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| Photo by Steve Harper |
for audio of sermon here is the link... http://www.standrews.net.nz/node/674
Like the
students from North Tech I’m new to Whangarei… we’ve been here for about two
months. One of the things I noticed coming here and really love, is that at
night when you are outside you can look up you see the stars. Unless of course
it’s cloudy and raining then when you go outside and look up you only get a wet
face. In Auckland where we lived for the past decade you still saw stars but
the night sky was diminished by the bright lights of the city, what has come to
be known as light pollution. If you’ve grown up here or in the countryside you
may not relate to the wonder of seeing the stars more clearly as special, but
it is.
I worked
with students in Auckland one of them was Adrianne. She had grown up in Hong Kong
and she told us she had never seen the stars at night until she came to
Auckland… I think if she’d come to study in Whangarei it just might have blown
her mind. In the reading from the bible we had today Paul says that if the Christians he is
writing to can work together without grumbling and arguing, if they can show
themselves to be a group of people who really care for each other then they
will shine like the stars in the darkness around them.
Now in our
services in Hope Whangarei we’ve been working through a book of the bible
called Philippians, which is a letter written to the first ever church on the
continent of Europe, written by its founder the apostle Paul. It’s called
Philippians because the church was in the city of Philippi in Macedonia. Paul
was writing from prison in Rome, he was in chains for his faith in Jesus Christ,
and was writing to the church to thank them for their ongoing support for him,
and to encourage them to stand strong Kia Kaha in their faith as they faced
opposition from outside the church. But also he was writing to a church where
there was some internal strife and conflict and he was writing to teach them
how to be partners together in the gospel. How they could work together in
unity.
We can tend
to forget that the church was something new and radical and different, it was people
from all different walks of life and background gathering together to be a new
people and family because they had come to believe that Jesus was the messiah, that
Jesus was Lord; they had come into a new relationship with God, through Jesus life
death and resurrection. Philippi was a good example of that from what we know
of the planting of that church in the book of Acts(acts 17), it contained Jew
and gentile, and people from all the different strata’s of society, a slave
girl a rich independent merchant, a roman prison guard and his family. Kind of
like with us this morning they were bought together from all over and we’re
working out how to be united in Christ. In first century roman society they
would have treated each other with disdain, Jew and gentile, and according to
where they fitted in a very rigidly hierarchical society but now their being
together was to reflect the love of God for the world shown in person of Jesus
Christ.
Paul had
told them the way to do that was by not focusing on their own wants and needs
but to consider the other person before themselves: to have the mind of Christ,
of Jesus. Who being in the very nature God, did not consider it something to be
taken advantage of but rather emptied himself and became a servant, in human
form and was obedient unto death even death on a cross. That attitude of
self-sacrificial love that is the very nature of God, is to be the guiding
principle for being a church together. Now with the word ‘therefore’ Paul turns
to talk of how that attitude can be lived out in practical terms.
Out of love
for his dear friends, Paul encourages them to “continue to work out their
salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and
to act in order to fulfill his good Purpose”. The Christian faith is not about
working to earn God’s love or our salvation, neither is it having to live a
certain way to appease an angry God. Salvation, being bought into a right
relationship with God, is first to last the work of God. In Jesus God became a
human being, he lived as one of us, in his death on the cross, he paid the
price for all that we had done wrong, that separate us from God, his being
raised to life again, is the promise of new life and new creation that we can
know in our lives. As we come to acknowledge that, God dwells in us by the Holy
Spirit and works in our lives to fulfill God’s good purposes. How we live and
how we treat others and deal with conflict is an outworking of that.
Some people
have seen Paul’s use of the words fear and trembling here as meaning, that some
how we are afraid that we are going to lose that salvation, or that we live in
fear of God. But it is like in the Old Testament, where fear means respect and
awe of God and his love for us, his action and what he has done in Christ. The
Ten Commandments are often seen as simply God’s set of rules for us a list of do not’s…or else, however they
are prefaced in the book of exodus with the story of God delivering his people
out of slavery and oppression… God’s faithfulness and salvation. They are then
ways that we can live out that love that God has shown us in our community
together. We live out of the grace and love and salvation we have received from
God…Jesus Sums it up in John 13:34-35 by saying “love one another as I have
loved you.” And Paul is inviting us to work out how to do that.
He gets
down to the issue at hand. He encourages his readers to do everything without
“grumbling or arguing”… which does not mean that there will not be conflicts,
it’s how we deal with them that is important. The Greek word that we translate word
grumbling and arguing or complaining is very rare in the New Testament, but in
the Greek translation of the Old Testament it is used to describe the people of
Israel in their wilderness wandering complaining about Moses and all the difficulties
that they were facing.
Grumbling and arguing has more to do with how we are
feeling about an adverse situation or a problem rather than actually dealing
with it, actually solving the problem. It’s a behind the back thing a murmuring
in the background, not bringing it out into the open to find a way forward trusting
God. The key thing that the people of Israel did in the wilderness was grumble
about their leaders, question the direction they were taking them in. Many
scholars have seen the second part of our reading this morning about Timothy
and Epaphroditus, being Paul having to deal with one of the things there were
rumblings and grumblings about. People were questioning Epaproditus as a leader
which had either caused his illness, or because of his illness the he was
unable to carry out the mission and ministry they had sent him to do. Paul
affirms him and fills them in on the details, he sets them straight. They may
even have been concerned that Paul was sending Timothy, instead of coming
himself. They were getting young untried
timid Tim, not old experienced Paul who they knew and loved… and Paul affirms
Timothy’s calling, care for the church and his credentials.
I’ve lead
the Alpha marriage course a couple of times, and one of the most useful things
I found was when Nicky and Sila Lee talk of solving issues in a marriage. They
use the analogy of arguing about something being like a couple sitting on the
couch with the problem between them separating them, and that that is unhealthy,
things don’t get sorted, and can fester and ruin a marraige. Whereas they
suggest the way to deal with conflict is to sit together on the couch, and with
the problem out on the table in front of you. Out in the open so it can be
dealt with and the problem solved by people working together.
The key
thing for Paul was the Church holding on to the word of God, holding on the
gospel truth, keeping the main thing the main thing. Often grumbling and
arguing takes our attention off that.
Paul however says if they could do that he would be proud of them, t5hey
would be his boast. Even though he was facing death, which he saw as martyrdom,
dying for his faith, that he would have joy knowing that they too were able to
rejoice in the gospel lived out in unity.
In fact
Paul says that living in that way they would shine like stars in a generation
that were struggling to know how to love one another. And in our broken and
fragmented world, our multi-cultural, fractured and divided world struggling
with how we can live together, if we can push past simply tolerating each other
to this genuine togetherness and unity in Christ it will be a shining light for
the world. For Paul as a Jewish man he would had psalm 8 in his mind as he used
this metaphor. Because it speaks of the purpose of the vast array of the
universe is to declare the glory and the greatness of God. We as a people in
our love and community are called to do display that as well. If the gospel
were a music he gospel is the lyrics and our lives working in unity is the tune
that makes it catchy.
You know
Paul would never have seen the star Alpha Centauri and its blue white companion
Beta Centauri. Not because he lived in a big city and the stars were blocked
out. Not because they are faint distant stars and you need a telescope to see
them, in actual fact they are amongst the brightest stars in the night sky. But
because he lived in the northern hemisphere. But if he had I’m sure that he
would have had those two stars specifically in mind.
Because we
know them as the pointers. They point us to the constellation known as the
Southern Cross. You can always find the Southern Cross by finding these two
bright stars. You students might want to do that one night. Our lives our
community our attitude of having the mind of Christ our working together without
grumbling and arguing and solving problems and issues together will point
people not to the southern cross, but to the cross of Christ where they can
find salvation healing and wholeness, community, family and unity in Jesus
Christ.
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