Simple Obedience
A sermon by Chris Whitmore on Philippians 2:1-13 and Matthew 21:23-3
May these words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be ever acceptable to you, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
When I first volunteered to preach, a friend casually mentioned that one of his favourite things about st. ben’s was that the sermons were always under 15 minutes. But before you start the clock, I would like to preface my sermon with a few words of dedication. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Chris and you can often find me at the back at the sound bord. Along with going to st ben’s, I’ve also been involved at All Saints for some time.
A few years ago, All Saints started a search process for a new priest, just like st. ben’s is doing now. As part of the parish profile prep, we interviewed about 40 parishioners, similar to the survey at st. ben’s. Now, parish profiles are a lot of work and a search for a new priest is a scary time for a parish or mission, but it can also be a lot of fun and a great chance to get to know the community. In our interviews, we found that answers to questions like, “What keeps you going to All Saints?” all came back the same: people. It was the community as a whole and individuals that drew congregants in and that kept them engaged. Of the many people mentioned, a few names came up again and again. I’ll focus on just one: Ray.
Many of you have met Ray or at least have held his palm crosses on Palm Sunday – all of which were made in loving memory of his wife Betty. Ray was the sacristan here – the keeper of the holy things – for many years. He handled the logistics of services, made sure there was wine ready in the sacristy cupboard for All Saints and st. ben’s, and was a vocal advocate for st. ben’s. But above all, he trained and coordinated the servers at All Saints.
The week after my mom introduced me to Ray while we were visiting All Saints for one Sunday, I got a call from him to say that he had put me on the roster of servers and that I was scheduled that following Sunday, “Shall I collect you before the service or will you make your own way here?” It was clear that there was no third option and I’ve been at All Saints and st ben’s ever since.
What stood out for me most about Ray was that he despised silliness. Which I think is why he loved working with young people and why young people were drawn to him. He despised silliness, meaning could not stand arbitrary rules, or complicated hierarchy or people thinking too highly of themselves. Ray truly embodied the message of todays readings.
We held Ray’s funeral here yesterday. The last time I visited Ray, I mentioned that I would be preaching today and, while he couldn’t respond, I think that he would have been proud – regardless of the quality of the sermon. In fact, I think he would have been delighted to see so many people stepping up to keep things going at st. ben’s.
I said this was a dedication, but Ican’t imagine Ray wanting a sermon to be dedicated to him, so in his memory I will dedicate this sermon to those people Ray would have identified as the best equipped to lead the church today, those people 20 or 30 years younger than me who can hear the message of the Gosple without the silliness of adulthood.
The last time I seriously interacted with the text from Philippians was in a bible study with a group of 15ish year-old girls. After reading the text, the first question came quickly: “Why did Paul start out with a question?”
I hadn’t really thought much of it before then and really wanted to focus on other thigs, but it always feels good to get a question that you can answer confidently, so I happily explained that it was not really a question, but a rhetorical device that Paul was using to drive home his point.
My pride in answering so authoritatively quickly faded, when she replied staring right though me, “Do you think I don’t know what a rhetorical question is?”
I did not say it was a rhetorical question and as I was thinking of what to say next, once of the other girls helpfully let me know, “I don’t think you need to answer that. It was a rhetorical question.”
The first girl continued, “I didn’t ask what he started with, I asked why.”
By this point I was feeling a little ganged up on, but I knew exactly what to say, “Why do you think he said it that way?”
“I asked you first” she immediately replied. I spluttered for a moment before conceding that I really had no idea.
Of course, instead of “if…” it can be read as, “since there is encouragement in Christ…” But I do not think it would have stood out to me or her if that were what Paul wrote and he knew that he was making an important point not to be missed.
“Make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or vainglory, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.”
Make my joy complete is an arresting construction. After Paul’s dramatic four-fold premise, “If there is any encouragement… consolation… sharing… compassion and sympathy”, Paul abruptly draws us in with his plea: “Make my joy complete”. The Greek word here is plerosate, an imperative form of the verb pleroo, which makes several appearances in the bible, translated as to accomplish, fulfill, fill up, consummate, perfect, or, in one translation I saw, “to level up”. As an imperative, Plerosate is a command or entreaty. It is not a wish or a suggestion, but an urgent and actionable plea. We could probably boil down the first three verses to an exasperated: “For God’s sake! Make my joy complete!”
I raised an eyebrow when I first read “level up” in a biblical context, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. For starters, when I imagine someone leveling up, I think of the previous level being filled, like in a status bar of some sort on a videogame. In other words, don’t just add a bit more joy, but make me so full of joy that I jump up to a whole new world of joy.
Paul would have worked from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and the first use of that word pleroo that I could find there was in Gen 1:22 where God said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters”. I think it is fair to say that we see in Genesis a clear leveling up, but not only did God level up the seas with sea creatures, God first had to create the seas and create those creatures and through doing all of that was able to level up the waters.
And now we have a similar leveling up. Just as God had to create the context for leveling up the oceans with fish, so too did Christ have to create the context for Paul’s joy to be leveled up by the true discipleship of his beloved community at Philippi. Paul did not ask them to make him a bit happier by being of one mind, he asked them to bring his joy to perfection by truly following the teachings of Christ.
I think that the term level up would also be immediately understandable to this church at Philippi. Settled by Thasian colonists around 360BCE, Philippi was first named Crenides, “Fountains”, after the several natural springs in the area. You may be thinking that when King Philip II of Macedon conquered the area a few years later he was arrogant enough to rename the city after himself, but that would have been rather gauche. One theory is that he renamed all parts of the city Philip and from there we get the plural Philippi, but my preferred account is that he renamed all those fountains in his honour and continuing the tradition of naming the city after the fountains, he really had no other option but to rename the city Philippi.
To level up by being named after a King – sorry, fountains – Philippi must have been an important place. It was an important place in part because of its fertile farmlands and strategic location on the main east-west trade route in the area and because of gold mines in the nearby hills. The city enjoyed renewed importance as the location of the Battle of Philippi in which Brutus and Cassius were killed after the assassination of Julius Caesar and after that battle, Philippi was leveled up again, this time to the rank of Colonia and granted the Italian Right, giving it privileged status as a Rome.
By the time of Paul, Philippi was once again a wealthy city, but as one would expect, that wealth was not evenly dispersed; successive colonisations and conquests led to a highly stratified society. The native population and the labourers brought in to do the hard work were at the bottom and the colonizers, Roman citizens, were at the top. While things like wealth could help you move up within your level, it was nearly impossible to move above your fixed societal tier.
It was, however, possible to move down a level and this community of Christ-followers had done just that, becoming outcasts among followers of the Roman religion and among more traditional Jews. Financially stressed, the community was facing hard times and fractures were starting to appear.
Paul had also recently leveled down. His very name, Paul (which was likely his registered birth name), conveys his birthright as a Roman citizen, but now he is in prison, stripped of his rights and relying on financial assistance from this marginal group at Philippi.
Although it was nearly impossible for the average person to level up, the emperor had the unique ability to level up to the max, being elevated to the rank of deity. But this Jesus Paul was writing about did the exact opposite: he went down from the level of creator to that of created and, as if that were not enough, he crouched to the bottom of that tier, experiencing the humiliation of crucifixion. To quote Paul, Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of 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 is this mind of humble obedience that Paul is imploring his friends at Philippi to have in common. And in humbling himself, to continue the quote “Christ was given the name above all names, such that every knee should bend and ever tongue confess.” Well, that does sound a bit fancier than Phil renaming the fountains. It’s also exceptionally provocative: a name above that of the emperor!? Bowing and declaring lordship to someone above the emperor!?
In this short part of Paul’s letter, we see a radical reinterpretation of rank and status and a radical call to action. A theme mirrored in the gospel reading from Matthew, in which you almost start rooting for the chief priests and elders, but you knew as soon as you read the words “chief priests” that things are not going to end well. Predictably, they answered that the son who said he would follow his father’s command was obedient and predictably they were wrong.
Dietrich Bonhoffer echoed this story in his description of what he calls simple obedience: to paraphrase, a child who practices simple obedience will know that when his parents say, “Go to bed”, they mean that he is to go to bed and not that he is go out and play so as to refresh himself so that he wont be tired and, therefore, will not need to go to bed. The command of the father in the parable from Mathew, like that of the parent in Bonhoffer’s parable, is clear and distinct. To do anything other than what is commanded is to not obey. Likewise, what Paul is asking and has been asking the followers at Philippi to do is made quite clear in his dramatic rhetoric. And likewise, what Christ was and is calling his disciples to do is clear. When Christ says, for example, “love your neighbour” he does not mean, love the neighbour to the west, but not the east.” He does not mean, “love them when it is easy” or “Love them but hate what you decide is their sin”.
I was expecting the chief priests and elders to get the answer wrong, but I do not know if I was expecting such a harsh rebuke: “Surely prostitutes and tax collectors will go to heaven ahead of you!” Now, if you are thinking that Jesus has just revealed the surefire way to get to heaven, you would also be wrong. To go to heaven, you do not need to become an accountant or even get a job at the CRA. But what is clear is that in the world Christ is imagining, the old answers simply wont cut it. In the world Christ is imagining, the uneducated masses who heard and believed John the Baptizer get the answer right and those with earthly authority get it wrong. Those who were once privileged will move to the end of the line and those most reviled will move to the front.
But even in all of that, Christ does not say, “surely the tax collectors and prostitutes will go to heaven instead of you.” No, even in his angry rebuke there is room for grace and there was room for all to drawn home.
And so, to get back to the girl’s question, why did Paul and Jesus use such stunning rhetoric? Well, I think it was because they had tried saying the same thing so many other times and it just was not sinking in. 2000 years ago, as today, those listening tried imagining Christ’s words through the lenses they knew best and through the hierarchies that were so important to them. The message of the Gospels is so simple yet hearing it and obeying it can be so hard. But the message of the gospels is urgent and Paul, like Christ, had no time for misunderstanding; Christ left no room for misunderstanding. His call was clear and unambiguous. His call to us was for simple obedience. “Obedience is simple”, write’s Karl Barth referencing Ditrich Bonhoffer, “when we do just what we are told to do – nothing more, nothing less and nothing different.” Christ called his followers at Philippi to be a community in which no one was better than another and in which they practiced radical unity. Paul was dramatically clarifying that when Christ calls us to regard all with equality, what he means is that we are to regard all with equality and when Christ calls us to unity, he means that we are to be united. Nothing more, nothing less and nothing different.
AMEN.
