Partners

Philippians 2:1-13

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
   as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
   taking the form of a slave,
   being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to the point of death—
   even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him
   and gave him the name
   that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
   every knee should bend,
   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
   that Jesus Christ is Lord,
   to the glory of God the Father.

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 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.

I find myself, when reading certain Bible passages, often being reminded of the show The Good Place. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s a comedy about the afterlife—it’s about a group of people who are condemned to the Bad Place—some of them are worse than others—but they’re ultimately not horrible people. They spend the show trying to figure out how and why they all ended up in the Bad Place, and what it would take to get into the Good Place. At one point, at the end of season three, they discover that no one had made it into the Good Place in 521 years. It turns out, as Ted Danson’s character presents to Maya Rudolph’s Godlike character, that the world has become too complicated, and the points system that was figured out at the beginning of time has made it impossible for people to ever be good enough—Danson uses the example of something as simple as buying a tomato at a grocery store—that tomato came from unfair labor practices, was shipped across the globe, contributing to global warming, and therefore, just buying that tomato is considered a moral failing, and that individual has a deduction of hundreds of points. They discover that the points system is broken because of how complicated and broken the world has become.

And I think about this a lot because of impossibly high Biblical standards are in this the broken world. Last week, we started this series on Paul’s letter to the Philippians— remember, he wrote this letter from prison, and it’s easily his most affectionate letter. There’s a mutual love and respect between himself and this budding Christian community in Philippi. But that doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and rainbows. There’s an implication that there’s still some discord here, which is to be expected in the beginnings of a new faith community. It’s never clear why this discord may be happening; we could make the assumption that some people have no-so-pure motives in joining this new community since there’s an emphasis on selflessness in this passage; but, as we touched on last week, Paul doesn’t spend this letter scolding his friends. Rather, he sort of gives them a reminder—a reminder of what really matters, of why they’re doing what they’re doing. They’re there to be “in full accord of one mind.” That is, the same mind that was in Christ Jesus. Paul then goes on to use one of the earliest known Christian hymns to explain himself—in this hymn, there’s the emphasis on Jesus rejecting his divinity, on Jesus sacrificing himself on the cross in the lowly form of a poor human. This emphasis on emptying oneself, of completely sacrificing oneself is a lot. To actually abide by this, to live the way Paul is talking about here, would mean leaving our families, our homes, all our possessions. It's more than daunting, it’s impossible if we want to survive in this world.

Now, I want to backtrack a little, to the very beginning of the Philippians. In chapter 1, verse 7, Paul says “…all of you share in God’s grace with me.” In theologian Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Philippians, Barth translates Paul as telling his friends that they are “copartners in grace.” I think that phrase really sets the tone for this letter—he really sees the Philippians as pious, good, and kind people who are deserving of grace, and he trusts that they will show him grace when necessary as well.

This concept of grace is what’s missing in the show The Good Place. Grace, the way I see it, is what stops things from being so black and white, just right or wrong. Grace allows for nuance and context. Without grace, I think we’d all, myself included, be headed to the Bad Place, if some semblance of the Bad Place actually exists. Grace is what allows us to be good Christians, or as good Christians as we can possibly be, in a world that makes being a good Christian nearly impossible. It gives us a little leeway. Because some of us have the privilege, especially in a rural area like this, with lots of local farms, to buy local, to buy organic, to buy cruelty free food and products and that’s wonderful! But that doesn’t mean we should be rewarded for the privilege we were born into; just the same way someone who lives in a food desert, with one single subpar grocery store in a 20-mile radius shouldn’t be judged for buying the factory-farmed, mass produced products that are available to them. We have to give people in difficult situations a little grace… or in some cases, a lot of grace.

On a personal level, I’ve discovered how good this church is, over these past three years, at showing grace—showing grace to one another, showing grace to me. I spoke last week about how this church has been really patient with me—patient in terms of my working through covid and the church building being closed, patient in terms of working through my personal traumas and losses, and finally patient and flexible in terms of my pregnancy and maternity leave that started nearly a month earlier than it was supposed to. But in reading this week’s passage, I thought of your patience in terms of grace. I thought of the fact that you could see times when I was struggling, times when I needed a break, times when I just couldn’t be present, and you showed me grace. Just like circumstances of this world make it difficult to do the right and moral thing all the time… or… ever, circumstances in my life made it so at times I just couldn’t be as present as I wanted to be in certain areas of my life. And thankfully, I was shown grace.

And it’s not just me—you show one another grace all the time. While we all, ultimately, come together for one reason, that doesn’t mean you all get along all the time. People butt heads, people disagree, people’s personalities just don’t mesh sometimes. We’re human, it is what it is… but you give each other grace. You see that the person you disagree with really means well. Or you see that the person driving you absolutely nuts with anxiety is going through a difficult time in their personal life. You make it a point to see these things in one another, and that is grace. We are all partners in grace here.

All that being said—grace, giving and receiving it—takes work. I have a hard time talking about grace without talking about theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his concept of cheap grace vs. costly grace. He writes of cheap grace,

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

So it’s shallow, it’s meaningless. It’s belief without introspection or compassion. He then describe costly grace as “the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a person must knock.”

It’s so easy to take things at face-value. To see someone acting out and assume they’re an inherently bad person; to see someone withdrawing and not putting effort into a relationship and just assume they don’t care. We live in a world of instant gratification and if we don’t get what we want from someone, we’re done with them. But a world like that is a world without grace. A world like that is an every man for himself world, a world where we don’t seek the gospel, we simply assume it’s there and it’s for us and only us, and we don’t really have to put much thought into it. It’s a world of entitlement, where we expect the gift of the gospel without actually caring for other people or working for the greater good—without actually acting out the gospel.

Grace, I believe, can only be received when it is given. And to give people grace is to seek. It’s to look beyond the surface to try to understand why people are acting a certain way, and what we can do to lighten their load. And when we are able give people grace by understanding, we are able to be understood ourselves. We are able to be partners in grace.  

This is a selflessness that is doable. This is what Paul is talking about in this part of his letter—“Do nothing from selfish ambition of conceit, but in humility regard others as better as yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Paul is simply asking us to think of one another and to give one another grace—to never assume we are better or more moral than someone else. Jesus is the ultimate example of this—he, fully divine, took a fully human, mortal form, and refused to use his divinity for his own sake. He truly made himself one of us, understanding our unique circumstances and difficulties, our sorrows and traumas, and therefore gave grace to all of us.

So we all have this gift of grace— but to really, truly utilize it in this world, to really feel the peace and relief that comes from grace, we have to give it away. We have to give this grace to others, or else it’s cheap and meaningless.  We have to seek the humanity and the goodness in others, just as we have to really seek the gospel in a world that tries to cheapen its message and its work.

I’ve seen firsthand that this community seeks out the gospel and seeks out the goodness and the humanity in others. I’ve seen the endless grace this community is capable of giving and therefore capable of receiving. It’s a cruel world out there, and it makes the work Jesus calls us to do so hard. But it’s grace that makes it possible. It’s grace that allows us to see the good in this world and the good in one another. So let’s keep doing the work of grace after grace, together, as partners. Amen.