Sermon for 09/28/14 The new issue of Chimes should be going out this week, so by next week you should have it; however, just yesterday I looked at the Gospel reading for next week. It just so happens that in my Chimes article I quoted something from the bible about Jesus, and wouldn’t you know it … that is exactly what the Gospel reading is about. I want you to know now that I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened. (You’ll have to wait to then, by the way, to find out what the biblical passages are.) Still, we have noticed that such coincidences seem to happen all the time for those who stick close to God. Well, this morning we have another. In my private study reading of Bishop NT Wright’s work on understanding St. Paul, I had just finished a section on Paul’s letter to Philippians that dealt with what is called “the Christ hymn”, and lo and behold, look at what this morning’s passage contains. By calling it the Christ Hymn scholars are indicating that it was clearly used in liturgy, most likely even sung (even now we want to sing “every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord”); and in analyzing it they see the theology it contains as representing perhaps the earliest creed known to the Church. The scholars find it significant because it suggests that the very first theological thoughts about Jesus were that he is God’s equal, that he is divine, and that this was not, as critics often assert, a later development by a church that was trying to turn the man Jesus into “the Son of God”. Bishop Wright contributed a couple of new thoughts to my own understanding; the first being that way Paul introduces the hymn into his overall argument calling for the Church to be unified in love suggests that he didn’t have to explain the hymn, that they already knew it, that he was quoting something they had already been taught as drawing them towards this goal of mutual affection and attention to each other’s needs. It was not the other way around; that they should love each other, and if they did, they’d understand what Jesus was all about, but rather, because they could see what Jesus was all about they could “have his mind” and so be united in love. Let me say it again. Paul was not appealing to love to try to convince people that Jesus is God’s Son; no, it was the other way around, because they all knew that he is God’s Son, his loving actions should inspire ours. If Paul was appealing to a teaching they had already received to make his point, it naturally begs the question as to whether it was a teaching Paul had given them himself earlier, or whether it was one that another Christian preacher, perhaps one of the apostles like Peter or John, had given, with which Paul agrees. While it would take us off point this morning, I was personally fascinated with Bishop Wright’s section on what could be a simple little insertion by Paul, which is the phrase “even death on a cross”, to suggest that while the Jews may have had the image of God’s Suffering Servant in the Old Testament as a possible picture of the Messiah, the fact of Jesus’s dying on the Cross becomes both the stumbling block and cornerstone of their faith (that’s a teaser for next week, by the way). All this is much about me sharing how exciting I think this all is. For us this morning we turn our attention to this basic Christian call to unity in love and mutual care for one another because of Jesus’s self-emptying of his own self. What do we make of this? To get there, let us examine the Old Testament reading and the Gospel to see how others did not get there. In both we will find there is the question of authority; who is acting on God’s behalf, and who is doing the things of God, doing God’s will, and in both, those who do not get it do not get it precisely because they are trapped in their own self-interest. In Exodus, we see this as the people began to quarrel with Moses. He had led them as God’s chosen instrument from oppression in Egypt into freedom; but this freedom presented challenges, in this case physical hunger and thirst in a desert, so much so that their former life started to look in hindsight as not so bad. Yet Moses didn’t address that question. Instead he pointed them towards a deeper calling, their calling to be God’s obedient people; and so if they chose to quarrel with him, it was not really him, Moses, whom they were challenging; it was God himself. In this case something quite understandable, their physical bodily needs, caused them to lose focus on their calling and fall back into self-interest; and so we see God respond not with anger but with mercy, and a famous miracle followed, in which a spring was found where none was expected. It resulted in a bittersweet memory, one in which God provided, but in which the people would be left with the aftertaste of how quickly they doubted their God and were willing to settle for a comfortable slavery. In the Gospel passage we see self-interest rear its head again, only this time in an ugly form. The chief priests and elders were specifically threatened by Jesus’s claim to be, at the very least, like Moses, in that he was acting on God’s behalf. Since they themselves wanted to be treated with the respect that Moses had commanded, they challenged Jesus, demanding to know by what authority he did what he did. It was a trick question, of course. If Jesus said anything other than “by God’s authority” they could demand that he obey them, but if he admitted that he claimed to represent God they could charge him with blasphemy. Jesus’s question back to them simply turned the tables and exposed them. Jesus brought up John the Baptist. Again, like Moses, people believed that John acted as God’s representative, and so Jesus asked these leaders from where John’s authority came. Their deliberations showed that they were not actually interested in the truth, as they didn’t argue among themselves what they actually believed about John, but rather that they only cared about their own position of power, as the questions they asked themselves only concerned what they thought would be the result of their answer. Put in modern terms, they weren’t addressing the substance of the question; just the spin. And so Jesus refused to answer them. Yet the hymn in Paul’s letter answered them clearly. Jesus’s authority comes directly from God. Like Moses and John he represented God; but even more so he had equality with God! Theologically the phrase says “being of the same essence” of God, opening the door to centuries of wonderfully contentious theological debates about his divinity. Note, however, that the hymn doesn’t dwell on this or try to prove this, but rather simply states it. Jesus is equal with God. The wonderful part, though, is not simply that recognition, but rather what Jesus did with that equality, because he did the one thing that self-interest would never do. He emptied himself. Rather than viewing his authority as God’s Messiah as something to “grasp”, (as it says in Greek, which means something to be content with in and of itself and for one’s own self alone) Jesus chose to empty himself, taking the form of a servant. The miracle, here, is that the one who was on a par with God, chose to give up all that status and power and glory and honor for the sake of … us. This earliest of Christian hymns not only reaches for the stars in proclaiming Jesus’s oneness with God, it revels in the awesome realization that he gave it all up, accepting rejection and worse … “even death on a cross” … so that he could be in solidarity with us in our suffering, and redeem us from our sins. It is this awesome display of love for all of us that Paul encourages those in Philippi, and of course us today, to use to draw us into the mind of Christ, and so enable us to let go of our own self-interest, to focus on the needs of each other, and so be united as a church community in love. Paul knows this is quite a task for broken and scared people who also have their own physical and emotional needs; and he acknowledges it as such when he says to “work out your salvation in fear and trembling”, but he encourages us that we can do it by pointing out something very important. It is God at work in us, enabling us to, as he says, “both will and to work for his good pleasure”, but what is this statement other than to say that just as Moses, John, and ultimately Jesus acted with the authority of God, we too will act in the authority of Jesus, and so continue his loving work of self-emptying love in the world. It is up to us to get down to the hard work of caring for each other’s needs; however, lest it all sound too theological, sometimes the beauty of some old stories illustrates it best. There is an old rabbinic parable about a farmer who had two sons. From the time they were old enough to walk, the farmer had them working in the fields with him, and he taught them everything he knew about growing crops and raising animals. When he grew older and could no longer work, the boys took over the chores of the farm; and eventually when he died, they found that they enjoyed working with each other so much that they decided to continue the partnership indefinitely. Each brother would share the work on the farm, and then share the proceeds. Over the years, the elder brother never married, but the younger brother married and went on to father eight children. Some years later while they were having a year with a particularly bountiful harvest, the bachelor brother thought to himself, “My brother has ten mouths to feed, and I only one. He needs more of this harvest than I do, but I know he is much too fair to renegotiate our agreement. I know what I will do. During the night when he is asleep I’ll take over some of what I have in my barn and put it in his to help him feed my nieces and nephews.” At that very same moment, however, the younger brother was thinking to himself, “God has given me these wonderful children, but my brother has not been so fortunate. When I am older my children will be able to take care of me, but my brother will have no one. He really needs more of this harvest so as to be able to save for his old age, but I know him, he is much to fair and will never ask for help. I know what I’ll do. During the night when he is asleep, I’ll take some of what I have in my barn and move it over to his”. And so at midnight, under the light of a full moon, the two brothers rounded the corner of their fields and walked right into each other, each on a mission of generosity born of love. It is said that even though it was a cloudless night, a gentle rain soon began to fall, the rain being God weeping with joy that his children were loving the same way he loved. Amen.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 16:02:19 +0000
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