To Be Right or To Be In Relationship (Philippians 1:2-6, 12-27)

This sermon was originally preached on June 9, 2024 at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.

The livestream of our service may be viewed here.  Today's scripture text is Philippians 1:3-6, 12-27 . It serves at the first of a four-sermon series through the letter to the Philippians on "Finding Joy in the Ordinary."
image: "Queer Pieta" (Michelangelo x Amy Courts)

A preface: This sermon did not come easily. In fact, it didn't really come at all. After literal days of mulling and chewing and writing all the notes and ideas and plans, and spending eight focused hours into the wee hours of Sunday morning when I finally gave up, I still showed up to worship with maybe five of the paragraphs you read below. So I invited the Spirit to move as She willed, to speak as She wished, and this is what came out.  For this reason, it's longer by a lot and doesn't read the way my typical sermons might. But it is precisely what was needed, and even garnered applause at the end -- which never happens. Thanks be to God and the Spirit!

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So good morning! I wasn't kidding when I said that Louis could preach today because it would probably be better than what I came up with in the last 20 minutes. The reality is this week has been a mess, I have been way too in-my-head, trying to find exactly what I needed to say and find --  There's a lot of verses on this page! Where, what am I looking for?! What am I going to find?! That has been the stress, along with like driving to and from other states, so I am here, we are here together, and that is the good, that is the good beautiful, joyful thing that I am clinging to right now, even as I beg the Spirit to come and be with us and breathe through whatever it is that comes out of my mouth. Amen. 

So today, we do begin our sermon series through the book of Philippians on Finding Joy in the Ordinary, and I get to start us off by simply acknowledging that joy is often hard to find. Pastor John mentioned a couple weeks ago -- last week?  -- we did this Enneagram thing. How many of you know the Ennea- Anybody? There's like three of you and half of you are staff. It's this personality thing that kind of shows you where your passion is, where your focus can be, and kind of what drives you internally. And for me, I am an Enneagram 4: I am the Individualist. I am the Creator. I want everything I say to be perfect and special. And I love sad things! I love feelings, I love big feelings, I love getting really deep -- really deep -- in the yuck and pulling it apart and going, “Where is the life here?” So that's what I get to do today. We'll see if it actually gets done! 

The reality is that especially within the the Queer community, of which I am part, in the United States we know deep in our bodies and our bones how hard it can be to find joy and to be full of joy in a world that so often hates us and wishes that we would just not be this. Paul knew it too. The people that he spread the gospel to and who took that gospel and spread it further -- they knew this in their bodies and their bones. And so I am going to begin at the end of Paul's teaching here, in verse 27 where he says, “Only live your life in a manner worthy of the Gospel, so that I will know you are standing firm in one Spirit, striving side by side with one mind, for the faith of the gospel." And I start here because this is the instruction, the commendation, that anchors everything else that Paul is going to say to the Philippians in the coming chapters. And it can anchor us as well, as we move into the rest of it, and as we move into our days.

Here, Paul is exhorting the Saints at Philippi to conduct themselves in a

manner worthy of the gospel and the Greek word here for “conduct yourselves” literally means to live as citizens -- "live your life as citizens of the gospel.” And he goes on to stay, "stand firm in one Spirit" -- Pneuma -- "with one mind" -- Psyche -- "striving" -- Sunathleó -- "for the gospel."

That word Spirit, Pneuma,  is Breath. This is God, right? “Stand firm in one Spirit, one Breath; With one mind, which is one Will or one Soul, one Center that drives you, and pulls you, and gravitates you to The Thing.” One mind, one Spirit. And this is what I love: Sunathleó means “cooperating vigorously with each other” in faithfulness to the Kin-dom.

Years ago when Paul and I were dating, we argued about something new. I was constantly in a state of, “is this a deal breaker, is this not a deal breaker” because he came from a different family with different beliefs, and had already gone through this deconstruction, so he was just like, “Love God. Love each other. What is the big deal!?” And I was still anchored in some fundamentalist beliefs where I was like, “If God didn't create the world in seven exact days, and if you don't believe that, then we can't we can't be together. If you don't agree with everything I think about politics, we can't be together.”

And so I was stuck in this constant tension of “Do-I-stay-or-do I-go, Do-I-stay-or-do I-go?” And I was having a conversation with a dear friend of mine, who remains unmarried to this day, and he was telling me about how he dated a lot of women, and he could have married a lot of women had he not been looking for perfection. 

And so he said this: 
“Amy, what matters more to you? To be right, or to be in relationship?”  

Would I choose rightness or would I choose relationship? 
Friends, I am so glad I chose relationship. I'm so glad I chose relationship. 

Now, before we go back to the beginning of Paul's letter, I want to set the context of today's text so we can get a better idea from where and to where Paul is preaching, and why it matters for us -- especially for Queer people, Queer Christians -- today. 

First of all, a bit about Philippi according to Jane Lancaster Patterson: Roughly 100 years before his letter was written, Philippi was the site of the final battle of the Roman Civil War. The town was taken by Anthony and Octavian and then subsequently colonized by Rome who “seized all of its tillable land from the local Greek-speaking populace and gave it to Roman veterans.” And so the Saints to whom Paul writes in Philippi are, first of all ,people who are no longer considered citizens of their own land -- which makes that final instruction to “conduct yourselves lives as citizens of the Gospel” all the more prescient, right? Instead of being citizens of Rome, these people are subjects in a settler-occupied territory, whose presence is tolerated at best and threatening at worst to the Romans who now live and rule them. Not only that, but they are subjects of the very same Empire which crucified the Christ they now follow as an Enemy of the State just 29 years before Paul wrote them this letter in 61 A.D. Which is to underscore as, Dr Patterson writes, that “Paul's letter is addressed to a community of people who have known and continue to experience economic precariousness and social ostracism.” 

Paul, for his part, is writing to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi,with whom he had established a partnership nearly a decade prior when he and Silas first visited Philippi. That was when they baptized Lydia, the seller of purple cloth who our other Pastor is named after. They baptized her; They were promptly arrested and thrown in jail in Philippi; And once they were released, they were welcomed to Lydia's home. All of that you can read about in Acts 16. 

So now, 10 years later, Paul is incarcerated again, at least for the second time time -- probably for the many-more-time’th -- and he faces execution as a result of his work in spreading the gospel. In fact, between his conversion on the road to Damascus around AD 33, when he was utterly radicalized in relation to both his religion and in relation to the Roman Empire -- between those two things and now, Paul would be tortured over and over and over again, incarcerated for at least 5 years on two separate occasions -- though Clement of Rome believes that he was incarcerated at least seven times --  and whether chained to prison guards on modified house arrest or shackled and thrown into cave jails, To Be a Prisoner of Rome was to be dependent, utterly dependent, on the people you knew on the outside, for everything from blankets and food to water and clothes.

Paul has almost certainly seen it all, so when he writes from the prison where he awaits a life or death sentence, giving thanks for these Saints and their partnership in the gospel as he does in verse 4, it is not an abstract idea or anything that is ethereal or out-there. It is a lived, physical reality. He thanks them for their partnership in the gospel, and this word that he uses here, Koinonia, as Dr Katherine Shaner underscores, “[i]s more than just a ‘hey we're all on the same team’ kind of grouping; …It is a concrete discret group of people who share in a partnership…that is formalized, recognizable to the outside, and often has tangible goals,” whether a shared financial or personal stake in a large valuable entity. 

And in this case, the currency, the thing in which they are all invested and around which they have all partnered, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Going deeper still, The Gospel of Christ here refers to two things:

First of all, in general "the Gospel" is the advancement of Christ's proclamation in Luke 4 that He has come by the power of the Holy Spirit to free the incarcerated, restore sight to the blind, Liberate the oppressed, declare the year of the Lord's favor, and in so doing embody the Fulfillment of God's word to Isaiah. That Gospel of General Liberation and favor -- that is their currency, their means and their ends as a koinonia. Their partnership revolves around this liberative gospel.

But in today's text, Paul is referring more specifically to the life and death relationship between a prisoner within the Roman carceral system who may well soon be sentenced to Roman capital punishment, and his benefactors who are themselves an occupied community of non-citizens under colonial rule, who have lived the last decade in defiance of that Empire to be in partnership with Paul for the gospel.

So that's the setup for today's text and for this series: An occupied people in an imperial Roman Colony are practicing their faith in the shadows, in the prisons, as members of a koinonia that was "explicitly outside the regions of the acceptable and outside of the legal and the condoned." (Guest, Queer Bible Commentary) They have partnered in very concrete, visible public ways with Paul who is a known enemy of Rome and a victim of Imperial violence and injustice, and they have partnered with him in a public way to spread the liberating gospel of Christ who was executed by that Empire. 

As Deryn Guest writes in the Queer Bible Commentary, “The letter to the Philippians only makes sense when viewed with this context actively in mind. In the this way it is Queer [italics mine]. It is a perspective from the margins, and it is a letter written by and to those that the larger society viewed as unacceptable and illegitimate, but by and for those who had discovered a joy that the condemnations of society could not dampen.” They are in active rebellion against Rome and they have taken extraordinary risks to help Paul for the sake of the Bible -- I'm sorry, for the sake of the Gospel; the Bible would come years later  -- and he is telling them to take heart and get louder for two big reasons.

First, every injustice he suffers in the name of Christ emboldens other siblings in Christ and partners in the gospel to take more courageous and more visible risks in proclaiming the liberation of Christ as the only alternative to Empire. And as a result of that, of course, more people are hearing the gospel and proclaiming and joining the kin-dom of God which is the Better Way.

And secondly, he rejoices because whatever happens to him -- whether he is liberated or executed -- his very own body will be a site of Christ's exaltation and the Empire's condemnation, the way that all victims of Empire hold up a mirror and show us in their bodies the inviolable and inalterable corruption and violence of Empire in all of its forms; And the degradation of our own Humanity when we accommodate rather than reject the Powers of the World.

I want to make this clear, what I'm talking about when I say that a body is like Proclamation, that it is a prophecy, a revelation, of who the Empire is and who we are. What I'm saying is this: When you see Christ on the cross, lifted, what you see is an innocent man slaughtered because the Empire is scared. And that tells you who the Empire is, right? That body tells you who the Empire is the way that George Floyd's body under the knee of a police officer showed you who our Empire is. Bodies are prophecies: Bodies are sites of the exaltation of Christ and sites of the condemnation of Empire. 

We Queer folks see this a lot -- we see a lot of this in this letter. What we know and have experienced and what we now enjoy as PRIDE month began in secret. They were the celebrations of Queerness at underground drag shows which, when discovered, were often raided by police, and the people were violently brutalized by those police and dispersed. They were not supposed to be there. They were not allowed to gather. To be Queer, prior to 1969, in the United States, was illegal. It led to unspeakable police brutality and common collective brutality against Queer bodies. 

And ultimately it led to an uprising of those Queer bodies against the Powers of Empire that said Queer folks were not okay. The police raided Stonewall Inn in June of 1969, and those Queer and trans and homeless youth rose up and said, “Not anymore! You cannot shame us. You cannot tell us we do not belong. You cannot beat us up anymore. God made us. Our joy and our beauty and our Queerness is Holy and Sacred, and we will fight to protect it."

As they say, “The first PRIDE was a riot” led by none other than our Black Trans Fairy Godmother, Marsha P Johnson, who was lynched both for her Blackness and her Queerness. Which is all just to say: PRIDE did not begin as a street dance but a street fight during which trans, gay, bisexual, and other marginalized folks fought not just for their Joy but for their very survival. And if it weren't for those fights I could not be here today. 

It also brings to mind how long it took and how fraught it was for women to be granted the rite of ordination in the ELCA -- even longer still for Black women -- and that if I had heeded the call of Christ upon my life prior to 2009, I would have been silenced. I would not have been welcomed here, in the ELCA, anywhere.

This was our Bishop-Elect Jen Nagle's experience as she served in churches for years and years, heeding her own call to ministry in congregations that would not ordain her. And she stayed. And she kept at it so that in 2009, when Queer people were finally allowed to be ordained in the ELCA, she was one of the first ordained. And she is now our Bishop-Elect in the Minneapolis Area Synod. That is what the PRIDE riots did: They gave us a Queer Bishop they gave you a Queer pastor. And my friends, I don't know if you know this but that's awesome! That is -- you can celebrate with me! It is Good News that I get to be here! 

But it is still fraught, because it is always easier to do things the way they've always been done, to not rock the boat, to refrain from taking risks in order to avoid disagreement and conflict at all costs, and to never change our minds about things we don't understand. And my friends, that is the aim of Empire. Empire wants us to pretend that everyone is the same, and that nobody is different, and to be afraid of anyone who does show up differently, because if we are afraid of each other, we cannot be community. We cannot partner with people that we are afraid of. It prevents us from becoming the Kin-dom of God. 

But koinonia partnership is the opposite: It calls for the real real. It is costly and scary and deeply uncomfortable. It asks us to look at things we don't want to see, to admit things we've long denied, to turn from evil and create something good. And that can put a Target on our backs. But that's also how you know it's the gospel: “The gospel always feels like bad news before it's good news, because when Christ comes nothing remains unchanged.” (Matthew Skinner, Working Preacher Sermon Brainwave, episode #636.) 

So we go back to this end here in verse 27: “Live your life as a citizen of the gospel of Christ so that whether I come to you or am absent, I will know that you are standing firm in one Spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the Gospel.” Friends, this does not mean that we have to be in agreement about everything. We do not all have to like each other. One of the best and most powerful things that I have ever learned from my Black teachers and Indigenous teachers is that, because of the harm that I have caused in the past, there are some who will not ever like me, and that's okay because we can still partner together and do the work of Justice together.

We do not have to like everybody among us. We do not have to agree about everything, but we can be together and learn from each other. We can open ourselves to other ways of being, to other expressions of God's Beauty, and in so doing be the full singular breath of the Spirit, as one body with many beautiful, individual, necessary parts; standing firm as an alternative to Empire.

We get to be the community that says, “We are a mess. We fight, we don't get along, we don't understand each other, but we love each other deeply and so we're going to stay put. We're going to figure it out. We're going to be Queer people and straight people and people who don't understand any of it, together, because that is the gospel."

That is the gospel that Paul fought and ultimately died for. That's the gospel that all of the Apostles died for, that hundreds and thousands of Christians were martyred for: It's not rightness. It was not a fight to be right -- That's the Empire's fight! The Empire needs to be right. We get to be in relationship.  

So that is what I'm asking of you today: Wherever you are on this journey of understanding or thinking about Queer people, about inclusion, about acceptance; Whatever you have been taught, whatever doctrines or teachings you hold on to, hold them loosely and come together, and be with people who are not like you so that we can all show each other God.

This is the Gospel of Christ.
This Is The Liberation of God for the people of God. 
Amen.