The deep
”And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” -Philippians 4
I want to suggest something very at odds with modern thinking philosophically, ethically, practically: Christianity is a thing about which we can either be "in" or "out." There isn't a half-way stage, or a moderate form of Christianity that allows us to affiliate with Jesus in a detached sort of way. This is an offense against our closely held values of radical personal freedom, the fluidity of our attachments, and of leaving our options open. The gods we favor are those who allow us the lion's share of our own lives, but where life is only what you make of it, and the best that your accomplishments can do, like the ancient Pharaohs, is decorate your coffin. The idea of Christianity as an "in" or "out" way of life may not be entirely shocking. But the reason might be.
Samuel Rutherford, a 17th-century Scottish Reformer who wrote not only beautifully about Christian doctrine but also political philosophy, he was a pastor, professor, scholar, and probably would have been executed during the English restoration in Scotland, if not for the fact that he died of natural causes first. Here's what he said about being in Christ:
"Christ is a well of life, but who knows how deep it is to the bottom?"
When you woke up this morning you made a set of decisions about your life. You chose to be in a career, to be in a marriage, to be in school. You made a choice to be in relationship with a neighbor or a friend. Of course every day we make these kinds of decisions. They are all in-or-out decisions. But those decisions, are altogether different than what Paul is proposing to the Philippian church. They are altogether different than the kinds of decisions we make as well. In part because they deal with a subject matter of deeper importance than whether or not you will get a degree, have spending money, even whether or not you will be lonely or not. Christianity is in-or-out because to be in is to save your life and to be out is to lose your life. We have other in-and-out decisions like that, don't we? If you go skydiving, for instance, you are also in-or-out on wearing a parachute. You cannot casually hold a parachute and hope to decide after jumping. To not decide is to decide. Christianity is one of those belief systems in which you have to tighten the straps, commit to the way. In or out.
Euodia and Syntyche Paul names as pillars of the Philippian church. They are in deep, painful, conflict and in that day there wasn't second presbyterian church of Philippi for Euodia to scurry away and find. Who knows what the conflict was, Paul offers no juicy details, but is was so deep that neither person could see their way out of it. They were in the weeds. They were like two exhausted swimmers trying to tread water. Neither could think of the other, neither could help the other, both were fighting for survival. He says that they are to agree in the Lord. This is the first of three markers in our text that tell us the importance of our union with Christ for living faithfully as disciples.
We have clues, of course, to the depth of Christ. Eudia and Syntyche are told to agree in the Lord. And a struggling, weary, persecuted community is told to rejoice in the Lord. And a people who have minds every bit as troubled and restless as yours and mine, are told to be at rest in the Lord. Paul is sounding out the depths of union with Christ here for his community, much as any good pastor should in their preaching and teaching. This is the depth of your union with Christ. You are to explore it, to rehearse it. You are to reckon yourself by its magnetism like a compass. You suss out its beauty and poetry the same way a lover writes a sonnet in meter, foot by foot; grasping for words, for concepts, bewildered. Like someone with Seasonal Affective Disorder looks at a clear Ohio sky in February, with their eyes blinking, in love. Desperately thankful.
The only thing comparable to the idea of being "in Christ," is our familiarity with being "in love." But there is a difference, of course. Being in love, though we romanticize it as irrational and out-of-our control, generally we acknowledge that it exists because someone, the one in whom we are in love, is themselves lovely. To be in love makes sense to us. Our affections are set on a person because of their loveliness and we are transported. And we are comfortable with a Christianity that makes a similar claim: that it is our moral or theological commitments, it is our attraction to the right religious ideas, it is because we kept our ethical train on the tracks, that keeps our union with Christ.
But Christ's union with us is not like falling in love. The divine mystery, in which Union with Christ is wrapped, is that there is no basis for his affection for us. Because he is God and sinless and we are a creature full of sin, our union with Christ defies even our romantic ideals. It can't be like falling in love because the object of God's affection is not, itself, lovely.
A person might ask, how can I endure a love story where all the beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Does Christianity degrade human beings by insisting on our abject sinfulness? No. When someone in our church takes vows of membership they say that they are "without hope save in his sovereign mercy." They do not disappear into the dark when they say it. Union with Christ is not only a judicial declaration of our innocence, but the planting of a seedling whose rootedness in the righteousness of Christ will not fail to produce fruit by faith. The beloved, by the love of the lover, actually becomes lovely. Christianity does not devalue human beings any more than a map degrades your sense of direction or food degrades your stomach for satiating its hunger. Union with Christ is a deep reservoir of grace whose extent cannot be known from the safety of your feet on the ground. You must be in to know it. Can you bear the weight of God's love placed upon you completely without merit? A love so strong that your only choice is to be carried away by its current to wherever it will have you go? It will bear your conflicts away. It can remove the fear of being wrong or the arrogance of believing you are always right.
As one author wrote, "I have been my whole life a bell and did not know it until that moment I was lifted and struck." Depth is what we are looking for. Until we are in union with Christ we do not know that we are a bell. We need to be out of our depth in the waters of God's grace and mercy and justice. We need to be struck by the force of Jesus' I am the vine. We need to be carried away by Jesus' you are the branches.
Thalassophobia is a fear of the seas. It's their darkness, depth, unpredictability, and largeness to our smallness that makes us fear them. They are the very image of chaos because they cannot be controlled. This is what it means to fall into the hands of a self-giving God. Whatever Samuel Rutherford meant when he said, but who knows how deep, it is something of that fear. We are Winslow Homer's man on a boat, with sharks. The union we have with Christ is both beautiful and terrifying. Beautiful because it is the greatest example of being both fully known and fully loved, but terrifying because to be in you must fall in, having nowhere outside of God's grace to stand. If you're in, you're in the deep waters of God's mercy, the cavernous space his redemptive love has carved into the cosmos. And who knows how deep?