AND THERE IS

Philippians 2:1-13

September 28, 2008 – Rev. Jerry Duggins

 

 

You feel it when you strike out for the fourth time in gym class and you’re playing kickball, not softball. You feel it when the teacher catches you napping and wakes you up with a sharp rap of the ruler on your desk. You feel it in the locker room at half time after giving up four touchdowns and failing to get even one first down.

 

You feel it at work when you forgot your notes for the presentation and you stumble through anyway with your boss present.   You feel it when the officer asks for license and registration, when this little old lady steps out of the car that you just rear-ended.

 

You feel it when mom or dad discover you haven’t been going over to Jim’s house, but instead been seeing a previously unknown to them girl friend, or if you’re a little younger when they discover the new artwork in the freshly painted living room.

 

You may feel it when depositing the unemployment check, or when the checking account is empty and you still have three more bills to pay. Maybe you feel it when your spouse discovers the affair you’ve been having or when you realize that your children are well aware of your drinking problem. Sometimes you feel it when you’re caught doing something wrong and sometimes its just when you failed to meet up to expectations.

 

If it’s a little thing, we call it embarrassment. Bigger things we call shame. When it’s an authority figure reading us the riot act, we call the feeling humiliation.   One of the earliest experiences where I felt this happened in 7th or 8th grade. I had promised my youth leader that I would make some phone calls reminding the other kids about a skating outing on Sunday afternoon. When she discovered Sunday morning that I hadn’t made those calls, she began yelling at me right there on the landing with all kinds of people walking by. I can still pull up quite vividly the image of the angry expression on her face. I felt humiliated, shamed and perhaps it would not be too strong to say, worthless.

 

I’ve heard people describe experiences like this as serving the purpose of keeping us humble. Failure to live up to expectations (our own or others’) helps nurture humility, a virtue encouraged by Paul in this reading from Philippians and seen apparently in the example of Jesus. Jesus, according to some, chose to humble himself before God, follow the path of obedience even to the point of suffering the humiliation of the cross.

 

But nowhere in this scripture are we told that Jesus felt humiliation. Nowhere does Paul suggest that embarrassment and shame promote a healthy Christian character. He encourages the Christians in Philippi to an attitude of humility, but this is a very different thing from the things I’ve described above. Humility has nothing to do with nurturing a sense of low self-esteem. It has nothing to do with accepting our own human limitations, with becoming comfortable with our failures and inability to meet expectations.

 

Humility has nothing to do with adopting a weak posture before authority figures, nothing to do with accepting the injustices of our society meekly. Jesus felt no embarrassment at his arrest except perhaps on behalf of those who felt his arrest necessary to preserve their own power. He felt no shame in being nailed to a cross, except perhaps for the sake of those who rejected the love of God he preached and demonstrated, because that love came with a call to give up their own self-importance.

 

Humility isn’t about lowering self-respect, but about raising respect for others. It isn’t about wallowing in the mire of our sin, but about turning our thoughts to the needs and interests of others. It’s about forsaking the island of self and learning to see who we are and what we do in the light of human community. Humility is the realization that life is not about rising to the top, being better than everybody else or becoming number one. The good life is not about getting ahead, but about coming together. Jesus might have used his connections to rise to the pinnacle of power in his world, but instead he chose solidarity with the poor and needy. He saw that the only way to a better world was by raising the standard of those below instead of climbing over the backs of those ahead.

 

Jesus was not ashamed of this attitude, nor embarrassed by it. He didn’t choose to heal the sick, preach good news to the poor and forgive the sins of the downtrodden because he valued himself too little. No he did these things because he saw value in those on the under side of life. He saw something not valued by the powerful and elite. He saw, I think, that God loved them, despite appearances to the contrary.

 

The church at Philippi has struggled with some differences. Paul was concerned that those differences were being used to divide the community. So he gives them this advice: “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.” Again, Paul is not saying that you are worthless or that your own interests are unimportant. He is not talking about doing less for yourself, but about doing more for others, not about thinking less of yourself, but thinking more of others.

 

How do you do this? One of the interesting ironies is that it’s very hard to become more humble by trying to be more humble. When we do this, we inevitably turn humility into the practice of thinking less of ourselves, and that will always produce embarrassment and shame, not genuine humility. To nurture humility, we need to turn attention elsewhere. We need to think about the things Paul mentions at the beginning of this section.

 

“If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy….” Thinking about these things help us put self into a proper and healthy perspective. These things help nurture a world built on community instead of personal achievement.

 

There’s an odd thing about the English translation here. The “if” makes it sound like there’s some question as to whether encouragement is to be found in Christ, some question as to whether love produces comfort, some question as to whether the Spirit draws us together, some question as to whether compassion and sympathy are to be found in human experience. The Greek is not ambiguous about this and why translators haven’t fixed is a mystery to me. There are two kinds of “if” clauses in Greek, the one we are familiar with that says if one thing is true then it follow…. That’s not what we have here. This “if” clause  assumes the statement to be in fact true. Many commentaries suggest we translate this “If there is (and there is) any encouragement….” You might think of it as a “rhetorical if” for which the answer is “of course there is.” Is there any encouragement in Christ? Of course there is. Paul is writing to a community who have chosen the Christian faith precisely because they have found a great deal of hope in Christ. Does love console us? Of course it does. Does the Spirit bring us together promoting a sharing? Of course the Spirit does! Have we experienced compassion and sympathy? Of course we have.

 

You want humility.   Think about the hope we’ve found in Christ.  Think about the consolation we have found in loving one another. Think about the Spirit we have come to share because of God’s love. Think about compassion and sympathy. Humility is not far behind these things. And a sense of peace, harmony and health in our life together is not far behind that.     Amen.