It is a wonderful thing for me to be in this beautiful sanctuary on this gorgeous sunny day in the welcoming company of this great United Church of Christ congregation. I have been looking forward to this Sunday for many weeks now, and I’m happy that it’s here.
First thing, I want to thank you for the love and support you have given my dear friend, Edith Guffey, a very proud member of this church who, until recently, has been my boss, colleague and mentor for the past 11 years that I’ve worked at the UCC Church House in downtown Cleveland.
We are all grieving there that Edith has completed her service as the UCC’s Associate General Minister. As many of you know firsthand, Edith is a talented, gregarious and witty woman, who is widely loved and deeply respected across the denomination, and has served faithfully as a national officer of the United Church of Christ for the past 20 years.
Months ago, Edith told me she wanted me to come preach here at Federated, and now that I’m here, she’s away at the Annual Meeting of the UCC’s Kansas-Oklahoma Conference, but she and I have made our peace with that, but I did want to open with words of appreciation for her, because this congregation has always been near and dear to her heart, as she has been to mine.
In my newly elected role as Executive Minister of the UCC’s Local Church Ministries, I will have the opportunity to visit and work with lots and lots of our 5,300 churches across the country; to learn from them, encourage them, provide ideas and resources and staffing support for them. The strength and vitality of these congregations certainly varies and there’s no limit to the many challenges that our pastors and congregations are facing now during times of drastic change.
It’s why, from the outset, I wanted to visit your church and other healthy, strong, faith-filled, justice-minded, mission-focused congregations like yours, so that I could gird myself from the outset with your enthusiasm, and tell your story and remind others across the country that great things really are happening in the UCC, and that excellence in ministry does abound, in many diverse places across our denomination.
You are one of the top leadership churches in the United Church of Christ, and we need you to see yourselves that way.
As a congregation, your generous financial support for Our Church’s Wider Mission makes possible many national and global ministries that reach far beyond these walls, and impact congregations and missionaries and agencies that you may never see up close. So it’s important to me personally that you hear our appreciation, and that you take all-due pride in the leadership role you play.
And many of you as individuals generously support these ministries as well, and you offer your personal gifts to Federated Church, to the UCC’s four special mission offerings, to the UCC’s Annual Fund, and during times of natural disaster, you remember to give through the UCC so that our church can respond quickly and generously all around the world. Please know how grateful this entire denomination is for you. You take seriously your congregational covenant, and the United Church of Christ is stronger for it.
It’s why we’re happy in Local Church Ministries that we could bring some of that mission support back to you, in the form of a grant to your Alive 360 worship service, that it can grow and prosper and, in so doing, provide new models for excellence in worship that might be replicated in other places across the church. We’re proud of what you’re building here at Federated, and we’re happy to be partnering with you to make it happen.
Again, it is wonderful to be with you this morning.
And now to the text for today. <prayer>
In the Bible, we encounter a fascinating cast of lead characters, the household names of our faith who were destined clearly for “rock star” status: Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Jesus … Peter, Paul, and Mary, folks like that – those obviously intended for top billing.
And there are others in the Bible who have intimate, well-known stories told about them; and yet they remain completely nameless: The rich young ruler, comes to mind, the one who comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life and walks away despondent when Jesus tells him that discipleship starts when he divests of everything that’s holding him back.
This “rich young ruler,” as he’s come to be remembered, joins a cast of hundreds like him, like Noah's wife and Lot’s daughters, the magi and shepherds, the Syrophoenician woman, the man born blind, the bent-over woman, the Samaritan woman at the well … people whose profound stories we remember, but whose actual names we do not.
And, then, occasionally, we bump into folk who have real names but we know very, very little about them. This morning, we were just introduced to two of them, but perhaps they walked right by you unnoticed. Don’t worry about it. It happens to them all the time.
Ironically, they live forever in scripture right next to one of the most famous verses there is: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.” But they almost hide in these ancient pages of ours, because their story, at least on the surface, seems pretty insignificant.
Euodia and Syntyche are their names. They must have been very small women, because they take up very little space in the New Testament, only a couple of verses and we never hear about them again. We can decipher, at best, four things about them.
They were clearly leaders of the church at Philippi, on the eastern most region of Greece, an old church, founded in the year 49 or 50 by St. Paul himself, who visited there. It was the first Christian church on the continent of Europe.
We also know they were dear, personal friends of Paul about whom, he says, they “struggled together beside me in the work of the gospel.” Their influence and opinions mattered.
They are dearly devoted to Christ, we know, for their names are <quote> “written in the book of life,” says Paul.
And, lastly and perhaps most surprisingly (given all their good qualities), the world will forever remember these two women, if remembered at all, for one thing only: for not getting along, for getting an old fashioned finger-wagging from none other than the big Apostle himself.
“I urge Eudoia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord,” he writes. In other words, “For heaven’s sake, would you give it a rest?”
Now, we don’t know what they were fighting about, but we know it was something, and two thousand years later that’s the single thing we remember most about them …. which may be the first point of my sermon: Be careful what you fight about, especially if there’s a historian around.
As a native and lifelong Kentuckian myself, before moving up here to Canada, I happen to know that both the Hatfields and the McCoys were lovely Christian people but, bless their hearts, put them anywhere near one another and they just couldn’t get along.
The same may have been true for Euodia and Syntyche.
But since we know so little about these sisters of ours, it’s tempting to reduce their differences in opinion to laughable petty disagreement, as if they were a couple of bickering women in the church kitchen, especially since it appears – on the surface – that Paul has little energy for their arguments.
But these were highly invested leaders of the church, co-workers of Paul’s, the early pioneers of Christendom in Greece. Euodia and Syntyche had every right to have big ideas and firmly held positions because they had invested their lives and most likely their deaths, too, in the church.
We remember the Philippians even today for their incredible financial generosity on behalf of other churches far and wide. They were passionate in their receiving of offerings that would benefit, not themselves, but people elsewhere they would never see or meet, and it’s likely that Euodia and Syntyche were instrumental in all that. It’s no wonder that this church was clearly Paul’s favorite. He visited there at least three times in his life, and no doubt this letter to them was not the only one he had written.
But maybe it helps to know that Paul, himself, was not in a bickering state of mind. After all, he was writing to them from prison, no less, in Rome, with his own death imminently pressing in, and at moments like that, even the most important quarrels can seem insignificant.
Oh, he wanted nothing more than to be with them; he says so. He longs for that day, when he can remind them of the preciousness of the gifts of God they have enjoyed, the beautiful things, the labors they had undertaken together over the years. Burdens that now seem light, when viewed with the clarity of hindsight.
“The Lord is near,” he reminds them. “So whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, pleasing and commendable … If there is anything worthy of your time and energy, think about these things instead. And keep on doing all that you have learned and received and heard and seen, and the God of peace will certainly be with you.”
Earlier this week, I woke up one morning, technically still nighttime, worrying about a work matter, specifically a legal contract, a deadline task that still needed to be finalized with the help of some attorneys and executed with a bunch of signatures. And try as I might, despite every good promise to myself to tend to it first thing at the office, my mental preoccupation would not subside and sleep was not to return. If the Lord were near that morning, I surely missed the presence.
Later that day, I was in a meeting at which we opened with singing, “I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus.” Except, of course, nothing could have been further from the truth, but I sang along anyhow, noting to myself the clear irony.
Because, even if we’re not fighting with others, we’re often wrestling with ourselves – and too often under the weight of heavy duress: the important task, the big meeting, the school assignment, the medical exam, the mortgage payment that’s due on the 15th.
And here sits the example of Paul, in prison, old and dying, just singing away: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again, I say rejoice.” A faith like that is nauseating! But still there’s something intriguing, isn’t it? It is a trust in the presence and promise of God that refuses to let us go, and for many of us we can’t help but flirt with that simple yet profound idea.
Because, for Paul, and for others whose stubborn faith we’ve witnessed and admired, there is something that exists for them, in them, that obviously has greater sway than a warden’s prison keys, that beats far more loudly than the dreaded drumbeat of earthly worries, that invites a rhythm in life that’s more soothing than a ventilator’s rhythmic hiss at a loved one’s bedside when their days seem far too few in number. It is the certainty that we are God’s, that life is precious, and that we can find our eternal peace by relishing in that fact.
Joy is the hallmark of the Christian life, or at least it’s supposed to be. It soars above everything else that fills our churches’ calendars, and our personal ones too, and joy comes not when we master the Christian faith, like some kind of “black belt” in religion. But it comes in the recognition and perception that God IS acting, even amid our difficulties and pain. The Lord is near. Look and see.
As one preacher explains: “Joy is a byproduct, not an end itself. A discipline, not a right. A command, not an option.”
And this is how Paul trained himself to live his life, and approach his faith, especially in his later years.
Did you know it’s possible – it’s possible – to live your life so that the future is actually behind you? It’s not easy, but for some, they make it appear so. A peace that passes all understanding, that’s what we call it.
And it’s what Paul did, and it’s what Paul meant earlier in this same letter when he begs the Philippian church – and now, us – “to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” – in other words, to make a final peace with your own uncertain future, so that, for TODAY, you might live in gratitude and joy. It is believing that the Lord IS near, despite all the good reasons you can give to the contrary.
In the United Church of Christ, we have three core values that bind us: First, we are a church of extravagant welcome; radical inclusion and generous hospitality. Ours is a church that has consistently “arrived early” and we have repeatedly extended our hands into the margins, at times and places where others dared not go.
Second, we are a church that believes in the power of this gospel story to change lives; to intervene. confront and change systems, institutions, traditions, and governments for the sake of God’s deepest desire for this world.
And, third, we are a church that believes in God’s continuing testament – “God is still speaking,” is how we phrase it now – that audacious notion that the Lord is not pent up, aloof, removed and distant, not only ancient but near at hand. That God is nowhere in particular so that God can be everywhere instead.
Euodia and Syntyche were not of the same mind, and for all we know, they never were. People they never worked out their differences. But they were of the same heart. And isn’t that the important thing?
They believed fervently in this strange good news that the Resurrected Christ somehow existed in their midst. And, encouraged by love and driven by compassion and sympathy, they were compelled to act in ways that impacted and changed the world around them. They held their possessions in common, gave generously to meet the needs of the poor and hungry, the widows and orphans. They reached beyond longstanding cultural superstitions and prejudices to welcome Jew and Gentile, slave and free, Roman and Greek, woman and man, and in everything – by prayer and supplication, with great thanksgiving, they let their requests be known to God. What other proof does one need? The Lord was near.
In the UCC, we have a little more than 1 million members, which means – at any given point in time – we have just as many opinions. We’re a thinking person’s church, and we actually take great pride in that complicating fact. And since a whole lot of us don’t really know what it is we believe anyhow, we actually have far more opinions than we have people.
But we can find some peace in that, because love, generosity, and friendship have never been dependent on our agreement, but in a shared heart that beats in response to God’s investment and goodness toward us.
It’s why I know that Euodia and Syntyche were UCC. They had to be. The proof is biblical: Passionate about justice. Passionate about inclusion. Passionate about the marginalized.
And each passionate that she alone was right.
So, thank God for Paul, who politely intervenes, who has the wisdom, fortitude, and years of experience to tell us all outright: There are far more important things than being right.
The Lord is near, he says. We’d better get on with it.
AMEN.