Oct 02 | “Take a knee,” (Sermon, October 1st 2017)

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, ²make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. ³Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
⁷ but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
⁸   he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

12 Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; ¹³for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Philippians 2:1-13

“So that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Sometimes the lectionary’s just too perfect, isn’t it?

Today, friends, I am praising God for this passage, because today we are finally hearing it in its proper context.

In the past, you see, when I heard the line, “At the name of Jesus every knee should bend,” I always imagined my friends who are not Christian kneeling before Jesus, and it hurt my heart. It made me sad, because it would represent a loss of who they were, and who they are is beautiful and precious to God now.

But today, the full weight of the meaning is on our shoulders.

Those who know a little bit about Paul will know that many of the letters in our Bible were written to churches who were struggling and for whom he sometimes had harsh words. The community at Philippi was different. Paul loved them. The letter is warm and affectionate. Paul did not give them this wisdom in order to castigate. This was advice given to those whom he trusts to live it out.

Today, that includes all of us here, in St. Margaret’s Cedar Cottage, in 2017.

Let’s explore the first piece of that hymn:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.”

It’s easy to see this as a call to debasing ourselves, a call to accept suffering in silence. It is not that, even though others have made it that in the past, as others have put the call to kneel into the service of colonialism and exceptionalism. But we are not being called to literally be slaves. Human beings, who can become slaves to other human beings unwillingly, do not serve God by embracing our chains. This was the rhetoric that led us to today’s protests in the first place.

No, Paul is saying something much more shocking, both to us and to the people among whom he served, who believe it or not were more like us than we might care to think. Roman society was predicated on the pursuit of honour and upward mobility. People spent their lives chasing the dream to become more, higher, richer, closer to gods.

Sound familiar?

Now of course this is not an inherently bad desire – it’s the unconscious desire of every mortal creature to perpetuate itself and become stronger. But it, like so many other benign and understandable impulses, has become an idol to those who sit atop golden towers of plenty and still imagine they are in the mud. And many of us below have found our own benign impulse turning itself into aspiration to be like them, to seek ascension and small godhood ourselves.

Paul calls the Philippians, and us, across time, to abandon our attempts at small godhood. We are called to complete renunciation of any kind of godhood at all.

God chose slavery and degradation because it was the one thing God could never have inflicted upon Her. She chose it in order to know us better, to close the gap that we insist exists between us and God. And She did.

We are not God, but we can have the same mind within us. We can choose to try to close the gap.

How can we do this?

Let’s first acknowledge something very important to our purposes. The original “take a knee” protest of football player Colin Kaepernick, had nothing to do with Trump. What Kaepernick was actually protesting was police violence against black and brown people. Kaepernick himself, a Christian, has named his act as being born out of his faith. When Kaepernick takes a knee, he proclaims that God, not the state, is supreme. God, not the state, deserves the true fealty of the soul.

It’s unfortunate that his original intent has been co-opted, because this is incredibly relevant to our faith. We as Christians proclaim not only that God chose weakness rather than power to save the world, but that God chose a particular kind of weakness. It was not apolitical, because true powerlessness is never apolitical. True powerlessness exists at the crossroads of societal apathy and societal condemnation.

It was not enough for God to be made manifest in a person. God chose a brown man, conceived in an unmarried teenager, born to poor refugee parents in occupied territory. And God chose to work out our salvation not through a powerful king or brilliant academic but through a rural prophet and teacher who eventually became a condemned criminal executed by the state.

It’s easy for us to forget how radical this is when Christians can buy images of an instrument of torture in solid gold to wear around our necks. Let me be clear that I actually think those images are beautiful, because they remind us of God’s power to transform an instrument of state oppression into one of cosmic salvation.

But again, how do we close the gap?

We claim those vows to renounce Satan and the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. We commit ourselves to God’s kingdom and God’s mission, which is to draw all people to God, the universal force of Love which is eternal and undying, the force that stirs within us when we are called to exhibit compassion and solidarity rather than fear and finger-pointing. We as Christians have a particular way of doing this, borne out of a particular story, and we should embody that wholeheartedly while affirming the ways of others and locking arms with them in our work.

It’s interesting that a lot of folks believe that when the church engages in activism it forgets or abandons its true values. This is a distortion. The kind of church that Kaepernick goes to understands things differently. This kind of church understands things differently. We are a reconciling community. We joined in the walk last week and we have a territorial acknowledgement every Sunday to honour the people of the land, and to name that this land is unceded and so our relationship is not exactly as it should be. Naming things gives us power over them, and so naming a relationship as broken and in need of healing has already changed the dynamic.

It’s the difference between saying our Saviour was killed and saying he was murdered.

The religious authorities of Jesus’ time confront him when he enters the Temple, their place of power: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” Jesus responds with a riddle about the source of John’s power to baptize. The answer is probably the same as the answer to their question: his authority and the baptism come from God. But they’re not listening. Instead of seeking to proclaim the truth, they are more concerned with how others will react to their response. Classic politicians, these. But there are some people, within and outside our tribe, nation, and preferred company, who are not afraid to work out the truth of our salvation, who are not afraid to allow God to speak through their lips.

The work of our salvation is to affirm the truth of God’s sanctification of humility, and to stand, or perhaps kneel, in solidarity with those who embody that truth of where true power, humility, and sanctity lies.

Brothers, sisters, and friends, you who know salvation, have seen salvation, speak truth with your lips, your bodies, your hearts.

If you don’t know how, ask God to tell you. Admit your own fragility and turn to the One who has promised to answer those who seek.

Proclaim that the humanity enslaved and crucified today is the true embodiment of divine power.

Proclaim that God, veiled in fragile flesh, is more powerful than any power exhibited by human authority.