists at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard University have agreed that there was once a woman whom they call Eve who lived approximately 200,000 years ago is the mother of us all.  Research shows that her genes are found in every human being living on earth today. Therefore, all six billion people on the planet are blood relatives. This mutual Eve is the 10,000th great grandmother of all of us.  Don’t we need to affirm that all humans have a common origin in God’s purpose?

However, we read our own DNA, or however we interpret the Bible, the common truth in all science and in every Holy Book, is that this earth will remain broken until people realize our need to be reconciled with God and with each other.  As followers of Jesus, we don’t believer everyone must think or believe like us, but we do want every person to love, like God loves us and God loves them.   As Christians, like Paul, we not only ‘remember’ warmly the love we share together, but we also ‘share’ a love that burns for others, a love that reaches out and unapologetically ‘joins’ and ‘partners’ with others to spread the good news that Jesus is the Savior who loves.   

It is this ‘sharing’, this ‘partnership’ or this ‘fellowship’ (v. 5, 7) ‘in the good news’ of the gospel of God’s love for the whole world, that brought Paul such great joy.   Isn’t this what was so amazing about Saul becoming Paul?   Saul was a narrow-minded, bigoted, prejudiced, Jewish Rabbi who murdered people who didn’t agree with his own faith, but after meeting Jesus Christ in a vision,  became a Paul, a Jewish follower of this different kind of King-Jesus, who reached out beyond his own religion, and beyond his own world, with a faith of love for all the world.  

Should this outward-reaching faith of love, which is based on God’s universal, global, and world-reaching love, be our own joy, as a church, too?  If we want to be a church of joy, we must be then renew our own faith to focus on this God who does not just ‘love the Jew, but also loves the Greek, the Gentile, the Arab, the Asian, and loves the whole world. 

This ‘gospel’ we are called to partner around and share with the world is the ‘good news’ to and for everyone who will believe.  It is a faith based on love, that declares trust in a particular God who became flesh and died on the cross to sacrifice to prove his love for the whole world because he ‘so loved’ this world.   This kind of particular God who ‘is love’, does not intend to negate other religions, nor does he come to move against other faiths, but God’s love, revealed in Jesus the Christ, magnifies and clarifies how God’s love can be found in any religion and in any faith, and at the same time, can expose the bad that can also be found hiding in any human religion or any faith, including Jewish or Christian faith.   What Jesus did that is so universal is to love, like God loves, and his point was not to destroy, but to ‘fulfill’, by revealing and renewing what was already universal and most needed in all the world: love.

This is the reason Jesus’ love isn’t just a love for few, but it is a love for all people anywhere, everywhere, without condition.  If the faith of Jesus Christ is only reduced to being just for Christians, or for only a particular kind of Christian, it then becomes a smaller, lesser and self-centered love, not a bigger, greater, God centered love. For when you put conditions on God’s love, or you limit Jesus’ sacrifice for sins, you make yourself god, and you make room for hate.      You make God small, not great, and you limit God’s love to your own terms, rather than extending or enlarging a love that forever belongs to God alone.  It was a ‘partnership’ or ‘fellowship’ of ‘enlarging’ or ‘expanding’ love, a love big enough that it could only come from God, that brought joy and gratitude into Paul’s heart, even though, at the time, he was imprisoned for sharing and preaching that kind of love.   It was the hope that this ‘gospel’ of love ‘might abound more and more’ (v. 9), because it was already becoming ‘clear to the whole palace guard and to everyone else’ too, as ‘Christ is preached’ (v. 18), out of ‘goodwill’ (v. 15) toward all, that caused Paul to ‘rejoice’  and to ‘continue to rejoice’ (v. 18). 

“HE WILL CARRY IT ON TO COMPLETION…” (6)

Because the ‘good news’ of God’s gospel is a about an undying, caring, sharing, and giving kind of love, it is the kind of ‘love’ and ‘good news’, it is miraculous, amazing-grace kind of love, that when you give it away, it also comes back to you.

Many Christians, in these days of traditional ‘church’ decline, wonder how in the world the church will survive?  One thing for sure, you don’t save, grow, or build the church by saving, growing, or building a church, but you save the church by reaching how to help and bring people to God’s salvation.  Most importantly, you don’t reach to them on your own terms, but you must learn to reach out to them on their terms, in their struggles, in their understanding.   This is the problem many traditional churches are having today.   They are trying to grow the church by growing a church, when they should be reaching out to people in their situation and condition of need, and letting God grow the church through those people who will become partners in the gospel.

When I visited Shelby, I got to share briefly with a former pastor, who had recently been an associate pastor, and then returned to that church to become the pastor of a large village church nearby.  He was trying to lead the church to reach out into its community, by using more contemporary methods.  But then, as changes started to occur, he ran into resistance in the church; leaders who told him that his focus should be on the church people, not on ‘them’ the outsiders. 

I don’t know the whole story, but what I do know is that either the church eventually asked him to resign or he left.  Fortunately, the pastor’s wife has a very good job, and he had a way to stay afloat.  Now, less than a year later, he has joined the staff of one of the fastest growing, contemporary churches in Shelby.  It was a church formed out of combining an old traditional church and a new contemporary, church start.  Now, my friend is the eldest of the 8 or so ‘pastors’, he said.  He had to even go out and by new clothes, and shoes, so that he could try to fit into the younger culture of that church.  The church has recently raised a million dollars, beyond their present budget, so they can focus, not on themselves, but on continuing to reach out into the needs of their community.  The other church, that let him go, continues to face a future of stagnation and decline.

That’s a ‘sad’ story, that fortunately has a good ending for the pastor, but what about the church where he left?   Why are people afraid to try new ideas?  Why couldn’t the church have done two things at once?  Why did it have to either be that he pastor focused only on the church, and not the needs of those outside of the church?  What was it not both/and, but had to be either/or? 

People are afraid to let go, aren’t we?  We are afraid to let of who we are, what we have, what we do, in order to reach out to where other people are.  We are afraid to become partners in this gospel that calls us to love, on God’s terms, at their point of need.  It is so much easier to remain in our safe place.  Isn’t that what the Jewish community of Jesus’ day wanted to do?  Isn’t that why the Judaizers wanted to take the church backward, rather than forward?  Isn’t that why Paul had to keep facing riots, beatings, insults, and prison.  We need to remember that is wasn’t the pagan world that kept attacking Paul, but it was the traditionally religious who kept complaining to the secular authorities, so that the authorities had to try to silence and stop Paul.  They did finally stop Paul, but there were others who came along beside of Paul and continued to share the good news until the gospel finally got to us too.

But here’s the question I want to close with:  Why are we afraid to ‘share’ and ‘show’ the gospel in new ways, when God assures us, that he is also not finished with us either.  Isn’t this the assurance Paul gave the Philippians?  Because they were continuing to move forward into the world with the gospel, and were partners with Paul in the gospel, they could be sure that God wasn’t finished with them, and that they could be ‘confident’ that ‘he who began a good work in them, would carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ’ (v. 6).

That’s a beautiful promise, isn’t it?  It reminds us that when we move ahead in him to go out to them, but that he is still not finished with working in us too.   I wish we could catch that kind of promise for us, too.  It’s the kind of understanding that could help us focus more on them, than on us, and find the promise of a future too.   I once witnessed ‘how’ this kind of ‘confidence’ works and is contagious.  Many years ago, when I was visiting Wilmington, I visited Winter Park Baptist Church, which was one of the first large traditional churches to risk focusing on outsiders, more than themselves.  The church was lead by a former Newpaper reporter, who had recently become a Christian and a pastor and wasn’t that far removed from those ‘others’. 

I visited the early service, and it was a very interesting, well-done contemporary approach to worship.  But what I noticed, was when I looked around, that most of the people there were white-haired, like I am today.  I went up to one lady and I asked, “Why do you come to this service?  Do you like the music?”  The music is not bad, but I didn’t come for the music.  I came because of the young people, who make me feel welcome and young.  It was if she was saying:  They make me their grandma. They come for advice. It’s here that I realize that God is not finished with me yet.

Isn’t that what ‘sharing’ the gospel, such a wonderful task.  It wasn’t us against them, but it was all together, helping one another, reaching out to others, and loving one another.  Isn’t that how God still gives us his promise and his hope?   Amen.