Announcements:
So this past Wednesday night, around 9 when everyone had left except for Garret and Sue and I, we sat back, looked at these pieces of flip chart, took a deep breath, smiled, and said, “ok… so what next?”
One thing was clear immediately – Pastor Sue looked at them and said “I’m seeing a liturgy coming out of these themes, I’d like to write that for Sunday.” We smiled again, agreed that we could and should shape our corporate worship service for Sunday morning out of our experiment on Wednesday night, and as we worked on that the remainder of the week we saw a need to make a few adjustments. We have just finished a time of worship together which concentrates on God, because that is where it must all start, continue, and finish. Sue chose songs that call us to remember and celebrate who God is and all God has done for us. We responded with an offering, and now I’m going to lead us in announcements and prayer and sermon-type reflection on Scripture all together as one block here, because they all tie together, but we won’t be done then. As I finish, Sue is going to continue with the liturgy and the imagery that comes out of the last verse in our Scripture passage which also came through very clearly and strongly Wednesday evening as God spoke. We figure by then it will be about 10:45, when our service is scheduled to end, but we knew from God that we weren’t going to done – so we are going to break for coffee, and I hope you will return at 11:15 and we’ll do the next step together here in the sanctuary which is both the completing of what God called us to do in worship and the beginning of our “adult ed” time, the themes of which were so perfectly aligned that, had we done it intentionally, would be absolutely brilliant – but since it was God who lined them up we’ll just respond in humble gratitude and hopefully increased attentiveness to what He is saying.
So there is the “road-map” for the rest of our morning.
“Announcements” are really a time of sharing the things going on in our community, the details and specifics of where we sense God leading and calling. We have lots of those: worship team training dates are in the bulletin, youth ministry has started up and those details are in the bulletin, several Bible study groups are starting and/or re-starting, and a bunch of seminars and retreats and conferences that we think might be worthwhile are coming up. Note also our Congregational Life Meeting on Oct 13th, which is a Wednesday night, supper at 5:30 and meeting in the sanctuary here at 7pm. Have I missed any?
Now what about this Wednesday night thing? Well we launched this past week. We were greeted at the door by the aroma of roasting chicken, garlic and rosemary, and followed our noses to the lower hall. Everyone pitched in – grabbing some chairs, cooking broccoli (perfectly, thanks Norma!), washing pots (thanks Cathie!), and greeting each other. We ate, visited, and for the rest of the week I discovered a side-benefit of a mid-week meal: leftovers for lunch!! and then Garret and Randy led us in preparing to go out and pray through our community, asking God what He sees, what God is doing, and what He might be calling us to. We fanned out into the neighbourhood for a little more than an hour, prayerfully looking and listening, and then returned to share and begin to prayerfully discern what we think God might be saying. One of our group walked into Tim Hortons and announced to everyone, “Ok, I’m here on a prayer walk, how can I pray for you?” (She knew most everyone there, but it remains a perfect example of our desire to get out our doors and engage our world as representatives of Jesus). The stories were powerful, tears flowed, and some pieces started to come together. We are going to talk about some of those more in a moment… God was smack in the middle of it, leading, calling, guiding, breaking our hearts and encouraging us.
So what’s up this week? This coming Wednesday we will eat together at 5:30 (I’m thinking of ham with pineapple/ginger sauce), and get out of our doors. We need to continue the process of discernment and of listening which we began last week, but now we can focus it a little more on a couple of locations. Several of our group felt God’s leading around the Whitehall Square area, both in that massive rental community and the residential community to the north (Jasper Park, Sherwood), so we are going to narrow our prayer focus to that section and try to listen for God’s leading, start to discover the needs that might be there, and start to imagine what ministries God might be leading us towards. The opportunities will be a little more focused – you will be free to prayer walk again, to conduct brief interviews with people who might be around, to again just open our eyes and look around, and to dream together about ministries God might be desiring. We will all go together, there is a beautiful park for kids at Lynwood community center, we’ll have a picnic-style dessert there, and we’ll see what God has to say…
{and maybe this is part of what God wants to say… roll video from Gail… possibly…}
Prayer:
At the very heart of my convictions about prayer is that it is NOT a one-way diatribe of things we want God to do for us or for people we care about. Yes, petition is a part of prayer, and an important one, but often in the shallowness of my life (and perhaps yours as well) petition becomes the only part. I don’t like what that says about the type of relationship I imagine having with the God who loves me, and so I try not to make my prayer life just a list of requests, though of course those are there. They are even there in the passage of Scripture we are studying at the moment, in Philippians 1, where Paul prays for these dearly loved friends (put prayer on screen). I want us to pray this same prayer together, in the context of our life and community and the things we need to share.
To begin that time of sharing and prayer, I’d like to first ask any of you who joined us for the prayer walk this past week to share what you felt God was saying then and maybe in the days since then, so that we can continue to pray together, and then I’ll open it up to the other areas of life for which we need to pray.
Sermon “Proper”… Introduction:
Imagine with me how it might feel for us, if early in our shared history as a church we had a man of incredible spiritual power, insight, and love, who had led us and challenged us and who had been used by God in powerful ways in our lives and for whom we had deep love and connection, whom we knew God was calling to the next place and so we parted with tears of joy in our loss but the greater gain for the Kingdom of God, with whom we continued to stay connected and supportive and informed, and who continued to speak into our community from a distance as messages were sent and received. Can you imagine that?
Now imagine that this aging saint went to a hostile place, bringing the message of Jesus, and was met with resistance, arrest, torture, and was thrown in jail. If I dare attempt to modernize the story and make it more real, imagine this was what happened to Brian Whittle near the end of his year in Bolivia – imagine some prison official had taken offence when one of the inmates in the San Sebastian men’s prison was baptized in the middle of the prison and professed Jesus as his Lord and Saviour, and this prison official was offended and so deviously decided to strike a blow against these “Christians” by framing the Canadian among them and incarcerating him. Imagine how we might feel… I’d be on a plane to Cochabamba as fast as possible, emptying my bank account (and maybe Brian’s bank account also) to bribe whomever I had to, to see him set free. Now obviously that didn’t happen, and likely wouldn’t, though it does every day to hundreds of Christian leaders in other parts of our world today. But if you can imagine how that might feel, you might be getting close to being able to identify with the church in the city of Philippi, and you might be getting close to being able to hear the opening words of this letter from Paul who is in prison to his dearly loved friends.
Philippians 1:1-11
1 This letter is from Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus. I am writing to all of God’s holy people in Philippi who belong to Christ Jesus, including the elders and deacons. 2 May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace.
3 Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God. 4 Whenever I pray, I make my requests for all of you with joy, 5 for you have been my partners in spreading the Good News about Christ from the time you first heard it until now. 6 And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.
7 So it is right that I should feel as I do about all of you, for you have a special place in my heart. You share with me the special favor of God, both in my imprisonment and in defending and confirming the truth of the Good News. 8 God knows how much I love you and long for you with the tender compassion of Christ Jesus.
9 I pray that your love will overflow more and more, and that you will keep on growing in knowledge and understanding. 10 For I want you to understand what really matters, so that you may live pure and blameless lives until the day of Christ’s return. 11 May you always be filled with the fruit of your salvation—the righteous character produced in your life by Jesus Christ—for this will bring much glory and praise to God.
Book Intro:
This fall we are going to study the book of Philippians together in our sermon time, simply working through it section by section, and allowing God to shape us through His word. We know quite a bit of background from the book of Acts chapter 16, which describe the familiar stories of Lydia who became a Christian after hearing Paul, of a slave girl who was demon possessed and would tell future events for money for her owners and whom Paul freed from the demon and thus got in trouble with the owners who could no longer make money off of her, of Paul then being thrown in jail from all that commotion only to have a massive earthquake strike the jail that night while Paul and Silas were singing hymns, opening the gates, and leading the jailer about to fall on his sword because he’d lost his prisoners until Paul stops him by saying “we’re all still here… it’s ok buddy…”, which then caused this Philippian jailer to fall to his knees and say “what must I do to be saved?”, he receives Jesus and is baptized that night, and in the morning Paul and Silas end up with an apology from the city officials accompanied by some begging for them to leave the city.
Some years later, when Paul is in prison in Rome, he sends this letter which is essentially a “thank you” letter because the Philippians have just sent a generous financial gift to Paul in prison so that his physical needs can be met. But as we see, the letter is much more than just a little thank-you note.
Love Overflowing:
Last Sunday I talked about verses 3-8, and while there is much more there our time doesn’t allow a detailed look. One brief word about the header of the letter: notice how Paul describes himself and Timothy: “slaves of Christ Jesus”. Not “Apostles”, not any other statement of honored position, but rather “slaves”. Why? – this is what it means for Paul to claim that Jesus is Lord, that he thus sees Himself as a slave to Jesus. Is that how you see yourself – is that what it means for you to claim Jesus as Lord in your life? It is quite contrary to our individualistic ideas of ourselves, of our desire to be our own boss, make our own decisions, decide for ourselves what we want and what we think is right and what we feel like doing. For Paul, Jesus is Lord and thus he is a “slave of Christ Jesus.” Is that true for you?
Let’s jump down to vs. 9-11. “9 I pray that your love will overflow more and more, and that you will keep on growing in knowledge and understanding. 10 For I want you to understand what really matters, so that you may live pure and blameless lives until the day of Christ’s return. 11 May you always be filled with the fruit of your salvation—the righteous character produced in your life by Jesus Christ—for this will bring much glory and praise to God.”
Again let us read these verses in context. Paul in chains, praying that his friends “love would overflow more and more”. As if “love overflowing” wasn’t enough, Paul adds the “more and more”. The picture is not just of a little bit spilling over the top, it is a picture of abundance, splattering, gushing, spilling out from them. The next phrase tells us how. Let me borrow the words of one commentator:
“When Paul tells Christians that he is praying that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, he is pointing to the way for love to increase… in this letter to the Philippians, Paul prays that love will be multiplied in knowledge and depth of insight… When the domain of knowledge is devoid of love, knowledge has no value. But when love abounds in the domain of knowledge, knowledge then serves the goals of love and love multiplies… Love is primarily a motive, a desire to give of one’s self to serve the needs of others. But love needs to know how to serve others. Love needs to be instructed by knowledge in order to fulfill its desire to serve. Only a doctor who knows how to make a diagnosis and perform the operation can serve the patient in need of lifesaving surgery… Love needs to see clearly and speak truthfully. Love knows how to see and speak… Paul’s prayer combines knowledge with depth of insight… Without insight, love does not know how to express itself with actions and words that are appropriate to each situation of life. Often love asks the question: I desire to love these people with such great needs, but what should I say and do to meet their needs? Only by insight does love have the direction to act wisely in ways that give healing, joy, and life to those who are loved.” (Hansen, G. Walter. The Letter to the Philippians, Pillar New Testament Commentary Series, p. 58-59, 2009, emphasis original.)
And that, my friends, is exactly why we need all of us to join in our journey of trying to discern how to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” It is really easy to say “Love First”, it is easy to believe it in our heads, but when we start trying to figure out how to live that out in our world as the people of God, it gets complicated, and it needs us to be experiencing the answer to Paul’s prayer not only that our love would overflow, but that it would do so with “knowledge and understanding”. And that is why we are all necessary – we each have different spiritual gifts, different passions, different ways that God speaks to us, and on our own none of us can know the extent of God’s call to us to serve Him by loving our world. It is only when we gather together, united in one purpose of “partner(ing) in spreading the Good News about Christ” (vs. 5), using our various gifts and skills and resources, that we can actually, tangibly, and wisely love.
What Really Matters: (vs. 10)
Paul’s prayer next goes to the place of “understanding what really matters”. Another translation says, “so that you may be able to discern what is best”. This is why our love needs to grow and overflow in knowledge and insight, so that we can find not just the things that are good but the things that are best. Throughout my whole process of thinking about Wednesday nights, I’ve had hundreds of ideas of things we might do together, the rub is finding out “what is best”. That is the next steps in our process, one to which I look forward. This prayer of Paul’s does not only apply to our corporate efforts on Wednesday nights, but in all of our efforts to love others around us. We need the help of God to discover what is best, what really matters, and then we must act.
Filled with Fruit: (vs. 11)
Our section for today ends with an image that is familiar throughout Scripture, that of “bearing fruit”: “May you always be filled with the fruit of your salvation—the righteous character produced in your life by Jesus Christ—for this will bring much glory and praise to God.” The image of “bearing fruit” is seen throughout Scripture, we are going to meditate on that a little bit together as we close. But notice finally (before I let Sue take over again and talk about one of the things we felt God was saying very clearly to us last Wednesday night which is directly related to this image), where this righteousness comes from – note the source: it is “produced in your life by Jesus Christ”. We come back to it again – it is all about Jesus. Our job is to obey, to create space, to choose to use our time and energy and resources to “seek first the kingdom of God”, and then we let Jesus produce fruit – both in us, and also through us.
Conclusion:
{We are going to spend some time together allowing Pastor Sue and the liturgy to lead us in this imagery of fruitfulness, including a story from Wednesday night, then we are going to break for coffee and I invite you back to explore the third area we believe God was leading us to spend time in today, which is centered around the question, “what might we do about it”?}
