The Sauntering Pilgrim

After I had delivered a particularly open-ended sermon, someone approached me and asked, with a look of friendly but serious frustration, “So what’s the bottom line?” Apparently she had been expecting an insight that would help her understand something about life, a teaching that would answer her questions, or an application that would inform her in what she should do. My sermon had provided none of those things – no “bottom line,” as she put it – and it left her disappointed.

Perhaps you, too, are searching for a bottom line. Do you recall your most urgent question? What’s in store for this congregation? Why is there so much conflict and hate in the world? How do I stop my anxiety from taking over? Will the mistakes I’ve made be forgiven? How do we get people to take better care of the earth? Can I find a way to be content with the life I have? Why are we here, and why is it so difficult for some of us to be the Love we are?

When someone wrote to German poet Rainer Maria Rilke with some urgent question or other, Rilke responded, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything” (Letters to a Young Poet).

But at times we do grow impatient with all that is unresolved in our hearts. We do seek answers now; lots of people are seeking them. Run an online search of a question like, “What’s the purpose of life?” and almost instantly you’ll get thousands upon thousands of responses. It seems to be in our human nature to want someone, even a computer search engine, to lead us to the bottom line.

Members of the early church in Philippi were looking for the bottom line in their relationship with Christ, and they were proposing all kinds of answers. Some were proclaiming Christ from envy and rivalry, others from goodwill; some out of love, others out of selfish ambition. Some were even trying to increase the suffering of their founding pastor. “What does it matter?” St. Paul wondered. “Just this,” he wrote, “that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true.” Whatever their motives, the Philippians were engaging Christ at a deep, visceral level as they tried to make sense of their lives. They were wrestling with urgent questions of faith in the context of their faith. And in that, Paul rejoiced (Phil. 1:15-18).

However you may understand and interpret and share Christ with others, Paul wrote, just “be of the same mind, having the same love,” looking “not to your own interests but the interests of others” (2:2-4). You may not think alike, and you may not worship alike, and you may deeply disagree with one another about everything else, but be certain in this, at least: be certain to love alike. Value one another enough to accept and embrace your differences, even differences in other matters of faith. But you must never turn aside from loving one another.

Paul was extraordinarily liberal in that. So he encouraged the Philippians, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure (Phil. 2:12-13). He was not encouraging them to behave well so they would be rewarded later, and he was not encouraging them to a particular faith so they might go to heaven one day. He did not understand God as a frightening “great judge in the sky” who will send you to everlasting punishment if you don’t play the game of life properly.

Paul understood God as a warmly welcoming, ever-present helper who is always nurturing us toward fullness and wholeness of life. And he understood that “salvation” meant freedom from our enslaving passions of every kind, freedom from ways of life that diminish or demean or limit life, freedom from ways of life that prevent us from living the fullest, most complete and fulfilled life possible today.

Work together as a community, he wrote – in his letters, “you” is almost always plural, referring not to the individual but to the whole body of the church – not so that in the end you get translated to heaven and others get left behind, but so you have today the best, fullest, most complete life possible, and so you’re able to share that quality of life with those around you. Don’t live today with an eye to heaven tomorrow; live today with an eye to all that by God’s grace is possible today. It’s the church’s calling to demonstrate that such a life is possible and that others can have it, also. It’s our sacred commission to fulfill the ancient covenant, that we are blessed by God so that we will be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:1-3).

The way we work out our salvation in the laboratory of our life together will be unique. The particular successes of other congregations may inspire us and give us examples on which to build. We may be moved by envy or rivalry or even selfish ambition (cf. Phil. 1:15-17). We may compete to have the best music ministry in the region; we may boast of the number of burritos we serve to our disadvantaged neighbors each month; we may take pride in what we contribute to the kids in School 17; we may compete with neighboring congregations to be the place to be on Sunday morning; or we may have motives that are darker still. None of that matters if we are motivated first of all by love.

However, no matter how we work out our salvation, sooner or later it will cost us something. In a world that is constantly changing, in a creation that is constantly unfolding, in a world where God is always doing a new thing (Isa. 43:18-19), working out the shape of our love will require that we also are constantly changing and unfolding and doing a new thing. And the cost is this:  to be the people God is creating us to be, we will no longer be able to be the people we have been. And to be the congregation God is creating us to be in this place, in this city, today, we will no longer be able to be the congregation we have been.

I wish I could tell you what that will look like. I wish I could tell you what it will cost in particular and not merely in general that it will cost you everything. I wish I could point you to the bottom line. But there is no bottom line because you have not yet created it. The puzzle of working out your own salvation has not yet taken shape completely because you have not finished putting the pieces together. There is more working out of your salvation to do, more imagination to follow, more creativity to engage, more love to give in new ways in ever-changing situations to neighbors with ever-changing needs.

The only thing I can tell you with confidence is that God is in the process and invites us to be fully in the process as well. As Paul said to the Philippians, I can say to you: “it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for [God’s] good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). Like a potter at the wheel, God is shaping you and reshaping you into a vessel of God’s own choosing (Jer. 18:1-4). Yield to it in faith and confidence, and don’t be anxious about the bottom line. ▪