September 27, 2026
/So I may be limiting myself a little bit here with this opening anecdote, but I don't know how many of you are familiar with Spotify, the music app that's on your phone or your tablet or other device, but it is one that is in regular rotation in our household. And at the end of every calendar year, Spotify produces this thing called a Wrapped, which is a kind of dissection of what you've played over the course of the year, and it gives you your top artist and your top genre and whatever else. Well, in the last five years since Anna's been born, Julie and I have seen our account go completely haywire. It just doesn't know what to make of our selections.
And one case in point there is that when we drive somewhere, we often have this practice of rotating our musical choices in the car so that each person gets a little sampling of things that they enjoy. And so it's not uncommon for us to bounce from, you know, like 1970s singer-songwriter selections of mine to 90s indie pop for Julie and then Baby Beluga or any number of other kids' songs that Anna selects. And so Spotify's logarithm at the end of the year is just completely confused by our selections and choices. But I've been thinking a lot about music this week because it actually, if we're paying close attention, plays a significant role in the quote-unquote readings we have, which they are readings, but I'll get to that in just a moment.
Looking back, music has essentially been a part of our human story since the very beginning. It looks as though we might have some proto-instruments made from bone as early as 40,000 years ago. And as long as we've had written and oral traditions, we have had a musical accompaniment to them. There's something kind of fundamental about music in the course of our lives, how it shapes and forms us, how it connects us to our own internal experience, but also the greater kind of universal experience of our human family and the way it connects us to each other.
And I bring that up today because if you pay close attention to our reading from Philippians, what we actually encounter for most of it is music. If you look, and we can tell this from the formatting, St. Paul begins in verse 1 through verse 5 with this kind of expository introduction. It's formatted in that way, right? It's block lettering, it's in a paragraph, it's all kind of nice and neatly, narratively portrayed. But then beginning in verse 6, the formatting of the text shifts. And it's actually in this kind of versical, lyrical format that runs all the way through the end of verse 11. And then we go back to this kind of expository narrative format in the block formatting with verse 12 through the end.
The Philippians epistle was written, as best as scholars can tell, in a five to seven-year period between the mid-50s to the early 60s AD, it was written somewhere in that time period. Not that it took five years to write, but it was written somewhere in that five to seven-year period during one of Paul's imprisonments. So this would have been about 20 to 30 years after Jesus was killed.
And what we have preserved here almost universally is agreed by scholars to be a hymn of the early church. This was a musical piece that was sung and recited by our earliest ancestors in the Christian faith. And through this text, through this music, we have some sense of who they believed Jesus to be. As St. Paul picks up in verse 6:
Who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
And it's fascinating to me—this is one of my favorite passages in the whole of the New Testament—because it's not just that this is a preservation of an early song and liturgical element in our Christian tradition, but it's about what this communicates as to who early Christians believed Jesus to be.
You know, in this modern era, we get all sorts of perspectives and arguments for who these earliest ancestors in our faith thought Jesus was, who they believed him to be, what it meant for them to be Christians. And we have some folks that say he was simply a wisdom teacher to the earliest communities of faith, that basically what they were following were a set of sayings by this Jewish rabbi who walked among them those millennia ago. And that there's a skepticism about these affirmations of divinity, that this was some sort of later accretion, that we complicated the narrative of the faith as it became an imperial force under Constantine. But that just doesn't make sense, right?
We have here in this earliest hymn of the church that is preserved in our writings this very explicit connection to Christ's divinity, that God was made in human form and came among us. We also elsewhere hear St. Paul talk about the centrality and importance of the resurrection. Again, in our day and age, we have folks that make light of that, say it doesn't make sense in our kind of modern, scientific, materialist worldview. Therefore, this must have been something that was kind of added on as a superstitious myth later in the tradition. But St. Paul's very explicit: if the resurrection didn't happen, then what is the value of our faith? If there is not life after death, all of what we do is fundamentally meaningless.
So there's an importance, an importance in paying attention, not just to what we believe today, but its continuity with our earliest brothers and sisters. In this case, brothers and sisters on the very northern edge of the Aegean, far from Jerusalem, far from the land in which Jesus lived and walked, but even now, just 20 to 30 years after his death. This place thousands of miles away in northern Greece in this community of Philippi have come to understand the depth of what it means to have this Christian conviction.
But St. Paul is very careful here because it's not just about this right belief. To use the sort of technical term here, the orthodoxy, the people, the community of faith, have the right way of thinking about Jesus. And to be fair, this hymn is kind of rooted in orthodoxy, right? It's about what we affirm of Jesus, who we affirm him to be, what we understand the nature of his personage to be. But St. Paul doesn't leave us just with the hymn. He says, there's this turn. In as much as it's important to have kind of the right way of thinking and believing about God, it's also centrally important to have this right way of believing, or right way of acting, this right way of practicing and living in the world around us. This is the technical term orthopraxis.
And so often in our lived faith experience, we kind of teeter on the edge of that dichotomy. We sort of emphasize the doxy part of it, the right belief, or we emphasize the right practice, the right way of believing, but we often find it difficult to kind of navigate the two together.
And I think, in some ways, that music has some kind of innate ability to help us find that pathway between the two. You know, I talked before about being an avid sportsman—I run, I backpack, I do all sorts of different physical activities. And one of the things that you often hear people talk about is what music kind of keeps them going. What is it that activates them? What is it that helps them get the miles in on a run or get the weight accomplished in their strength training? So many of us may have background music we use to accomplish other tasks in our lives. My folks talked about using classical music to write their dissertations in the slog of completing their PhDs. There's just something about the nature of music that seems to help keep us doing the things that we need to do and keep us oriented in the ways that we need to go.
And I was thinking about that as I was reflecting on our gospel passage today. You'll notice we are yet again kind of bouncing along through St. Matthew's gospel, sort of jumping from one chapter to the next with all of this material that we lose in between. But if we sort of step out for a moment and look at the larger arc of what's happening in the lectionary cycle—what the editors have essentially chosen in this season of ordinary time in Year A—is to go from one parable to the next. So often each week, what we miss in between is the kind of narrative structure of what's happening in Jesus's ministry between the teaching of one parable to the next.
And I have my criticisms of that. I've shared that with you over the last few weeks. But I do think one value and benefit of doing that is that often the orthopraxis, the right way of living that Jesus teaches us, is communicated through these parables. So the constant connection, the thread in this bouncing around is the focus on how we are to be in the world around us. What it means to kind of have this right way of living in the world and living with each other.
So last week was about this important sense of equity, even when we have all sorts of our own value judgments and barriers to appreciating the worth of other people, we are reminded that it is ultimately God who values us, and it is ultimately God who rewards us for our intrinsic valuing, even when we have all sorts of judgments about each other in the world around us.
And today's lesson is fundamentally about showing up. And it's not exactly parallel to what we heard last week, because what we have in the structure of this parable is simply a task at hand, this labor in the vineyard, which one son promises to do and does not do. Another son says he will not do and does it. But what it fundamentally brought to mind for me was the way in which we show up for each other and respect to that for God. When we are not terribly inclined to do so, the number of times that we kind of begrudgingly take on tasks or favors or do work for someone that we're struggling to like or we're struggling to appreciate, someone for whom there's this kind of exhausting sense of toil—when we take on these invitations of support or labor or compassion.
We've talked repeatedly over these last several weeks about the incredible value of the work we are doing as a congregation with the Up County Hub, the incredible power of the work we're doing with our new food market, where we are now serving over 100 families every month. And yet, how often do we hear in the larger societal narratives these kind of oblique questionings of people who seek that assistance? Do they really need it? Are they gaming the system? How often are they getting support?
And yet, even in the midst of those kinds of errant judgment values, even if we have some of that own wrestling in our hearts and in our minds, we nevertheless show up. We do the work of kindness and compassion, even in the midst of that uncertainty, even in the midst of kind of fogginess and lack of clarity in the world around us.
And so today, as we encounter these readings, as we encounter the power of music, in some ways, to keep us oriented in the world around us, I want to bring us back to this kind of tightrope walk that we often lead. This navigation of right belief and right practice, reminding us and acknowledging that we often fall one side or the other and not quite hitting that nail on the head. But we are called to both. We are called to that hard work of living faithfully, believing faithfully, and in the fullness of both of those things, living the totality of the life that Jesus is calling us to.
And admittedly, I think sometimes there are ways to do that that don't seem so very straightforward. Like the power of music to kind of keep us oriented. We don't always understand or comprehend why it is that it moves us in just the way that it does. Or the multitude of musical selections that might impact us or hit us in just that way. You know, so often when I'm in a space listening to something that is not my preferred genre or style of music, I can kind of have this instinctive reaction to just tune it out and not pay attention to what's happening.
But if I'm honest, even something like Anna's selections sometimes move me in ways that I least expected. I mentioned at the beginning she's had this recent obsession with the movie Huntrix or K-Pop: Demon Hunters and the band in the animated movie Huntrix. And the music that they sing, this kind of K-pop style genre, is not at all my cup of tea. And yet there are some incredibly powerful and profound messages about showing up, about transformation, about new life on the other side of humility that are valuable and vital lessons for the world that we live in today. And there's something profound in what is being communicated. And if we can but hear that, it not only transforms us, renews us in our beliefs, but it can empower us ever more fully to live in the things of God that we are called to live into.
And so may we continue, through the guidance and power of the Spirit, to find that path of navigation in our lives today, being both people of good faith, of right faith, of proper faith, to be people of action, of right living, of compassion, of care, of showing up, even in those times that are hard to do, keeping the promises we've made or showing up even when we haven't agreed to do so, to see the need and to follow it through with a responsiveness of faith and of kindness.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.