I love World Communion Sunday, although really every Sunday is just that, as is every Eucharist. I alternate between focusing on the unity of the church across the globe (which is to speak aspirationally and theologically more than realistically!), and fixing on the world itself and our mission to that world.
Exodus
17:1-7. Christians, forever confused about grace, sense that grace is some valuable
favor God offers – if we accept it, ask for it, believe in it. These Israelites
only ask greedily, then grumble, foolishly ready to abandon freedom to return
to the fleshpots of Egypt. God responds with… shocker! – grace, mercy, water in
the wilderness. God’s like that.
The Jewish festival of Sukkoth, the Feast of Booths, commemorating the wilderness wanderings, is happening now. Jewish families create little shelter-like structures in their homes. Fascinating. Talk to a rabbi. See if you can get invited over for a glass of wine. In your sermon, tell your people what you’re doing. They’ll be jealous.
Israel’s demand for proof will seem familiar
to us modern self-appointed arbiters of truth! Think about it: Anselm, Aquinas
and a host of brilliant people have devised proofs for God’s existence; and a
now larger number of wickedly smart people have debunked God’s existence. Logic
can’t bend the will, or the heart though. As we’ll see in Philippians 2,
Jesus ‘proved’ God by utterly ungodlike actions: humbling, debased, being
abused and killed. There. That’s the only proof you get.
You could devise a whole sermon around the
question of all questions there in verse 7: “Is the Lord among us or not?” How
would we discern a Yes? Can we allow the space for those who’d say No, or I
wish, or Used to be, or Maybe?
Philippians 2:1-13 is one of the high water marks in all of Scripture, almost a creed-like distillation of the entire story of redemption. Scholars think it was an early Christian hymn. The joke’s on Leigh Teabing and The DaVinci Code, claiming Constantine made up the divinity of Jesus stuff in the 4th century. Here’s a song from 2 decades after Jesus, extolling him as God come down. Karl Barth: “A text like this can hardly be approached with sufficient care and concentration, for it offers so much is so few verses – a little compendium of Pauline testimony.”
Little
things charm me here (and so does the big thing…). “If there is any
encouragement…” A big if indeed! Nobody gets too much.
Christians encourage. Do it. Invite others. It opens up the possibility of
“being of one mind,” so elusive for us, even in church life. The culture never
tells you to “Regard others as better than yourselves” – which is curious,
since we seem quite naturally to do two weird things constantly: we harbor
dark feelings of insecurity, suspecting others have it better, scanning
Facebook with envy, etc.; but then we pass snarky judgment on others as if
we’re superior – no more than a kneejerk reaction to our sense of
inferiority. Paul wants neither, but the clarity that is
humility. Humility is simple honesty.
“Look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” No politician since John F. Kennedy (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”) has ever uttered such words, and neither have advertisers.
And then the last 2 verses! Can
you hear the paradox: “Work out your salvation, knowing God is at work in
you.” Do I work? Does God work? Do I work and then realize God’s
the one doing it? Yes.
The
hymn proper begins in v. 5. Translators differ on how to render the very
beginning. Should it be the familiar “Though he was in the form of God, he
emptied himself”? or the equally valid “Because he was in the form of God, he
emptied himself”? God didn’t temporarily suspend being God, masquerading
as empty, humble, obedient and slave-like for a season. God, in Christ,
showed us God’s heart, what it always has been and will be like. His
wasn’t to grasp (can we picture Adam and Eve grabbing that fruit? or Prometheus
seizing the fire of the divinities?), or to consume, but to be emptied, poured
out, “born.” God thought I want them to know and love me – so I’ll do
this: I’ll become an infant, totally vulnerable, dependent, the antithesis
of power. Maybe then they will be tender toward me and each other.
As Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote, “In the Incarnation, the triune God has not simply helped the world, but has disclosed himself in what is most deeply his own.” Infancy, and crucifixion: this is God. Paul moves into glorification – but as Barth reminds us, when the crucified one is glorified, “the abasement is not washed out or cancelled – it is he [the crucified one] who is exalted; it is to him the great name is given; it is of him who abased himself that all that follows is said.”
This downward mobility, this life as emptying, will be ours the closer we are to Jesus. Think the whole life of St. Francis. My book, Weak Enough to Lead, got its title from Hudson Taylor, a pioneer English missionary to China: “God chose me because I was weak enough. God does not do his great works by large committees. He trains somebody to be quiet enough, and little enough, and then he uses him.”
My
preaching on this text focuses not on us or a Christlike demeanor or behavior,
but on Christ. Stephen Fowl: “The best way to think of Christ’s manifestation
of the glory of God is in terms of Christ’s beautiful body, a beauty that is
not diminished but enhanced by taking the ‘form’ of a slave.”
George Hunsinger, in his brand new Brazos commentary, is especially wise on this. “Christ Jesus does not consider his glorious mode of existence as something that cannot be relinquished. He can relinquish it without ceasing to be who he is. Indeed he is never more fully who he is than in the act of relinquishing it. He relinquishes his glorious mode of existence without ceasing to be God. He does not refuse to act selflessly, at cost to himself, for the good of others.” Jesus’ “emptying” (kenosis) isn’t a subtraction, but addition (in keeping with the view of Athanasius, Aquinas and Barth!).
Let’s ponder relinquishment. My book, Birth: the Mystery of Being Born, has a chapter on Adoption – and I am awed by Kelly Nikondeha’s wisdom (in her lovely book, Adopted: The Sacrament of Belonging in a Fractured World), pondering her own adoption as a baby: “A woman scooped me out of the white-wicker bassinet in the viewing room of the adoption agency and claimed me as her own. Her physical emptiness prepared the way for my fullness.” Then, pondering the woman who bore her, she tries to fathom if her giving her child up was a rejection? or rather a relinquishment? The woman who did not have to carry the child for so long actually did, at considerable physical cost. What if surrendering your child at birth is a loving relinquishment, not rejection, a humble acquiescence in the face of crushing circumstance? Is there a surprising kinship between a birth mother relinquishing her child for another so both can have fullness of life, and Jesus laboring for us in life and in death so we might have life?
Notice I’m shrinking from offering illustrative material here. There’s really
nothing like what Jesus did. Can the preacher trust the Jesus story, or the
image of the crucified One, without dressing it up or lunging to “make it
relevant?” Ours is to retell the story, and to be in awe and wonder. The
preacher leads the way for the people. The preacher exhibits her own awe, his
own wonder, inviting the people to join us in singing our own hymn about the
glory of the humble Christ.
Matthew 21:23-32. Very much like
Socrates before him, Jesus answered questions with questions. I love the way
this text delves into the privacy of their minds, struggling how to reply to
the one they thought would struggle. Fearful, they try “We do not know.” Then,
with considerable cheek, Jesus injects, “Then neither will I tell you.” Davies
and Allison read this as indirect confirmation of Jesus’ authority: “He need
not submit to question. His refusal is in fact veiled affirmation.”
Plenty of stories present themselves. Tony Campolo tells his funny, moving story about Agnes’s birthday in Hawaii. Greg Boyle tells about Mario, the tattooed ex-gang member. In Northern Lights: Resurrecting Church in the North of England, Jason Byassee tells a great story of a church of ex-cons, homeless and drug users being birthed in a barbershop. Better if you have one of your own, of course.
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