First Cobleskillians

“First Cobleskillians”

June 14, 2026

Philippians 1:1-11

Second Sunday after Pentecost

Philippians 1:1-11

1 Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,

To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops^[a] and deacons:^[b]

² Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

³ I thank my God for every remembrance of you, ⁴ always in every one of my prayers for all of you, praying with joy ⁵ for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. ⁶ I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete^[c] it until the day of Jesus Christ. ⁷ It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because I hold you in my heart,^[d] for all of you are my partners in God’s grace,^[e] both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. ⁸ For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the tender affection of Christ Jesus. ⁹ And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight ¹⁰ to help you to determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, ¹¹ having produced the harvest^[f] of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

I’m really going to miss you all. You sure do know how to throw a good party.  Yesterday’s celebration was overwhelming and a couple of times it made me think this must be what it’s like to be at your own funeral… so many people saying so many nice things.  What a blessing it is to have opportunities while we are still living to say the things we want and need to say to one another.  

Times of change are like that.  Bitter and sweet.  Tears and laughter all in the same breath. I’ve thought for a long time about what needed to be said in this space in these last two Sundays together.  But the truth is, opening the Bible offers exactly what is needed in this moment.

Speaking words into transitional moments is something scripture is very good at.  The canon of our Bible includes many pages written by inspired individuals to communities that were or are or will be in the midst of change.  Moses bringing the Israelites out of Egypt through the wilderness and toward the Promised Land.  Ruth traveling with her mother-in-law to a new home.  The Babylonian exile during which time nearly all of the prophetic literature in the Bible was inspired.  And then there’s Paul’s letters.  Letters written to churches far flung across the Mediterranean world. New churches that were just finding their footing in the midst of the teachings that were being spread from Jesus.  Churches that needed encouragement.  Churches that needed challenging.  Churches that Paul loved very much and with whom he shared vision and purpose. 

The church in Phillipi, in present day Macedonia, was one of those churches Paul loved dearly.  And you can hear it in the opening to his letter.  

³  ”I thank my God for every remembrance of you, ⁴ always in every one of my prayers for all of you, praying with joy ⁵ for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. ⁶

Paul wrote these words to the church at Philippi from… prison, where they were financially supporting him and praying for him.  The purpose of the letter is to both thank the church for their support and prayers and to remind them of their shared purpose.  

We, too, are a church in transition.  And while I’m a far cry from the Apostle Paul and I’m certainly not heading to prison (at least I hope not), I wanted to write you a letter and it will take two parts.  Today we talk about gratitude, mine for you.  And next week we talk about our shared purpose.  

Gratitude.  Where do we start? 

Yesterday you had your turn to speak through words and hugs and blessings and a food table that looked heavenly and it blew me away.  I was pretty much speechless when the time came for me to talk.  But let it be known, as Paul said and as I do now, too: “I thank my God for every remembrance of you, always in every one of my prayers for all of you, praying with joy for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.”

And that partnership is what I’m grateful for the most. I probably could have filled several months with this letter but I’m going to focus on two pieces where my gratitude is centered today.  

First, You are open-minded.  The depth and practice of that in this church is truly such a special and unique thing. 

What kind of church lets their pastor draw chalk murals on the side of the building or hang mobiles from the entrance porch or plant seeds for a complete remodel of the chancel area?  The same kind of church that says: how can we help?  But chalk murals and dove mobiles and architectural accessibility don’t even really touch the truth.  That’s just the surface.  Your open-mindedness as a community is what fuels you to think about church differently.  You see God as love and church as the community driven vehicle to share the simple truth that God is love.  Nothing more and nothing less.  This simple truth allows you to think outside of the box and not be constrained by “the way it’s always been done.”  You have been open-minded and curious and it shows.

“Partnership in the gospel from the first day until now” as Paul says.  For me, this partnership has meant when I encourage you to ask questions and be curious, you don’t hesitate.  We have come to a mutual understanding that spiritual curiosity deepens the well.  This is something we know deep inside of our beings, and sometimes all we need is encouragement to trust our inner curiosity.

Yesterday Brian Elder presented a project he had been working on.  He works in some sort of technology job that I still don’t completely understand, but that’s okay.  Technology is his gift and that’s all I need to know.  He used his gift of technology to create a website or maybe an app (?) that randomly generates phrases from the hundreds of sermons I’ve preached here.  Truly, it is amazing that he took the time to do this!  Each time you log in, it gives a different phrase from a different sermon.  They don’t have context, it’s just the phrase itself.  Well, last evening I gave it try and this is the phrase that came up (I guess I’m quoting myself at this point): 

"In the Gospels, Jesus is asked 187 questions. How many of those questions does he answer? Maybe 8 of them. How many questions does he ask himself? 307."

Supposedly random, but this perfectly illustrates the way we have partnered.  Your open-mindedness and spiritual curiosity is part of our gospel heritage and all I’ve needed to do is connect the dots.  Open-mindedness and the willingness to be a community of questions rather than a community of answers is an intrinsic value that Jesus instilled.  And right now, this is exactly the kind of church the world needs.  Less convinced by their own certainty and more open to what God is still saying.  It’s why we read in a small group setting the book Why Stay Christian? by Brian McLaren as we wrestled with the baggage and legacy of the practice of our faith.  Spiritual curiosity is why our children get asked questions up at the front of the church and their words are just as worthy of a microphone as the pastor’s.  Spiritual curiosity is why you’ve embraced new ideas and dreams instead of saying, “we’ve never done it that way before.” And it even comes down to something as practical and seemingly small as this: when someone visits our food pantry, we ask what they want instead of assuming we know.

Together we’ve tried a lot of new things.  Instead of sitting inside a sanctuary and applauding ourselves for our own definite and never-wrong beliefs, we’ve turned ourselves inside out and wondered, what would it be like to serve our neighbors?  What gifts and questions do they bring?  How can we meet them and know them?  How can we make our own faith accessible and visible to the community? 

Your open-mindedness is a gift from God.  And I thank my God for every remembrance of you.  God is good, all the time.  All the time, God is good.

But that’s not all.

The second piece of my gratitude for you this morning is this: 

You see challenges and from them you create opportunities.

I really resonate with Paul’s phrase “From the first day until now.”  Our journey together has been full from our first day until now.  And the key part of our partnership that I am eternally grateful for is that when we have seen challenges, we have created opportunities.

And our time together has had its share of significant challenges.  In my very first summer with you as your lead pastor, I kid you not, a deer jumped through the window of the conference room and the catalpa tree was struck by lightning.  On top of that we lost some dearly beloved souls, pillars of our congregation: people like Margaret Karger and Ina Jones.  This was a startling start to my ministry with you.  

But the first year wasn’t over yet. Eight months later, I was preparing a Lenten sermon series called “Giving Up,” a play on the traditional things you give up for Lent like chocolate but instead focusing on harder, less-tangible aspects to self-examination like giving up control, expectations, contempt, pride, prejudice, popularity, and death itself.

By the second week of the series, early March 2020, it suddenly took on new meaning.  We realized as a church and a community and individuals that the “giving up” was going to go a lot further than any of us thought.  As global pandemic descended, Lent 2020 was the Lentiest Lent we could have possibly imagined.  Everything we knew about gathering as a community of faith got turned on its head.  Smiles?  Hugs?  Handshakes?  Singing?  Sitting in the same room?  We did, in fact, give up a lot that Lent and that was just the beginning.  I would say a solid three years of our life together was defined by Covid and the recovery of our common life together.

And then raging in the background and often glaring at us in the foreground was and is the erosion of what we thought were shared social contracts in our political landscape.  The last decade of our ministry together has been overshadowed by a challenging political environment, to put it mildly.  The value of diversity, equity and inclusion, which we established last week as an expression of God, has been completely undermined in ways that surprise me every day with how as we reach new lows as a society. 

Challenges, my we’ve had challenges.  But you know what, we’re a hard bunch to get down.  You see, the enduring truth that God is love never changed and you knew that.  There was no challenge- none of them- that changed that enduring truth.  And together, by God’s grace, we found ways to create opportunity out of challenge.  Necessity was the mother of invention and sometimes, my friends, God works in mysterious ways.  You rallied together and helped the church be the church in surprising ways.  

Some of my favorite memories from that era were the ways you tried new things: Bringing Pentecost to the people with a Ding Dong Door Dash (birthday cake in a bag left on the doorstep).  Caravans of caring as a parade of cars brought cheer around the community.  Zoom Bible studies (who had ever heard of Zoom?).  Food Pantry orders that got delivered out into the community by volunteers.  Food Pantry expansion so that our community could access our food pantry twice as often.  Partnership with our Mosaic churches to make worship videos that included many faces and voices.  And perhaps the most lasting effect: never before Covid had this church put its worship on the internet.  You invested time and money and our volunteers have been relentlessly faithful and now every single week out of a challenge, you have created an opportunity for people outside of these walls to be with us in Spirit worshipping together as one body.  

And in this time of socio-political erosion, you have chosen not to remain neutral but to stand on the side of the marginalized and oppressed.  You’ve chosen justice over complacency and love over apathy.  Just as soon as we were able to gather in person on May 22, 2022, this congregation made the decision, as a group, as Paul says “with knowledge and full insight ¹⁰ … to determine what really matters.”  And you stood in the gap of reconciliation and made a statement about the value and worth of all people, especially those in the LGBTQ community, in the face of a denomination that hadn’t yet arrived.  You saw a challenge and you responded with an opportunity.

God is good, all the time.  All the time, God is good. 

And lastly, I must say a word of gratitude for the ways you have personally lifted me up. I served here through some very challenging times in my own life.  Probably the most challenging.  And through it all, there was never a time when I felt alone.  God was with me and you were with me.  There were days when this community carried me in ways you probably won’t ever know.   Even and especially in times of challenge, God shows up in ways that give us hope.  For me, God showed up in you.  And I thank my God for every remembrance of you.  

God is good, all the time.  All the time, God is good.

Will you say it with me: All the time, God is Good.  God is good, all the time.

Grace and Peace,

Pastor Anna