Sermon 5 : Getting It Together

Philippians 1:12-26

When C. H. Spurgeon was a child, his grandmother offered to pay him for every hymn he could learn by heart. The going rate was a dime per song. (Or whatever all those pence and ha’pennies and shillings work out to in real American money.) The little fellow conned the lyrics so readily that she dropped the price to a nickle. Then his granddad, noting that the joint was overrun with mice, put in a competing bid: a buck for every dead rodent.

"I found, at the time," Spurgeon writes in his autobiography, "that rat-catching paid me better than learning hymns, but I know which employment has been the more permanently profitable to me." The Prince of Preachers testified that at any point in mid-sermon he could quote a song text in harmony with his topic. "The hymns have remained with me, while those old rats for years have passed away, and the shillings I earned by killing them have been spent long ago."

There must have been rats aboard the ship when Paul sailed for Rome. Fortunately, no one seems to have distracted the apostle with payment for exterminating them. Instead, he seems to have spent some of his time memorizing (some say composing) the powerful hymn which sits at the center of his letter to an embattled church. Philippians 2:5-11 is generally recognized to be a set of lyrics, composed by the early church to provide a compendium of Christology for Dummies for a church which had few literate members and no New Testament. Two things about it strike me.

First, it is neither traditional nor contemporary. "Traditional" church music in Paul’s day was the book of Psalms. Following the lead of the synagogue, the early church sang or chanted these divinely-inspired poems. So Paul boldly quotes one of those "modern" songs. But "contemporary" would have meant a catchy toe-tapper modeled on, say, the rock ‘n’ rolling dithyrambs belted out by the Greek equivalent of boy bands. Instead, we have a compact essence of intense Christian theology.

Second, Paul breaks the rhythm to shove in the cross. The line "even death on a cross" messes with the meter in the original language. Evidently, for Paul, aesthetics took a backseat to the ascetic act at the heart of the gospel.

Oh, and I’ll throw in a third: this song sits at the center of a text which deals primarily with unity in the church.

So a few conclusions. Traditional/contemporary is the wrong debate; theological validity is what counts. There is always room for the cross, but the cross is always an awkward customer. And worship focused on Christ unifies; what does not focus on Christ is not worship.

Dead rats and spent shillings – that’s what most of our "worship wars" are worth in the end. A confession of Christ which unites us at the foot of the cross, that’s the only song worth singing.

Dead for a ducat, dead!

Sermon 4: I Can Explain This

Philippians 1:12-26

Don’t call Greg Olsen a space tourist; he finds the term offensive. "Space evangelist" might work better.

The New Jersey gazillionaire shelled out twenty million bucks American to buy a seat on a joint U.S./Russian space mission. The jaunt took a week and a half, which works out to about two mil per day. But don’t picture the civilian showing up at the last second in baggy shorts and a Hawaiian floweredy shirt with a camera around his neck. He logged nine hundred hours of physical and academic training before qualifying for blast-off, then served as a guinea pig for various experiments aboard the space station. He enjoyed the binge so much that he now plans to stump the elementary school circuit, sharing his experience and encouraging kids to study math and science.

You wouldn’t have called Paul a religious tourist, either. He paid a high price for his trip to the capital, and arrived as an evangelist, a man on a mission. Years of spiritual training had prepared him for the hardships of sharing the gospel with soldiers and slaves. Years of physical privations had readied him for the harsh conditions of prison. The various religious sects of the city – including other Christian communities – poked and prodded him as a sort of lab rat for the faith. And Paul considered himself so well-treated that all he wanted to do was encourage others to follow his example.

The astronaut and the apostle also had this in common: both favored experience over explanations. "As all the astronauts tell you," Olsen assured reporters upon his return, "whatever you think now, once you get up there, it’s better." Or, as Paul put it, speaking of Heaven in a different sense, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." – 1 Corinthians 2:9.

So get on board. The destination is worth the training.

We Have Lift-Off!