Here’s my sermon from yesterday shared with three congregations in two services…
Let me begin this sermon with a story. When was the last time you desperately needed to get a message to someone or get help? Like now! On Friday afternoonI went to visit Joan. After I’d done, I asked to be let out. The carers card wouldn’t open the door. The door was jammed. We suggested she ring the reception. Her phone had died. She then decided the best way to get the urgency of the need for someone’s attention was to bang hard on the door until someone heard it. Eventually a man in a North Yorkshire council shirt unjammed the door and we were out.
Where was the last letter or e mail or text sent to you written I wonder? The last letter I got was from the hospital rearranging an appointment from November to January due to “unforeseen circumstances.” The last text was from our Circuit steward wanting to talk about the chapel in Finghall.
The last e mail received was the church notices for Allhallowgate, and the last whats app was checking whether we’ve fixed September staff meeting for the 1stor the 8th September because none of us could remember. The modern way of messaging wants an instant response from us. It’s fast and unrelenting.
When you went away on holiday for a couple of weeks, you used to find so much post on the mat you couldn’t open the front door, now it’s 300 plus e mails. And social media wants to grab our attention. Doom scrolling it’s called. My friend reposted a film of the Prime Minister and his Chancellor in a pub ranking pub snacks, that wasted twenty minutes of my life yesterday morning!
I wonder where messages sent to us were written and whether the writer knew our context and our life issues?
Some of us have been studying Philippians through the summer. Paul is writing to the Philippian church to give encouragement from prison which he has been thrown into for being a rebel. I wonder what you would like your last words to be? What do you want to say upon your deathbed? Here are some funny famous last words from people in the past:
Apparently Oscar Wilde said: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do!”And Humphrey Bogart said: “I knew I should never have switched from Whiskey to Martini!” But my personal favourite is Spike Milligan’s epitaph: “I told you I was ill!” That’s on his tombstone in the churchyard in Winchelsea in Sussex in Gaelic.
More seriously, if you thought you were about to die, who would you write to or call, and what would you say to them? I guess you would contact your loved ones, and use words that expressed your love for them, and offered them guidance and encouragement for the rest of their earthly lives.
The apostle Paul was in a similar situation when he wrote his letter to the Philippians. A letter we have been looking at in our services this month. Paul was under house arrest in Rome, in chains and under armed guard. He was shortly to be put on trial for his faith, and Paul knew the death penalty was a real possibility. So, unsurprisingly, Paul chose to write to his loved ones. Not to an individual or to his biological family, but to the Christians in Philippi, a church that Paul himself had founded. He calls the Philippians his “brothers & sisters”, and his “dear friends”. Paul tells them that he “loves them and longs for them”. They are his “joy” and his “crown”, or as we might put it today, they are his ‘pride and joy’. So as we look at chapter 4 of Philippians today, we are reading Paul’s last words to his loved ones. Words he most wanted them to hear. Words they should treasure, should they never see him again.
So what was Paul’s parting shot to the Philippians? What were the last words he wanted to leave them with? Rejoice in the Lord always. Be joyful in the Lord!
Let’s rejoice because our sins are forgiven. Our guilt was taken away at the Cross and we are members of God’s forgiven people.
We can also be joyful because God is at work in our lives today. Through every trial and temptation we face, God is with us by his Spirit, making us ever more like his Son. And we can even rejoice in the face of death. Christ’s resurrection means that death is not the end for us or a doorway to divine judgment. Rather, death is merely the threshold to everlasting life. Everlasting life in a world without disease and decay. A world where Jesus is undisputed king.
To rejoice in the Lord is not to put our head in the sand or deny the harsh realities of life. It is to know that whatever happens we are loved, we are saved and we have a glorious future ahead. A future that is ‘over’ and ‘above’ our present circumstances, held secure in Heaven for us.
Maybe the task before each of us is that of ‘keeping the rumour of God alive’ In both our passages, the power of words is used to keep alive the story of faith, to keep telling the tales of grace, to keep spinning narratives of hope into being.
What gives us joy, what causes us to rejoice. Joy is not the same as being happy, as that can be transient. Joy is something deep within, something lasting. Paul knows the answer, it is finding our joy in Christ within. That unshakable knowledge that we are not alone. Paul had found the answer to worry by handing all his concerns over to God. The trick is to leave it there, the thing we do so often is to pick it up again and continue to worry about it. If we can manage to rejoice and not worry then Paul promises the peace of God to guard our hearts. If we are honest, joy and peace are often elusive. There are always things that will disturb our peace.
But Paul urges us to “Rejoice.”
The theologian Karl Barth once called joy a “continually defiant ‘Nevertheless’. I would suggest that this is the kind of joy which Paul is talking about because it isn’t based on circumstances. He was in a dire situation and he was writing to a church which was experiencing persecution. This joy and peace can’t be bought it can but it can be our reality. It requires a conscious effort on our part to remember who we are. In the face of all our problems and worries – ‘Nevertheless’ we are God’s children, loved by God, bought with a price by Jesus on the cross. Our hope is not just for the here and now, but for eternity. We have the promise of God that he is always with us, even in our darkest hours. As David wrote in the 23rd Psalm ‘even when we pass through the valley of the shadow of death’ God is with us, for to have any shadow there must be some sun, it is never truly dark if we have God with us.
Paul was at peace. He had no idea what he would be facing tomorrow, but he knew he wouldn’t face it alone. We don’t get peace by the bucket full or a lifetime supply. We get enough for the situation we are in. We need to be in constant touch with Christ within to know the joy and receive his peace.
Stanley Hauerwas has spent years irritating Christians by suggesting that the church’s task is not first to make the world run smoothly or reclaim cultural dominance, but simply to become the kind of community that remembers how to tell the truth about God in a forgetful age. I suspect there is something in that.
Things buried sometimes rise again in forms nobody expected.
And after all, Christianity began not with influence, strength, or cultural dominance, but with a crucified man outside the city walls. Abandoned by many. Mocked by empire. Followed by frightened disciples who barely understood what was happening. And yet Christians dare to believe that somehow, in that broken body, God was reconciling the world to himself. Maybe we need to be a place where we find: A people gathered around Jesus. Prayer offered in fragile places. Bread broken. Mercy practised. The lonely remembered. The dead buried. The gospel whispered stubbornly in a forgetful world.
Have we a joyful message to share with Boroughbridge and Bishop Monkton today? Are we sharing the Gospel with joy? Do we know there is one God and besides him there is no other? Is our message urgent and attractive? After a worship service, a mother with a fidgety seven-year-old boy told me how she finally got her son to sit still and be quiet. About halfway through the sermon, she leaned over and whispered, ‘If you don’t be quiet, the minister is going to lose his place and he will have to start his sermon all over again!’ It worked.” Let’s not have a message so boring people want it to end quickly!
In a prayer written when the Archbishop of Canterbury walked prior to her installation from London to Canterbury, by Student Chaplains at The Archbishop’s School, in Canterbury, they prayed that God might:“Strengthen us in faith, Grant us a heart like Christ’s, gentle, humble, and devoted to the truth, So that we may share the Gospel with joy.”
Friends, we have a gospel to proclaim. We also need to be attentive to what we are needing to hear. Let us share the Gospel with joy and have a message as urgent as hammering on a door to avoid being trapped in a care home for ever. Amen.
