"Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." [Philippians 4:8]
I've had more than a few conversations with folks lately who feel helpless these days--maybe we all do in some moments. The anger, the bitterness, the mean-spiritedness, the tidal waves of misinformation thrown at us on a million subjects, the many ways that crooks seem to get away with their crookedness, the shadiness and self-interest on display from very public places, and the assumption that everybody's hands are dirty so nobody can speak up and say, "This isn't right!"--well, it all has a way of overwhelming us, and we can feel like we don't know how to put one foot in front of the other. Or maybe, like driving during a torrential downpour, we aren't sure which direction is forward--and which could be sending us off a cliff. It's hard to know how to navigate in times like these, and honestly, I don't see an endpoint when the fog will all magically lift. We are going to have to learn the skills for driving in the rain.
And the best counsel I can give, both from the Scriptures and from about twenty-five years of driving, is this: it’s about orientation.
It’s about keeping pointed in the right direction along the way, and using whatever pointers and guides you can get as you go. That’s what Paul is talking about. And it’s why he often talks about the Christian life as a “walk,” which is to say, we are headed somewhere, and we are already on the road now.
It’s about, as I say, orientation.
In the most basic sense of that word, to be “oriented” is to be pointed east, the direction of the sunrise. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is to have a sense of which way is east, and from there to be able to tell which way the other cardinal directions were pointed. That information is really only useful if you are traveling somewhere, and you need to get your bearings set. But if indeed you are on a journey, say a “walk,” or even a drive in the rain, especially to somewhere you have never been before or by a route you have never taken before, having the right orientation—the right sense of direction—will help keep you headed where you need to go.
Now, there is an obvious way of knowing where east is—the sunrise—but there are also times when you can’t gauge where the sun has risen from, times like, noon, for example. So you might have a whole list of possible ways to know which direction is “east.” Aside from the sunrise, you can look for Venus in the morning sky. You can get out your trusty compass and keep the needle for north always to your left and for south always to your right. When I was a kid and we would vacation on the shore of Lake Erie, you could always get your bearings by keeping the lake in perspective—it was always north, so if the lake was on your left, you were pointed toward the east. I suppose if you were a Scout and you knew to look for the right kind of moss growing on the north side of a tree, you could get your bearings that way, too.
The point here is that even when it comes to your literal geographic orientation, you might have several different things to focus on, all of which can serve to keep you pointed in the right direction, even if the most obvious one, the sunrise, is useful when you’re awake to see it. And in the rest of those times, you could look to the other kinds of signs—the compass, the location of the lake, the Morning Star, Venus, on the horizon, or whatever other landmarks you might have.
This is really the same kind of direction Paul gives to us today. When it comes to being pointed in the right direction—or what the early Christians would have called “walking the Way”—Jesus himself is our obvious clue. Christ himself grounds us and orients us and gives us our bearings. Consider him the sunrise, if you like. And when we keep Christ in focus we can know where we are pointed and what we are sent to do in the day before us.
And when I say that we “keep Christ in focus,” I mean something more than just spouting vague concepts like “just be loving” or “do the right thing,” because, truthfully, we don’t know what “loving” or “right” looks like, really, apart from seeing Jesus live it. The world’s picture of “loving” is quite often about what “feels good at the moment,” while Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection show us a different picture of “loving.” Jesus shows us that love means a willingness to suffer, a willingness to give ourselves away, and a willingness to be fiercely faithful even when love is not returned to us. Same with talking about doing “the right thing.” Lots of people do downright awful things convinced that it’s okay because they are “right” or that their actions are justified by the outcome they are hoping for. Lord help us with even vaguer concepts like "greatness"--the world absolutely loves to talk about how to be great, how to attain greatness, and how you should want greatness, too, and yet it is a "greatness" that runs completely counter to Jesus' picture of greatness, which shows up in serving, in love, and in doing right by other people, rather than a win-at-all-costs scorched earth gamesmanship. We've got competing pictures of what love, decency, truth, and greatness look like--and when that happens, we are called to keep looking to Jesus to point us in the right direction again.
Like Eugene Peterson says, "Jesus is the dictionary in which we look up the meanings of words." And that means Christians are people who are learning to let Jesus show us what “love” and “right” mean, along with words like “truth” and “justice” and “mercy” and “integrity.” Jesus is our primary way of being oriented, and, when we get off course, of being re-oriented. If Jesus is our sunrise, then the Christian life is that daily re-gathering of our bearings and letting Jesus get us pointed in the direction he is walking.
But like with the sunrise, we have other secondary ways available to us to confirm our direction. And when it’s noon, say, and you missed the direction of the dawn, or when it's thundering and pouring so hard you can't see very far in front of you, you rely on things like compasses or GPS, or the yellow stripe in the road, or the location of the lake. And you trust that those things are ultimately going to agree with what you would learn from the sunrise. In the end, the location of the lake and the direction of the sunrise should both lead you to the same conclusion about which way is east.
And so it is in the Christian life, too. If Jesus himself is our sunrise, then there is a whole long list of other things that offer navigational help, too. Paul describes them this way: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable…” Paul’s point is not that we can just chuck Jesus for our bearings and just go with what our gut tells us is “right,” but rather than if something is really true or pure or just or good, in the end, it is going to line up with the character of God we have met in Jesus—his radical self-giving love, his welcome of the stranger and the outcast, his standing up for those made into victims, his willingness to serve in humility. In the end, if something really is true, it will point us in the direction of the living God, too, anyway. Or, as Thomas Aquinas once put it, “Every truth without exception—and whoever may utter it—is from the Holy Spirit.”
In other words, if you missed the sunrise this morning and you are still looking for east, you can use your compass and it should give you the same correct answer.
For us as Christians, in those moments when we are really struggling to see where Christ is leading us--especially in times when we feel overwhelmed with a tidal wave of rottenness and lies, Paul invites us to take a look at the other signs around us by looking at whatever other things, or people, around us have shown us goodness, purity, truth, and justice before. They may be secondary signs to navigate by, but they will do until the next sunrise, when we will see once again clearly which direction the true Bright and Morning Star is shining from, and we will be re-oriented for the new day.
Sometimes it's hard to know where the sun is for all the storm clouds, but if we don't drive too fast for our brains to process what we are seeing, we can get our bearings from the lines on the road, the guardrails along the berm, and the lights up ahead. Keep your orientation, and let those things keep reorienting you when you are afraid of going off the road. And we keep on keeping on until the rain does let up, or the daylight finally gets through.
Lord Jesus, give us your direction today, using whatever means you will. But keep us on your Way.
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