In My Absense
Jean Alexander
The United Parish of Auburndale
January 8, 2012
In My Absence
Philippians 2:1-12
As I was cleaning out my office the past month, I found many hidden treasures as well as a lot of stuff I should have thrown away years ago. A cartoon that surfaced in the purging showed a man at the pharmacy counter and the pharmacist saying to him.”Take two tablets the moment you begin to feel indispensible.” It is always tempting especially as one is leaving to feel like they won’t be able to get along without you, that you are indispensible. One thing I know after all these years is that you will do just fine without me. There is sadness, yes. There will be adjustments, yes. There will be a period where people will say, if only to themselves when Ed does something, but Jean used to do it this way! And then over time you will adapt to a new voice and new ways of doing things.
So given that it is now time to say good-by, what should I say? I thought of all my favorite texts and rejected them. None of them seemed quite right. And then I remembered this passage from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi. Many years ago, at a time of great turmoil in my life, I had been attending our annual fall clergy retreat back in Maryland. At the end of the retreat, I stayed behind to walk and have a conversation with God. Actually I was doing all the talking. But suddenly I heard a message. There have only been a few times in my life when I can actually say I heard a message from God and this was one of them. The message I heard clearly was these words of Paul, “work out your own salvation in fear and trembling for it is God who is at work in you.” When I looked at the passage again I saw it begins by saying: Therefore my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation in fear and trembling for it is God who is at work in you. Well I don’t know that you have always obeyed me, but you have certainly been kind, thoughtful and supportive through these years. And you usually laugh when I am trying to be funny which is gratifying.
I have always appreciated Paul’s letters to the congregations he founded. They are full of reminders of how human the church has always been. But always, even after chastising them for one thing or another, Paul finds a way to tell them how much he appreciates and cares for them and how important they are to God. This is especially true in the letter to the church in Philippi. It is the most lyrical of the letters, focused more on affirmation than instruction or admonition.
Chapter 2 begins by urging them to care for one another and to be unified as a congregation. He asks them to be like Jesus and then he quotes what most scholars believe is a hymn that would have circulated in the churches at that time. It is a hymn describing Jesus as one who was not afraid to humble himself to the point of being willing to take on human suffering and death, an act that would have saving consequences for those who believe. This section ends with those words I heard so long ago now encouraging them to continue to work at their faith reminding them that God was with them in the struggle.
And this is what I want to encourage you to do as a congregation today to keep working on your faith. One of the things this church prides itself on is that we are not a creedal church. When you join, you don’t have to get up and confess a series of beliefs. This is congruent with both of our denomination’s stance on faith. Faith in our traditions is something you live and not just pay lip service to. However I’m afraid for some this may also mean that you think it doesn’t matter what you believe, which is certainly not true. I have been troubled over the course of my tenure by how little effort this congregation makes to deepen faith and belief. How many of you read the bible regularly and try to understand it? How many of you have actively worked on your prayer life, or tried to read something that has spiritual depth to it or that challenges your thinking about faith? How many of you reflect on what the meaning and purpose of the church is for our time? I’m not going to ask for a show of hands but I suspect that there is a fair amount of improvement that is needed in these areas.
One of the other things I found as I started cleaning out my office were books I had never read. One of them had obviously been given to me but I did not remember it and I certainly had never read it. It was by Margaret Blair Johnston called When God Says’ No: Faiths Starting Point, published in 1953. (Simon and Schuster) I took it home and one night started reading it and was hooked. Margaret was one of the early pioneer woman ministers and attended my own seminary, Chicago Theological Seminary. While in seminary she began serving a dying church in Chicago. After graduation, as the church began to turn around, she persuaded the Chicago Association of Congregational Church to ordain her, not an easy thing to do in that time. From there, after several years, she on went to multiple small parishes in Northern New York State. At the time the book ended she was in Groton MA but she was still serving churches in the early years of my own ministry in the 1970s where she was serving a church in New Jersey.
At about the 12th year of her ministry she encountered some tough stuff and out of that her faith grew. This is what she wrote:
I can see now that up to this point faith, for me, had been largely a holding operation. Through it I kept myself and others from running away, no matter what had to be endured. I had yet to discover faith is a helping operation. It gives not just a defensive by an offensive strategy for living. Faith is endurance; but it is also exploration.
For my first twelve years in the ministry, I took it for granted that faith was what you got when you found the answers. “If only I could get all the answers straight,” I used to say. Now I see that the instant one says “I have all the answers” …for them, faith dies. For faith is a process of infinite inference. Though by faith we draw conclusions, a living faith never concludes.” (p. 214)
On this my last Sunday, I want to challenge you to “work out your own salvation in fear and trembling.” Don’t settle for what you either learned in Sunday school or what you have rejected perhaps from what you learned earlier about Christianity or the church. To have a living faith is work, it is work of the head, the heart and hands and it is on-going. You never really arrive. There is always more to learn and to explore. There will be times when you feel lost in the woods all alone, and other times when the consolations of faith will be like a life giving fountain permeating every aspect of your life. No matter, keep exploring. For as Eugene Petersen translates this last verse: Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God’s energy, an energy deep within, God himself willing and working at what will give God the most pleasure.
