Sermon — You are Not Alone

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church in Allison Hill, in response to Philippians 1:1–18a. You can listen to the audio of the sermon at this link.)

There’s a detail in Philippians that’s easy to skip right past.

Paul doesn’t open this letter by saying I. Listen to the beginning. “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, together with the bishops and deacons.”

From the very first word, he insists that this is not a solo act.

Paul, who had more reason than almost anyone to make a name for himself. Paul the visionary, the apostle, the one who had the road-to-Damascus experience. He opens his most joyful letter not with his own story, but with the people around him. And before he says anything else, he thanks them. He thanks them for being with him from the very first day. He thanks them for sharing in his work. He holds them in his heart.

It’s important to remember that he’s writing from a jail cell in Rome. And he’s writing a thank-you letter.

I want to stay with that for a moment, because the situation matters enormously to what Paul is saying.

He is under guard. He is almost certainly chained to a Roman soldier. He is entirely dependent on friends for food, water, basic human contact. He is inside a power arrangement designed to break people. A power arrangement that runs on power and fear, that takes away your freedom, your dignity, your sense that anything will ever be different. A power arrangement that tells you that you are alone, that no one is coming, that hope is for fools.

And from that place, Paul writes, I thank my God every time I remember you.

Think about what that means. The empire is doing everything it can to convince him that he is alone and the situation is hopeless. And Paul is writing a letter that says: I am not alone. I have never been alone. And neither are you.

That is good news. That is the gospel Paul is proclaiming. Not in spite of his imprisonment, but right in the middle of it.

I think about Paul’s situation when I walk the streets of Allison Hill.

There are people in this neighborhood, people who come through the doors of the church, who know what it is to be imprisoned. Not always literally, though sometimes. There are people who have been taken to immigration detention facilities without a lawyer, without due process, without anyone who speaks their language to explain what is happening to them.

There are people imprisoned by addiction, which is its own kind of chain. Not a moral failure, but a real and physical bond that does not let go easily. There are people imprisoned by poverty, by relationships that have become cages, by health challenges they cannot afford to address.

There are people imprisoned by a mental health crisis that the rest of the world just calls a problem and moves on from. There are people imprisoned by changes in voting laws and gerrymandering designed to silence voices. And there are LGBTQ+ people who have been told, sometimes by the church itself, that who they are is an offense to God. And that is a kind of prison too.

We live, in many ways, in the kind of world Paul was writing from. A world where those in power are often the most disconnected from those they are supposed to serve. A world of great injustice dressed up in the language of law and order. A world that specializes in telling people they are alone and that nothing will ever change.

And yet Paul writes a letter of joy.

Not because the prison isn’t real. Not because the injustice doesn’t matter. But because he has found something the empire cannot take away from him: he is not alone. He has people. He has partners. He has a church.

And that changes everything.

Now let me read you a letter.

“Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, together with the bishops and deacons: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now.”

That’s Paul’s letter to Philippi.

Let me try something. What if someone wrote a letter like that to this congregation?

“To all the saints at Christ Lutheran Church in Allison Hill — to the staff and the volunteers and the medical teams and the partners and the neighbors who trust you: Grace and peace. I thank God every time I remember you. Every time I think about the pregnant woman who knocked on your door because someone on the street told her you would help. Every time I think about the person who came in struggling with addiction and found that someone knew their name. Every time I think about the nursing students walking through this neighborhood, the dentists giving their Saturday, the churches that send work groups and then want to come back. Every time I think about the grant writers and the foundations and the individuals who make this ministry possible. I thank God for all of you, because you have been in this together from the beginning.”

That’s not a far-fetched letter. That’s the letter that’s already being written, one act of love at a time.

I write thank-you letters all the time. This congregation writes thank-you letters for financial gifts, for donations of medical supplies, for hygiene items, for dental equipment and materials. Some of those letters go to large foundations. Some go to individuals who gave what they could. Some go to churches. Some go to businesses.

Every single one of those letters is saying the same thing Paul is saying: you are a part of this. What you gave mattered. The gospel was proclaimed because you showed up.

And I want to be clear about something. I am the pastor here, and the executive director of the health ministries, and there is no version of this work that I do alone. None. It is not possible. This ministry only exists because of a team of people, and the list is long.

There are people on this staff, admin, custodial, worship leaders and helpers, dental support staff. People who are paid by this congregation, and who show up each day and do work that holds this place together. There are people paid by Holy Spirit Hospital and Penn State Health who bring expertise and resources that we could never generate on our own.

There are dentists who give their time for free, and Melissa who runs Healthy on the Hill as a volunteer, and dozens of others who give themselves to this work without a paycheck. There are work groups who come for a day and leave changed. There are congregation members who throw themselves into the life of this community with everything they have. Many of you are sitting in the pews today. There are churches who have been committed partners in this ministry for years. Churches like Derry Presbyterian, where I’ll be going next month, carrying stories from this place to share with them

There are foundations and grantors. There are individuals who write checks and never ask for recognition. There are people who give ten dollars a month and people who give much more, and every single one of them is a partner in this gospel.

Each one of these people are good news. This is the gospel in action.

I am standing at this lectern. But I am not alone up here. All of you are up here with me.

Here is the thing about Paul’s letter that I don’t want us to miss: it isn’t just an emotional thank-you. Paul is making a real claim. He is saying that the Philippians, with their money, their prayers, their presence, have been genuinely essential to the proclamation of the gospel. Not nice-to-have. Essential.

And he says: I am confident that the one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.

That confidence is not in himself. It’s not in the Philippians. It is in God who started something here and does not abandon what God starts. Paul is in prison, and what he has learned from prison is that the gospel cannot be chained. He says that plainly: my imprisonment has actually helped spread the gospel. The empire tried to stop it. It spread anyway. Because the gospel travels through people, through relationships, through networks of trust. And those cannot be imprisoned.

That word is trust. That is the center of everything here.

Think about what it takes for someone who has been failed by every institution they have ever encountered, by schools that gave up on them, by courts that didn’t treat them fairly, by hospitals that sent them away, by churches that told them they were too broken or too sinful or too different. Think about what it takes for that person to walk through that door and ask for help.

It doesn’t happen because of a flyer. It doesn’t happen because we have a good website. It happens because someone told them: I went there and they helped me.

Trust is built one encounter at a time. One kept promise. One daily clinic. One Sunday meal shared. One work project. One conversation where someone felt heard. And over time, that becomes something real. A reputation, a relationship, a covenant with a neighborhood.

And trust can be destroyed fast. We know that too.

We are living through a moment of profound mistrust in this country. People don’t trust each other. People don’t trust the government. They don’t trust the media. They don’t trust the courts or the medical establishment or the schools. And they don’t trust the church — and sometimes for very good reason. Every time a pastor is caught in sexual misconduct, that trust breaks for everyone in the congregation and far beyond. Every time a church steals from its own people, trust breaks.

Every time a church uses its platform to dehumanize people, to suppress women, to tell LGBTQ+ people they are not worthy of God’s love, to stand with the powerful at the expense of the lowly, trust breaks. And it doesn’t just break for the people directly hurt. It breaks for everyone who was watching, everyone who was already skeptical, everyone who needed one more reason to stay away.

We are so desperate for something trustworthy that people will latch on to almost anything. They latch on to Christian nationalism, which wraps the gospel in a flag and calls it holy while ignoring or rejecting everything that Jesus is about. They latch on to hyper-partisan politics, where the team becomes the thing you trust and everyone outside the team becomes the enemy. They latch on to celebrities and influencers and brands that promise belonging. They latch on to theologies that offer absolute certainty, that have an answer for everything, that tell you exactly who is in and who is out, that make the world feel manageable and clear, because certainty feels like safety when everything else is falling apart.

I understand that hunger. I do. When the world feels like Paul’s prison, built to take away your hope, your dignity, your sense that anything matters, you will look for anything that says you are not alone and that there is a way through.

What we have to offer is not certainty. It is not a brand or a tribe or a clean theological system. What we have to offer is something much more fragile and much more real. A community that tries, again and again, to do what Jesus did. To see people. To hear them. To tell them they are not alone. To point toward a future that God is already building. To say, “let’s go.”

Every person who walks through these doors is in need of healing. Every single one. That’s what the healing wheel is about. Not a program, not a list of services. A theology. A picture of what the gospel looks like when it shows up in a body. Each spoke is a form of good news: medical care, dental care, education, mental health, community, presence, peace, the sharing of the peace, communion, sanctuary.

People come here for bandages and blood pressure checks and medication. They come because they are lonely and need one healthy human interaction. They come to be in community without having to perform or pretend. They come for the literal sharing of the peace, someone to look them in the eye and say peace be with you and mean it.

People have come here high, because they knew it was safe. People have come here in the middle of an overdose, because they knew help was here. People have come in mental health crisis and not been dismissed.

This building with its duct tape and its worn floors is a sanctuary. And I mean that word in every sense. It is a holy place because holy things happen here. Because God is here. Because Jesus keeps showing up in the nurse who knows someone’s name, in the dentist who gives their Fridays and Saturdays, in the congregation member who just sits with someone who needs to not be alone. In the work group from another church that comes for a day and leaves with their hearts changed.

Jesus sees. Jesus hears. Jesus says you are not alone. Jesus points toward a new future. And Jesus says let’s go.

That is what is happening here. Not because we are good at this. Not because we have it figured out. Because the God who began a good work in this place is the one who keeps showing up. We are not the authors of this story. We are the people lucky enough to be in it.

Paul is in his Roman jail. The empire has done everything it can to silence him. And what he writes back to the church that has kept faith with him is this, “I am convinced of this, that the one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.”

Not, I am convinced we can do this.

Not, I am convinced if we work hard enough, we’ll make it.

The one who began a good work in you. God started this. And God finishes what God starts.

That is the good news. Not the building, not the staff, not the grants, not the partnerships, though all of those are real and all of them matter. The good news is that God is in this place. God chose Allison Hill. God keeps showing up on every Monday morning and Sunday morning and every morning in between, in every encounter and every act of care and every moment of real human connection that happens within these walls and on these streets.

We don’t do this alone. We have never done this alone.

And neither did Paul. Today’s section of his letter ends with him saying that he doesn’t even care if some people are preaching the gospel to make him look bad. It doesn’t matter. Christ is proclaimed. That’s enough. That’s the whole thing.

Christ is proclaimed when a trafficked woman gets out. Christ is proclaimed when someone finds their way to recovery. Christ is proclaimed when a church across town sends a work group, when a foundation writes a check, when a nurse sits down and really listens. Christ is proclaimed in this room right now, in the gathering of imperfect, worn, healing people who keep showing up for each other and for this neighborhood.

Paul wrote his letter from a jail cell, giving thanks for the people who made it possible for the gospel to travel. This congregation receives that letter. And you are also the ones writing it with your presence, your giving, your care, your willingness to show up again and again.

That’s good news.

That is very good news.

Thanks be to God.

Originally published at https://pastormatthewbest.com on May 11, 2026.