So: taking my inspiration from the extraordinary, but perhaps over-familiar, passage from the end of the Epistle to the Philippians that we have just heard read, let me consider briefly three related themes that Paul here covers in so short a compass, and yet so magisterially: first, the paradoxical relation of anxiety and joy secondly, the central importance of prayer and meditation in deflecting and metabolizing anxiety and third, the gift of peace that can thereby interrupt our anxiety and release us, and our mission, back into the incomprehensible depths of divine love and divine power in Christ.įirst, then: what is anxiety and how is it related to joy? “Rejoice in the Lord always,” begins Paul in this exordium – he uses here the familiar verb chairete, a word that can mean both ‘be joyous’ but also ‘farewell’ (it’s still a rather old-fashioned way of saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ in Greece) and we recall that Paul is writing from his own desperate situation of imprisonment and potentially imminent threat of death. In particular, and in the light of our current turmoil about racism in this country, I shall be drawing especially on the extraordinary spiritual writings of Howard Thurman, himself an Afro-American theologian of the Calvinist tradition, and one whose radical depths of insight – dare I say it – probe to a level much deeper than the politicized divisions on racism that are now afflicting us afresh. Yet let me also put it you that no good mission ever sprang from anxiety, even though no good mission is ever devoid of its threat and that is why I believe we need to think about this topic afresh today – with Paul, with John Calvin, and with a number of other sage contemporary witnesses along the way. For let me put it to you that so many of our current busy Western strategies for combatting so-called “denominational decline,” can themselves be deeply anxiety-inducing, as if the objective ecclesiastical state of affairs, with its internal divisions, were not already bad enough in itself. But perhaps we spend less time than we should in reflecting theologically and spiritually about what anxiety actually is, how it undermines our Christian witness, and how it can be creatively resisted and transformed (not, note, obliterated – that would be super-human) in our own spiritual lives and in our work as ministers. We do, of course, have plenty of things to be anxious about: I have just listed them, and one would have to be either super-human or in some kind of denial not to feel their combined force. For when, in any of our lifetimes, have we felt so profoundly the combined threats of mortal pandemic illness, economic instability, loss of confidence in democratic processes and the force of “truth,” radical erosion of church attendance and cultural confidence in the historic North American denominations, international threats of global war and ecological meltdown, and – most disturbingly in this country right now, but not only here – newly-stirred racist division and hatred, with its ever-present threat of violence? What a time to be a Christian minister what a time to enter afresh into that great responsibility of mission that the gospel enjoins on us.Īnd so I want to speak to you, this afternoon, as you stand on the cusp of new adventures in your own ministerial lives, about what I think is one of the deepest and most pervasive threats we confront at this time, in our own psyches and in our ministry and that is the threat of anxiety. To graduate this year, however, and from this august seminary in the Reformed tradition, is not only to have completed all your academic and pastoral requirements successfully, but already to have proved your mettle and courage as current and future ministers in a time of unique trial and challenge for the churches and for the world.
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