Book: Philippians

This greatest and most important spectacle - the celebration of Holy Week, culminating in the glory of Easter, portrays all that was, all that is, and all that is to be in the drama of our salvation.

Beloved, the Church is the only place where people can find true healing and refuge from the failings of a fallen world. We have an obligation to stand as outposts of truth and sanity amid a culture that is losing its collective grip on reality. This requires the Church to no longer abandon her simple duty to point out what is right and wrong, even when it is “controversial.” Our call to embrace the incarnate life, then, is to accept our duty as the Church - to be the hands and feet of Christ in our communities.

God spoke the universe into existence. God created all we can and cannot see. This same Divinity broke into time and space, born of a Pure Virgin, to save all of humanity. But we in our folly refuse to accept this glorious truth while at the same time believing we will make science fiction a reality. This contradiction must not be so for the professing Christian.

Paul explains to the Philippians how Christ is the ultimate example of counting others as more significant than yourself. Christ’s entire life, in fact, was singularly oriented toward His willing humiliation and death on the Cross, a perfect sacrifice for our sins, to the Glory of God the Father. Jesus, of all people to ever live, had every excuse and every means to exalt himself and save his life, and yet He laid His life down without grumbling or complaining. Let us examine ourselves, therefore, against Christ’s perfect standard of humility.

The LORD says through the prophet Isaiah, “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert… for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise” (Isaiah 43:19, 21). We all have wilderness experiences in our lives, but God will never leave us or forsake us, and it is the mark of the Christian to praise God even when everything life appears to be going wrong.

Anyone can believe IN God, certainly a god of our own creation - we really enjoy doing that. What we fail at is BELIEVING God, that is, putting our faith in Jesus Christ to save us from our sins, and not trusting our own works. When we trust in Christ, His righteousness is imputed to us by faith. Listen as the Rector discusses God’s covenant with Abraham, and how God’s faithfulness requires that we not only believe in Him, but believe and trust Him fully.

We rejoice because the Lord is near to us. We do not serve some faraway God who sits up in an ivory tower, nor do we serve some “divine clockmaker” who wound up the gears of space and time and then stepped back to watch without any involvement. We are instead blessed by a Lord who knows each and every one of us intimately, who took on our very flesh to dwell among us, and who promised to come again one day and redeem all of creation.

There is the expectation that those to whom we are accountable will eventually visit us, and we should want to have our very best prepared to make a good impression. The same is true of our preparation for the coming Day of the Lord.

Christ's Passion, His final hours before the Cross, form the climax of all human history. An honest reading of the Passion narrative shows us the incredible weight of Jesus' great sacrifice. Our challenge, then, is this: Do we live as if this is true?