Readings for 10 December 2006
Second Sunday in Advent
Year C
Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on for ever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God; put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting; for God will show your splendour everywhere under heaven. For God will give you evermore the name, ‘Righteous Peace, Godly Glory’.
Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look towards the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them. For they went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies; but God will bring them back to you, carried in glory, as on a royal throne. For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low and the valleys filled up, to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God. The woods and every fragrant tree have shaded Israel at God’s command. For God will lead Israel with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.
Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,
To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
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 gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God’s grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that on the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
“I thank my God every time I remember you… because of your partnership in the Gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this: that the One who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 1:3-6)
Our patron St Paul starts his letter to the Philippians as he usually does – giving thanks to God for those to whom he writes. In this case, he gives thanks for something very specific: the partnership that he and the Philippians share in the Gospel. That partnership has included a deep affection, shared prayer and shared work for the spread of the Good News. Its has also included financial support for Paul as he traveled around Greece proclaiming the Good News, and, now, when Paul is in prison, the Philippians have sent one of their members to bring a gift for his needs and to help care for Paul. Such prayerful, practical partnership is a joy to Paul – and not only for the obvious benefits its brings to him and his work. Paul rejoices in this partnership because it an expression of the love of God that is at the heart of the Gospel he proclaims.
Paul writes also of the confidence that he has: the confidence that the One who began a good work among the Philippians will bring it to completion. Faithful as the Philippians have been, Paul’s ultimate confidence dos not lie in them, but in God working in and through them. The good work the Philippians have done they haven’t done by themselves.
There is another Partner in this enterprise of living and spreading the Gospel: God. The shared partnership of God and faithful people, Paul knows, is what makes living and spreading the Gospel possible for him and the Philippians. Their fruitful partnership in the Gospel is rooted in partnership with God.
That was true not just for Paul and the Philippians almost 2,000 years ago, but for Christian communities ever since who seek to live the Gospel – including this community called Grace-St. Paul’s. Our life and ministry, past, present and future, our life in the Gospel, is a partnership with each other and with God. It happens that this week I have been updating the parish history that will go into our new pictorial directory. That has made me reflect on some of the fruits of our partnership with each other and God in the Gospel in recent years. Some of those fruits are present in the buildings around us: modern lighting and sound equipment in the Church and modern boilers in the basement; Internet and phone networking in the offices and handicapped accessibility in our meeting spaces; the music of the pipe organ and our newly-dedicated Memorial Garden. Some of us have been around long enough to know that none of these were here ten years ago.
Others fruits of our partnership with God and each other for the Gospel may be less obvious, but perhaps more important: community groups such as AA, Overeaters Anonymous, and Enable regularly using these facilities; the ministry to homeless families in the IHN in which we partnered with other congregations for many years; the coat and food drives our Church School has led us in this year; our growing capacity to seek out and welcome new members to share in our life and ministry; how people in this congregation reach out to each other in ways both practical and prayerful in times of need. Reflecting on all that and more this week, I have found myself, like Paul, offering thanks to God for this partnership in the Gospel we share with each other and God.
It has been good for me, also, to hear Paul’s confidence, confidence that the One who began a good work among us will bring it to completion. For I am also aware of challenges to our living of the Gospel here at Grace-St. Paul’s. It seems to be a challenge for many of us to invite a friend to come to church with us: on our last Invite a Friend Sunday, I saw no invited friends here. If we have gotten better at being hospitable to visitors – and we have – we have a ways to go in becoming the inviting ambassadors for Christ that true partnership in the Gospel calls for.
I am aware of the challenge that the Nominating Committee is having in finding people willing to serve in leadership as members of the Vestry. I am aware of the challenge the Finance Committee faces in developing next year’s budget without the needed pledge commitments on which to base income projections.
When faced with such challenges in our common life, I sometimes find myself discouraged. It was good, therefore, for me to be reminded by our patron St. Paul of the confidence we all can and should have: the confidence that despite real challenges and setbacks – remember, Paul was in prison when he wrote these words! -- confidence that the One who began a good work among us will bring it to completion in partnership with us.
And shared partnership is the key – we doing our part, while trusting God to do God’s part. Here Paul helps again. In the next chapter of this same letter, he writes these words: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling…” Now that sounds at first like it all depends on us, doesn’t it? Where’s the partnership in that? Well, listen to the rest of the sentence: "for God is at work in you, enabling you to will and to work for what God desires.” OHH! There’s the partnership – God at work in us as we do our work.
So here’s how it goes: “work out your own salvation” – that means our side of the partnership is essential; what we do really does matter. If we are to live our partnership with God in the Gospel, commitment of our time, energy and finances are necessary. Having confidence that God will bring God’s good work to completion does not mean we can sit back and do nothing – God is counting on us! The living and spreading of the Gospel will not get done without us, without our work, our commitment, our generosity, and our prayer.
But we aren’t in this work by ourselves: "for God is at work in us, enabling us to will and to work for what God desires.” It is God who gives us the energy, will and desire to do what God wants. It is God who animates us, who gives us life and hope; who calls us to action and to generosity; who empowers us to work for the Gospel. What we does matters; what God does matters. That’s what it means to be partners, after all!
The two-sidedness of this partnership is summed up in two familiar sayings, and I hope you’ll remember at least one of them if you don’t know them already. Here’s the first:
“Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not.”
In other words, without God working in us, we cannot live the Gospel effectively; but without our partnership, God will not bring the Gospel to fruition either – for in Christ, God has chosen us to be partners in that work.
Here’s the other saying:
“Act as if everything depended on you; pray as if everything depended on God.”
That’s how our partnership with God in the Gospel works – We are to act as if everything depended on us; We are to pray in full confidence to the One who is at work in us, the One who began a good work in us and who will bring it to completion. Both sides of the partnership matter.
When we work in partnership with God in these ways, all sorts of remarkable things can happen. Earlier, I told you about some past fruits of our partnership in the Gospel with God I’ve been thinking about this week. I can’t tell you about the future fruits because those will depend on how we and God live that partnership in the weeks, months and years to come. What I can tell you is that it matters that we live our side of the partnership fully and faithfully and that we do so in full confidence that the One who began a good work in us will bring it to completion.
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