Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.
I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my coworkers, whose names are in the book of life.
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Finally, brothers and sisters, 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. As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you.
Phil 4:1-9
Like Paul with his friends, I knew I was in a season of goodbyes for the past couple of months, but this week I found out I have to say one more goodbye that I didn’t expect: my 2003 Acura RSX. On the one hand, it’s not that hard, nor unexpected; I knew I would be done with it soon. It hasn’t had working A/C in two years or heat for one Vermont winter; I never bothered painting the new bumper after I ran off the road into a snowbank my first winter here. I never bothered giving it a name, or a gender—“she” wasn’t my baby, it was just a good car for me for a long time, basically a nicer Honda Civic that used to have nicer leather until the upholstery started ripping through.
And yet I don’t like saying goodbye even to a beater. Because even though it’s an inanimate piece of metal, it’s been with me through so much of my life and so many relationships since I got it in the last week of my first job in Los Angeles. It’s been with me through so many different jobs, breakups, even religions, from coast to coast and up and down both. It’s seen twenty-nine states and three Vermont winters (barely). Yet it’s so silly because the car really is just a car. I’ve wanted to say goodbye to it for a while! I really mostly love it not because of what it is, but because of where it’s been with me and for how long. And yet even the easiest goodbyes aren’t easy.
So as I’ve been thinking about goodbyes, it struck me that we already are trying to put a positive spin on a hard thing by even calling them “goodbyes”; there’s no word “badbyes.” We’re already trying to be optimistic. Really, the only obvious “good” bye is to something that’s bad, something working even less well than an old car. Many of our byes are to something good, before we knew it, much less wanted it, but those aren’t good byes, just pain.
Even in our small congregation, I only know a glimpse of some of the hard goodbyes some of you have had to make. Even this weekend, we lost a beloved dog unexpectedly. In the past year, we have lost parents, spouses, and friends. We’ve lost more intangible things, too—around us in this community, people have lost jobs, abilities, dreams, and worse. These are not “good” byes.
Paul didn’t always have easy goodbyes either. In Acts 20, Paul says goodbye to one of his closest, most affectionate churches, his friends in Ephesus. He talks about all they’ve been through together, gives them some last exhortations, and charges them to remember what Jesus is calling them to do in their ministry. They prayed together, they cried together, they grieved together, and then they said goodbye.
The Church in Philippi, whose mail we’ve been reading this past month, was another beloved group of friends to Paul. The church gave birth starting with the women who gathered by the river, where he met Lydia. Then he and Silas were bound in jail in Philippi, and after a holy earthquake jailbroke them, they ended up baptizing the jailer and his entire household. These were his friends, and they also had to say goodbye, but they kept in touch.
And now at the end of this remarkable letter, we hear the Holy Spirit showing us what a really good bye looks like. All our other readings today explicitly mention a meal—a “table before me” in Psalm 23, a feast in Isaiah, Jesus’ wedding banquet—but in the letter to the Philippians, we symbolically get a taste of the meal of the kingdom of God, a place where humans are gathered together in joyful love. Here we, in 2026, are gathered in relationship to these saints across time and space, the magic of writing, with Paul passing around dishes of spiritual goodness like Thanksgiving gravy. Hear again some of what he says in his good bye:
“Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.” Stand firm in the Lord in love; don’t be bent, don’t be swayed, stand firm in love together. He urges reconciliation with Euodia and Syntyche, two women who struggled with him in the work of the gospel—maybe two of the women who had first become Christians by the river together—people who were on the same team but couldn’t get on the same page. Then he says, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again, I say, rejoice!” Not because of hardship, but in the midst of it. “Let your gentleness be known to everyone”; don’t be any more famous than your kindness. “The Lord is near.” “Do not be anxious,” but give everything over to God in thankful prayer. Know that there is “a peace of God that passes all understanding” and it will “guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” And then this beautiful last litany— “Finally, brothers and sisters, 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.”
Why does Paul say all this now? Why put this near the end? Maybe he knows that the antidote to a hard goodbye is not straining for the past, but living even more into what is good today. Now of course, even if we do that, goodbyes aren’t necessarily any easier. The loss is still real. Even knowing the unfathomable amount of life-giving love that would come on the cross through the resurrection did not make the pain of the cross easier for Jesus. His tears were real, and they are our tears. His anguish was real, for he shares in our anguish at the ultimate departure of life in death. The cross was not an easy goodbye to this life. Why would saying goodbye to the joys of this life be easy for us?
But we also know there is something so sacred in even the pain of a goodbye, because the same emotional investment that makes a goodbye hard is what made a goodbye worthy of the pain; the same passion that burns with grieving and the sorrow of letting go is how we know there was any love to delight in in the first place.
Time can be a miserable tyrant who death recruits to do its bidding. What’s remarkable, though, is how God can see all of time at once; every time we say hello to someone or something, God already sees us saying goodbye. And when we are in the pain of a goodbye, God already sees what we can’t as humans: the new graces we are about to say hello to. From where we stand in a goodbye—when we first met the love of our life who is no longer with us, or the first weekend I arrived here on those backroads, or the best family gathering we ever had that can’t happen again—remembering the “hellos” is just bittersweet. But from where God stands, a goodbye is passing the plate so the next dish of love can be served in his banquet.
That’s how Jesus can tell his disciples in the same breath, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” (John 14:28); “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you…because I live, you also will live.” (John 14:18-19) “In my Father’s house, there are many rooms,” (John 14:2), he says, and he is preparing a place for us there. As prophet Isaiah told us today, “The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food and well-aged wines,” destroying shrouds, wiping tears, and “he will swallow up death forever.”
In our parable today, Jesus says many are invited to his feast: “the good and the bad.” The good, the bad, and you are invited to his feast. And so in Jesus Christ, every “badbye” is a truly good bye, because in the kingdom of God, there is hello again at the feast. That doesn’t mean we pretend grief isn’t there. We don’t take off grief, but “put on the clothes of Christ” (Romans 13:14). We do that in the beauty, joy, goodness, and love, standing firm in the Lord, reconciling, rejoicing, and making your gentleness famous. We are not running away from our grief. We are embracing it by also embracing the goodness of God along with it.
The place I’ve seen this most recently has been in the grief groups that Vicki and Sandy have led in the past couple of years for people who have lost a spouse or a child. It started as a program called GriefShare, and it’s now evolved into a group called “Living with Loss,” meeting monthly for potlucks and sharing. When I last attended as a supporting pastor, if you were to pop your head in during the first hour, you might not have known what we were meeting for, because we were simply eating, communing, and being in fellowship together. Then people began to share the aspects of living with loss they were still working through. As the stories go around, you see just how much we have in common in our grief that we thought nobody would understand or want to hear. But even though we feel left alone, God does not leave us orphaned. He brings us to the table together. And so “Living with Loss” is a great name for such a group, and even greater if you think about it for a second, because the loss isn’t denied, it’s lived with. And, I would say, it’s not just living “with loss.” It’s living through loss, which really is all living.
And when I go home from those meetings, I come back to hug and hold my wife a little tighter, filled with such joy and gratitude and even a little pre-grief at knowing this can’t be forever, because nothing is at the hands of that tyrant time. But by the grace of God I will soak up every moment that he gives us together, and know it will have been worth it.
That’s also how I’ve been feeling about leaving Craftsbury. That’s why today, even though there’s one more week, my sermon became about saying goodbye, partly because that’s just what our Philippians reading points to, but also because I don’t know if I will say goodbye properly next week or not. And I’ll have to give that up to God. But I know that no matter the goodbye, there will be another hello at the feast.
But until then and after then, brothers and sisters, “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…do them, and the God of peace will be with you.” Amen.
