TEXT: Philippians 2:1-13
Working
Salvation
Many years ago
– but not all that long ago – during
a visit home with my parents, my mother asked if while I was there I might look
through some of the things she had been saving to see what I still wanted to
keep. That may not sound like any big
deal – I hadn’t lived there in years.
But my mother and my room are special.
More than one person has described it as a shrine. While not literally true that nothing had
changed in that space since I left for college, and only entered in order to
dust – the claim is substantially true.
Sure, my kids managed to claim it along the way as their room and left their appropriate touches, but no stranger can
take very many steps inside the door without discerning a distinctive
fingerprint.
The bulletin
board on the closet door is still covered with Cooper Cougars high school
memorabilia; awards and certificates still cover the walls from as far back as
elementary school; tennis trophies are encased in the glass chest, and the TCU
mug is still on the dresser, filled with personal trinkets and
semi-valuables. Closet shelves sag and
desk drawers drag under the weight of days long passed, and truth be told, I
had mixed emotions about the undertaking.
I’m sentimental, to say the least, and emotional at the slightest
provocation, and this project would pluck all the tender strings.
But mustering
my fortitude I ventured forward into the past.
Through scrapbooks and yearbooks and shoeboxes of still-fragrant
letters, through shelves and drawers and cabinets and church camp pictures, the
past once more passed. And the taste was
melancholy; but it was good.
The reason is
that remembering is one of life’s most essential pursuits. It locates us, centers us, and deepens us; it
corrects us, embarrasses us, and contrary to popular wisdom, it heals us. To those sick with grief, memory is one of
the healing salves that helps keep life together. Remembering, and retelling. Phillips Brooks, who wrote the words to O Little Town of Bethlehem, and who was
one of the great preachers of this century, spoke words I often repeat in
funeral meditations. Speaking to those
left standing in the wake of a loved one’s death he says, “May I tell you where
your comfort lies? It is not in
forgetting the happy past. People bring
us well-meant but miserable consolations when they tell us what time will do to
help our grief. We do not want to lose
our grief,” he concludes, “because our grief is bound up with our love and we
could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.”
Remembering,
he knew, is essential.
And wags have always reminded us that
those who ignore the past are bound to repeat it. Life with no memory is a circle.
Remembering. It is also one of the best vitamins for our
values, our priorities, and our principles; it is the great crucible in which
our selfhood is purified and cleansed; in which those metals that cast us are
refined and strengthened.
All of which is something we learn
from scripture, where a good memory is understood to be the prerequisite for a
good life. On the day of the Exodus, for
example, as Moses prepared the Israelites to leave
Later, at the foot of
To this very day Jews celebrate the Passover
at the command of God through Moses: so
that you children and theirs will remember where you were, where you went, and
by whose hand. Why? Because that story is their story, no matter
how long ago it occurred. It tells them
who they are and why they are, and what difference it all should make. It recalls to them their name.
And Paul, speaking to his beloved
friends that we met last week in
“Remember the story of Jesus – his
selflessness, his generosity, his sacrificial sharing. Remember his story, because it is your story, too. Allow it to affect you. It is your history. Let this be the governing attitude of your
life together,” Paul says. “Have this
mind among you.”
Remember. Because the memory will become fingers
between which you – your principles and priorities; your beliefs and behaviors;
your very ways of living together – will like clay, be reshaped and reformed;
reborn.
Remember, as did Christ, each other’s
interests and not merely your own. This
is the essence of the fellowship of the church.
Inappropriate to the Body of Christ, observes Fred Craddock, is the
“selfish eye, the pompous mind, the ear hungry for compliments and the mouth
that [speaks] none, the heart that [has] little room for others, and the hand
that [serves] only the self” (Philippians, p. 38).
Have, instead, this love, this common
care for unity, this common mind among you, this common attitude, this shared
orientation that understands fellowship – life together in the family of the
church – after the image of Christ.
Remember the way of God as given
shape by the pattern of Christ. That, by
itself, is quite a wisdom. But it isn’t,
of course, all there is to it.
Remembering isn’t an act of facing backwards, devoted to the past. It is facing forward into the future with the
fingertips of the past on your shoulder, guiding your steps and shaping your
direction, for the new, creative work
there is to do.
After reminding the Philippians of
his own involvement with them and setting the example of Jesus prominently in
the center of their consciousness, he goes on to tell them that they must now work out your own salvation with fear and
trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and
to work for his good pleasure.
What does it mean to “work out your
own salvation”? It doesn’t mean you are
on your own; make it up as you go along.
It isn’t the sort of flippant bow to individuality so common in our
culture, as if to say, “everyone is different.
Each will find his or her own way.”
For starters, the pronoun Paul uses is plural, not singular. Paul is writing to a community, not an
assemblage of individuals. He isn’t
writing to say, “Each one of you needs to go off into the woods and create a
unique blueprint for salvation.” To
borrow from my heritage, he is writing the equivalent of, “Y’all are going to
have to work out the rest without my help.”
Paul is, after all, writing from a
prison cell from which he may not be released.
But even if he were free, they can’t rely on him to spoon feed them
forever. The task, he implies, is always
to “work out,” “think through,” “flesh out the details” in the community of
faith, what it means to follow Jesus in the new situations and questions that
unfold each day.
And it is precious – and precarious –
work. It isn’t for the casual, the
flippant, the arrogant, or the sure. The
faithful, Paul says, are to “work out the details of” the salvation they have
come to know in awe, and in the light
of what we know and have discerned about God in Christ. We don’t just make it up. We unpack the package that we have received,
ever mindful of the presence of God.
What does it mean to be a Christian
today – in
We will need to work out such practical elements and implications of our salvation,
but we will need to undertake such work carefully, delicately, humbly – with
fear and trembling.
And with a memory – a mindfulness of
the Christ who called and led us into this life together – with his
encouragement and consolation and the company of his Spirit. Work it out together -- with this mind among
you.