Packing Slip

My God will fully satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. To our God and Father be glory for ever and ever. Amen. 

—Philippians 4:19-20

Listening to daughter Chelsea debrief her adventure in Colorado this summer, one repeated ritual stuck with me—the rite of packing—loading a backpack with what will be necessary for a week at 12000 feet, camping on the trail, passing through varied climate zones—you may start in warm sun, pass through snowfields, hit sudden thunderstorms, and end in fog—and feeding a group of fifteen teenagers and yourself. There was an order, n list of commandments, and a list of verbotens. Everything had its place. 

A lot of us know this experience even if we have never been within a hundred miles of a mountain pass. We call it “getting ready for the day.” We have a routine and ritual to prepare ourselves to face each day and all it contains. We want to be ready. We want to have exactly what we will need within easy reach. To make sure it will be so, we carefully organize ourselves, our lives, and our stuff. Again, everything has its place.

Now, it is my guess, perhaps mistaken, but I don’t think so, that few of us consider this daily passage spiritual. Most of us probably never consider getting ready for the day meditation. Our minds are just not in a holy place.

But they are.

As we ready ourselves for the day’s trek, we are in tune with ourselves in a way that brings us uniquely present to the moment. We are here, we are now. We are really present, making sure nothing essential gets left out and that all that is essential gets in the briefcase, day pack, or car. We are considering what we need, moving beyond what we want. If there is an airplane trip in the day, we are really attuned to that—gonna avoid that bag charge at all costs; gonna get everything to stuff beneath the seat or in the bin! 

That presence is holy.

Aristotle claimed it was eternity lived. It is the experience of being fully and completely alive. There is right now and nothing else.

All of this rumination is a prelude, though, to the crux of our passage this morning. As St. Paul winds up his epistle to the Philippians, it becomes “a minute for mission” rooted in stewardship as he encourages his congregations to support one another with the real and material goods absolutely necessary for their continued work and mission. It is his prayer and hope that as these congregations become intertwined and mutually supportive, all their needs will be met, and they will be able to flourish as communions of Christ. In order for that prayer to be answered, each community will have to take stock, run through their needs, see what is essential, see what becomes a need as opposed to a want. They will have to pass through that ritual of getting ready, getting packed, and getting gone. 

A place to ruminate is the difference between need and want. As we pack for the day, we begin to delineate and discern what is required—we will need our laptop, but we may not need the I-Pad, so we’ll leave that home; we will need to pack a lunch because there won’t be time or opportunity to leave the office; we won’t need an umbrella; we might need a change of shoes because there will be a ling walk through a terminal or city street, and dress shoes will not cut it—and on goes those listing. We might want something else, but we begin to see what we need. 

So it is with the life of faith. We come to God with our lists, too. We come to God with a list of answers, hopes, requests, intercessions, and whatnot. As we begin, we may well assume they are all essential, but then as we pray, as we meditate, and as we reflect, we begin to sense our list changing and shifting. What looked absolutely essential begins to fade in importance. What we thought unnecessary begins to glow with necessity. 

As a congregation, we do this collectively—we set priorities, we set goals, we make agendas—but as we begin to practice, we begin to see that some things are far more vital than others. At a recent Presbytery meeting, an Elder from a foothills congregation rose in the midst of a discussion about churches leaving or staying, and asked us to consider what was absolutely essential to our communion. He confessed that he and his pastor had some deep and real disagreements about what was right and proper, but—and this may well be one of the most important “buts” I have heard spoken on the floor of Presbytery—it was far more important, vital, and necessary that they come together beneath the banner of Jesus than to be right in the views. His point is that what the people of faith need more than all else is the presence of Christ, who seems to be far more gracious than any of us imagine, able to welcome a disparate, divergent, and diverse sweep of humanity; while we seem lost in a want that the Church be morally pure, practice an agreed code of behaviors, and sure some are in and others out, maintaining the fences to keep it so. So, this wise Elder from the hills of Georgia asks us to check our baggage—what’s there? is it necessary? does it flow from the welcoming presence of Jesus?

Packing is necessary step before any journey. Be careful what you pack.