Philippians 1:27-2:11 January 25, 2015 The Greatest Sermon Illustration of All Time Next week is Super Bowl Sunday, and for good or for ill the Super Bowl has become the most watched television show of the year. And because well over 100 million people will tune in for the game next Sunday it has also become the most important event of the year for the people who produce TV commercials. This year advertisers will pay something on the order of $4.5 million for a 30-second spot, and with all that money on the line the pressure is on to produce a truly memorable commercial. This backfires sometimes, though. Because it s possible for a commercial to be so creative that we in the audience can completely forget what product was being advertised. Preachers can have the same problem when it comes to the illustrations we use in sermons. Sometimes a sermon illustration can be more memorable than the message itself. When someone speaks to me at the back door after a service, and says, I really enjoyed your story about your dog, I m left wondering why? If it was a really effective illustration, they might mean, From now on, whenever I see a dog, I won t be able to keep myself from thinking about whatever the message for that day was. But they could just mean that it was an entertaining story, which what I usually guess when they turn around and starting telling me a story about their own dog. 1
We preachers tell stories for a number of reasons. Part of it is just to provide a little breathing space so that sermons don t just become academic lectures. But the stories we tell also serve a more important purpose. Listening to a story engages our imaginations. When we hear or read a story, we leave the world we re in and enter a different world inside the story. And if it s a good story we ll come back into our world having been changed in some way by the experience. We ll be able to see and imagine our own lives differently. The passage that I m going to call the greatest sermon illustration of all time is Philippians 2:5-11. Theologically this is one of the most important passages in the New Testament. It s such a powerful statement in its own right that people have preached countless sermons and have written a pile of books about it. But what we often overlook is that Paul actually uses it as an illustration of something he s teaching his readers in Philippi about how they should live as followers of Jesus. To discover what that lesson is we need to go back to chapter 1, verse 27. Up to this point in his letter Paul has been making references to his own situation being held in a Roman prison because of his faith in Christ. In the verses leading up to verse 27, he has been speaking about his hope of being released from jail and being re-united with his friends. But now he says, beginning in verse 27, [In the meantime], live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel, and are in no way intimidated by your opponents. (Philippians 1:27-28a NRSV) 2
There are a couple of things here that need a bit of unpacking. To begin with, Paul s agenda in this section of the letter is to teach his friends what it means to live a life worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And, in particular, he s teaching them about doing that in a hostile environment in which suffering for their faith is a real possibility. Our first impression of this is maybe to wonder what this has to do with us. Any suffering we experience as a consequence of our faith is pretty minimal compared to being thrown into prison. And we probably don t like to think of the world as a hostile place with enemies lurking around trying to destroy us. Talk of opponents reminds us too much of the way fundamentalists see the world. But while we may uncomfortable with that sort of talk, we also recognize that there are things in our environment that stand in opposition to Christian faith. We hear about, and can see the influence, of a new, militant brand of atheism in our public discourse. We experience daily the effects of the pervasive religious and moral pluralism of our society captured in phrases like being spiritual but not religious and the growing number of none of the aboves on surveys about faith. We see the effects of rampant consumerism and materialism, eroding sexual mores, and a resurgence of racism and violence. In this environment, some Christians see enemies everywhere and are quick to draw battle lines. Christians in the mainline Protestant stream of the church are more likely to see the lines less rigidly and call for a critical engagement with secular society in the hope of having a Christian influence 3
and witness. There s plenty of room to debate which approach is more faithful or more effective, but one by-product of this is that Christians can spend more time criticizing each other than making a difference in the world. In Paul s words, the key to living in a manner worthy of Christ in an environment like the Philippians or like ours is to not turn on each other, but to [stand] firm in one spirit and to [strive] side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel. Now when he says to [stand] firm in one spirit, the word spirit should really be capitalized. Because Paul is saying that the basis of our unity is the Holy Spirit who dwells in each of us and connects us in Christ. And when he says to strive side by side, the Greek word he uses is the source for our English words athlete and athletics. So we could say that Paul is telling us that we all need to play on the same team if we are to stand firmly in the world. In our current environment, Christians across the whole spectrum of the church may have more in common than we think especially in contrast to the values of our society. Just as one example, Christians in our society are deeply divided on the question of same sex unions. But despite that, Christians across that entire spectrum are more committed to the importance of marriage than our society is. If we were to focus on modeling and teaching about healthy relationships and building strong marriages instead of blasting each other over our differences, we might be surprised at the difference we could make in a society where the institution of marriage is in trouble, where divorce rates are high, and over 40% of children are born to unwed mothers. 4
Paul moves the conversation to a deeper level as he moves into chapter 2. What is the secret to standing together in Christ, of being united in the one Spirit? Paul s answer to that is embedded in an expression he uses that doesn t translate into English all that well to be of the same mind. To our thinking that may give the impression that he means that we need to agree on everything. But what he s really getting at is more a mindset, or an attitude as the New International Version puts it, being one in spirit and purpose. All of this links back to what he s just said at the end of chapter 1. He s calling us to be united in our shared faith in Jesus and our shared calling to follow him. And the key to living with this unity of spirit and purpose is, in a word, humility. Paul says, 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. (Philippians 2:3-4 NRSV) Being able to pursue our shared purpose in Christ, even when we don t agree with each other, begins with admitting that we don t have all the answers and that we might even possibly be wrong about some things. And along with that to really believe in our hearts that sisters and brothers who disagree with us are in fact really sisters and brothers in Christ, who just like us are doing their best to believe and follow him faithfully. Paul tells us not to look to our own interests but to look to the interests of others. We also need to understand this in the context in which Paul is writing it. He s not talking about letting others abuse us or take advantage us. In fact living this way only works in a community of people who are all practicing it, who are 5
all looking out for each other s interests. But it s this sort of humility that makes it possible for us to live in unity with each other and stand with each other in Christ. It s only after all this that Paul comes to the great illustration. You will notice that in most modern versions of the Bible these verses are set apart in the form of poetry. That s because most scholars think that Paul is quoting from an early Christian hymn, one which his readers already knew which is in itself a very common way to illustrate a point in a sermon. And notice that the hymn tells a story. The picture may be painted in broad strokes, but we know the details. Using the same word he used about our mindset, he directs our attention to Jesus, encouraging us to have the same mindset as Jesus. He considered the needs of others to be of first importance. He considered them so important that he willingly laid aside the divine status and position to which he was entitled, and as a human he subordinated his will to the will of the Father to the point of even laying down his own life standing against the power of evil and ultimately triumphing over it. Like anyone s story, Jesus story is unique. It s not a step-by-step pattern for our lives, but his story captures our imaginations and shows us that living with each other in humility is possible. Just think of the difference we might make if we let his story change us. Amen. Rev. David Spaulding First Presbyterian Church, Dixon January 25, 2015 6