The short blurb we just heard from the letter to the Philippians is nothing less than a magnificent love letter.
It’s one of the oldest writings we have in the New Testament, older than the Gospels. It’s one of the first things we have on record that was written with the knowledge of who Jesus was, instead of just with the idea of what a Messiah might look like.
The letter was probably written by the Apostle Paul, and he wrote it to a little church in a city called Philippi that was on the Aegean Sea in Macedonia. So it was across the water from Rome and was a Roman colony at the time.
And about four years before he wrote this love letter, Paul and some others had gone to Philippi and started a church there. Which means he’d really known the people and the faces and the fears and the antagonisms and the hopes and the culture they were in. All of it. And now, in his travels and imprisonments and everything else, he’s still carrying them in his heart. He loves them, so he’s checking in with them.
See, Paul knows that a community of faith isn’t a static thing. He knew he wasn’t going to set this thing in motion and let it run, and he could check it off on the list of important cities in the New Testament to write a letter to. He knew that this new church was a growing thing. And because he loves these people, he wants them to grow in the right direction.
So Paul does two things. The first is that, as he often does, he tries to mold how they act as individuals – that’s all his guidelines ever are. It might sound like a checklist, but it’s really about shaping real people on a day-to-day basis. The second thing Paul does is a take it from that sort of checklist level – compassion, sympathy, humility – to a bigger view that shows those things aren’t just nice ends in themselves. Paul sees it all as part of an exchange, from one hand to another, a passing-off that becomes the transformation of this living community.
In other words, we go from the behavior level to the transformation level. And that’s not an easy stretch to make, in reality. It might sound plenty nice – like, when we’re sympathetic with each other, Christ Church is a “nice” place, or like DOCC just being a place to be sympathetic, as Tim mentioned last week. Neither of those things are the case. Neither Paul nor Jesus was ever interested in “nice.” They were both interested in transforming what’s real – real, on the sweat, tears, fear, “what hurts and what just plain feels good,” human level of life.
So to transform what is real, Paul’s practical – he knows to start with a list like compassion and sympathy and not doing things just to feel pumped up but being aware of our effect on people around us. And at the same time, he also knows that, for this to really work, for it to get any traction, we all need to do it. It’s about both personal behavior and an ongoing exchange where something like compassion or kindness passes from one of us to another in a real, concrete human moment. That’s how we get from a list to transformation. We need to experience these things and then we need to embody them. And I’m not sure which comes first.
Because once you really go to a place inside yourself where you have received gentleness or forgiveness and you see what happens in the little God mirror we each carry inside us, once you go that deep, then things have a way of beginning to change with other people.
That’s Paul’s circle of exchange. But what Paul is saying in this ardent, riotous love letter, is that compassionate exchange between people isn’t just a vague, humanistic thing, which can only get so far. For compassion to really take root and grow into something that is transformative, it has to come from something bigger than itself, something bigger than just individual feelings of empathy.
And that bigger thing, that bigger exchange, is what Paul describes in the middle of the whole passage – “Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality wit God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…” all the way down to “every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord.” This whole middle section is probably an ancient hymn of some sort, both in its structure and in what it captures so beautifully this relationship between God and Jesus.
It captures yet another way, and maybe the ultimate way, that Jesus chose to show us who he is – not just what a Messiah might look like but what the real Messiah did look like. We have the teachings, parables, healings, but this was Jesus going even further in graphically showing us what he was really like inside. And what he was really like inside, in terms of that exchange of love and self-giving, was big enough to explode the whole universe, let alone human understanding.
That’s the crux. Right there. It’s too easy for lots of nice humanistic folk to think that if we’re all just nice enough, or show compassion, that out of that will come the big changes. But Paul is doing the daring Christian thing of saying it’s the reverse. We show mercy and compassion and love, not up out of our own personal resources, which are limited, but out of the huge, overwhelming resource of this intimately loving exchange between God and Jesus– and that’s what’s really going to get traction in this world.
Paul is saying that this exchange is what we need to live into ourselves. And we can enter it wherever works for us in these dance steps, maybe a moment when we are receiving kindness, or maybe a time when our hearts could harden to someone and instead we empty out love or gentleness that we have received. And remember – those moments when we might have betrayed someone else are probably, even more important, moments when we betrayed ourselves. That emptying out of forgiveness happens at a intimate level.
And then what this hymn, this model, of Jesus and God shows us is that this kind of emptying doesn’t mean we’re left empty. This give-and-take among us isn’t supposed to be demolition of the healthy human self that God wants for each of us. Rather – and this is tricky, so I’m just making a stab at it – rather, Jesus’ kind of self-giving has more to do with passing something along that somehow stays in us at the same time.
As weird as that sounds, that’s a litmus test for whether it’s working: if, in the giving, we’re somehow not left with less. We’re not diminished.
And what Paul’s saying is that, as this cycles through a community of faith, it creates some kind of unity. Which brings us up eye-to-eye with that line of Scripture that’s so well-known and important: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” People use it a lot, and sometimes in an accusatory way to someone they’re mad at.
But get this. The “you” there is plural, in the Greek. That’s where my Southern “y’all” comes in handy. Work out y’all’s own salvation with fear and trembling. And as funny as it sounds, remember it that way, if you have to. Because this was not meant to be used as a pointed finger at an individual. It’s a call to a beloved church – remember, he loves these people.
It’s a call that goes from the gritty places in each one of us right up to the level of the living, breathing body that we all are here today – and beyond.
Because for Paul, spirituality was really personal – and – it was never individualistic.
Personal – but never individualistic. And if that twists our American brains around into some weird yoga position, then hold the position for a moment. Because in our American ears, aren’t personal spirituality and individualism the same thing?
No! – or as Paul, who saw and heard the resurrected Christ and got that close to the holy, would say, “By no means!” Our spirituality is inside the very kindness or integrity that has helped free us up from our burdens – and we can only experience that in this dance with each other.
Ok, there’s an understanding of salvation that I can live with. Not because it’s easy – it’s easier to point fingers and tell other people about their salvation, which I think most of you know we’re not into doing around here. But I can live with this other idea of salvation because it’s real, and because it lets me look around at real messiness and hope in own life and figure out a real next step.
And as basic and elementary as that sounds, it’s actually pretty substantial. It’s not transformation like magic or perfection or something outside of ourselves that we go fix up. This is about transformation of what’s real and human in our lives. Because what Jesus did was real and human. Dying on a cross wasn’t theoretical or abstract, and as lovely as this hymn is, we’re not supposed to let it rob that death of any of its pain.
That hymn tells us on a human level about what Jesus was really like and how we can look for that in our own relationships, in our own capacity both for cruelty and for love, and in the give-and-take that nourishes us instead of diminishing us. This is what we’re to be working out in a community.
Which of course leads to the final question – exactly what is the community?
There’s a lot we can say in terms of all the different people who flow in or around Christ Church, and that’s really important. But with everything that’s going on these days, especially in our markets, I feel like we have to broaden the view out that large.
With what’s happened in the markets in the past two weeks, and what it shows us that’s been going on for a long time, how does all of that measure up to this basic way of being that Paul calls us to on the most human level? – much more basic than political parties or points of view, I’m talking about a more basic level of being human. In the markets, was there true exchange, passing along, of resources, of knowledge – not just a one-time distribution, which is easy to criticize, but a true flow? Or – in terms of real resources, was that flow seriously interrupted and seriously misrepresented?
That is not an unrealistic or naïve question, just something a preacher says while the real adults go back out to run the real world. The real world has been brought to its knees before this question of genuine flow, not illusory flow. And given the massive social implications the markets, implications that have affected this community and may change the way things look around here, this Pauline flow of resources is as realistic and as wise as our next breath.
One activist noted this week that we can have $700 billion on the table, just talking about it, to bail out Wall Street – and I understand, to bail out the institutions affects almost everybody, so I’m not saying yea or nay on it. But just look at the figures. How is it the figure of $700 billion can be on the table, when the G8, the eight largest and wealthiest countries in the world can’t come up with $25 billion that would save the lives of the 25,000 children who die daily from preventable diseases? Not just 25,000 kids, as if that wouldn’t be enough to justify the money, but 25,000 per day. The 700 we can talk; 25, we can’t. There’s something seriously wrong with the flow of resources here. And we don’t even have to get into figures that high.
I know people in this community of faith who’ve really felt that breakdown of the flow, and I’m sure there are a lot more of you that I don’t know about. For many of you, I don’t yet know the details of how this is affecting your lives.
But I’ll bet it all comes down to Paul’s paradox: utterly personal, and yet no way individual. When we think about it that way, it’s a paradox. But when we live it, it’s a miracle – and that’s what real faith is.
And the best I can do is name that and invite you to live into it with me and with each other, in so much awareness of what’s inside us and what’s all around us that we sometimes physically quiver.
And in that way, beloved people, we’ll work out the things that are going to set us all free.