It’s not a trick question, or one with a right answer which you’re supposed to find. Tell truth, I’ve been at this whole following-Jesus business for decades, and I’m not sure I’ve ever had an answer for very long. Is prayer about asking for things, is it about God changing us, do we need to be specific and detailed, is it immature to make specific requests of God—do we know enough to even know what we really want to ask? At various points in my life, I’ve had answers to each of those questions, but they’ve never been the same answers from one point to another. What, really, are we on about when we pray?
To help us think about this, I want to draw in my favorite poem by one of my favorite poets, the 17th-century Anglican priest George Herbert. His principal poetic collection, published after his death, is The Temple; one of the odd things about it is that some of the titles, such as “Love,” “Affliction,” and “Employment,” were applied to multiple poems, and so we have poems with names like “Employment (II)” and “Love (III).” There are numerous great poems in the book—“Love (III)” is one of the greatest, in fact—but my favorite is “Prayer (I),” which offers an extraordinary response to the question “What is prayer?”
Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Happy twelfth day of Christmas! Anyone here planning where to plant a grove of twelve pear trees—or how to get rid of all those lords a-leaping? No? Well, the old traditions aren’t what they used to be. Indeed, a lot of folks anymore don’t know the twelve days of Christmas begin with Christmas—they are the twelve days of the Christmas season, December 25 through January 5. For Shakespeare fans, yes, that means tonight is Twelfth Night, which in Elizabethan England was the last and greatest night of the party; it was a time for the sorts of humorous reversals and playing of the fool which characterize old Will’s greatest comedy.
So this is the last day of the Christmas season, and tomorrow is Epiphany. The feast of Epiphany most likely began as a celebration of Jesus’ baptism, as it still is in Eastern Orthodox churches. In the Western church, however, the focus of Epiphany shifted to the coming of the magi. Their visit marked the first revelation of the Messiah to the Gentiles; it wasn’t exactly the first revelation of the Messiah to the Jews, but the appearance of the magi before Herod was the first announcement of Messiah’s coming to the broader Jewish world beyond Bethlehem. Epiphany is the transition from the Christmas season to Ordinary Time, and it turns our attention from the birth of Jesus to his ministry. It’s the outward turn from celebrating his coming to focusing on why he came, and thus to considering our own work in the world.
Also, by this world’s calendar, this is the first week of the new year, and so for VSF it marks a turn in another way. Last year, we focused first on detachment—on living life with open hands—then turned to grapple with the concept of integrity. A life of full integrity would be living with undivided mind and heart, which is only possible to the degree that we are aligned with the character and will of God. That launched us into a season of teaching on discipleship, on following Jesus’ for Jesus sake, being all-in with him and for him. Only detachment makes discipleship possible, and only faithful discipleship can produce lives of true integrity.
The Apostle Paul was a wanderer. God had gifted him to plant churches, and that meant moving around a lot: start the church, build it up to where it could keep itself going, raise up leaders within the fellowship, and move on to the next city. Or at least, that was the general approach. Some places, he stayed longer—most notably Ephesus, where he spent three years; but there were more places like Thessalonica, where the authorities ran him out of town after just three weeks. None of them added up to long pastorates for Paul, only short ones and shorter ones. That was hard on him, because he cared deeply about the churches and people he had left behind; getting back to visit churches he had planted drove his travels just as much as planting new ones. When he couldn’t visit for whatever reason—perhaps because his travels went awry, perhaps because he was in prison—he wrote letters, like this one.
In reading Paul’s letters, we should always remember there’s no small talk here and no fluff. Right from the first word, he’s always on about his purpose, always doing something intentional. Philippians is one in which his opening comments serve as an overture to the letter, bringing up themes he intends to address at greater length, starting with the very first line. Normally, Paul opens his letters with “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus . . .” and goes on from there. His calling as an apostle is the source of his authority, and so that’s generally where he needs to start; but here, writing to a body of believers who honor and respect his authority, he leaves that out. Instead, he describes himself (and Timothy) as a servant of Christ Jesus. Or at least, that’s how the NIV renders it; to give the word its full force, he calls each of them a slave of Christ.
To be sure, this didn’t mean quite what it does to our ears. Roman society knew full well that slaves were human, and they weren’t doomed to perpetual slavery; if things broke their way, slaves could earn their freedom and even become Roman citizens. In fact, I’ve seen speculation that Paul’s parents might have been slaves who had earned citizenship. All the same, slaves had no legal rights, no freedoms, and no personal autonomy whatsoever. They were completely subject to their masters’ every whim and desire, whatever those might be.
In addition to the cultural context, there is an important biblical context for Paul’s description of himself as a slave of Christ, because nearly a third of the Old Testament uses of the word ebed, the principal Hebrew word for “slave,” are used to describe an individual or the nation as the slave of God. Among individuals, the word is used most frequently of David and Moses, 38 and 37 times respectively. Paul is putting himself and Timothy in the same biblical frame as those two, Elijah, Isaiah, and the prophets more generally.
For Paul to call himself a slave of Christ means he is bound over to Christ, totally at his service, with no independent rights of his own; Jesus is his Lord in every respect, in every aspect of his life. It therefore means he is Christ’s instrument: he does not speak and act on his own, but God speaks and acts through him. It also means he does not find his life in getting his way, but rather in submitting to Christ, for that submission defines his life; his identity is defined by serving others, for he serves his Lord by serving his people. And here’s the key: Paul isn’t claiming this title to assert his authority (he would do that by invoking his apostleship) or his superiority to the Philippians—and how ironic would that be, anyway? Rather, I believe, Paul is presenting himself and his status as a model for the Philippians. We might say the goal of discipleship in Jesus is to reach the point where we can honestly say we, too, are slaves of Christ.
So, discipleship is dispossession? So Emily argued last Sunday; and I say yes, but take it further. Yes, but not just in material terms. There’s more going on, as we see in Mark 10. We have an advantage over the disciples, of course: we know Jesus is not building a one-generation movement. The story is not “Jesus gathers support, Jesus and his supporters win, God’s plan is accomplished, the end.” He’s starting something designed to keep growing long after he has left the planet, and so he’s making disciples not just to follow him but to lead others to follow him. His disciples will be called to make disciples themselves—but not disciples of themselves, disciples of Jesus. Problem is, we naturally think of whom we’re following as the person right in front of us, and many gifted people are working to capitalize on that. There are many who want to build their own kingdoms and are happy to use building Christ’s kingdom as a pretext. There always have been. We see Paul, for instance, exasperated by this over and over again, perhaps most memorably (if not most directly) in 1 Corinthians 1.
This is worldly thinking, in which the point of following Jesus is to satisfy and stoke my own ego, and we see it clearly in James and John: Jesus is great, and if I can become one of his closest, most trusted lieutenants, I can be great too. He uses the encounter as an opportunity to teach them, and all his disciples, the hard but critically important lesson that discipleship is not only material dispossession, it is ego dispossession. Which in this case, I would argue, is disempowerment—but disempowerment of the ego, not of us. Just as we are called to let go the idea of “my stuff”—or perhaps we might better say, to detach from it, to learn to hold material things with open hands—so too the idea of “my leadership, “my ministry,” “my position,” “my authority.” After all, even Jesus did this, as Paul points out in Philippians 2. Jesus was God and had every right to be acknowledged as such, but he didn’t see that as something to hold tightly in his grip; instead, he opened his hands and became one of the lowly of the earth.
To the world, to the sinful nature, this feels like death. This is another instance of a problem which has been mentioned many times in this congregation’s history, our false views of death and false views of life. The way of the ego is one of those Proverbs 14:12 ways which seem to us to be the way of life but lead only to death in the end. If we allow the disempowerment and displacement of our egos, if we set aside the idea of “my ministry” along with “my money,” then as Emily said last week, it opens us up to entrust ourselves to God’s goodness—even our sense of our own value and significance.
As some of you know, I have a personal project going on the Sermon on the Mount which I’ve been developing off and on for the last twelve years or so. It first saw life as a sermon series, but I had quite a bit more I wanted to do with it; the manuscript has been on pause for some time now near the end of Matthew 5, but if God is merciful, I’ll get it finished at some point and perhaps it will find its audience. Even with the writing on hiatus, though, it continues to shape how I interact with Scripture on a daily and weekly basis.
That’s why I bring it up this morning. As you know if you’ve been here the last few weeks, last Sunday we began a season focusing on discipleship, and I greatly appreciated where Emily began this journey; she’s teased me once or twice for my focus on defining our terms, but last Sunday she did that where I might not have thought to, and wisely so. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that the word “discipleship” might be loaded with negative connotations for a lot of people, as it’s far too near and dear to my heart; but I can see it, and it’s clearly important to deal with that issue before spending any time on the subject.
For my part, I don’t think I had much of a definition for the word “discipleship” at all beyond “following Jesus” until I started digging into the Sermon on the Mount. I noticed something at that time which had never really registered with me before—something not from the Sermon itself, but from the verses immediately before it. Matthew 4 clearly shows us two different groups following Jesus, both with energy and determination. There are the crowds, who are following Jesus for their sake—for the miracles, the entertainment value, and the like; and then there are the disciples, who are following Jesus for Jesus’ sake. Then you also have the Jewish authorities, who aren’t exactly following Jesus but are keeping a close eye on him, with growing suspicion and concern. I came to believe one of the purposes of the Sermon on the Mount was to encourage the crowds to pick a lane: follow Jesus for Jesus, or go home.
You see, on my read, the Sermon on the Mount is a carefully-constructed exposition of the way of the disciple—what it looks like and feels like and means to follow Jesus for the sake of being with Jesus, learning from him, and being shaped by him. One of the things Jesus makes clear in the Sermon is that if you’re his disciple, you are not in control of the ride. It’s not going to follow your plot, you’re not going to see the twists coming—or the challenges—and it’s not going to defer to your comfort zone. I won’t say Jesus didn’t care about creating safe spaces, because he did—but for the broken, the hurting, the repentant, and the shamed. Protecting you from the things you don’t want to hear, or don’t want to face? Not on the agenda.
Our story this morning is a prime example of that. Read more→
There are a few things in the verses we just read that I’d like you to be aware of as we move through this chapter. One is timing, and I want to explain this by borrowing a distinction from the Greek of the New Testament between two kinds of time. One is chronos, which means time in the quantitative sense—an hour, a week, a day, how old I am, how long I’m going to preach, and so on. The other is kairos, which is time in the qualitative sense: the opportune time, the time God has appointed for a given purpose.
Chronos time is absent from this passage—we aren’t told how much time has passed since the structure of the temple was finished in 1 Kings 6—and that’s striking. The author or authors of the books of Samuel and Kings structured them deliberately with careful attention to detail, including how much time has passed . . . but not here. I think it’s safe to say the omission is deliberate; we’re meant to notice it and ask why. It makes me wonder if Solomon lost track of finishing the temple interior because he was so busy building his own house. I can’t say for sure, but put a pin in this and we’ll come back to it.
While chronos time is absent from this chapter, kairos time is highlighted. For context, the covenant God made with Israel through Moses at Mt. Sinai was established at the time of Pentecost, which is a firstfruits festival—a feast to thank God that the work of plowing and planting is just beginning to yield a return. The dedication of the temple, 1 Kings tells us, took place during the Feast of Booths—which is to say, Harvest.
Our main text this morning is a sequel—and not the blockbuster kind, but the kind that comes out a decade or two later because the first one wasn’t all that popular. In this case, we’re going back to 1 Samuel 4-6 to complete what some scholars refer to as the Ark Narrative. If you were here at the beginning of June, you remember that in 1 Samuel 3 God gave Samuel a word of bleak judgment for his mentor Eli. In chapter 4, that judgment hits like a sledgehammer—and it happens because Eli and his sons have not discipled the elders of Israel well.
Israel is going into battle against the Philistines, because of course they are, and the leaders of the nation decide to bring the ark of God (which is referred to elsewhere in scripture as the ark of the covenant) from the sanctuary at Shiloh to the battlefield. This is classic magical thinking, which is to say it’s pagan thinking: the ark is a divine object which has powers which they can use to help them win. It’s terrible theology, and it shows a lack of respect for—or even awareness of—God’s holiness. They are treating God as someone they can use to accomplish their own purposes. The result is utter disaster: the army of Israel is routed, the sons of Eli are killed . . . and the ark is taken by the Philistines. When Eli hears, he falls backward, breaks his neck, and dies. His pregnant daughter-in-law hears the news, goes into labor early, and dies in childbirth; she lives just long enough to name her son Ichabod—i-kavod, which means “no glory”—saying, “The glory has departed from Israel.”
Now, the capture of the ark is a loss for Israel, but no win for the Philistines, for a similar reason. Where the Israelites’ pagan thinking led to a lack of respect for God’s holiness, that of the Philistines produces a lack of respect for his power. They have captured the sacred thing of Israel’s god; by their understanding, that must mean their victory on earth was the result of a victory in heaven by their gods over Israel’s god. The thing to do with the ark, then, is to represent and honor that victory in heaven by taking it into one of their temples and setting it before the image of the god. So they do, taking the ark to Ashdod (one of their five main cities) and placing it in the temple of Dagon.
Again, the result of pagan thinking is disaster. The next morning, the Philistines find the statue of Dagon flat on its face before the ark. They set the statue back on its feet—and then the next morning, they find the statue has fallen on its face again before the ark, except this time the head and hands have broken off and are lying in the doorway. What’s more, the Philistines are hit by bubonic plague and overrun by rats, first in Ashdod and then everywhere else they try moving the ark, until the people beg their rulers to send the ark back to Israel before they all die.
I first encountered that poem when I was younger than Iain is now, I think, and it’s stayed with me ever since—not because it’s poetically great, but because it’s a fascinating scene. I could easily start analyzing it as I would an Old Testament narrative—if the angel was there, God must have sent the angel, and obviously God knew what would happen, so . . . —and I’d be off to the races. That would be piling far too much weight on it, of course, but the poem is making a theological point: we can only love other people because of the love of God, and so to the extent that we do love others, it’s a sign of the love of God at work in our hearts.
Which is true, and one of those truths which sounds very noble and high-minded, especially if one wants—as it seems Leigh Hunt, who wrote “Abou Ben Adhem,” did—to argue the position that all religions are fundamentally the same, all lead to God, etc. At first blush, it seems freeing; you don’t have to worry about anything specific the Bible teaches, or any other religion, because as long as you love other people, you’re good. But here’s the kicker: that’s a move away from a divinely-revealed faith toward human religion, and as I’ve noted recently, that means legalism. What does it mean to love other people, and how do we know if we’re doing it right, or if we’re doing it enough? All well and good if you have an angel show up in your bedroom to tell you, but what about the rest of us?
I get teased a little for my insistence that we have to define our terms—which makes me smile, because it makes me feel seen—but no word ever actually goes undefined; it’s just that if we don’t get the definitions out into the open at the beginning, we don’t know what definitions everyone is using or who’s determining them, and so we’re playing by someone else’s rules without knowing it. That’s especially true when we’re using a big, loaded word like “love.” “All you need is love” sounds great when you have John, Paul, and George on guitar with Ringo on the drums, but what happens when you get down to brass tacks?
Well, what happens is what always happens: the law of love yields to the love of law, and the people who get to decide what it means to be loving make all the rules and judge you for breaking them. Read more→
As you may know, we’re going to be spending the next several months reflecting on the concept of integrity in light of the Scriptures, and vice versa—a concept which eludes easy definition. We don’t want to abandon the effort, like Justice Potter Stewart, and say, “OK, I can’t completely define it, but I know it when I see it”; but moving from “I know it when I see it” to being able to articulate what exactly it is that we know is a challenge because integrity can’t be defined with a checklist. As Emily highlighted last week, it is an attribute of God, and like all such, it is too large a thing for us to pin down and dissect. We have to watch it fly, so to speak, to understand it.
Fortunately, for those of us who were here before the service last week for the Opening, Frank Benyousky gave us a little help when he started a parallel conversation about the nature of truth. Like integrity, truth is an attribute of God, and thus when we ask, “What is truth?” we are diving into a sea of which we will never see the bottom in this life; but for all that, I believe there is an answer that can guide us in that dive. It dates back over 2300 years to the Greek philosopher Aristotle: if I say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, I speak the truth. If I say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, I do not speak the truth.
It’s a simple enough definition, and can play out just that simply with regard to matters of scientific or historical fact; but of course, when you start dealing with the human heart, figuring out “what is” gets much, much harder. All the same, if we understand that each person is an objective reality—each of you exists, and each of you are who you are, whether I perceive and understand you accurately or not—and ultimately God are an objective reality who determine himselves who he are, not a concept we can define however it suits us, then I think there’s a principle here we can use. If we can say truth is alignment with what is real, I believe we can understand integrity in the same way.
If it seems a little odd to you to put Mark 11 and Philippians 2 together, you might find it interesting that the folks who put the lectionary together would agree with you. The fact is, I’m playing mix-and-match with the lectionary this morning. Today is Palm Sunday, but it’s also called Passion Sunday, especially in churches which don’t have services for Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. The lectionary deals with this by offering two tracks: the “Liturgy of the Palms,” with Psalm 118 and Mark 11, and the “Liturgy of the Passion,” with Mark 14 and Philippians 2. There’s a tension here, and the lectionary opts to avoid it with this separation. I believe—and this is very much in keeping with what this congregation has always been—we need to lean into the tension and see what it has to teach us.
To do that, we need to pay careful attention to the context. Strictly speaking, the lectionary passage from Philippians 2 is just verses 5-11, but it’s dangerous to take those verses in isolation. It’s very easy to treat them as a pure abstraction, and then to spiritualize and theologize away to our heart’s content (and many have done just that over the years). Thing is, Paul didn’t write this because he got up one day and felt like saying something pretty about Jesus—he’s going somewhere in this letter, and our passage this morning is a piece of his argument.
So, OK, we’ve included verses 1-4 as the immediate context for the next seven; but then 2:1 begins, “Therefore . . .” There’s a piece of wisdom I heard many times growing up, and maybe you’ve heard this, too: “When you see a ‘therefore,’ you need to see what it’s there for.” It’s good advice, and one of the things that has anchored me in understanding the Bible; therefore tells us this is because of that, and thus where that sends us. Back up a few more verses, then, and, we can see the church in Philippi is going through tough times. They’re facing opposition, and they’re struggling. Paul compares their situation to his own—and he’s in prison, facing possible execution and contemplating his mortality. But while that possibility, to borrow from Samuel Johnson, has concentrated his mind wonderfully, it’s having the opposite effect on the Christians in Philippi: their community is fracturing and dividing under the stress.
