Brunswick Baptist Church

Sermon – 28 February 2010

Bible readings: Psalm 27, Luke 9:28-36, Philippians 4:1-7

When I was a boy, the minister would always start the sermon on Sunday with the words, ‘I would like to take for my text today -----‘ Well I want to take for my text today Philippians 4 verse 6, ‘Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God’.

Some of you would have noticed that more often than not I preach from a passage in the Gospels, less often from the Letters or Epistles. There is a reason for that. I grew up with a sense that, as Athol Gill used to say, ‘the Gospels were for children and the Epistles for adults’. The churches I grew up in treated the Letters of Paul, Peter and John as the textbook for all Christian doctrine. The Gospels are about stories and parables and you don’t get doctrine from stories and parables. It was only when I studied with Athol that the full richness of the Gospels, with all of their discrepancies and contradictions, grasped my soul and convinced me that the Christian life is not about watertight doctrines but about knowing Jesus. You wouldn’t get a better story to demonstrate the discrepancies between the Gospels than the story of the Transfiguration:

- In Mark and Matthew the Transfiguration occurred six days after Jesus sayings about discipleship. In Luke it happened eight days after. In John’s Gospel it doesn’t happen at all, however the voice of God does speak audibly when Jesus is agonising over his impending death, but out of heaven, not out of a cloud.

- In Matthew and Mark Jesus is transfigured in front of the disciples as soon as they climb the mountain, in Luke Jesus is transfigured while he is praying and while Peter, John and James are heavy with sleep. Only when they wake up do they see what has happened to him.

- Matthew and Mark mention that Moses and Elijah, the great Jewish prophets, appear with Jesus, but only Luke tells us what they weer talking about. He says they were ‘talking about his (Jesus’) departure’; the Greek word for departure is ‘Ex-hodos’ – can you see why Moses had to be there? The Exodus from Egypt; the innocent lamb sacrificed to protect the first born sons of the Hebrew slaves; Jesus about to die and leave the disciples; his death and resurrection central to God’s salvation for the world. Only Luke spells out for us the theological significance of the Transfiguration, and only in Luke does it happen in the context of prayer. I want to return later to what this passage says about prayer and its connection with the Transfiguration in Luke.

So then, back to Philippians which seems to be accepted by the majority of scholars to have been written by the Apostle Paul, one of the great theological and pastoral minds of all time. It is a wonderful letter, written at a time when Paul was in gaol for proclaiming Jesus as Lord. He begins with a beautiful salutation, ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’. And he exhorts them to ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice’. Here is this great Saint, who has been persecuted, reviled and beaten, imprisoned, and would ultimately by executed, and he says to the people at Philippi – ‘Don’t worry, pray!’

The church at Philippi was very special to Paul. In Acts 16 we read how he had a vision of a man from Macedonia pleading with him to come and help. The first place he and his friend Silas stayed, in response to the dream was Philippi where he met Lydia, a ‘God-worshipper’, then ended up in gaol for exorcising a slave girl from a demon, and baptised his gaoler and the gaoler’s family after an earthquake broke open the prison doors and set all the prisoners free – great story.

Obviously from these rather chaotic beginnings a church was set up in Philippi, and equally obviously Paul kept in touch with the people and the events, just as we in this church have many former members who are deeply interested in all that is happening with us. Some of them pray for us every day. The church in Philippi had bishops and deacons but Paul doesn’t just address his letter to them. He writes to ‘all the saints (holy ones) who are in Christ Jesus in Philippi’. This was a terrific church, one that contributed generously to Paul’s collection for the poverty-stricken mother church in Jerusalem. But, like every other church that has ever been or ever will be, the church in Philippi experienced conflict and division. And Paul warns the church against the Judaising Christians who harass and confuse new Christians by teaching them that they must obey the law of Moses – including being circumcised – in addition to having faith in and following Jesus. He calls them dogs, evil workers, those who mutilate the flesh, enemies of the cross of Christ – go Paul, tell us what you really think!

The church is always prey to bad theology and to people who control others through bad theology. I remember when I was working as an engineer in Brisbane, working with a young man who believed absolutely in a doctrine of sinless perfection – he believed it is possible for Christians to achieve a state in which they don’t sin any more, and until I achieve that state of sinless perfection my salvation is not guaranteed. I saw what that diabolical doctrine did to another new Christian in our workplace. He became uncertain, introspective, anxious, and afraid. Fear and anxiety are the indicators that something is not right, that we’ve got our thinking or our priorities out of perspective.

‘Don’t worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God’.

What do you fear, what do I fear? What makes me anxious? Well, I worry about those baby boomers chasing me into retirement who will muck up my retirement plans; I worry about global warming and the kind of world my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will live in; I worry about the increasing knife culture in Melbourne; I worry about what the church property redevelopment will do to us as a community; I worry about whether I will have the mental, emotional and physical energy to see the building program through. I am a real little worrywart and bag of anxieties. My theme song could be the old Monty Python hit, ‘I’m so worried’:

I'm so worried about what's happenin' today, in the middle east, you know
And I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow
I'm so worried about the fashions today, I don't think they're good for your feet
And I'm so worried about the shows on TV that sometimes they want to repeat

I'm so worried about my hair falling out and the state of the world today
And I'm so worried about bein' so full of doubt about everything, anyway.

I'm so worried about modern technology
I'm so worried about all the things that they dump in the sea
I'm so worried about it, worried about it, worried, worried, worried

‘Don’t worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God’.

Notice that Paul separates prayer and supplication, both are important, but they are not the same. The word for supplication originally meant lack or need. I am conscious that I am lacking something, or someone needs something, and so I turn to God who supplies the thing that we lack – hence supplication. Our community prayers are pure supplication; we have deep concerns for ourselves, for our families, for our community, for our world. We, or people we care about, lack health; the people of Haiti lack shelter and food; our world lacks peace. Supplication can be driven by fear and anxiety, yet Paul says ‘Don’t worry – pray’.

Prayer is different from supplication. The kind of prayer Paul is talking about, and the kind of prayer Jesus went up a mountain for, was what Evelyn Underhill describes as the ‘surrender of the creature to the uncreated Spirit’. It is ‘The response made by a creature conditioned by time and space to a timeless and spaceless reality’ which we call God. She says that prayer engages ‘thought, feeling and imagination’, and that is why it is in prayer that we are most fully alive.

Back to Luke: ‘While he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, his clothes became dazzling white’. In prayer Jesus was most fully alive, and his face and his appearance were transformed. Peter, John and James were not transfigured because they had not been praying – they had been sleeping. They were heavy with sleep and their minds were befuddled, nevertheless they could see the transformation that had come over Jesus as he prayed. This kind of prayer must have space and time to get in touch with thoughts, feelings, fears, imagination, all in the context of faith in God Sometimes we need to do that on our own, but in this story, like in the Garden of Gethsemane, I think he longed for companions who would pray with him. Instead they fell asleep.

We are most fully alive when we pray. And when we have prayed our supplications will not be motivated by fear and anxiety, but by love, and by hope, and by faith. Supplication without prayer can become a catalogue of our wants. But when we are fully alive in prayer, thanksgiving and gratitude for the blessedness of our lives flows naturally.

‘Don’t worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God’.

Prayer is a discipline, a discipline I confess I have always struggled with. I wonder if there are others amongst us who also long to pray but find it too difficult. Perhaps you would like to speak with me afterwards and see if we can’t begin to climb the mountain of prayer and transfiguration together.

Notice that the conclusion of this passage in verse 7 is not a prayer for the church at Philippi, it is a promise for those who pray – future, active, indicative!

‘And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus’.

Amen