Sermon on Philippians 1:3-11
The theme of this Sunday of Advent is peace.
But as with every Sunday in Advent, the underlying theme is preparing for the coming of the Lord. To explain this, I have a wonderful parable from Captain John Melvin Ward.
I asked him last Sunday about riding along on a short tugboat run, maybe one of his three-day trips. He said I was welcome, but that I might find it boring. Then he stopped and corrected himself: “Ninety-percent of the time, it’s boring. But the other ten percent? CHAOS!”
The day-to-day duties of the captain and crew during the ninety-percent of the time things are boring, are probably pretty easy to master. Captain Ward could correct me on that, I suppose.
But all the training and the licensing and the hours of experience, the passing of tests, and all of the stuff people have to do to work on a tugboat is for that ten percent of the time when things are chaos.
When John the Baptist was born, Luke tells us that his father broke into song, or at least poetry. You can look it up, the passage is in the bulletin. It ends with this wonderful line:
“Because of the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to shine upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
The way of peace.
The New Testament, every single document in it, was written during a long slow trajectory toward the Jewish War, through the War, through its terrible end, Jerusalem leveled, the temple destroyed, over a million civilians slaughtered, a hundred thousand enslaved, the rest scattered throughout the empire, and on through some thirty years after its end.
It was a backdrop that the audiences of those documents knew, and so there was no need to make much reference to it in their writings.
A storyteller today might mention a cell phone. He wouldn’t bother defining what a cell phone was, because he knows his intended audience already knows what it is. He’s not thinking about someone reading it two thousand years later, by which time some other technology has replaced phones altogether. They’d have to research the term in some history resource.
So it is with the Jewish War. Even during Jesus’ lifetime, many Jews were spoiling to rebel. Rebel banditry was rampant. Pro-Roman Jews informed on anti-Roman Jews. Sometimes you’d have to walk through a forest of crosses as you went up the hill to Jerusalem, on which hung a band of would-be revolutionaries.
Jesus came as a messenger of peace from God, as Saint Peter referred to it. The realm of God had come close to Israel, to save it, in the person of the Son of Man, the one chosen by God to lead Israel to shalom, to peace. On the cross, he would reveal to Israel, and through them to us, God’s suffering love for us, who reject him, to inspire us to repent and embrace God’s way of peace.
Jesus taught his disciples to walk in this way of peace, to love each other and all of humankind, friend or foe, oppressed or oppressor. Jesus definitely took the side of the poor, but he also loved the rich ruler who turned away from discipleship, choosing his possessions over the kingdom of God.
Early Christians called it “the way”. A way to be a nation that had no need of land or palace or temple. The people themselves would be land and palace and temple, God dwelling in them, invulnerable, eternal. Their ministry was to be a blessing to all as a sign of the coming victory of God’s love.
Jesus died a revolutionary leader, but his was a revolution of peace, a refusal to give ultimate allegiance to any human or human made thing, people and things that were mortal and messy, and often violent, but only to God, whose will was, and is, peace.
And he did this in the midst of a rising call to violence among his people, the irresistible allure of taking advantage of the collapse of Roman power to take back their nation, and indeed even somehow to become the new Rome, all nations streaming to its light. So it would be inevitable that Christians would be implicated by Rome in revolutionary sentiments and would suffer persecution, both from fellow pro-Roman Jews, but also from the Romans.
They would be arrested and faced with an ultimatum: Renounce Christ and worship Caesar, or die.
That’s the ten percent chaos, right there.
All of Paul’s teaching was informed by the rising tide of the Jewish War, just as Jesus’ teaching was. Both quite reasonably expected that their proclamation of Jesus as Lord, Prince of Peace, who sits at the right hand of God over all, would get them in trouble with the paranoid and violent Romans and their fellow Jews who feared Caesar more than they feared God.
So Christian teaching was largely preparation for martyrdom, not the horrid kind that terrorists claim, but a witness to faith in heaven’s victory, the final glory of God’s peace. They studied and prayed and worshiped and share the Lord’s Supper, Luke tells us, frequently, all to ready themselves for the possibility of receiving the greatest honor a Christian could be given, to die with Christ, to die as he did, for his sake and for the sake of the kingdom of God, for the sake of peace.
Ninety-percent boredom, going to church, week after week, singing old songs with flowery words, chipping away at the scripture, praying, eating and drinking, serving, loving one another and as many of our neighbors as we can.
Sound familiar?
Paul mentions twice being found blameless on “the day of Jesus Christ” or “the day of Christ”. Last week in Thessalonians, he described it as the day “the Son of Man comes on the clouds of glory with all his saints.”
There’s only one instance I know of anyone in scripture seeing the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory, and that who Stephen, the deacon who preached a sermon confronting his fellow Jews with their complicity in the death of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus the Messiah, a sermon met with a stoning. As he died, he cried out, “I see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory!”
The training of early Christians was for martyrdom. It’s practice for the time of chaos, however it comes to you, however it maybe has already come, perhaps more than once. It may have come into your personal life. It may have shaken the world, and you along with it. It may yet do both again.
Because it’s in the dark times, the ten percent of the time that things fall apart, that all that training kicks in, when all that work finally makes sense, when you see, as Stephen did, “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory.” When all that you have believed, all that you have done, all that you have already given, becomes your treasure from heaven, from which you can make a withdrawal, summoning God’s strength and power and clarity and wisdom and righteousness and above all love, just when it is most needed by those around you, to say or do whatever it was that God made you to do for him, to pick up that mountain and throw it into the sea, to cross the waters of chaos without even needing a boat, to walk through the valley of death on the way of peace.
Martydom simply means witness. And the power of a witness is in the heart of a faithful disciple, who does the work during the ninety-percent of the time things are boring, so that they can walk in the way of peace through the ten percent that isn’t.
Get ready. Christ is coming for you, on the clouds of glory.
Amen.
