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David Orendorff    Philippians 2:5-11   September 20, 2009

A short review will get us all on the same page. You remember that it is sometime around 90 CE and Paul is writing to the congregation of Philippi from prison because he has heard there are angry factions developing in their congregation. He is in prison because from the Roman point of view he preaches treason and even sedition.

Briefly, Paul’s gospel is treason because he preaches Jesus Christ is the son of God and Caesar is not; Jesus Christ is Lord (capital L) and Caesar is not. He preaches true peace comes from generous lovingkindness and not domination and violence. He preaches that freedom and prosperity are meant for all peoples and not just Roman citizens and their few selected friends. In short, he preaches the destruction of Rome and the emerging reign of Christ.

This same gospel causes Paul to plead with the Philippians that they end their factionalism and humbly regard the concerns of others as highly as their own. For, again, Jesus is Lord and no one of us is; peace comes from lovingkindness and not winning the argument; freedom is meant for the opposition as much as it is meant for me. The way of the flesh, which is both the way of Rome and the way of self-centeredness, results in the works of the flesh, which are “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing and things like these. (Galatians 5:19-21).

In a nut shell, the gospel as Paul understands it, and which leads him to both confront Rome and beg for unity among the Philippians is this: Paul believes and trusts that there is a spiritual reality which is greater than the empirical reality upon which we most often focus. He believes that those who experience this spiritual reality are changed from living the works of the flesh (fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing and things like these) to living the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control).

This change or transformation being worked in the faithful he calls justification. Think of justification this way: it is the process of being made a just person-the process of being made just like Jesus. Those who accept the mind, spirit and power of the living Christ into their minds and hearts receive the gift of being transformed into a just person. Justification comes as grace, a gift, to those who trust God and by the mystical power of the Spirit they begin to bear the fruits of the Spirit.

Paul offers his life as a case in point. He was once a persecutor of those Jews who followed Jesus. Then the Spirit of the resurrected Christ came to him and into him. Now he preaches not division and persecution but unity and nonviolence; he no longer preaches the demands of legalisms but now a humble servant love. Once an enemy of Christ, Paul is now Christ’s servant and counts all those who follow Jesus as his true family.

Paul thus pleads that the Philippians be just and let go their factions. He writes to them that they “be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” and that they “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Paul then gives the Philippians a hymn (Philippians 2:6-11) that speaks, for him, what the mind and thought of Christ are. Virtually all scholars agree that this is the oldest Christian hymn we have. Many think Paul wrote this hymn, and many others think that Paul merely incorporated it into his letter. But either way it reveals to us the fundamental belief of the earliest Christian view of the mind of Christ.

The hymn opens with “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited (to be taken advantage of)…” As the true son of God, Jesus had all the power of heaven. The desire that led to Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, to be like God, Jesus had. Jesus could have used this power to coerce compliance to God’s way. Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell us that Jesus faced this very temptation at the beginning of his ministry.[1] Jesus could have called armies from heaven to defeat Rome. This is what those who hoped he would be the expected Messiah wanted. He could have made the disciples and the entire world conform to love, and this is what those who wish to win the argument desire. But he didn’t do either.

Instead, as Paul continues, “(he/Jesus) emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” The way of Jesus is not the way of domination but the way of servant love toward and with others. In the way of the flesh, power is seen in the ability to command and demand. In Jesus’ way, the way of the Spirit, Godly power is seen in the one who best serves.

Paul continues this thought in the hymn to the gift Jesus gives in his death, “And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-even death on a cross.” It wasn’t just that Jesus took on human form, he took on the lowliest of forms, that of a slave and that of the crucified. At the time, death on a cross was the ultimate humiliation, being hung naked for all to see. It was public torture. It was reserved for the worst kind of people.  It was meant as a warning to anyone that to do what this person did meant to die as this person died. Yet, Jesus, though being of the same stuff as God, humbled himself to the lowest of the low.

Paul continues the hymn with the proclamation that because Jesus humbled himself, God exalted him. “God therefore also highly exalted him (Jesus) and gave him the name that is above every name (Caesar’s name, Paul’s name or my name), so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend (even Caesar’s and especially mine), in heaven and on earth and under the earth (the three parts that make the whole of the universe), and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

The evidence, the proof that the loving, serving and nonviolent way of Jesus is to be the way of the world and the way of every person is God’s response to Jesus’ crucifixion, it is the resurrection. This is why in I Corinthians 15:14 Paul writes, “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.”

Without the resurrection, Jesus is a very good man who was murdered. And the only thing this proves is that really good people get murdered. Which then leads to the conclusion that violence and not love is the victor of history.

And if domination and violence are the victors, then Jesus’ death is wasted and love is a fool’s folly. Paul’s preaching against Roman imperialism is foolish because, without the resurrection, it is Rome’s violence that keeps peace. And without the resurrection, Paul’s call for unity is foolish, because factionalism is necessary to possess truth. Those who gave us the crusades, the inquisition, manifest destiny, colonialism, those of religious intolerance that use coercive means to gain power (think Ku Klux Klan and radical Islam), those that practice the politics of fear and division become the victors of history. And Christ and those follow him the ultimate losers.

Paul readily admits that what he proclaims is foolishness to the world. But he must proclaim it anyway because the resurrected Christ came to him, lives in him and shows him the way to peace and justice for all humankind. And he names others throughout his letters who have had the same experience of the Spirit. With the raising of Jesus, God pronounced the Lordship of Jesus and made him fully the Christ, the Messiah. By Christ’s gift of his life and God’s gift of the resurrection, we are given a present and a future of lovingkindness, of humility and generosity, of equality, of a just prosperity, of peace and a true and full shalom.

Paul is well aware that preaching this gospel will lead him to his execution. But preach and write he does with the whole of his voice and literary skill. To recant the good news of Jesus Christ is to deny the validity and true power of Jesus’ crucifixion and to doubt the resurrection. For the love of God and neighbor Paul is willing to make the full sacrifice trusting the promise of God for life.

The reader of this letter and all of Paul’s authentic letters, even though 1900 years later, is still challenged to take up the foolishness of the crucifixion and resurrection and believe in a reality of the Spirit that will enter persons and communities as the resurrected Christ. But in our science-minded age, believing that some kind of resurrection happened and that Jesus Christ is still alive and with us, meeting us on the road, dwelling within us as the agent of justification by which we are made more loving and ironically more willing to die for love, even love of our enemy, seems absurd. Yet this absurdity is the mind and heart of our faith.

Now I bring this home. Back in seminary in an ethics class I learned that it wasn’t enough to just think about these things in the abstract, but that it was also necessary to think about them in the concrete. So here goes:

Asking the Christ to live in me and justify me means that should I be at a committee meeting (or you are at work) and someone essentially calls me inept or stupid, perhaps implicitly calls me a liar, I will pray to not react with a heated defensiveness but with lovingkindness and nonviolence. And I will understand that the emerging kingdom of heaven depends on my prayers being answered by grace for it is natural for me to argue.

That was an easy one. But suppose an intruder enters my home and threatens me. This actually happened to a woman a number of years ago, you may remember the news story. She was in her home when a very disturbed man broke in, took her hostage and threatened to kill her. I am going on memory with this so don’t hold me to the details. But what I remember was that when the police surrounded the house the woman forcefully told them to stay out. In the house she got the man to talk and tell her of his life, his fear, his anger. She made his concerns more important than hers even though she was the hostage. She told him of her faith and eventually she prayed with him and he with her. It was then that the man lay down his weapon and the woman invited the police into her home. I saw a follow up story later which indicated this saintly woman kept up her relationship with the man in prison and that she was his Paul leading him to Christ. I pray the Spirit makes me more and more like this woman, more and more just and righteous.

You can easily see how the gospel that Paul preaches extends into our national lives as well. We are challenged to think of the way of the Spirit in our prison systems as we debate retribution or transformation. When we argue healthcare reform, to whose concerns do we give the greater attention, ourselves or others? In our war on terrorism, are we attempting to dominate our enemy or love our enemy? Or is all that Paul teaches merely the foolish prattle of a first century mystic,which doesn’t really apply to us today?

If we take seriously the faith of Paul and our own way to spiritual fruitfulness, we must think about these hard things and prayerfully invite the Spirit into our minds and hearts. Our time of Spiritual Renewal at Bear Creek will intentionally challenge us to open ever more fully our hearts, minds and souls to the living Christ who makes us just.

Shalom and Amen.