Rejoice in the Lord

In the past three sermons we’ve surveyed the first two chapters of Philippians to review what we’d discussed last summer and fall.  Now we’ve arrived back to chapter 3.  Although I preached one sermon from chapter three back in October, I’d like to start over.  Let’s read: 

3 Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you.

We said before that with this word “finally,” Paul isn’t wrapping up the letter – he’s only halfway through – but he’s bringing what he’s said before to a point.  What is that point that he’s been driving toward, what is the summary application of chapters 1-2?  Rejoice in the Lord.  Here, the Lord is Jesus Christ.  

Since preaching through Philippians with you, I’ve been convicted about how little I host Jesus Christ.  How un-Christian my existence is.  There’s little of Jesus Christ in my speech.  A little more in my thoughts, but still not enough.  I’m embarrassed that even some of my preaching has little of Jesus Christ in it.  God, yes.  Scriptures, yes.  But not enough of the Lord.  

It’s easy to fall into a Christianity that isn’t quite Christianity.  It can be niceness.  Or positivity.  Or the assembling of pretty words.  Or “Therapeutic Deism,” as someone named it.  In this quasi-Christianity, everything is about relationships; the terms trauma, “PTSD” are thrown around a lot.  Toxic this, toxic that.  Jesus sprinkled in.  Baptized psychology.  

Or, related, a baptized self-help.  Also, Christianity can become almost sheer activism: we need to do this, meet now, get the Word out, always scrambling around….but little meeting Jesus.  Or on the other hand, Christianity can become overly literary or aesthetic or conceptual – think about how Jordan Peterson speaks of the Bible.  

Or, Christianity can become completely entangled, so that it can’t become disentangled from, politics.  

Christianity can be thought of only as big and dramatic and overwrought – majoring on the significant and noticeable: inspiring music, always moving toward bigness, especially big numbers of people, constantly referring to contexts just above where people actually live, always moving toward emotional peaks.    

Anyhow, there are several ways to keep grasping onto almost-Christianities or Christian jargon – you got something like the shell of Christianity, but Jesus Christ… not so much.  There’s a chilling scene in Ezekiel where the shekinah glory of God leaves the temple…for good…and yet afterwards the priests and sacrifices still continue as always.  The glory is gone but the show continues.  This happens when our Christianity moves toward Christless Christianity.      

I haven’t watched The Chosen, but I’m thankful for it, because in bringing scenes from the gospels to the screen we’re reminded of something important…the Lord.  (I guess that’s Someone, not something.)

When I read Paul, I see a person who is filled with Christ – there’s a proper word.  The Lord never leaves his thoughts for long.  Again, I direct you to this little prepositional phrase that litters his letters: in Christ.  Never a filler, he always means something specific by it.  

And then of course some sentences of his: “For me to live is Christ.”  “I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me…”. “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him…”

It is this Christ Jesus the Lord in whom we are to rejoice.  Rejoice in the Lord – that big thing is the undercurrent Paul’s been communicating throughout this letter.  When we reach this part of the letter our impression should be: we should really rejoice in the Lord

Joy is to be the current in which the Church moves through her days.  A Church of rejoicing.  As the Church gathers together, while the Church disperses into the world, as the Church dwells at home, in her speech and various communications, especially in her thinking, all the way down to her heart, joy is the theme.  

Toward the end of his great book, “Orthodoxy,” Chesterton wrote, “Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.”  He meant that while the pagan world had a superficial joy that would grab people from afar, joy really does lay at the heart of Christianity even if it covered by hardship.  

Just think of a couple of central practices of our religion: meals and singing, both presentations of joy.  Where else do people come together weekly and sing except for the church?  Yes, Christians are readers, thinkers…but also we sing!  Last night I was upstairs and out the front window I saw the Amazon delivery guy walking up our driveway – Tonia had ordered paint.  I was wondering what he was thinking as he approached the door because Paul was at the piano singing hymns at the top of his voice.  

We’re singing, but we’re not singing Sara McLachlan, that is mainly melancholy songs about how sad things are, how sad we are.  The songs are filled mostly (more on that next week) with cheer.  

Alongside singing, another central feature of our religion is a meal.  When Jesus still walked on the earth during those 40 days after he rose from the dead, the gospel highlights meals together with the disciples.  We don’t regularly celebrate the Lord’s Fast, but the Lord’s Supper.  Speaking of fasts, the early Church had a rule that there was to be no fasting on Sundays and no kneeling in confession on Sundays.  Sunday marks the Resurrection Day, it’s the great eighth day of the world, the first day of a new creation…it stands for where everything is going.  So, stand up and make merry!  

What are the different streams that together form this current of joy?  I’d say a big one is gratitude.  God shows His love to us in that when we were sinners Christ died for us.  

I’ve mentioned this scene before and I’m not sure why it made such an impression:  My first year of seminary was hard: I was working full time at night and then going to class during the day.  I had one of those old Mac computers – the box – and a dot matrix printer.  Well, my brother who lived in town invited me over for dinner, and after dinner he gave me a package from my parents.  I opened it up – a band new Dell Inspiron computer, a laptop.  Slog, slog, slog – and then an unexpected help that was going to make life so much better.  No way!  

The gospel hits like that – this mercy dropped on us.  Mercy underwritten by a deep justice, backed by eternal love, brimming over with community and purpose and hope.  

The poet George Herbert captures this generosity of God’s that is so disarming, so gracious:

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back

                              Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

                             From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

                             If I lacked any thing.

[Like a host going up to the awkward visitor]. We spend a lot of times “drawing back,” – you mustn’t love me, look what I’ve done.  Look what I’ve just done.  You don’t know my thoughts!  We feel coarse, dirty.  Yet through our live God keeps playing the gracious Host, drawing near to us with the Gospel and all the assurance it contains: what shall separate us from the love of God?  

But the gratitude isn’t just for truths about God but for how everything gets fleshed out in love.  We feel undeserving, and yet we’re constantly met by meals and afternoon light and mother love and a dog’s affection and libraries and paved streets and quiet nights and law & order and kindness of friend and stranger – the grace of God falls everywhere on the evil and the just.  We sense that if it has come to us through so much sin it must have been at some cost.  At the cost of our Lord’s lifeblood, who is the Savior of all, especially of those who believe.  (1 Timothy 4:10).  Thank God for it!  

So our rejoicing contains gratitude as one of its chief ingredients, but also a sense of victory.  The decisive blow against evil has been struck, and we live in an era described as the old is passing away and the new (and improved) is coming in.  There’s a lot of faith required for this perspective but that doesn’t mean there’s no evidence.  Behold: throughout the globe today are gathered men and women and boys and girls who have a life that will not be extinguished, that is beyond condemnation, that is not fraying or drying out or running out of energy.  Christ is winning, has won!  

Through the victory, there’s hope in this rejoicing.  Believers sometimes are given to see hard things, to pass through searing experiences.  But here’s the thing: the darkest or most upside-down scenes we know are shaping us or shaping the future for good.  There’s that famous quote: the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.  Yes, and more specifically, the arc of history bends toward Jesus Christ.  Everything in heaven and earth is being arranged under Him.  How exactly this will occur isn’t clear to us.  You’ve seen those street artists whose drawings begin so randomly and you’re thinking where is this going…and then at some point everything comes together.  

Everything is being drawn into a future headed by the Lord.  

But you say, it sure doesn’t look like it!  I see the wicked flourishing today – have you seen the website traffic numbers for porn? Can’t you see the attention spans of people shrinking?  Look at how dumb people are becoming!  Check out the waste!  This man is a bully in his home!  Look at the number of kids growing up in unstable families?  The LGBTQ machine is kicking butts and taking names.  There are so many fake Christians…

“I have seen a wicked, ruthless man/ spreading himself like a green laurel tree.  [so in moments or periods it looks like the wicked are healthy and developing.]  But he passed away, and behold, he was no more/ though I sought him, he could not be found.  Mark [the Lord Jesus Christ]/ for there is a future for that Man of peace./ But transgressors shall be altogether destroyed/ the future of the wicked shall be cut off.”  (Psalm 37). The future is with Jesus Christ and those connected to Him.  That’s how it ends.  

Man, I could keep going with ingredients to joy: Gratitude, sense of victory, hope.  A growing confidence from all that.  

And wonder.  Wonder at the vastness of God.  

I’ve told you of this before but I don’t get tired of it.  Job.  We recall the saga of Job, a father and husband and property owner who walked blamelessly before God.  But after a conversation unbeknownst to him, almost everything is taken away from him.  His children are killed, his property swiped, his health.  

The bulk of the book of Job consists of him wondering why God would allow this, and his friends attempting to explain God to him.  They’re working all the usual angles – chiefly that Job’s a bad guy who deserves the pain he’s experiencing.  And Job says, No.  This is not right.  God needs to answer for this.  In fact, I want a court date with me as the plaintiff and God as the defendant.  The judge will be…Oh shoot, who’s going to judge God other than…God!  See, the system’s rigged.  This shouldn’t be happening.  God didn’t get this one right…

It’s only at the end of the book that God shows up again.  As He enters the scene He says something like, what’s with all these words being tossed around?  Words without knowledge…  Darkened counsel.  You’ve been saying a lot about Me, now it’s time for you to listen.   And He begins a series of questions.  

The one I keep coming back to is in Job 39.  “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?  Do you observe the calving of the does?  Can you number the months that they fulfill, and do you know the time when they give birth, when they crouch, bring forth their offspring and are delivered of their young?  Their young ones become strong: they grow up in the open; they go out and do not return to them…”

There’s Job with open sores on his body, using pottery shards to scrape off the ooze, recently having lost his children and property.  And God says, Job, how long are mountain goats pregnant? 

I remember being in the southwestern corner of Colorado, where are three 14,000’ mountains that can only be accessed by train.  The train stops in the middle of nowhere and you get out and hike seven miles into a base came.  Then with a ten-mile loop you can bag all three of those peaks.  I remember setting up camp and noticing these specks of white against the hills: mountain goats.  You could walk close to them and they wouldn’t bolt, not sure why.  Anyway, in my almost 50 years the only time I’ve been around mountain goats.  They haven’t played a significant role in my life.  

And I’m sure, not in Job’s.  Yet, ‘Job, how long are mountain goats pregnant?”  Do you know?  Do you know what it is for their kids to grow in the does over those months?  Job, tell me about the does laying down behind a bush, panting, panting, panting, and then out from her plops a kid, then another, then another.  

Job!  No, you can’t tell me about this, because you’re not there.  But I am, God says.  I’m there.  And when the hawk soars in the sky.  And when his young suck up the blood of the prey he brings….

Job needed to sense something: God is not sequestered to some religious corner.  He doesn’t operate only in so-called “spiritual” environments.  He’s the Creator of heaven and earth and involved everywhere.   

As you grow up in Jesus Christ, wonder grows and becomes part of your rejoicing.  Because what starts to dawn on you is how big this God is.  How infinite his scope and range are. How His victory sweeps through everything.  

After praying for his success and asking you for the same, recently my son Kai was recycled in his program in the Army, so he had to start something over because he failed a test.  Then on his way back to Fort Liberty from visiting a friend in DC this past week his car broke down in the middle of nowhere at night.  He slept in his car overnight. Then got it towed as soon as the shop opened in the morning, then paid $120 to take an Uber back to the base, then got shouted at by his Cadre,  then learned there’s a hole in the engine so the car is kaput, then got sick. 

And the message of Job is: it’s all useful to God.  All the pain.  But not just the pain, the pleasure too.  But not just those extremes but everything in between.  

Keep walking with God, and we’ll start to see it, first a little dimly.  Someday you’ll see it clearly: the location of your house, your regular trek to the grocery, your bouts of back pain, your wrestling with covetousness and gluttony, your walks with the dog, your meals around the dining room table, your monthly income, your town’s leadership, your assembling the crib, your schoolwork, your waking up in the middle of the night, your getting up out of the chair, your thoughts, even the faint ones, your heart palpitations, your bronchial infections, your sins, committed and forgiven, your allergies, your shooting the breeze with your neighbor, your temptations…

 – all things small and large and tiny and humdrum and tragic will work together to  form the character of Jesus Christ into us.  Nothing will be wasted by God in forming a Jesus shaped people being brought into the future that is dominated by Jesus our Lord.    

“Son, he said, ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory….” – C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce

And so shot through everything is this great reason for joy.  We have grounds for joy, but will this Church rejoice in the Lord?  Notice it’s not just a suggestion but a command.  We’ll pick it up there next week.