I have a friend who is a psychiatrist.  He was studying to practice psychiatry in the Medical school at Duke while I was studying to be a pastor in the Divinity School.  We’ve kept up over the years, and we still get together every now and then to catch up with each other, for me to get some free psychiatry, and he some free pastoring.  I’m usually not sure it’s a fair swap.  He’s got access to medication, the title “Dr.” and can accept insurance.  His work seems so much more legitimate that mine.  I usually leave our times together wondering if I chose the right line of work.
The last time we were together, we were talking about our respective practices, and he began to complain about how little good he feels like he does in his work.  “I’d say that about 98% of my patients never get better,” he said.  I treat symptoms, prescribe medication, bring stability, but they never really get better.  They never fundamentally change.  They just limp along, and my job is to sort of prop them up so that they don’t fall over as they go through life.
And in that moment I was thankful to be a pastor.  Because I actually get to see people change.  I actually get to watch transformation happen, people change fundamentally, and then get better, really.  I may not have medication, but I do have verses like the one we read in the book of Philippians today that give me hope beyond anything that comes in a little bottle.  Listen to this.  You won’t read this in any psychiatry textbook.  Saint Paul writes, “I am confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it.”
Note the actor in the verse.  The church in Philippi is not going to get better because of anything they do.  They are not going to be better people because they buckle down and try harder, work more for God, or get the right tips on how to think better of themselves or their world.  No, Paul isn’t too confident in them.  He’s confident in the One who has begun the good work in them.
That’s because Paul knows that the One who began the good work in them is love.  And love is the only thing that ever changes people, the world.
Paul knows the transformation that comes with being loved so fully, so fundamentally that we simply become better than we would have been if left on our own.  If you don’t know Saint Paul’s story, he was a zealot.  Formally trained to be judgmental, to keep people in line with the letter of the law, Paul was set aside to be among the next generation of leaders in Israel.  Add that to an already inflated ego, and Paul became the worst that religion can produce: namely a young hothead who scoffed at others thought that he had all the answers.  A young religious zealot has been a bad by-product of religion since the beginning of time.
Until one day, Paul met Jesus, or was met by Jesus.  And for the first time, Paul felt loved.  He felt loved so fully, that being loved became more important to him than being right.  Love changed him.  Fundamentally, he was converted through a confrontation with love in the flesh.  In Acts 9, we read that Paul was struck blind, he couldn’t see the way he used to.  Sure, he was still Paul, but this love of God was white hot, and even those places in Paul that he knew weren’t quite right, those places in him that he had always struggled, his arrogance, his pride, his judgmental nature, even those parts of him were loved by God with a white hot sort of love that changes you.
If Paul is hard for you to read, if some of his letters come across as arrogant, chauvinistic, legalistic, you should have seen him before God got a hold of him.  He’s a lot better than he was before he met Christ.
Having walked with Christ for some time by the time he wrote his letter to the Philippians, and having known the white hot love of God to love every corner of his soul until he was changed, he writes to his friends, the good news that the One who began the good work in them will be faithful to complete it.
We Wesleyans call this process, “sanctification”.  It’s how we describe what God is doing in us, completing the work that was begun in us.  In other words, it is the process of God reconciling the world to himself.   Sanctification is a word we stole from the metal industry.  It’s really a technical term of how someone refines precious metal.  When you have a lump of gold, or silver, but still entangled with impurities and imperfections, you stick it in the fire, and you let the heat of the furnace burn out all the impurities.
The church heard that and said, “that sounds a lot like what God does in us.”  That sounds like the way God sees worth in us, and then gets to work riding us of all those things that keep us from living into the full worth that we were created with.  It is the relentless, white hot love of God that just refuses to leave us until we are finished, better, whole.
If conversion is the initial run-in with Jesus wherein we are converted to our original image, sanctification is the process of that work being finished.  And according to Paul, God will not rest, will not stop, until God has God’s way with us, all of us, and all that is in us.  God will not stop until the good work that was begun in us is finished.
I was in the gym last week, with my iPod plugged in and determined not to talk to anyone, when a guy asked me to come give him a spot.  I walked over and did my duty, barely taking my headphones off.  He grunted through his set, and then he motioned to my shirt and said, “you go to church?”  I had forgotten that I was wearing my All Saints’ t-shirt.  I took my headphones off and said, “what?”  “I said, do you go to church?”  I looked down at my shirt and said, “yeah, I go when I can.”  
    He said, “I just started.  I’ll tell you, it’s more work than I thought it would be.  My wife drug me there, and at first I hated it.  The pastor just said the same things week after week.  It was just boring.  Better to be bored for an hour than to put up with my wife nagging all week, so I went.  For the kids.  Next thing I know, the pastor called me to ask me to serve on some committee.  I felt guilty, so I said okay.
Now, every time I turn around, I’m doing something at church.  It seems to have taken over my life.”
“I know the feeling,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s good,” he said.  “I’m not drinking as much as I used to, all those meetings at night, I guess.  And every Saturday night, I help my kids with their Sunday School reading.  It’s amazing what they see.  And at lunch on Sunday, my wife and I can talk about the sermon, and make fun of the preacher together.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“Yeah.  I never thought I’d be the church type, but it’s good to feel like I’m a part of something better than me.  I never would have done this stuff in a million years if it was up to me.”
And it was like I was looking at a masterpiece in the making.  It was like God was giving me a peek over his shoulder as he worked on his newest Saint.   This work is going to be amazing when it’s finished, I thought.
If we had time today, I’ll bet many of you could tell your story of how you are so much better than you would be, had God not gotten a hold of you.  I’ll bet looking back, each of you has a story of sanctification.
Maybe that’s what this advent season is all about.  It’s about us telling the story, our story, of waiting on God to come and finish the good work that was begun in Christ.  We don’t wait in doubt, or fear, but in confidence.  We wait, for God to come and do it again, to finish the work begun in Christ, and not just in us, but in all of creation.
This is what we are doing today.  As we move to the font, as we sit in silence, as we sing our hymns, as we eat our food, we are waiting.  This is our Advent discipline. We wait for God to come again, and finish the work begun in Christ at the fist Advent.
We wait.
With confidence.
We wait.
We wait.
We wait.