One of our great institutions in this land is the annual
festival of Thanksgiving. Once a year it offers us a day to pause and to render
thanks to God for his many blessings to us. The focus of Thanksgiving for the
most part is on our material blessings—a home to live in, food on the table,
physical health—not to mention those less measurable blessings such family and
friends, freedom and peace. In the opening words of the letter to the Ephesians,
the apostle Paul by contrast gives thanks to God “for every spiritual blessing
in the heavenly places”. Then he goes on in the verses that follow to enumerate
those blessings: being chosen in Christ and adopted as God’s children,
redemption and forgiveness by God’s grace, the hope of a glorious inheritance
and the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.
In the verses before us from Philippians 2, Paul calls upon
his readers to do the same thing. But he does it in an indirect fashion, at
least for us who speak the English language. For he begins each phrase of what
he says with the word “if”. For us “if” is a word that expresses doubt. But
that is not necessarily the case in Greek. In fact, “if” can mean quite the
opposite. It can be an expression of absolute certainty. So let me try to
render what I think Paul is really trying to say in the first verse of our
passage this morning.
If there is any encouragement in Christ (and most assuredly
there is!), if any consolation from love (and most assuredly there is!), if any
fellowship in the Spirit (and most assuredly there is!), if any compassion and
sympathy (and most assuredly there is!), then make my joy complete…
What Paul is doing is calling the Philippians to look around
them and see in the faces of their fellow believers the blessings by which they
are surrounded: those who have stood with them when things were going wrong,
those who have expressed love in times of loneliness, those who share your most
deeply held values and convictions, those who have given their very selves for
you at your moments of need. As we look around in that way, we recognize that
we owe far more than we could ever give. I find myself humbled by the many ways
in which my fellow believers, my brothers and sisters in Christ, have given
themselves faithfully, selflessly and unstintingly for me on so many occasions.
The Call to Unity
Well, says Paul, if that is the case (and most assuredly it
is!), here is something else I want you to work on: Be of the same mind, having
the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. It seems to me that the
challenge for the Christian community in Philippi was not that different from
the challenges that face any healthy, growing church body. It was that there
were great things happening over here, and over here, and over here, but they
were happening without any sense of the larger whole. It was what business
people today call siloing.
In the business world siloing often goes along with personal
kingdom building and departmental turf wars. However, I don’t think that was
the case with the believers in Philippi. I suspect that things had simply grown
and grown, and nobody had had the time to stop and give consideration to the
life and health of the whole body. Yet Paul recognized that if they didn’t take
measures to do so, there were all kinds of pitfalls that lay ahead of them.
Paul recognized that for the most part unity doesn’t just
happen. It requires intentionality and effort on the part of all. In verse 2 he
tells the Philippians what that is going to involve: being of the same mind,
having the same love and being in full accord. Now for some of us “being of the
same mind” may bring visions of Waco, Texas, and the Branch Davidians or of
Jonestown in Guyana thirty years ago. But that kind of groupthink is the
farthest thing from Paul’s mind. Remember after all that Paul is the one who
exhorts us to stand firm in the liberty in which Christ has set us free. Paul
is not looking for mind control (unless we mean minds controlled by the Holy Spirit).
Over my years at Messiah our Vestry has had a number of
discussions about what this means when it comes to making decisions. On the one
hand there have been those who have argued for complete unanimity. On the other
there is our democratic heritage of majority rule. The tragedy is that our
human fallenness is able to make either of these into a form of tyranny. What
Paul is describing is a common mindset, a commitment to set of shared values
that is able to guide our decisions and our common life.
Yet that is only one side of the coin. Aside from being of
the same mind, the second thing Paul exhorts the Philippians to is to have the
same love. That is to say that the church is bound together not just by a
commitment to certain truths, but also by a commitment to one another. Without
that love, that mutual caring, we are no different from a stamp club or a
historical society. “Love covers a multitude of sins,” says St Peter. And of
course the love that both he and Paul are referring to is the love that bears
all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
The Call to Humility
The second quality to which Paul exhorts the Philippians is
humility. “There is nothing so foreign to a Christian soul as arrogance,” proclaimed
the great fourth-century preacher and bishop John Chrysostom. “The two
impediments to a universal, diffusive, unconditional charity are the exaltation
of party and the exaltation of self,” wrote another great preacher and bishop,
J.B. Lightfoot, fifteen centuries later.[1]
Like unity, genuine humility is a basic ingredient to
Christian community. I like the fact that our English word “humble” has its
origins in the word “humus”—earth, soil. It reminds us of our origins, that
like Adam God formed us from the dust of the ground. That truth is visibly and
tangibly reenacted for us every Ash Wednesday, as the ashes are smeared on our
foreheads in the form of a cross and we hear the words, “Remember that you are
dust and to dust you will return.” Before going too far, however, I should make
it clear that humility does not mean groveling or indulging in what some call
“worm theology”, thinking that I am worth no more to God that a creature that
crawls beneath the ground. Quite the opposite: if nothing else, the cross of Jesus
proves our infinite worth to a heavenly Father who loves each of us more than
we can ever imagine.
Thus, says Paul, true humility involves having a balanced
understanding of who we are—what Oxford professor Markus Bockmuehl defines as
“an unadorned acknowledgement of one’s own creaturely inadequacies, and
entrusting one’s fortunes to God rather than to one’s own abilities or
resources”.[2]
And that in turn involves leaving aside selfish ambitions and conceit (what Bockmuehl
again colorfully describes as “that strangely addictive and debasing cocktail
of vanity and public opinion”) on the one hand and esteeming others above
ourselves on the other. Once again, that doesn’t mean that we have to be
doormats, but that we always have other people’s interests at heart. I like the
way Eugene Peterson paraphrases it: “Put yourself aside, and help others get
ahead.”
I think I may have told you before about Bishop Russel
Brown. With pure white hair and a resonant voice with just the trace of an
English accent, he was a man who could not have looked our sounded more like a
bishop. One of the roles he took on well into his retirement was as chaplain at
a small hospital and it happened that my student assistant was assigned to him
for part of his training. I well remember Paul telling me with a look of
amazement, of how the two of them had paid a visit to a patient who was too
weak even to shave himself. Without hesitating, the bishop rolled up the
sleeves of his purple shirt, daubed the man’s face with shaving cream, and began
to shave him. It was a lesson in humility that he and I would never forget.
As we sang three weeks ago at Pentecost,
Let holy charity my outward vesture be,
and lowliness become my inner clothing—
true lowliness of heart, which takes the humbler part,
and o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.
and lowliness become my inner clothing—
true lowliness of heart, which takes the humbler part,
and o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.
In humility esteem others as being higher than yourselves.
The Call to Christlikeness
Paul calls the Philippians—and by extension he calls us—to
unity and to humility. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. The real point
he has been leading up to all along, the primary challenge that makes the
others pale almost into insignificance by comparison, begins in verse 5: “Let
the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…” More than unity, more than humility,
it is the call to Christlikeness.
In his commentary on Philippians Markus Bockmuehl describes
these verses as
… a passage which in the twentieth century has been the
subject of an uncontainable deluge of scholarly debate, quite possibly more than
any other New Testament text. Other passages in the New Testament are of
similar poetic grandeur and force; others have been similarly influential in
the history of the church; but few if any have over this past century received
even a comparable amount of scholarly attention… Fifteen years ago, one
well-known monograph on Philippians 2:5-11 and its modern history of
interpretation had a bibliography of five hundred items; at least another
hundred items could now easily be added.[3]
And he was writing more than fifteen years ago himself! The
subjects of these debates are many and include issues such as, “Were these
verses really a hymn already familiar to the Philippians?” and, “What did Paul
mean when he described Jesus as emptying himself?” But all these questions
really are a colossal exercise in missing the point. That is, that if you and I
are truly going to be the church, if we are to be the body of Christ in the
world, then we need to be like Jesus.
What does that mean? First of all, Jesus did not see
equality with God as something to be exploited. Do we hear echoes of Adam and
Eve here in the Garden of Eden? They were fooled into thinking that if they ate
the forbidden fruit they would become like God. But Jesus chose to divest
himself of all his divine prerogatives, to empty himself, not just to share our
human frame, but to go all the way to the death for you and for me. “No one has
greater love than this,” Jesus told his disciples before he went to the cross, “to
lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
So, says Paul, our calling is, yes, to unity and to
humility, but even more to the same self-sacrificial love that Jesus has shown
to us. Such love will rarely be recognized by the world. It will not hit the
headlines or go viral on YouTube. Apart from the women and John, Jesus died on
the cross alone and unrecognized by the world. Yet now he holds the name that
is above every other name, the name before which every knee will one day bow.
So too, we do not look for fame or any earthly reward, but to be effective in
God’s service, to know that we are doing the Father’s will—and finally to hear
those words that every child of God longs to hear, “Well done, good and
faithful servant.”
I’d like to conclude with a well-known prayer from Ignatius
of Loyola.
Lord, teach me to serve you as you deserve:
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.
No comments:
Post a Comment