April 5, 2020 - Sermon - Rev. Hamilton Throckmorton

Sermon Text

Scripture:  Philippians 2:1-13    

     PBS is currently showing a documentary series on the country’s twenty-sixth president, Theodore Roosevelt. It was reported by one of his visitors that he went one day to talk to Roosevelt. When asked later about how the conversation had gone, the visitor said that he had greeted the president, and that was the last word he’d uttered in the conversation. Roosevelt took all of the available airtime.

     That story reminded me of a remark once made by his daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She said about her father, “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.” Humility was evidently not one of his strong suits.

     It didn’t seem to hurt Roosevelt, though. Humility, after all, is not a virtue particularly prized or rewarded in our society. We don’t honor people for their humility. We honor them for their successes. Seldom do rewards accrue to those who have given themselves up for someone else or for something bigger than they are. Seldom is the world’s swag awarded to those who have genuinely humbled themselves.

     Which is why the apostle Paul’s words to the Philippians are so captivating. “Don’t push your way to the front; don’t sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand” (2:3-4, The Message). And the reason we’re to do that? Because, says Paul, this is the way Christ was. “Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what” (2:5-6).

     In a world in which upward mobility is paramount, in which we’re to seek always bigger houses and higher incomes and more prominent positions, this sounds like sacrilege. Achievement is how we establish our worth, isn’t it. Success is how we measure our value. What do you mean, “put yourself aside and help others get ahead”? That sort of downward mobility isn’t going to get us anywhere. It’s not going to provide us any security. Humility? No thanks.

     And then we come to a time such as this, and maybe we wonder whether there’s something to these words of Paul, whether there’s something to this way of Jesus. We have a lot of stuff, and still we’re scared. We’ve reached the work position we’ve sought, and still we’re unsettled. We’ve piled up our nest egg, and not only might it dwindle drastically, but, even when the economy bounces back, we may have realized that it doesn’t offer us the deep peace we had hoped it would.

     This is a humbling time. The baskets into which we may have put our eggs may not be as satisfying, as fulfilling, as we had hoped they’d be. And maybe, on this last Sunday of this totally unexpected Lentiest of Lenten seasons, we are being turned. In some ways, we have—to use an image of Jesus—built our houses on sand. And in the crucible of this moment, we are being turned to another lot on which to build our soul’s house, a lot with a sturdy and totally trustworthy foundation (cf. Matthew 7:24-27), a lot that will hold us steady always. Maybe it’s that sort of re-centering that we’re being invited to this Holy Week.

     One way to look at this time of ours is by way of an image suggested by the contemporary Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr. Years ago, Rohr studied initiation rites for boys in indigenous culture who were being ushered into manhood. In order to become whole and healthy adults, concluded Rohr, these boys—and he now adds girls, as well—had to recognize five fundamental truths about life. All of us, says Rohr, need to acknowledge these basic truths: 1. Life is hard. 2. You are not important. 3. Your life is not about you. 4. You are not in control. 5. You are going to die. If you were expecting an uplifting list, that’s not what you got, is it. And it’s apparently completely contradictory to what we’ve come to believe. Why would these discouraging, wrong-sounding realizations be at the heart of a journey to full maturity? So let’s explore them a little.

     Rohr’s first truth is that life is hard. I’m guessing there won’t be much argument about that today. If you’re like me, you may constantly want it to be easy, and think that something has gone horribly wrong when it isn’t. Wouldn’t it be great if life were full of happiness and success? Wouldn’t it be nice if every day were sunny and warm? And what would we give not to have the pain and death and disruption of the pandemic that assaults us all? If we thought life were going to be easy, COVID-19 brings us back to earth. Life is hard.

     If we thought that first truth was at least understandable, even if we didn’t like it, the next two seem just flat-out wrong. Rohr’s second truth is that you are not important. And I can sense every bone in my body recoil. No, we think—we are important, we do matter. Isn’t that the core of God’s good news to us, that you and I matter?

     Rohr, though, reframes it for us. What’s not important is not really you and me. What’s not important is the false self we construct—the illusions with which we live, the facades we like to project. What’s not important is our desire to convey to ourselves and each other that we’re strong when in fact we ache, that we’re the picture of success when inside we’re saturated with doubt, that we have it all together when, in truth, we lie awake at night wondering if we settled on the right career path or whether we messed up the work project or if we’ve been a good parent. It’s that “you,” that carefully constructed artifice, that’s not important. “[E]very one of Jesus’ confounding questions is intended to bring up the limitations of our own wisdom, power, or tiny self” (daily email, March 31, 2020), says Rohr. No edifice that conceals and misleads is important. And maybe just as big a part of what he’s saying is that “No one is more important than anyone else,” which is what we may secretly like to believe. Any pristine false self we construct for others and any sense that we’re particularly and uniquely valuable: it’s that you that’s not important.

     Rohr’s third truth is: your life is not about you. In other words: “we are not our own.” This is almost entirely counterintuitive. Of course, my life is about me! Who else would it be about? I can’t live somebody else’s life. I can only live my own. My life is about me! Right?

     Rohr urges us to a kind of Copernican revolution, though. Just as an earlier generation had to learn that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, so we have to take in that the world doesn’t revolve around each of us. What’s most deeply true is that we are all floating together on a river, and it’s not any one of us who is most important on that journey; it’s the River itself. And it’s the other boats that are being carried along with us on that current. The way Rohr puts it is, “Life is living itself in us.” And when we recognize that, he says, “We do not have to figure it all out, straighten it all out, or even do it perfectly by ourselves. We do not have to be God. It is an enormous weight off our backs. All we have to do is participate.” As he goes on to say, “My life is not about me. It is about God. It is about a willing participation in a larger mystery” (daily meditation, April 1, 2020). Your life is not about you.

     Fourth truth: You are not in control. This really rankles! But I am in control! And I need to be responsible! Who else is going to earn the money I need to live on? Who else is going to buy the groceries and prepare the meals and take care of the finances? Who else is going to write this sermon? And what about life with this virus? There’s lots I can and should control. I can wash my hands again and again, I can make sure to stay at least six feet away from you when I see you, I can wear a mask when I’m in close quarters, I can sanitize every single thing that comes into our house from the grocery store. And if I don’t do these things, they’re not going to get done. I am very much in control! And I need to be.

Control, says Rohr, “is nearly an unquestion[ed] moral value in Western society.” It’s what every self-help book tells us to do: “take control of your life.” And on a practical level, says Rohr, it’s true—there’s so much we can control. We control what we eat and when we go to bed and what shows to binge-watch. On one level it’s true that we’re in control. On a global level, though, not so much. This pandemic is teaching us that we’re very much not in control. No matter how much you and I might wish it, we are “not steering this ship.”

  “For many of us,” says Rohr, “this may be the first time in our lives that we have felt so little control over our own destiny and the destiny of those we love” (daily meditation, April 2, 2020). And it can feel frightening, disorienting, discouraging.

     The last of Rohr’s five jarring truths is, of course: you are going to die. As he says, “death, in any form, is perceived as the great human enemy. We construct much of our lives to avoid it, delay it, and deny it.” If we didn’t know it before, though, we certainly know it now. A rampant virus that you can’t see and that, despite our best efforts, strikes without warning, has placed this truth front and center in our common life: There’s no getting out of this alive; you and I are going to die.

     Life is hard. You are not important. Your life is not about you. You are not in control. You are going to die. Pretty sobering, isn’t it. And yet, there’s also something more. Painful as those truths may be, they are also laden with gifts. Rohr says about this difficult life that pain is the great teacher. And that pain can reveal the good news of God, the blessing of grace.

     This, in a sense, is what Holy Week and this Passion Sunday are all about. Today we remember that the disciples are terrified by how hard this stage of the journey is, and that even Jesus resists it. As they go through this gruesome week, they face the truth that the illusions of their lives are not important, that life really is not about them, that they are all so far from being in control, and that this beautiful, lovely, precious life is going to come to an end. On one level, what an unsurpassed agony.

     On another level, though, what comes out of that week is the awareness that something else is more important than any of it. Even in the midst of what is, on the surface, excruciating and deeply humbling, there is a richness and grace that fills them and carries them. Of Rohr’s five hard truths, it may be that the third one has a uniquely special gift to offer us. Remember the third truth? Your life is not about you. Because really, it’s about God. Even though life is hard and you and I are not uniquely important and we’re not in control and we’re all going to die, the heart of our faith is that we are always being borne aloft on the winds of the spirit, we are at every moment being carried along on the currents that are the rivers of the God who will not let us go. As Paul said in another of his letters, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

     At the heart of God’s word to us today is the Christ who is abjectly humbled, and in whose humiliation is holy victory. The words “humiliation” and “humble” come from a Latin word meaning “low,” and both are ultimately related to the word humus, meaning earth. To be humbled is to know ourselves to be part of the earth. And the earth is the fullness of God. Our glory is not in anything we do. It’s not in any particular accomplishments or successes. Our glory is in being part of the magnificent whole. And it’s in knowing that, in life and in death, we are being held by the God who never lets us go. As we live through this virus, and as we now celebrate communion together, may we live in the humbled confidence of God’s tender embrace. And may that give us a deep sense of joy and freedom.