Dean L. Gregory Jones' Opening Convocation Sermon
August 30, 2006
"Excellent Harmonies"
Terrorism. Iraq. Global warming. Plane crashes. Lacrosse. Racial injustice. Poverty. Church splits large and small. Cancer. “We need you to undergo some tests for an irregularity that appeared in your scan.” Haunting memories. Daunting workload. Shrinking budgets. Increasing debt. CH13 and OT11. Greek conjugations. Hebrew vocabulary. “Preach the Word of God, for your congregation is depending on your faithfulness to the Gospel they came to hear.”
We live in anxious times – in our world, in our country, on Duke’s campus, in our families, and even here in the divinity school. Every time we begin to relax, something emerges to create anxieties, to keep us up at night. My father used to say that serving as a seminary administrator means that you sleep like a baby – you wake up every few hours and cry. There will likely be times this semester when each of us, for different reasons, with different questions and issues in mind, will find ourselves sleeping like babies.
So I bring you the good news from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, chapter 4, verses 4 through 6a: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything.”
There you are. Have a great semester. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Huh?
What a rhetorical misfire. Paul’s pious speech couldn’t possibly address the challenges and struggles we face. After all, he lived before the Holocaust, before nuclear weapons, before 9/11. Heck – he even lived before the core requirements of Duke Divinity School. His words sound like the pious platitudes of popular culture: “Don’t worry, be happy.” What does he have to say to us?
“A lot,” says the preacher, perhaps unsurprisingly. Lest we think we had it tough, we should recall that Paul wrote these words from prison – a prison that separated him from his beloved friends. And the “joy” to which Paul calls us to is not the passing emotions that come with a terrific grade on an exam, or the return affection of the one who caught your eye, or another triumph by the Duke women’s basketball team. As he indicates elsewhere in the letter, Paul rejoices in the fact that the Gospel is preached even if some have false motives (1:18), and he and the Philippians share in mutual rejoicing in the midst of suffering by holding fast to the word of life (2:16-18).
Paul isn’t calling us to rejoice and to not worry by pretending that everything will be fine if we wish it so. His isn’t a “don’t worry, be happy” sort of message. Rather, his joy is rooted in a trust in God, a trust in the drama of the salvation that has been wrought by Christ. Similarly, his call “not to worry” isn’t an invitation to pretend that there aren’t things to worry about – rather, as the words immediately following indicate, we are freed “not to worry” by turning to God: “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (4:6b). Paul’s life and ministry offered plenty to be anxious about, just as our lives and our world do.
Yet, unlike the Stoics, we aren’t called to overcome our anxiety by “picking ourselves up by our bootstraps” and willing ourselves into self-confidence. We are to trust in God, giving thanks for God’s glory and goodness.
In so doing, we are offered the peace of God – a peace that will “guard [our] hearts and [our] minds in Christ Jesus” (4:7). Paul calls us to a life of prayer, a formation of our spiritual life through disciplines and practices that keep our hearts and our minds focused where they belong – on Christ Jesus. And we can be joyful whatever our circumstances – an invitation not to complaining or dwelling on the negative, but focusing on the One who gives us life and adopting a pattern of “living thankfully.” There is far more to be gained by focusing on what and whom we love than by cynical negativity – tempting though the latter might be.
If we are centered in Christ, then we can face any challenges that come our way – including the beginning of a new school year and all of its demands, even the beginning of a whole new journey in preparation to become pastoral leaders, preachers, teachers, prophets, administrators, and other leaders in ministry.
Vaclav Havel, the great writer and, eventually, president of the Czech Republic, wrote a poem, “It is I Who Must Begin,” that is instructive:
- It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try –
here and now, right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently –
to live in harmony
with the ‘voice of Being’ as I
understand it within myself –
as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.
Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.
We are not lost if we practice lives of prayerful thanksgiving, keeping ourselves focused on the transforming, life-giving power of Jesus. We are called, “all the more persistently,” to live in harmony – and thereby to challenge the cacophony of a broken and fragmented world, and the cacophony of our own memories and fears and inner conflicts. Such harmony, shaped by prayerful thanksgiving, is cultivated – as the rest of Philippians (and all of Paul’s letters) reminds us – in the common life of Christians who nurture holy friendship with God and with one another.
Paul follows his invitation to prayer with an injunction to think – to think about whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise (4:8). Again, on one level this injunction sounds like the pious platitudes of a college administrator at the beginning of the year – “students, let’s all spend the year thinking about what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable….” (It is especially good if it is said with a stern voice and sober tone). If that is all Paul is telling us, he’s not saying much that wouldn’t have been commonly accepted – whether in the Greco-Roman world or in our own.
Paul is after something much deeper. As Stephen Fowl perceptively notes in his commentary on Philippians (Eerdmans, 2005), Paul is calling the Philippians – and us – to engage in rigorous study and thought so that we can appropriately discern what is genuinely characteristic of truth, honor, justice, purity, respect, admiration. Such discernment requires careful understanding of God through study of Scripture and doctrine (to distinguish God from the “gods” we so often substitute), analysis of historical as well as contemporary contexts, and understanding of practices of Christian life and ministry. It involves study of those who have sought truth as well as those who embodied truthful lives, those who have studied justice as well as those who have lived justly, study of what “faithful” purity means as well as those who have lived pure lives, and the like. It also involves careful, prophetic analysis to help us distinguish simulacra from the real thing – within as well as beyond the discourses and practices of the church.
How can we study in service to faithful discernment? One component is the prayer that will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. The second component is to imitate Paul’s faithfulness – “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me” (4:9a). It is a call to apprenticeship in faithful practice – and what have the Philippians learned and received and heard and seen in Paul?
A full answer would require a lifetime of theological education, including apprenticeship to saints before us as well as those around us. We receive clues by looking earlier in Philippians, specifically at the beginning of the second chapter. What the Philippians have received and heard and seen in Paul, among other things, is a concern to put away “selfish ambition” (2:3) for the sake of the Gospel. This critique of “selfish ambition” suggests there is an appropriate ambition – to be ambitious for the Gospel. It is an ambition shaped by the Holy Spirit and committed to the bonds of community, to the quality of common life – an ambition to let the “same mind” be in us that was in Christ Jesus. To have the “same mind” is, as Fowl suggests, to pattern our thinking, feeling, and living in Christ – to cultivate a Christian practical wisdom (2:5) shaped by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (2:6-11).
The stakes are high, precisely because there is so much brokenness and fragmentation in our own lives and families, in our churches, in our schools and universities, in our cities, in our world. We need discerning study shaping our thinking, faithful prayer shaping our emotions, disciplined discipleship shaping our living, all in service to the Great Commission to make disciples of Jesus Christ – a call that includes worship and teaching as integral components of learning discipleship.
Paul calls us to focus on “any excellence” and “anything worthy of praise” (4:8). We cannot afford for the church, or theological education, or any of our lives to be an example of what one of our alumni calls “mediocrity masquerading as faithfulness.” There is too much mediocrity, too much “playing church” and “feigning academic rigor” and “being nice” among Christians, rather than holding ourselves to standards of excellence and an ambition for the Gospel.
The Gospel calls for excellence in our study, in our worship, in our service. But we are not called to “competitive excellence” adopted because it seems to meet a standard of business or popular culture. Rather it is a “resurrecting excellence,” excellence defined and shaped by God’s gracious work in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. The referent for excellence is the Triune God.
Havel’s poem calls us “to live in harmony.” In The Message Eugene Peterson translates Philippians 4:9 as follows: “Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.” Excellent harmonies – reflecting in our lives, with thanksgiving, the beautiful music of God’s grace and God’s glory.
Our hearts and minds and lives are kindled afresh by beautiful music – whether it is the extraordinary harmonies of Bach’s “B-Minor Mass,” or the passionate pleas for a better world in the moving music of Moses Hogan’s spirituals, or the contemplative riches of John Rutter’s sacred music. St. Augustine said Christians should be “alleluias” from head to toe; and Christian communities, including our own here at Duke Divinity School, are called corporately to bear witness as an “alleluia.”
My hope, and my prayer, is that we will cultivate excellent harmonies in our life together this year – harmonies among our study, worship and service; harmonies among diverse people from diverse backgrounds; harmonies among diverse areas of study; harmonies in our pursuit of excellence in discerning whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable. Excellent harmonies cannot be discovered apart from habits learned through specific disciplines and practices, and we will have plenty of opportunity together to cultivate such habits. And, to be sure, there will be difficult questions and challenges with which we will need to wrestle, there will be profound theological and moral disagreements, there will be times when we feel particular forms of anxiety…but we can bear them together in our common life if we are truly focused on the peace of God, the peace that surpasses all understanding, the peace that will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus.
Don’t worry…but don’t just be happy, either. Keep focused on God, and “Rejoice in the Lord always” – even during midterms and finals and grading and committee meetings and field education and practices of discipleship and spiritual formation and writing papers and books and practicing Sabbath and enjoying families and friends – “and again,” Paul says, “Rejoice.” It is time to begin.