05/10/2026 - Philippians 4:1-7, Sixth Sunday of Easter

For the past three weeks, we’ve talked about the section of the Lord’s Prayer that focuses more on God. Addressing God, praising God, and affirming that we wish for God’s kingdom of love and justice to be present on earth.

This week, we move from focusing on God to focusing on us. And the first thing Jesus tells us to do when praying for ourselves, is to ask God to provide for us.

And the other writers of books of the New Testament reaffirmed the importance of praying to God for ourselves. Including one of the most prolific authors of the New Testament, Paul.

Scripture: Philippians 4:1-7

Therefore, my brothers and sisters whom I love and miss, who are my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord.

Loved ones, I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to come to an agreement in the Lord. Yes, and I’m also asking you, loyal friend, to help these women who have struggled together with me in the ministry of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my coworkers whose names are in the scroll of life.

Be glad in the Lord always! Again I say, be glad! Let your gentleness show in your treatment of all people. The Lord is near. Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks. Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.

~

While I am not the biggest fan of Paul, I will give him one thing; he is very passionate and very caring and loving towards the congregations he founded. It is not uncommon for him to lavish praise and love and adoration in his letters. And while he loved all his congregations equally - for the most part - the churches in Philippi here gets the most generous outpouring of his love and affection.

And I say churches because Paul addressed his letter to “all those in Philippi” along with their “supervisors” and “servants.” Not to the congregation or the church in Philippi, which was how he addressed some of his other letters.

This letter, of which we read part of the ending, is focused on gratitude and joy, along with a plea for unity that takes up most of its pages. Some scholars think that this plea for unity is coming from the fact that there are two different churches in Philippi when there used to be only one. We’re not entirely sure what caused this schism, but some scholars think that Euodia and Syntyche were the leaders of two different house churches who’d previously worked together with Paul to found the first congregation in Philippi. Now, for some reason, they’ve split up. And while that’s not necessarily the main point of the letter, some scholars think that this split was the reason that pushed Paul to finally write to them.

And Paul had plenty of time to write now, because he was in prison. Again. He ended up in prison a lot throughout his ministry; mostly for causing social or political unrest. So when he writes about having joy and gratitude in all situations, and that they should always bring their prayers and requests to God, he’s doing so from a Roman prison cell. Not necessarily the easiest place to be thankful in!

And in the same line as gratitude, he tells the churches in Philippi to not be anxious about having their needs met, which is a theme that repeats throughout Scripture. All the way back in Exodus we see the Hebrew people being taken care of with mana from heaven when they’re wandering for forty years in the middle of the desert. In Daniel we see God provide for the people held captive in Babylon’s courts by miraculously making the food they could eat nutritious enough to sustain them. And in the Sermon on the Mount, which is the section of Matthew where we get the Lord’s Prayer from, Jesus talks about how the sparrows and the lilies are cared for by God, and so God will care for humanity in the same way.

Except we can easily look around our communities and world and find example after example of people not having their daily needs met. Even in places where we least expect it to be the case.

For example, Noah and I attended SMU for college, which is an affluent university in Dallas, Texas. So most people looking at SMU from the outside, including me at first, assumed that there wasn’t food insecurity on campus. So it shocked me when I started working in student life and learned that SMU had a food pantry on campus specifically for students. Most of the time it was used by grad students, who even though they were studying at such a wealthy university, were not getting paid nearly enough to cover rent and groceries at the same time.

And this pantry wasn’t run by the university directly - instead it was completely funded by donations from the SMU community, and overseen by a partnership between the Student Advocacy office and the libraries on campus. I still don’t think many people know that it exists, because it just seems so unthinkable that such a wealthy school would have a student population that couldn’t afford groceries. But it just goes to show that even in places where it seems so unlikely that people are struggling to make ends meet, even there people can struggle to get their daily bread.

And this has been the case since the earliest days of the Church.

Rome was an incredibly rich empire, one of the wealthiest in history. And even though Jerusalem was in a poor province of that empire, people in it tended to be better off than those who lived in the more rural villages throughout the province. But just as it is today, people who never had to worry about where their next meal was coming from lived right alongside people who never knew when they would be able to eat.

In fact, really the first Church institution ever created was for the purpose of making sure everyone in their growing faith community was taken care of, no matter who they were or where they lived. From the very beginning, the priority of the Church was not only prayer and telling others about Jesus, but making sure that everyone was taken care of. Even as it grew from a few dozen people to a few thousand, the Church still prioritized making sure that the widows, orphans, and poor among them had what they needed to live. But with how quickly the Church grew, and how diverse it was becoming, people started getting overlooked and left behind. So when we reach Acts 6, we see accusations made by Greek-speaking disciples that their widows are being overlooked during food distribution.

There’s no direct reason given as to why this is happening. Maybe it’s because of the language barrier, maybe the widows were too afraid to stand up for themselves in case they were thrown out, and maybe they didn’t want to make trouble for the new faith community they were living in.

Or maybe it was straight-up discrimination.

But once this comes to light, the twelve apostles’ response is to ask the community to nominate seven men to oversee the food distribution to make sure that everyone is getting what they need. These men from all different backgrounds became the first seven deacons. Eventually the role would be expanded to include women, and their focus was on making sure that the practical needs of the quickly growing faith community were met - that everyone had food, and that the widows and orphans were protected in a society where they were often exploited. So while the apostles focused on the spiritual welfare of the growing Church, the deacons focused on the material welfare. Because both were important to the early Church, to God, and to Jesus.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus modeled for us to pray for God to “gives us this day our daily bread.” He didn’t say for us to pray that God would “give me this day my daily bread.”

This is where the Lord’s Prayer becomes a reminder that we pray with an entire world for our needs to be met. And if ours are, it’s a reminder that just down the street, there are people whose are not. Even right here in Lake Bluff and Lake Forest.

This budgeting cycle, we voted to have some money for outreach directly come from our operating budget. And this was important because it’s money that the outreach team can count on being there, meaning that they could promise it as a regular donation to nonprofit organizations in our community.

For those who’ve served on nonprofit boards and worked with them, you know how much it regular donations help determine an organization’s capacity and plans for a given year. So this year, the outreach committee decided to promise that money to Bluffers in Need, a program through the Lake Bluff school district. When the teachers or social workers find out a need amongst their students, the social workers can then get the student the things that they need with the funds that’re donated by the community for that purpose. And with our ability to regularly help replenish that fund, they will be able to do more for the kids that live in our neighborhoods. They won’t have to worry about the funds being there for the next student who needs food, clothes, or the power turned back on at their house.

Because yes, families right here in our little bubble can still struggle to get food on the table and keep the lights on. But we can do something about it, and we are doing something about it.

Because we know that when we pray for God to give us our daily bread, we mean all of us.

But we’re meant to do more than just to pray for it to happen. We’re meant to be the answer to prayer ourselves.

Because prayer is more than just words. It is our actions, our love made manifest in a world that is often too bereft of it.

When Jesus was here on earth, he lived it out through multiplying bread and fishes and making sure crowds of thousands were fed. Then once he was ascended into heaven, it was the early Church that came together to put together the resources and make sure nobody among them went without.

Now it’s our turn to do the same.

~

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

compassion on this world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

- St. Teresa of Ávila