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Philippians 1:21

Tuesday, August 8th, 2017

For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.

Frontispiece

Over pasta last summer, on a hot July night, six of us of long friendship ate and talked. For decades, our dear friend has been a committed participant in a community group. She has taken pride in her work, preparing and practicing for her role, recruiting others and helping in the community. With spaghetti, wine, and the warmth of long relationship, we nodded and supped. But something had happened. The old committee chair left. A new one came. He was, sadly, rude and belligerent with his helpers. Not just once or twice.

Said she: “What should I do? I love the group, and I love my team. But his behavior I cannot abide. I have talked to him. He rebuffs me. If I stay, I endure and even collude in his misbehavior, but I will still have my voice in the group and with the committee. If I leave, I exit from what I love and also leave behind any influence I might have to help, support, or protect others. I am loyal to my friends, but I am ready to go. What should I do?”

Hours, days, and months are actually shot through with this form of dilemma in choice. Exit or voice? A famous study, written at MIT forty-five years ago, laid out for economists the dimensions of the dilemma.16 But such a condition goes well beyond the marketplace.

Having introduced our gospel, let us re-introduce ourselves, one to another . . .

We are grateful for your witness here, at Chautauqua, your ubiquitous ministry—lay, musical, clerical, and all. Incidentally, Peter Gomes left us a clue or two about ministry:

You ask me the secret of my success in ministry at Harvard over forty years? I give it to you in a single word: ubiquity. I am everywhere. I go everywhere. I attend everything. I enter every building and dorm. I walk through every yard and hill and valley and molehill. I go where I am invited. I go where I am not invited. I go where I am expected. I go where I am not expected. Surprise! It’s me. You ask my secret? I give it to you in a word: ubiquity. I am ubiquitous.17

Both exit and voice are themselves ubiquitous. Exit is as old as the exit from the Garden of Eden. Voice is as old as the dominical voice of Christ resisting temptation. Exit and voice: how do our Scriptures help us frame such living choices? These are good Lenten meditations. Paul: For me, to live is Christ—voice—to die is gain—exit.

Paul longs for exit. Paul lives for voice.

Student Life

Students of every age and stage—after all, we are all disciples, are we not?—understand the strange interplay between trial and faith. But that understanding comes through the ministry, here, of Asbury First, your location, history, architecture, program, music, pastoral care, and, especially, your voice. Good thing. In a recent Atlantic article, Marshall Poe concludes his essay:

American higher education is the envy of the world. Students come here from all over the globe to study. And American higher education is something we, as citizens, should be very proud of, for we built and fund a large portion of it. It’s really one of our crowning achievements as a nation.

American higher education has, however, one glaring deficiency: it does not teach its undergraduates how to live. It teaches them when the French Revolution was, what the carbon cycle is, and how to solve for X. It does not teach them what to do when they feel confused, alone, and scared. When they break down after a break-up. When they are so depressed they cannot get out of bed. When they drink themselves into unconsciousness every night. When they find themselves living on someone’s couch. When they decide to go off their meds. When they flunk a class or even flunk out of school. When they get fired. When a sibling dies. When they don’t make the team. When they get pregnant. When their divorced parents just won’t stop fighting. When they are too sick to get to the hospital. When they lose their scholarship. When they’ve been arrested for vandalism. When they hate themselves so much that they begin self-mutilating. When they’re thinking about suicide. When they force themselves to throw up after every meal. When they turn to drugs for relief from their pain. When they’ve been assaulted or raped. When their mind is racing and cannot stop. When they wonder about the meaning of it all. When they are terrified by the question, “What do I do next?”18

Philippians

How shall we use our human freedom faithfully in the light of the divine freedom known to us in Christ? We return to our Scripture and explore our experience. For this, the witness of the church—Asbury First—is crucial.

How beloved are the golden verses of Philippians. I propose that a survey of favorite verses—not your favorite hymn, psalm, or parable, but your single favorite verse—would show a heavy reliance on Philippians:

I thank my God in every remembrance of you. (Phil 1:3)

Thankful for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. (Phil 1:5)

For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. (Phil 1:21)

If there is any encouragement in Christ, any incentive of love, any participation in the Spirit, be of that mind. (Phil 2:1)

Have that mind among yourselves which you have in Christ Jesus, who took the form of a servant. (Phil 2:5)

That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:10–11)

Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Phil 3:13)

Our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a savior.

Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice. (Phil 4:4)

Have no anxiety about anything, but in all things by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. (Phil 4:6)

Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, gracious, excellent, praiseworthy, think about these things. (Phil 4:8)

I know how to be abased and I know how to abound. . . . I can do all things in him who strengthens me. (Phil 4:12)

Experience

Take heart for the long journey, the daily exit from the green garden, and the hourly summons of the dominical voice. The strange world of the Bible nourishes us.

Exit or voice—or resignation? Fight or flight—or play dead?

Your roommate smokes for breakfast, drugs for lunch, drinks for dinner. Do you leave—him, school, or both? Do you confront—“one of us is crazy and I think it’s you”? Do you grin and bear it?

Your faculty has taken a new direction, that is, a wrong turn. For well-intentioned reasons, in the plan for a new curriculum, they have exchanged birthright for pottage. Do you politic, agitate, criticize, and combat in what may well be a losing cause? Do you call a friend who has wanted you to come to Cornell or Colgate for a long time anyway and prepare to exit? Or do you close your door, grade your papers, and play a little more golf?

You are a young person entering ministry and a cradle Methodist. You affirm the full humanity of gay people and eschew any bigotry against sexual minorities. Do you exit and seek orders in the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Congregational, American Baptist, or Unitarian churches? Or do you stay and lift your voice within Methodism, recognizing that the struggle will be generational in length (longer than my lifetime, perhaps), global in breadth (requiring the warming and freeing of African hearts and votes), and gritty in depth (underground railways to marry gays and deploy ordained gays—both prayer and political love.)

Your brother is about to marry the wrong woman. He is impressionable and she is impressive—an empress if you will. Do you shout a warning and then risk never speaking to him again? Do you reason, consult, have lunch, empathize, and appeal to the better angels of his nature? Do you throw up your hands, send an early shower gift, and bite your tongue?

You are a major world superpower. With limited success, you have partially pacified a part of the Middle East. Now what? Do you exit stage left, leaving behind a decade of warfare, tens of thousands dead, tribal hatreds still much in evidence, and hope for the best? Do you stay, increase your footprint and military presence, giving voice to the rights and needs of children, women, non-muslims, and others? Or do you practice a little benign neglect, and put your energy into health care, immigration reform, nuclear disarmament, Chinese economics, and the next election?

You are the dad in an immigrant family where three have papers and two do not. Do you stay, with risk, placing your voice in chorus with that of Emma Lazarus (“Give me your tired, your poor . . .”), or do you exit, to Montreal, to the Olympic Stadium, and make a new life?

You are a member of a nearby city church, which is about to be closed by superintendents, general and district, neither of whom has ever served a city church in upstate New York. What do you do? Go down the street? Write a letter? Exit or voice?

You are on your third session of marriage counseling. You know that, “I do,” cannot become, “I redo.” But you need some growing space. What do you do?

You are a great, large church in a shrinking, splintering denomination. Your buildings, savings, endowments, and apportionments are held in trust for the denomination. Your ministerial leadership comes thence by appointment. How do you address this relationship? With distance, silence, absence, and exit, hoping for the best? Or with proximity, noise, presence, and voice, planning for the worst?

Today’s Lesson

How much for exit and how much for voice? How much for flight and how much for fight? And then, when do you just pull your turtle head back into the shell and play dead?

In 54 AD, Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle to the Gentiles, in a verse with links to exit and voice, wrestled with the same angel/demon.

On one hand, he wrote: “For me, to live is Christ, to die is gain. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell” (Phil 1:21). For once, his regular apocalyptic eschatology, the horizontal primitive hope of the day of the Lord, which he fully expects to see in the flesh, gives way to a simple, vertical, Greek, gnostic eschatology, an immediate translation to glory. Troubles, trouble in the churches it may be, spark Paul’s momentary exit strategy, his longing to “depart and be with Christ.”