“Being the Best” – Sermon on Sept 25, 2011
September 25, 2011
Scripture: Philippians 2: 1-13
If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
Sermon: Being the Best
by Rev. Doreen Oughton
I knelt on the red carpet beneath the stained glass window in my long white robe, with loved ones pressing in around me – my family and mentors and friends, my church family – hands laid on my arms and shoulders, my head, hands reaching out to touch those who laid hands on me, the entire assembled body connected. And I heard the prayer of Ordination: “Now bless and sanctify by your Holy Spirit your servant Doreen, whom we, in your name and in obedience to your will, ordain to the ministry of the church, committing to her the authority to preach your word, administer the sacraments and exercise the responsibilities of pastor and teacher.” The prayer went on, “Let the same mind be in her that was also in Christ Jesus.”
I usually preach from the Gospel, but the words of Paul’s letter to the Philippians resonated so richly for me. To be of the same mind as Christ, the themes of sacrificial love, of self-emptying, of obedience to Divine authority. The compelling instructions to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. The reminder that God is at work in them. Paul was writing to a beloved church in Philippi, and he was writing from prison. They had established strong bonds. He had given them such inspiration, had taught them so much, had led them to Christ, and they might have wondered how they would go on with him in a Roman prison. They know that the likelihood of his release was very low. Perhaps they’d already started to feel the tensions within the community. And then they get this letter from Paul telling them how to go on.
I’m sure the ordination ritual was different in those days, but Paul served as a wonderful founding pastor. I took my ordination vows to heart and am deeply committed to being a wonderful pastor to this congregation. I tend to be competitive, so I don’t just want to be average, I want to serve God and you as perfectly as I can. I did a little research and found out about a computerized survey that offers a description of a perfect pastor: “The perfect minister preaches exactly fifteen minutes. He condemns sins but never upsets anyone. She works from 8:00 AM until midnight and is also a janitor. She makes $50 a week, wears good clothes, buys good books, drives a good car, and gives about $50 weekly to the poor. He is 28 years old and has preached 30 years. He has a burning desire to work with teenagers and spends all of his time with senior citizens. The perfect minister smiles all the time with a straight face because she has a sense of humor that keeps her seriously dedicated to her work. He makes 15 calls daily on congregation families, shut-ins and the hospitalized, and is always in his office when needed.” Well… No this was a humorous e-mail making its way around. It follows up with a suggestion that if your minister doesn’t measure up, simply send this letter to six other churches that are tired of their minister, too. Then bundle up your minister and send him to the church on the top of the list. In one week, you will receive 1,643 ministers and one of them will be perfect.
Now the church in Philippi had been wonderful to Paul. They’d been a receptive group of people, dedicated and passionate about sharing their gifts – their time, talent and treasure. And still, they argued about who understood best how to follow Christ, judged one another, pushed for their own agendas. I haven’t come across any computerized survey on the perfect church, but I did find a poem: If you should find the perfect church without fault or smear, Please, don’t join that church, you’d spoil the atmosphere. // If you should find the perfect church where all anxieties cease, Then pass it by lest joining it you mar the masterpiece. // If you should find the perfect church, then don’t you ever dare To tread upon such holy ground you’d be a misfit there. // But since no perfect church exists…made of flawed human, Then let’s cease looking for that church, and love the one we’re in. // Of course it’s not a perfect church, that’s simple to discern, But you and I and all of us could cause the tide to turn. // So let’s keep working in our church until the resurrection, And then we each will join God’s church without an imperfection.
Paul talks about obedience in his letter, how Christ obeyed God, even to the point of dying, and the church obeyed Paul while he was there, obeyed him in following God’s word. Now obedience is a value that I think many people have mixed feelings about. We value independent thought, reasoning things through and coming to our own adult conclusions about our actions. We understand the need for some laws that all people are expected to obey – stop at stop signs and red lights, respect personal property, etc, and we can think through why we ought to observe these laws. We also understand that sometimes obeying without independent thought is also important – like in a combat situation, or a child obeying a parent who understands more about danger and morality. Sometimes we obey out of fear of the consequences of not obeying. We stop when pulled over by a flashing blue light so that we don’t end up in a chase with guns pulled on us. We pay our taxes whether we want to or not because we fear criminal charges. People obeyed the Romans in Palestine because of all those crosses bearing dead and dying bodies dotting the road. This is coercive obedience.
But sometimes we obey even if we don’t see the logic of something, even if we aren’t fearful of consequences, just because of the authority of the person speaking. We trust them. The gospel reading I shared in the children’s message has the temple leaders asking Jesus where he got his authority. It wasn’t that he dazzled them with his knowledge of scripture, though he might have. It wasn’t that he threatened them with eternal damnation if they didn’t listen. Jesus was not into coercive obedience. He didn’t want people to act from fear. He wanted them to act from love, and he got his authority through the way he lived. He walked the talk.
There is a story about Mother Teresa. She was visiting a place near Philadelphia to dedicate a Sister’s of Charity program. In a nearby city there was a movement by a state hospital for emotional and psychologically disturbed people to develop halfway houses in the community. That way the patients of the hospital could be nurtured gradually back into community life and society. The administrators were looking to open five such houses. There was a city council meeting on the matter, and the place was packed, with 500 people squeezing in, yelling their opposition to this plan. They didn’t want the crazies living in their neighborhood.
No surprise, the city council voted unanimously against the proposal. Not much discussion, and a lot of whooping when the proposal was denied. Just then the back doors opened and in came Mother Teresa. She came down the center aisle, right to the front, got down on her knees in front of the city council, raised her arms and said, “In the name of Jesus, make room for these children of God! When you reject them, you reject Jesus. When you affirm them, you embrace Jesus.” And she cried out, repeating 5 times, “Please, please, please, please, please, in the name of God, make room for these people! Make room for them in your neighborhoods.” And next thing you know, there is a motion to change the decision, which is seconded and a unanimous vote to reverse the decision made just a few minutes before. And not one of the 500+ people there spoke a word against this change. Mother Teresa was a woman who spoke from authority. She had no coercive powers. She didn’t utter any threats about what would happen if they didn’t change the vote. She earned her authority on the streets of Calcutta, sacrificing for and loving the poor and oppressed.
Paul also sacrificed everything for his mission of sharing God’s good news. He surrendered his position of power as Pharisee, as a persecutor of this small but disruptive movement, and joined this movement. He took risks with the people who had been established as leaders of this movement, challenging their insistence that this way was only for Jews, not for Gentiles unless they converted. He risked and suffered persecution by the religious and political establishments, much like Jesus himself did. And so his church obeyed him. He’d earned his authority by the sacrificial way that he lived. And he called upon this church in Philippi, upon all his churches, to establish their authority by the way they lived. This authority can’t be faked. You can’t tell others what they ought to give for Christ if you are mostly concerned with being right, with promoting your own agenda, when you are self-satisfied.
Church folk are generally well aware of the incredible decline in church membership and attendance over the past few decades. We bemoan how awful it is that sports events are scheduled on Sunday mornings, that families just don’t make the time for church anymore. There’s an essay that has been offered as a devotion three times in the past month at various denominational activities that is a very snarky stab at people who call themselves spiritual but not religious. But I have to wonder about the reason that the church universal has lost so much authority. Could it be that it does not practice this self-giving, sacrificial love that Paul calls for? Despite the ordination vows and other covenants made in and by churches, are we focused more on ambition or conceit? Do we regard ourselves as better than others rather than the reverse? Is the church more invested in its own interests, its own survival, than in the interests of God’s people?
I’m not really sure what a sacrificial church would look like. Paul wasn’t telling the Philippians to go do outreach projects. He wasn’t telling them to feed the poor and visit the imprisoned and house the homeless – at least not in this letter. He was telling them how to be together as a church family. He might have been saying, “When you have a fair, make sure the other tables have the room and supplies they need before you worry about your own table. When you are at a church meeting, make sure that others get to share their thoughts before you share yours.” He might have said “make sure the worship space is accessible, even if it costs extra to make modifications.” So maybe that’s a good place to start. Right here, with how we treat one another in our life together. Like the poem said, there is no such thing as a perfect church, but we can always work to be better.
We are called as Christians to be sacrificial in our love, because Jesus was sacrificial in his. Jesus taught with authority, but also honored the authority of his Abba. This hymn Paul quotes reminds us that Jesus was not only the son of God, but part of God himself. He emptied himself of his divine nature to show us how to live with each other, how to become the beloved community. But he did this not only to teach, not only because this modeling was an effective method, granting him authority. He did it out of great love and a desire to be with us, to know us, to witness the human condition. The hymn says he took on the form of a slave, and it leads me to wonder, a slave to what? Did he become a slave to the human condition, or to all of humanity? Was he a slave to us, to me? I hate to think of that. I love the idea of servant leadership, but a slave? But maybe slave is right when it comes to understanding humanity. Maybe our finite lives, our instincts for survival, our sense of fragility enslaves us to some sort of primitive baseness that is not who we are meant by God to be. Jesus experienced those limitations, that fragility, and showed us that sacrificial love is possible even in this condition. He stands right beside us, full witness to the human condition, and inspires us to become more. Let us take this love and go forward to do likewise. May it be so.
