Letting the Light Through

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.21.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Philippians 1:21-30

It’s funny, what you notice when you’re paying attention.

I’ve been paying a whole bunch of attention to my garden this summer, and over the last month or two that’s meant my wildly productive patch of bush beans.  I’ve watched them come up, tending them every morning, watering them and weeding them and generally fussing over them.  I wanted them to do well, because these plants are the children of the plants I grew last year.  I seed-saved from last year’s crop, marking the largest and healthiest pod on each of the most vigorous plants.  So this is kind of a a little extended family of green beans that I’m carefully watching over.  I’m getting to know them.

As the season has moved on, I’ve watched them grow up ferociously together, rising up into a dense thicket of plants.  I’ve watched as they’ve cast their foliage out thick and heavy, catching so much of the light that they leave nothing to feed the weeds that struggle to grow in the dim soil beneath. With their leaves woven up together into a quilt of green, they also shade the earth, holding back the sun so that more moisture remains to fuel their growth.

Plants are not, after all, objects.

When you garden, you become more and more aware of them as living creatures, simple beings that are nonetheless aware of one another and aware of their environment.  They have a peculiar form of intelligence, one that allows them to engage in behaviors that we miss if we are not watching carefully.  They cooperate.  They interact.  They communicate.  And beans, like many plants, grow.  They grow, but not like ice-crystals or a thundercloud billowing up on a hot and humid summer afternoon.  They move.  They just move a whole bunch more slowly than we do.

Over the course of the late summer, I’ve been able to watch this.  In the morning, the leaves of that patch of bush beans are all facing one way, towards the sun as it comes over the tall trees on the far side of the street.  In the evening, they’ve all turned, facing the sun as it disappears behind the row of trees on our side of the street.

It’s called “heliotropic” movement, and it generally means that plants track the sun to maximize photosynthesis.  And maximized photosynthesis means that at the height of the season, growing in good soil and light, those beans come out of the plants like balloons out of a clown’s mouth at a birthday party.  Only, you know, not shaped like dogs or bunny hats.  I suppose, if you were into it, you could try to figure out a way to make them grow that way, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands.

But as the plants poured out gallon-bag after gallon-bag full of tasty fresh greenbeans, I noticed they were doing something different.  As the days grew cooler and the summer began to wane to fall, the leaves on the now-fully-grown plants changed. They no longer aligned themselves to catch the sun, but turned their leaves so that their edges faced the sun as it passed.  Light streamed down and through to the soil, and...notably...onto the beans that I’d left to grow full on the plants to go to seed.

When dusk settled, they’d return to their former posture, leaves out, preserving moisture.  Why, I wondered.  Why would they do this, these simple creatures?  I observed, and I watched as the pattern continued, and I searched through scientific studies of bean behavior to scry out the truth of it.

And in the thick of watching this, I was also reading Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi.

Philippi was a decently-sized ancient town just a little less than twice the size of Poolesville.  It sat on a major East-West thoroughfare in the Roman province of Macedonia.  It was near the sea, and more importantly, near some highly productive gold mines.  Phillippi was a prosperous place.  It did well for itself, for a long while.

This little letter has a different flavor from pretty much all of the other letters Paul pitched out into the early church.  The letter he wrote to Rome was to strangers he wanted to impress.  The letter to the Galatians, to people who he was frustrated with to the point of calling them idiots.  He wrote letter after letter to Corinth, in the desperate hope that they might improve

Paul really cared for the church at Philippi.  He’d put them there, and .   The letter he wrote to them was a manifestation of that love, an expression of the deep bond of affection that he felt for the community there, particularly as they supported him through times of challenge.  This letter was written during one of Paul's many imprisonments, and may well have been written from jail in Rome in the early 60s.

The letter is both warm and deeply personal, thanking the Philippians for both their material support of Paul in his time of imprisonment, but also thanking them for their prayers and care.  What makes this little section so interesting is that Paul is staring the potential of a messy death at the hands of the Roman authorities.  “You know, I might die, or I might not,” he says, which generally isn’t something you fire off in a casual email to folks.

That’s impressive, but even more impressive is how much pleasure he takes in the exchange with the Philippians, in their well-being, and in the mutual support that this relationship has brought to both of them.

This is a remarkably generous letter, in both spirit and in intent.  Paul’s hope and intent is with them, which, again, is a little odd given the context.  

What matters to Paul?  Sharing joy with them.  What is the hope that’s sustaining him?  That they’ll thrive, and that if he has the good fortune to survive his imprisonment, he and they will be able to celebrate their shared joy together.  It’s their well-being he cherishes, their lives that matter to him, and their strength that is more important to him than his own.

It’s the love that drove his relationship with them, and it’s also the primary thing that he tried to share as he spread the message of Jesus of Nazareth throughout the ancient world.  What makes Philippians such an important letter, and such a vital part of the story-of-stories that comprise our Bibles, is that it is a letter of affirmation.  What it presents isn’t primarily theology, or Paul pastorally trying to correct a community that’s managed to turn the message of Jesus into an excuse for infighting or other forms of human mess.

What we see in this letter is the core of the Christian message, being lived out in the relationship between Paul and a gathered community that he loved.  He knows he will someday cease to be among the living, sooner or later, but what sustains him is knowing that the Philippians are living out what most mattered to him.

They, in turn, felt the deep grace of that letter so powerfully that they kept it, and they shared it, so that long after Paul had met his death--executed in Rome, either during this imprisonment or a later one--the words of encouragement he shared with them would linger on.

Philippi no longer exists as a city.  It dwindled and faded, slowly but surely, and by the nineteenth century, all that was left were ruins.  Maybe the gold ran out.  No-one knows.  There’s a little Greek town nearby, just about three hundred souls.

But they passed along this letter, copying it and sharing it, because they wanted everyone who followed on to know what they’d known, and share in the light that had shined between them and Paul.

Which, in the roundabout way my mind works, brings us back to those beans.  They’re not loving, not as we’d understand it.  It’s so easy, as a human, to anthropomorphize everything you encounter, seeing our human intentionality and our emotional responses in the whole world around us.  But God made beans to be beans, and if they think, they think like beans.

Here, at the end of their season, as they’re coming to the end of their two-to-three month lifespan, what matters to them is not themselves.   Having prepared the seeds for the next generation, they seem more interested in insuring that those unknown others thrive than in keeping themselves growing.  They don’t take the light for themselves, but let it pass through them, let it cast down onto the seeds below, drying them out, preparing those pods for the life in the seasons to come.  It’s the way of beans, I suppose.

Where that speaks to me, as metaphor, as part of the story of living creatures, is in how much the life of this Way that Jesus taught does not have to do with our own selves, our own power, and our own well-being.  What gives us joy isn’t our own thriving, but the thriving of those others around us.  It’s a radically countercultural message, in this consumer era of self-absorption and self-promotion.  What matters isn’t what we have and what we grasp, anxious for ourselves, anxious for our own wealth and success.

That form of faith, that’s all about the self, that’s not who we’re called to be.  We are called, like Paul, to rejoice in the rejoicing of others.  We’re called, like the Philippians, to pass that light along.

Let that be so, for you and for me.

AMEN