Sermon: Grace, Peace, Gratitude, and Love Overflowing
Text: Philippians 1:1-11, 27-2:4
Date: November 14, 2004
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

Dee Eisenhauer, servant of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus in Eagle Harbor Congregational United Church of Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

"Grace and peace" was the greeting Paul typically used in his letters to churches, and perhaps also in his sermons.  Preacher Fred Craddock, writing about this salutation, notes that such a greeting verges upon a miracle every time a human being says it.  That's because besides the grace of God itself being a miracle, for a human to convey a wish for God's unmerited favor upon another person without reservation, without picking and choosing which saints the grace of God should be directed toward, is small miracle every time someone says it.  

   
It's a beautiful greeting, isn't it-"Grace and peace."  Try saying it to someone next to you.  Grace and peace to you.  What if that was our regular greeting inside these walls?  What if that said something about our reason for being, to make space for grace and a pocket of peace?
We have done it already, you know.  We have, by the grace of God, made a space for grace and a pocket of peace here among us.  One of our young members wrote about our church, "It is a safe and friendly place to come together with friends and family and express yourself without being judged."  Several other youth used words like "relaxed" when talking about how they feel when they are here.  Another wrote, "An open, welcoming and loving place to share and embrace your faith without being judged or criticized for your beliefs-a sense of community." 

It's not just the young people who have expressed gratitude for the shelter of a welcoming community.  One person said, "The church is home."  Another said of our church, "I was a stranger and you took me in."  Many of us have experienced a sense of openness, welcome, and freedom to explore the life of the spirit without undue dogmatic restraints.  Grace is a good word for that wide welcome; peace is a good word for a safe and spacious sanctuary carved out of a wound-up, pressure-cooker world.  And of course we didn't invent these blessings; we have just been doing what we can to be vessels for the grace and peace that God offers. 

  St. Paul offered this blessing, "Grace to you and peace," "to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi."  It's a dual address, if you look closely.  The first designation is broad and inclusive-all the saints in Christ Jesus-a nod to the faithful in every time and place.  Grace and peace are aimed at and channeled through Jesus' followers in lots of places, and that's important to remember.  But it's also addressed in particular to those saints in Phillipi.  They had a particular ministry in their time and place.  Phillipi was a crossroads community which witnessed daily the traffic of commerce, culture and religion between East and West.  It was a colony of Rome.  Probably anti-Semitic.  Not at all an easy place to be Christian.  But it was a strategic place for Christian mission, and Paul conveys a sense of the urgency of having the community of faith right there.

We recognize that we are not the only grace and peace franchise in town.  We acknowledge that God's work is underway in many communities of faith, both Christian and non-Christian.  God's grace is to all the saints.  But we have a particular place and particular gifts to share; we are part of God's strategic mission.  One of the purposes of the Round Table conversations we have completed is to try to get a clearer sense of what specific gifts we bring to the community.  What would be missing if we weren't here?

Many of us spoke about our building as a beautiful landmark, a link with the history of Old Bainbridge, and a symbol of faith and values in the heart of the town.  At the crossroads of commerce and government, we stand as a physical reminder of the importance of faith and the endurance of the religious community in an evolving landscape.  We recognize that as we inhabit this corner we are stewards of a icon of something larger than our local church.  Most of us would feel a profound sense of loss if this place was just another foo boutique or real estate office.  Therefore, the constant and sometimes heavy cost of caring for this building is not simply a burden but a ministry.

We have a fair consensus that being an open church is important to who we are and what we offer.  One of us expressed this as a "low threshold to get into the church."  We don't have a creed you must affirm or a set of qualifications you must meet in order to be a part of our church.  Now, we are well aware that there are many religious communities that find this stance scandalous.  The General Minister and President of the UCC, John Thomas, says that some Christians would call our welcome "promiscuous."  But in the UCC, and for the most part in this local church, we would call our welcome not "promiscuous" but "extravagant".  One of my colleagues calls the UCC the church of the free-range chickens-"it's where you go when they let you out of the cage."  By and large, we are happy to be a church of free-range Christians.  We are content to let other churches provide what some other people of faith genuinely need in terms of clear definitions, creedal clarity, rules and boundaries.  The gift we bring is openness, and we choose to live with the down side, which is the division that can rise out of diversity. 

Closely related to this is our sense of being people on a journey.  An article I read recently distinguished between "answer churches" and "journey churches."  If those are the categories, it's clear that this is a journey church, and we like thinking of each other as companions on the journey.  Many of the ministries people mentioned as those they value are perceived as supportive of one's spiritual journey: the Quest groups, the youth groups, the Bible study, the Sunday school classes, the Hungry Readers, the Men's Breakfast, Remedial Christianity and other such adult education programs, the worship hour.  We don't collectively expect to "arrive" or get to a place where we can stop growing in faith.  We bring that sense of journey as a gift to the community.

Many of us value the practice of faith that's not afraid to get its hands dirty.  That is, we believe deep down that grace and peace are not only God's gift to the churches but to the world, and that we are called to take the love of God out the doors with us.  We want to be part of a church that puts faith into practice in deeds of mercy, justice, and love.  One of the youth fellowship members who's part of another church said of us, "you do excellently in the good deed department."  Wherever there are good deeds to be done, we are there, individually or collectively.  We sometimes disagree about what qualifies as Christian action-for example, whether we should be outspoken in a quest for peace-but even so, few would vote to withdraw from the world.  We try to walk our talk, and that's a gift to the community even when we're knocking heads over it. 

We're not too fussy about the line between the sacred and the secular in this corner of God's kingdom, and I hope we will see that as a gift.  We have an instinctive understanding that God's spirit is moving both inside and outside religious communities, and that God's wisdom is not always communicated in strictly religious language.  The Men's Breakfast is a great example of a ministry that crosses freely over the boundary between sacred and secular.  That lively fellowship has discussed everything from global warming to ship building, from population control to the Comprehensive Plan, and even theology once in a while.  Some of the men in the group are part of the church, and lots of them aren't.  We proudly claim this as a ministry and would like to find other places to intersect with the broader community in meaningful study and fellowship.  It's becoming more and more important in a divided society to have places for the public to meet and have a civil dialogue on any number of topics.  It's an essential contribution in offering the blessing of peace, and we are uniquely positioned in both our physical and philosophical location to offer this gift to the community.

Are you getting a sharper sense of what our distinct ministry is about here at the corner of Madison and Winslow Way?  Our attempt to be vessels and conduits of God's grace and peace is as unique as a snowflake, delicately designed and deliberately dispatched to this place by the Creator.  I love Paul's words to the Philippians, and believe they apply to us as well: "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."  God began a good work among us in 1882, and is still in the process of bringing it to completion.  Every generation has the task of discernment as we discover the shape and texture the vessels of grace and peace are taking in our time.  Paul's prayer points to this process of discernment: "This is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what is best, so that in 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."  Fred Craddock's commentary on this verse suggests that the love Paul prays for is "not a love that is sentimental and easy and grins at the wrong time; not a love that shrinks from truth-telling and tough engagements; but a love that is joined to knowing and understanding, to probing and discerning, to putting itself to the test in real-life situations and making moral choices that count."1  That's the kind of love we would pray that God would overflow here.

Praying for or wishing for grace, peace and love to overflow in a harvest of righteousness don't make it so.  God's grace and peace and love can be either helped or hindered by the church.  Paul hints at discord in the church in Philippi, several times urging the congregation there to stand firm in one spirit and strive with one mind for the faith of the gospel.  "Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind."  Could that exhortation possibly apply to a church like ours, where we think of diversity of opinion as a real asset? 

Again, drawing on Fred Craddock's commentary, we note that being of the same mind does not refer to agreeing on everything, but to having a common attitude or orientation.  Being in full accord means not agreeing on everything but having souls joined in the same love, the love of Christ.  Paul gets a little more specific when talking about looking to one's own interests.  Craddock interprets his words this way: "Paul was not opposed to individualism in the sense that one is to be responsible for oneself and bear one's own burden.  If minding one's own business meant an unwillingness to bear another's burden, a distancing of oneself from partnership in the gospel, an aloofness from the common joy and suffering, a coldness to all the ways we are members one of another, then such individualism is destructive of the community and a contradiction of the gospel which speaks and sings of a Christ who was first and always a servant to others."2  The "mind of Christ" which Paul urges his friends toward is a spirit of love and servanthood.  There is a willingness to put others' interests alongside and even ahead of one's own.  There is a sense of humility and a willingness to forgive.  This "one mind," this orientation toward servanthood, will make effective ministry possible even in a hostile environment. 

We must acknowledge that we are trained in our culture to be consumers, not servants.  We may approach our church like consumers, expecting at some subconscious level to be treated like the proverbial customer who is always right.  If we are not pleased with some aspect of church life, we may be tempted to hold ourselves aloof from our companions, withhold adequate financial support, or at the extreme, "take our business elsewhere."  What we may forget is that we are not consumers of ministry.  We are partners in the gospel, producers of ministry and each of us vessels of grace and peace.  Our orientation is not to be our individual pleasure but rather an orientation to Christ's ongoing ministry of grace for the sake of the world.  We are one in this enterprise even on those occasions when we are driving each other crazy. 

Our consultant J.B. Fowler said to us a few weeks ago that we are at a critical juncture in our church life.  Maybe every juncture is a critical juncture, who knows?  But I think he's right.  We're at some kind of crossroad.  We're sharpening a sense of our identity.  We're finding new ways to articulate what gifts we offer to the community.  We're wrestling with what it means to follow Christ in our place and time.  We're being drawn in to new kinds of commitments.  It feels like we're on the cusp of something either exciting, or terrifying, or both.

I thank God for you, my friends.  For the opportunity to be partners in the gospel with you, from the first day until now.  I look forward with great anticipation to the continued unfolding of this ministry we've been given.  I have confidence that inasmuch as we orient ourselves toward Jesus and share ourselves unstintingly we will be vessels and conduits of grace and peace.    Let me share with you these sweet, tentative words from an outsider, a young person who visited our fellowship for the first time last week:  "I don't know much about this church, but the first time I came here they fed me a very good dinner, and all said hi to me very nicely, so that looks hopeful."  Hopeful indeed. 


1 Craddock, Fred Philippians: Interpretation Commentary  Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985, p. 21
2 Ibid. p. 38