Getting Specific – a Fellowship of Accountability

         One of the things I have always enjoyed doing, especially in youth groups, is role playing.

       The idea of role playing, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, is to put yourself in a situation or take on some attitudes which are not your own.  You then act and speak as if you were actually the person in the situation and had his or her attitudes. The purpose is to develop an appreciation of other person’s points of view and the reasons for their actions. Role playing was very popular in the touchy-feely 70s.

        But even today’s high tech Junior and Senior Highs can do quite well at this.  I think you would be surprised at how well a Junior High can adopt the attitudes and actions of his parents. We find things out about you that you don’t think we know.

        In fact, they do so well that I have been emboldened to try out this role playing this morning in worship with another group.  I am going to ask you to put yourself into a situation with me. Try it and we’ll see what happens.

       Close your eyes.  In your mind, take yourself out of this sanctuary and put yourself into a small meeting room lit with oil lamps.  Take yourself out of this century, back 1940 years ago to the first century A.D.  Now take yourself out of this country and place yourself in Philippi in Northern Greece .  Now, and this is the hard part, take yourself out of yourself.

       Your name is Euodia --a Romans-Greek woman of the first century.  You are a member of the young Christian church at Philippi .  In fact, you are one of the church founders.  You’re a leader.

       Your church at Philippi is doing well.  More people are joining every day, the potlucks are going well.  You’ve even been able to raise enough money to send a gift to your old friend Paul who is in prison.  In fact, everything would be fine if it weren’t for that “nasty Syntyche woman.”  She’s always getting in your way, talking behind your back, and generally making a real pain of herself.  You’ve almost come to the point where you decide, “either she goes or I go.”   You used to be friends but things happened.

       You’ve come to the meeting tonight because Ephaprodites, one of the members of your church, has recently returned from visiting Paul and has brought a letter from the Apostle.

       So you sit on a bench near the wall and listen while Ephaprodites reads the letter.  The lamps are bright and you can clearly see Syntyche sitting across the room with her husband.  “How can he stand living with her?” you wonder.

       As the letter is read, you watch her face.  You hope that she’s really listening to Paul’s words because she needs to hear them.  “If there’s anyone who needs to practice unselfish love, and grow to maturity in Christ, it’s her.”

       It’s a good letter.  You’ve just about decided that you ought to drop Paul a note commending him on how he “told off the sinners,” when you hear Ephaphrodites read: “Euodia and Syntyche, I beg you by name to make up your differences as Christians should.”

       “What’s this?!”  “Where does Paul get off telling me to make up?!”  “It’s not my fault…it’s that Syntche’s.”  We can make up our differences very fast if she’ll come over and apologize…but not ‘til then.”

       Gradually, however, your anger and frustration begin to cool down and you begin to see some justice in Paul’s words. “Yes,” you say to yourself, “perhaps I haven’t been as forgiving or as loving as I could have been.  Maybe it wasn’t too good of me to spread those stories about her children.”

       As the meeting breaks-up, you’ve almost decided that maybe you should get together with Syntyche sometime that week to talk things over, when you see her walking across the room toward you.  She takes you by the hand and says:

       “I was wrong, please forgive me.”

       Suddenly, the long awaited sweetness of victory is gone.  You hear yourself saying that you are also to blame and that you also need her forgiveness.  As you talk, the wounds begin to heal.

       Okay, open your eyes.  We’re back in 2008.  If the person next to you still has their eyes closed, give them a nudge.

       I will confess right away that a lot of this situation we’ve been in is conjecture.  We actually know nothing about Euodia and Syntyche and the problems between them except for this one reference in Philippians. We don’t really know the problem.  But from our experience with people, however I think we can see that the situation is not all that far-fetched. 

       Two people who one day are good friends and co-workers can suddenly have a falling out.  A sharp word from one, half-heard by the other; a bitter response said hastily and without quite meaning it, then the slamming of doors, the face turned away in the patio during coffee time and the sense on both sides of hurt so great that nothing can mend it.  Or business partners disagree and bring their disagreement into the church.  “If he’s at that service, I won’t be.”  Others are pushed to take sides.

        Every pastor I know has dealt with this.  And I believe that there is something to learn from Paul in how he handles this situation.

       First, Paul was not afraid to get specific.

       It has been said that there are two types of people in a congregation.  Those who divide congregations into two types of people and those who don’t.

       Actually though, there are at least two types of people in a congregation who make getting specific very necessary.

       On the one hand we have those who never apply anything to themselves.  They shake the ministers hand as they leave the service, congratulate him on “telling off those sinners” and walk away unchanged and unmoved.  To use Jesus’ analogy from Matthew 7, they tend to “look so hard for the speck of dust in another person’s eye that they completely ignore the huge log in their own.”

       On the other hand, we have those who apply everything to themselves.

       A year before I left home to go to seminary at Fuller, I bought an Irish Setter who I turned over to my parents.  Brandy was the type of person who applied everything to himself.  If someone broke a glass even if he was nowhere near, he went and hid.  If he heard someone shouting, he was the one who felt guilty.

       In the same way there are those in a congregation who are very open to being made to feel guilty.  Everytime the preacher says repent they repent whether they have anything particular to repent of or not.  Being specific protects these people from themselves and from putting guilt on themselves which isn’t theirs and it helps those who need to hear to recognize that someone just might be talking to them.

       Paul sees that it is sometimes necessary to get specific in the Christian Community.  There are some situations which must be openly faced or a minor problem can become a cancer which saps the strength of God’s people.  But the goal of getting specific, as we see in Paul,  must always be to heal a situation and never to hurt or to be divisive.  All throughout the Bible the unity of God’s people is stressed as a primary thing -- a matter of first concern for each of us.

       There are some things which are essential to Christianity on which we must never compromise. There are times in the life of an individual or a congregation where a stand has to be taken.  But anytime we refuse to call someone our brother in Christ because of a doctrinal difference; or anytime we threaten the unity of God’s people through a disagreement over approach or technique -- we had better make certain that, that doctrine or stand is really essential. Or we are making our particular theology or our role in church politics more important than God’s desire to unity in the church.

       Some years ago, National Geographic included a photograph of the fossil remains of two saber-toothed cats locked in combat. To quote the article: “One had bitten deep into the leg bone of the other, a thrust that trapped both in a common fate. The cause of the death of the two cats is as clear as the causes of extinction of their species are obvious.”  Like the cats, when Christians fight each other, everybody loses. As Paul puts it in Galatians 5:15: “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.”.

       We also don’t have a license to go head-hunting for problems in each other’s lives so that we can embarrass each other before the congregation.  Paul isn’t just trying to embarrass two women by having their names read out loud in a worship service.  Whatever is going on between Euodia and Syntyche is big enough to have reached Paul in Rome .  Jesus says that if someone sins against us we should first go to that person in private and try to iron it out before we take it to the church.  The constant theme of the Scripture is that any time we put ourselves in the position of judge; we must do so out of love, an overwhelming willingness and eagerness to forgive, and a willingness to be judged by the same standards that we use in judging. 

        And we can’t be petty and clueless about what is going on. 

       One of the weirdest stories from World War 2 comes from the afternoon of D Day.  General Gerhardt, commander of the 29^th Division came ashore in the late afternoon and set up his division HQ in a quarry.  He could not get much information on how things were going up on top for his regiments, but he could see a long file of men trudging up the draw. He spotted a passing soldier eating an orange. When the man tossed the orange peel away, Gerhardt sprang up from the maps he was studying and gave the GI a furious tongue-lashing for littering.

        You kind of get the idea that he hadn’t even seen the condition of the beach or recognized what his men had gone through.  If you’ve seen Saving Private Ryan, you know that littering was the smallest issue on Omaha Beach on June 6.  But Gerhardt made it his top priority. 

         Let’s not be clueless or petty.  Paul isn’t being petty.  Whatever is going on is already public knowledge and is impacting the whole church.   Euodia and Syntyche are leaders and what they do will influence others. 

       Being specific also requires certain other credentials that we can discover in Paul’s life.

       Paul is not a stranger to the Philippians.  He is the founder of their church.  He has been arrested, beaten, and imprisoned in Philippi on their behalf.  He has traveled to Philippi several times since then to strengthen and encourage them.  He loves them personally so much that he is able to write in Philippians 1:8, “God Himself is my witness how I long for you with the deep yearning of Christ Himself.”  No, Paul is not a stranger to the Philippians. He has established his right to get specific with his presence, his hard work, his constant love, and his expressed willingness even to die for the Philippians if that will somehow help them grow.

      Paul also knows the Philippians.  He knows their worth and their value so that he is able to call them, “My joy and my crown”.  In particular he knows Euodia and Syntyche. He commends them as persons who had shared his struggle for the cause of the Gospel.  They are obviously not bit players in the Philippian church. They are leaders. They are women who have given their all and deserve of the help of the entire church.   So healing the division is the business of the whole church. 

        I am impressed by Paul’s confidence in the ability of amateurs to be of real help I the healing.  We who live in an age of experts need to remember and be reminded that people are helped by people. Paul, the expert, does not take sides and does not prescribe a cure for the argument at Philippi .  He turns it over to the family at Philippi .  He gives the local church guidelines and encouragement, but the message is crystal clear: They must do the helping and they must find the help that best fits the situation.

        The other thing Paul knows is what God is up to in the lives of Euodia and Syntyche.  Paul knows that they are in the Book of Life.  As we saw last Sunday, Paul expects the great future for them.  So he is gentle.  He doesn’t just say, “Okay, you two, shape up.  Your messing up the church so snap our of it!”  He doesn’t pull them down.  He wants to lift them up.  Paul shows us that a Christian who messes up isn’t our enemy.  He or she is a wounded soldier who needs our help – still our brother or sister, still or fellow worker.   So Paul tells Euodia and Syntyche to “agree in the Lord.”  There may be lots of places they can disagree but there is a bid place they can stand together and that is in the Lord.  That’s where they need to plant their feet.

       Finally Paul knows himself.  He knows that he is a forgiven person just as the Philippians are forgiven persons.  Paul is not writing from the point of view of someone who has already arrived but as a person engaged in the same struggle and facing the same temptations as the Philippians face.

       It is probably obvious to anyone who has ever gotten specific, especially in a negative way, that there are certain problems involved.  We might be rejected because of our words.  Rejection is a risk which must be taken in getting specific.  But that risk is certainly lessened if the proper credentials of personal involvement, commitment, love, and real knowledge are established.

       The other risk in getting specific is that we might be confronted by guilt in our own lives.  That is why Jesus said, it is so very important to take the log out of our own eyes before we attempt to take a speck of dust out of someone else’s.  We must approach any situation with a good healthy knowledge of our own imperfection or, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “what we are will stand above us and shout so loud that no one will be able to hear what we are saying.”  It does not good to tell someone what they should do unless we are doing it ourselves and are willing to take the time and effort to help them also.  Euodias and Syntyche could respond to Paul because they knew that his words were backed with his life.

       During these Sundays coming up to Easter, in our sermons and small groups, we are looking at the theme, “The Community You’ve Always Wanted.”  We are looking at six wonderful aspects of Christian fellowship that Paul models in his Letter to the Philippians.

       So you may be asking, “Why would I ever want to be a part of a community that holds me accountable?” 

         Well Proverbs 27:6 tells us that “the wounds of a friend are faithful.”  This means that someone who is our friend tells us the truth even when it hurts – and that truth telling is for our good. 

       Friendship is a priceless gift. God gives us friendship to serve our relational needs. But that is not all. He gives us friendship for our spiritual well-being as well. The vision of friends is not hindered by the blinders we wear. Friends can steer us away from moral icebergs that would tear a Titanic-size hole in the hull of our soul. Friends listen when we are confused about what to do, where to go, how to trust God. Friends dare to challenge us with truth. True friends accept our imperfections and forgive us. True friends fuel our hopes and dreams with their undiminished expectations. 

        Isn’t that the kind of community you want?  It is wonderful to be with people who love you enough and believe in you enough to tell you the truth.  I have those people in my life.  I have people who care about me so much that they are willing for me not to like them for a while because they have hit to close to home.  True friends are willing to hurt our feelings to save our reputations.  I hope you have people like that in your life too.  They help us be the best we can be.  They help us grow.  They help keep us faithful to the high calling of God in our lives.