An Attitude Adjustment: Choose Contentment
Rev. David Horton
September 4, 2016
Philippians 4: 10-14

I rejoicein the Lord greatly that now at last you have revived your concern for me; indeed, you were concerned for me, but had no opportunity to show it. Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have.I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need.I can do all things through him who strengthens me.In any case, it was kind of you to share my distress. (Philippians 4:10-14 NRSV)

Let us pray. Gracious God, I pray that you would open up our ears this morning that we might hear you. Open up our hearts that we might listen to you. Open up our hands that we might receive you. Open up our mouths that we might preach you. Move our feet that we might walk in your path. Amen.
When’s the last time you rode the bus? A teenaged boy named Joel would ride the bus all the time in the suburbs of the suburbs of Los Angeles. His parents refused to drive him anywhere. Some kind of quirky way of teaching him a lesson. So whenever he wanted to go play basketball with his friends he’d have to arrange his own transportation. That usually meant he’d take the bus.
Joel hated the bus. He thought busses were for losers. But one day Joel was on the bus and he was the only one on the bus. Then this old guy, slow as molasses, gets on the bus. The bus fare is 25¢ and he paid in nickels and pennies…16… 17, 18. And Joel saw his whole life pass before his eyes and figured he’d be as old as this guy before the bus ride was over.
Of course the entire bus is empty and the old guy picks the seat right next to Joel. He’s carrying grocery bags and he reaches into the bag and pulls out an orange. He turns to Joel and says, “What do you think of it?” Joel says, “I think it’s an orange.” And the man said, “I’m from Germany. Did you study the war in school?” Joel said, “Yes, I did.” Then the man said, “Did you learn about the place where I come from? Auschwitz.” Joel said, “Yes, I did.” Then the man said. “And did they tell you in school that Auschwitz was black and white.” Joel said. “Oh, you mean the pictures in the textbook were black and white.” Then the man said, “No, Auschwitz was black and white. The guards wore black. The fence was black. The snow was white until the ash from the smokestacks turned it gray. The tattoo on my arm was blue but now it’s black. The food was gray. They boiled potatoes until it was soup.”
Then he continued. “One day I was walking along the fence and I was picking up trash and I looked under a piece of trash and there it was. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was an orange. It was a very orange orange. I took it and I hid it in a crack in the barrack walls. And every night I would sneak out and I take out this orange and I would roll it again in my hands. I was so hungry. All I’d eaten for months was potato water. But I didn’t eat it. Instead I scratched it and I sniffed it. “Then all of a sudden I wasn’t at Auschwitz anymore. I was in Palestine with my cousin. In Palestine we grew oranges. The smell of oranges filled the air. I smelled this orange. It was freedom. I scratched it and I was free.
“I would do this every day. I’d sneak out at night and roll around this orange in my hand. Then one day a Nazi guard would split us into two lines and if you were in the group that went to the left you didn’t come back. If you went to the right you were sent back to the barracks. So he pointed to me and said, ‘Right.’
“That night I gathered my people around me and I took out that orange. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They’d forgotten what color was. So we peeled it and we passed it around and everyone got a section. We ate it and nothing had ever tasted so sweet. That orange saved us.
“I kept the orange peels until one day men came and rescued us.”
He pulled the string on the bus to get off but before he got off, he turned around to look at Joel and said. “Young man,” he said, “remember the sweet things in life.”
Today we’re talking about contentment. About choosing the sweet things in life.
Paul says he’s found the secret to being content in all situations. That’s pretty ironic because he’s writing from jail. He writes his letter to the Philippians from jail. It’s no concentration camp but it is prison. It’s a very strange place to be talking about contentment.
The Philippian church was one of the first churches to sponsor Paul financially in planting more churches around the Mediterranean. He was their missions offering. They passed the plate on Sunday mornings and sent the money to him. But you must understand. This was before giving online and before that miracle called Amazon Prime – one day shipping. It’s wonderful.
So it was before all that and they had a hard time getting Paul the money. It’s been a long time since Paul had received the offering.
One of the Philippian church members, Epaphroditus, is the Fed-Ex delivery man in this situation. He finds a way to deliver this gift to Paul. And Paul has to write a rather awkward thank you note. He says, “Thank you. I can’t use this. I’m in jail.” And he picks a rather awkward time to teach his church something. He says, “Thanks for this gift, but I’m fine. I’m content with or without this.”
The Greek word he uses for content is autarkes. It usually means “self-sufficient.” It was a very common word, a buzz word in Paul’s time to refer to anyone who could do anything without the help of anyone else. Completely self-sufficient. In our time, isn’t that what it means to make it? Isn’t that how we define success? To be someone who could do anything? Anything we want because we have amassed enough resources, enough net worth, enough connections, enough money, enough whatever to be able to do anything we want without having to rely on anyone else. Isn’t that what you and I are working toward one day? But the only person we can really rely on is the bank account.
Paul says, “That’s not contentment. Maybe privilege but it’s not contentment.” Paul redefines contentment when he writes about it from a prison cell. When he has no freedom, he can’t make his own schedule. He has to depend on other people to feed him. He’s dependent. He’s not a self-sufficient man. He’s a dependent prisoner. For Paul, dependency is the shape of contentment.
What’s contentment? It’s being totally dependent on the God who made all of this. Contentment is knowing that this is all a gift and the giver is always ready to give.
Honestly, I struggle with contentment. You might do that, too. I think it’s because I’m always trying to do more, have more, be more than I am now. As if now is, for some reason, not enough. And it helps me to understand contentment in terms of what it is versus what it is not.
First, contentment is an external gift. It’s not an internal product. We get this wrong. Contentment does not come from something inside of us. Contentment is something we receive from outside of us.
Now normally when we think of something like contentment we might think of yoga, or meditation or some Buddhist monk teaching us how to clear our minds. We try to look inside of ourselves to fill up this hole inside of ourselves. We try to be our own enough.
But the problem is that we find that we cannot run on ourselves. We can’t power ourselves. These lights need power from somewhere else. Your car needs power from somewhere else. Your muscles need food from somewhere else. We don’t produce our own power. We need something else to live on. And Jesus likes to remind us that we do not live on bread alone.
What are you living on? What have you chosen to live on? See, we’re always in search for that thing to live on, whether it’s the next Smart phone, tablet, gadget, food, drink, person, whatever the price give me something to live on. To be enough. What are you living on?
I think we’re all born a puzzle but we’re born with a missing piece. And that vacant space is precisely shaped for God’s love. Nothing else but God’s love will fit in that space. But the problem is we try to jam other pieces into that space and we try to make it fit. We know nothing else will fit but we still try. Contentment is fitting the right piece in the right place. God’s love into the love-shaped hole. Only God’s love will fit.
Last summer in 2015 I had the pleasure of volunteering as a counselor at a camp for teenaged theology nerds. Like I used to be not too long ago. Had a blast. There were a few days of service during this camp. One of those days we went to a group home for children with special needs. It was hard. One of those children with special needs picked up a plastic toy and shucked it at one of my youth, and hit her in the head. She was okay, but it was awkward. We sat awkwardly with people trying to make small talk. They couldn’t talk. I tried to play basketball with one kid. But he just took the ball and ran with it. It was awkward, it was hard and it was uncomfortable. I think because I wanted so badly to fix these people. That’s why they sent us there, right? They must be in need of fixing.
Well, at the group home they loved the pool and it was a great pool. I put on my swim trunks. One of the caretakers pointed out this young man and said, “Put him in. He loves the water.” He was this teenaged boy, mute, paralyzed. So we strapped him to this yellow flotation device made especially for him. We gently lowered him into the water and he was floating. He was looking up.
I’ll never forget the way the sun shone in his eyes, like he was muttering this silent prayer that I couldn’t understand, but God sure could. As his hand touched the water his lips couldn’t smile but his eyes could smile and his eyes smiled. I remember thinking in that moment, “He’s got something I don’t, God. His puzzle’s complete. Is mine?” He knew God’s love in a way that I just don’t.
Is your puzzle complete? Is it complete? Nothing but God’s love will fit.
The second way we can understand contentment this morning is by understanding it comes from a place of knowing what it means to be powerless. Not powerful, powerless. Paul experiences powerlessness in his prison cell. In chains. He thinks back to his life before. He had all this power. The man could do anything. Anything he wanted. But now it’s all gone and it’s like he’s lost nothing. What he thought was important back then isn’t so important now.
Contentment is a before and after shot of your life. You were one way and then you went through something. All of a sudden the things you thought were so important and valuable before just aren’t so much now. Think of a time when you have been brought low. Low. When you’ve experienced powerlessness. When you had to completely depend on another or you saw it in somebody else. I’m sure it gave you perspective, and what you thought was very important now is not.
Also, last summer I went with a group of St. Luke’s volunteers to Guatemala on a Zoe Mission Trip. In Zoe we visited working groups of orphans and these orphans served us this amazing tea. Oh, this tea was awesome. It was sweet and was like nothing I’d ever tasted before. So I asked the orphans, “Where can I get this tea? I have to get this tea somewhere in the States. What is it? I’ve got to find it!”
And the orphans brought out this tiny two inch red package of tea. It was black pekoe tea which you can get at any grocery store in the U.S. for pennies. They gave it to me with such joy. It still sits in my office at church. They gave it to me with such joy, this thing that would have cost me pennies, but to them was a treasure. It gave me a reality check.
I get a reality check all the time at Gethsemane, our campus in Southwest Houston where I usually am on Sunday mornings. Every Sunday, right about now, actually, if you were to go to Gethsemane right now you’d see about fifty African refugee children youth and adults from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and they’ve survived God knows what in refugee camps to get here to Houston. About twelve of those refugee teenagers were sent here to the Westheimer campus to volunteer for Vacation Bible School. They came back to Gethsemane and said “we have never seen a place so big and so beautiful.” Just that week I was in a meeting and I joined in the grumbling about how long construction was taking in this very big and very beautiful building. We’ve grown so used to it, haven’t we? You have to understand, for me and these refugees at Gethsemane, will be my “before and after shot” – my reality check.
You must understand contentment as an active thing, not a passive thing. Contentment is something you choose to do, it doesn’t happen to you or it won’t happen at all. Listen, you’re going to go through our doors this morning and God knows what kind of nonsense is going to hurl your way. Your plane is going to be late. Some unknown villain is going to ram your car with the shopping cart. The cashier is going to give you the wrong change. Who knows what life is going to throw your way? You don’t have that power to choose, but you do have the power to choose how you will interpret it. You have the power to be the story tellers of contentment of your life. No one else has that power. Don’t give them that power. Own that power. Choose contentment. Choose the sweet things.
A few weeks ago I had the honor of presiding over a memorial service for a young man named Matthew. Matthew was 47 and passed away from leukemia. Matthew was a big kid. At 47 he had this love of Scooby Do. While he was in the hospital for chemo he would bring his stuffed animal Scooby Do with him. He’d take selfies with himself in the hospital bed. And he’d take selfie after selfie, and Scooby Do would be somewhere in the background but it would move from selfie to selfie. He would text these selfies to his wife and she would have to figure out, find where Scooby was. Like where’s Waldo, but where’s Scooby. I had the honor of telling his family “Matthew didn’t lose to cancer. He beat it. He beat it by how he lived. He chose the way he was going to go. He didn’t give cancer a chance of deciding his own end. He chose it.” That’s the power of contentment. Choose contentment.
One of my former seminary professors, Dr. Bowler, was diagnosed with Stage IV liver cancer about twelve months ago which means she’s outlived her diagnosis by one month already. Dr. Bowler is young, smart, funny, Canadian. What’s not to love? She’s just wonderful. She wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about her most recent CT scan. The day before, she had gone hiking with one of her girlfriends in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. They had forgotten water and sunglasses which meant the uphill was all the more uphill. They got to the top expecting to see a view – this picturesque vista of pine trees and rolling hills for miles. When they got to the top there was no view. Just rocks and trees like the millions of rocks and trees they had passed by on the way to the top.
The next day she was sitting on the bed of the CT machine. She laid down, she had to look up. She saw something in the ceiling. Something she had chosen not to see the day before for whatever reason. One of the tiles was different from the others. It was this glass panel and on it was painted this picturesque view of rolling pine trees, hills for miles. In her blog post she said the sun was just shining through.
We come to the end of our sermon series, folks. What Paul is really saying in Philippians Chapter 4 is that the Son is breaking through. Contentment is there for the choosing. But don’t look down. You have to look up.