Transcript
Well, I'm really honored to be able to be your preacher, our preacher, on this first Sunday of the new year. I love this church and love this chance to preach in this pulpit and to especially focus our eyes on a great prayer. I have a prayer for us. It's from St. Paul. And I just think it's just right for the time we're in right now. It's a time of pandemic. It's a time of challenge. And I
think Paul's prayer to a church he loved, one of the last books Paul wrote is his letter, a prison letter, to the Philippians. And in the first chapter is this prayer. And we're going to look at it together. But first, let's have a little prayer. Now, may the words of my mouth, the meditations of our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength, our Redeemer. Amen. Paul begins his prayer this way. I want you
to watch for a word because it's going to be very important in the prayer. I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you. Because of your sharing in the good news from the first day until now, and I'm confident that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. It's right for me
to think this way about all of you because you hold me in your hearts and for all of this that we share in God's grace. There's three words there that all come from the word joy. And joy is the sort of dominant word in the beginning of this prayer. Let me tell you about those three words because they all come from the word chara. Chara is the word joy. Joy means literally in Greek surprise, but it's
a positive surprise. In fact, if you were to call someone on the phone in Greece today, they would probably answer the phone by saying chara, joy. It is a wonderful surprise word, and it's a good word, but it becomes the root of some very other important words that appear in this prayer. The word grace that he immediately brings up comes from chara. It's by adding an S to chara. You get charas, which is grace. And then
if you put an eu in front of charas, then it becomes the Greek word eucharist, which means thanksgiving or thanks. He started the very first sentence in the prayer is, I'm thankful for you. And then comes joy, and then comes grace. And if you add an M at the end of charas, grace, you have charisma, which is the Greek word for gift. And that's another wonderful word. The gifts that God gives us all come because then
if you put the eu in front of that, you get eucharist, which means thanksgiving. So all these words come together in this prayer. And joy is the first one. I got a lot of help in understanding joy when I read C.S. Lewis's little book, Screwtape Letters, because he reflects on the meaning of joy in that little short book, In that book, he is, in a sense, wondering what a senior devil would say to a junior
devil. So you have to reverse a lot of things that are said. But he does a reflection on joy there. He must have loved the word joy because later when he wrote an autobiography on his life, he titled the whole autobiography of his life Surprise by Joy. It's a play on the word surprise, surprise by surprise. I was surprised by joy. What is joy? Well, in the Screwtape Letters, we meet the word. As a matter of
fact, Screwtape, the senior devil, is describing the sources of human laughter. And one of them, he says, is joy. And he says, joy, you'll see it. What the real cause of it is, we don't know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art, which the humans call music. Again, you have to reverse what Screwtape says to understand what Lewis is meaning. And something like it occurs in heaven. And then comes Screwtape's definition of
joy, a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. We can't understand it. But Lewis is there giving his definition of joy. Joy is a meaningful, so you have to reverse what the Screwtape says, a meaningful acceleration. He got that word right. It has energy. A meaningful acceleration in the rhythm of our relationship with God and each other. Because earlier on, he said, you see it among people when they meet each other
at a great festival and they're joyous with each other. So that's the word joy. And that's the word that gives a great insight for us to understand this prayer, because the prayer is sort of dominated by Paul with that word joy. He prays for a joyous acceleration, a meaningful depth of love and rhythm and love in our lives. And so that's what we're going to see as Paul puts his prayer together. First, the acceleration. Acceleration. And
let me read that to you, because now after having shared about this joy, he says, and this is my prayer for you. And now comes the heart of his prayer. My prayer for you is that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what is best. So that in the day of Christ, you may be pure and blameless, having produced a harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ
to the praise of God. All right, now listen to that opening part. This is my prayer that your love may overflow more and more. This is the acceleration of love that he is talking about. There is something about love that has an accelerating effect. And Paul wants the Philippians to know that. And so he uses the word for more and repeats it, mallon, mallon, more and more to a greater extent. It's the love of Jesus Christ
that outruns, outruns evil and hate and resentment. You see it in Romans five when Paul says, where sin increased and sin has its own accelerating power, sin can accumulate and build. We know that evil has its own energy. But where sin increased, the grace of God, the love of God increased faster, more. And that is very important teaching from St. Paul. The love of Jesus Christ has for us outruns hate. It outruns resentment. It has a
built in multiplying impact. By nature, it grows. It grows. In fact, one of my favorite sentences is, as we grow in age, may we grow in grace. We don't have any control over growing in age. We always grow in age. That's not up for grabs. But to grow in grace, that we get to play a part in. We get to experience that love and allow it to multiply in our lives. And so that's his first insight.
There is an acceleration, an energy in love. And he wants these Philippians to experience it. And next, he prays that they'll have clarity in the meaning of this love. And that's why Lewis is describing joy as a meaningful acceleration. It's a meaningful acceleration in the rhythm of our relationship with God and with each other. So we need to have clarity. We need to understand the meaning of this love, which is at work in our lives. And
therefore, he introduces the word knowledge. That you'll have knowledge. But he intensifies the word knowledge. Gnosko is the word for knowledge. And he makes it epiginosko, which means knowledge in every direction. So that you'll know and be able to gather information and have a depth and a discerning understanding of what's happening around you. And so he puts those words together. He wants you to have knowledge in every direction. There are no benefits to ignorance. The
one thing that is a sad moment in a person's life is when they become anti-intellectual in order to have their faith. In order to have faith, I have to park my mind at the door. Oh, no, you don't have to park your mind at the door. Knowledge is in your favor. Truth is always in our favor. What we know, what we learn is good. And it helps us to have meaningful love and meaningful acceleration of
love. Because there are no benefits to ignorance. You know, the saying, ignorance is bliss is a bad joke. It's not true. Clear thinking leads us to know truth from all sides. And that's why he uses the word epi gnosko to have knowledge in all sides. We need it in the midst of a pandemic. We need truth in order to make the right choices in the time that we're in when we're in a hard time. And again,
this knowledge, accelerating knowledge is needed and it needs to be thought through. And so that's the meaningful part of the prayer. And he also uses another word that is the word for test. We need to test our own love and test what's going on around us in the world so that we can play the part we're supposed to play. And that is to have kind of a joyous, accelerating love, but a love that is meaningful. And
then rhythm. Rhythm. I believe that that's what he means in the end of that prayer when he says, Notice that your knowledge in all directions with a full insight to help you determine what's best, to determine what's best, what works best. And that's sort of the rhythmic side. The word that he uses here is a word for roadway knowledge. It is the Greek word for common sense. You need common sense. You need to think clearly and
you need to think wisely. But it's got to make sense also to do the right thing on the road. You need to know how to listen and you need to know how to talk. In the midst of our life, and everyone is sort of mid-story in their life, we need to have a kind of wisdom that is enabling us to have in depth of knowledge, but is also enabling us to do what we're supposed to
do that is appropriate for that situation. It's sort of like you need to know patience as well as acceleration. They have to go together. It's sort of like how long should you give thanks before a dinner when everybody in the room is starving and they want to eat. It takes common sense to know how long that prayer should go. How to make use of a moment or to wait till someone is in the right moment to
speak and to think. So he's talking there about discernment and he's also talking in that discernment period of how to evaluate what is going to be the thing that I'm going to wager on, what I'm going to do with my life. And that is a kind of meaningful acceleration, a meaningful rhythm in life so that we discover God's grace and discover his grace in our lives. I was really struck when I read the autobiography of Martin
Luther King that he said these words in his autobiography. He said, I rejected the Marxist materialistic interpretation of history. As a Christian, I believe that there is a creative, personal power in this universe who is the ground and the essence of all reality. In other words, he then had to make a choice of what he was going to build on. And then he said, I disagreed with communism's ethical relativism. Things are not all relative. Constrictive ends
can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means. And so I had to decide what was going to be the way I would make my case, the way I would share truth, the way the love that I wanted to share and wanted to accelerate in my life, how it would work out. And so I used judgment. I tested and saw what was really working. And that's so that the accelerating part was meaningful. It was worth building
my life on. And so he said in that part of his autobiography, as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative, personal power in this universe. And I wanted that personal power. I wanted to wager on the right side of that good personal power. And not in relativism that was not faithful to reality. And this sort of common sense addition to the importance of joy and grace at work in our lives is what makes this
prayer a good prayer. It's a good prayer for us today and for our time. But the prayer that Paul is praying for us, he also invites them to pray for him and for his life. And continuing in in that very text of Philippians one over at verse 19, he does continue to rejoice. But he also is thankful that they have been praying for him. It's not only that he is now praying for their accelerating and meaningful
and rhythmic life. But listen to this. He says, Yes, I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance. He's in prison. It's a prison epistle. And they're worried about him. And in fact, they sent a young man, Epaphroditus, to help them to help him in his imprisonment. And that's one of the reasons this letter is so tender, because
Epaphroditus is the one who brings this letter to the Philippians. So he says, Yes, I'm so grateful that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance. By the way, the word help there is a fascinating word. I first when I first read it, I thought it was the word sulumbano, to lift, because that's a common word for help. But when I looked at the text in
Greek, it's actually not that word. It's it's a strange word, epichoregeous. It is the word choregeous is we get the word chorus from that word or chorale from that word. It's a musical term. And it's that word that he uses, epichoregeous. And so what Paul is saying, I am so grateful for your prayers, your prayers and the help of the Holy Spirit. And the word for help there that is not sullumbano, not lift, but it's choreograph,
the choreography of the Holy Spirit, where the Lord now makes use of your prayers to assist and help me in my dilemma. And so that's how he moves on as he thanks God that their prayers, their accelerating prayer, their meaningful prayers are helping him and the Lord is choreographing them. So then he says, it's my eager expectation and hope that I'll not be put to shame, but by that I will be able to speak with full
openness. He's in prison, so he wants to be able to openly share his faith so that Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death, for to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I'm to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. I don't know what I prefer. I'm hard pressed between the two. By the way, there are translations of this text that I don't
like. One translation says, I am torn between the two, but that's not the right word. He uses press. It is soon echo. It's pressed. I am pressed between the two. In other words, and I like the fact that that's different than I'm torn. Paul is not torn about whether he should live or die or do something else. He is pressed. And so I like John Calvin's translation of this text. He says, I have my life and
my death in my mind, and I leave both in God's hands. So, again, that's a kind of meaningful and joyous and meaningful way of looking at his own life. So he says, I'm hard pressed. I leave it in God's hands. And then he does come up with a conclusion, though. Since I'm convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith so that I may
share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come and I see you again. He hopes to come and visit them. So there's Paul giving a prayer for them and then thanking them as they pray for him and actually honoring their prayer by saying, your prayer for me has been choreographed by God. He choreographs that, and it helps me. So we have here a wonderful prayer to begin a year, and we leave everything in God's
hands in a way. And yet we have this tremendous prayer from Paul that our love should multiply more and more with all thoughtfulness and with a kind of rhythmic patience and wholeness. And that's the prayer of St. Paul for this new year. I claim it for each of us. Dear Lord, thank you for this wonderful prayer of wisdom from St. Paul. At this moment in our lives, thank you for this, that we may experience your love
and that it will be an accelerating experience so that we can share it and help us to share meaningfully and wisely and then help us to be rhythmic and realize that patience and joy go together, and then we can be thankful. So bless us and especially give us that wonderful, accelerating joy. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.