A Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on October 1, 2023, the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
This section of Paul’s Letter to the Philippians–known as the “kenotic hymn,” the hymn of self-emptying love–is thought to have been a hymn sung by the earliest Christians. If you followed someone who had traced the ichthys in the dust with the toe of their sandle to the unremarkable door of the local village butcher’s house, whispered the password in Aramaic–Maranatha (Come, Lord, Come Lord Jesus,”--and were secreted inside, chances are a version of this hymn would be a part of the worship. And if you asked one these rag-tag followers of Jesus, “Who is this Jesus fella you follow after and call, ‘Lord?’” chances are they would reply by singing this song, humming the Tune of the Loosening, dancing the Jig of the Great Unbinding.
Who is this Jesus we follow and call Lord? Not an idea, concept, a word in some creed, or an object of study–the indwelling presence of the Risen Christ is a person encountered in a relationship of mutual self-offering. He is the one who was before the foundation of the world, who is now and is to come. He is the one who does not regard this equality with God as something to be grasped, held onto, exploited, but opens his hand, releases his grasp and assumes the form of servant obedient unto death, even death on a cross, to free us from our captivity of sin and death–to share the divine life with human beings, to make us partakers, by grace, of God’s nature. Against a picture of distant, unresponsive God sitting on a grumpy throne overly concerned with what goes on between the sheets, the Kenotic Hymn reveals instead a living, loving, and liberating God who descends to us in the flesh in order to draw the whole world to Godself. God in the person of Jesus comes down, heals and feeds, ties a towel about his waist, stoops, kneels, and washes our feet in the dark night of our greatest need.
God offers all of Godself to us, with nothing held back, nothing in reserve, in order to love us into loving others. Paul’s words in the Letter to the Galatians– “and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” should not be heard as extraordinary, or even particularly remarkable, but as entirely normative. The Christian life is making the journey into the wideness of God’s mercy that the unrepeatable uniqueness of this very body, mind, and spirit might, touched by grace, might express God’s love as only this body, mind, and spirit can. It’s why, when we baptize Christian don’t use last names. We simply say, Jim, or Jane, or Jehoshaphat as we baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The last name of every baptized Christian is “Jesus Christ.” The great adventure of discipleship is that, as it says in the First Letter of John, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” What does the Christ-pattern of self-emptying love look like in this one here? As this body, mind, and spirit? No good comparing yourself against others, ‘cause they ain’t you! What does the non-grasping, non-exploitative, open-handed love of God that stoops and feeds and meets the stranger in their need look like in the minute particulars of your life here and now?
The thing of it is, we have this beautifully terrible power of free-will. We can choose where and in whom to place our trust. We can choose in what direction we face, and where we place our attention. Where we take our stand. Where we plant our feet. From what spring we drink. In whom we are rooted and grounded. In the person of Jesus love comes down, is here, now, knocking at the door of the heart just waiting to be recognized, received, basked in and shared with others, and question is whether or not we will become partakes, run to him with open hearts.
Our reading from Ezekiel frames this freedom in terms of being caught up in stale, old stories. Hackneyed phrases. Tired truisms and played-out proverbs that blind us to the freshening work God is actually up to. Sort of like Jonah last week talking himself into a miserable hell under a dead tree while all of Nineveh rejoiced. Sort of like Joseph’s brothers fearing retribution where there was only the washed clean baptismal waters of forgiving tears and I will take care of you and your little ones. The Israelites are walking around murmuring, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Try saying that five times and see how it makes you feel. Contracted. Fixated. Identified with a story of fear, scarcity, and lack. It’s a story that makes them fearful of a God on whom they blame their own bad behavior, projecting it outward as “punishment,” rather than facing the uncomfortable truth about themselves. “Who’s unfair?” the incredulous Lord asks echoing his question to pouty Jonah last week: “Is it right for you to be angry?” Seriously?
But the discipleship question is this: “Who is here when that story is seen through and released?” Come and see. Take and eat. “Get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit… For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone. Turn, then, and live!” Drop the storyline and enter into Jesus’ warm embrace. Divine birth or human birth? Really? Are we going to pen Jesus up in a cabinet of arms-length intellectual curiosities, or let him love us?
As the Book of Common Prayer tells us, God does not “willingly afflict or grieve the children of men.” God’s only desire is to come to us, to stoop, kneel, wash, and feed us in the darkness of our deepest need. And all that is required is that we, in imitation of the unclenched blessing hand of Jesus, open our hands and receive. We turn from trying to secure our happiness, our self-image, and identity in things outside ourselves–relationships, possessions, changing circumstances, our fickle health, substances–and return and rest in trusting surrender in the Lord–our crag and our stronghold, our strong rock, our castle that keeps us safe in times of trouble. We go to the vineyard even if we said we wouldn’t in a fit of go-it-alone pique.
We turn from trying to secure our life by our own frantic efforts and instead offer ourselves, open-handedly, just as we are, to God: “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” Certainly we “let go and let God,” and release our grip on diminishing stories, but we also engage in a whole-hearted giving over of our very being into God’s hands. We change our minds, we repent, we turn from self-centered seeking and return to God’s vineyard where the work is a lot more like play in the company of Easy Yoke. This is the essential dynamic of Christian life–the “wonderful exchage” of which St. Irenaeus speaks–the God who pours Godself out for us elicits in us a similarly patterned pouring out. You might say the Kenotic Hymn is a catchy tune sung not only with our lips but with our lives. The open-handedness of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit opens our hands as we are built into the kingdom one forgiven enemy at a time.
Like Peter at the Last Supper who won’t let Jesus wash him, self-sufficiency dies hard for all of us. We say we’ll go to the vineyard, but we don’t. And perhaps this is what makes the Christian path so simple, and yet so challenging. We don’t really have to do anything. We have to become perfect receivers, to let ourselves be loved—which is the Father’s will after all. But we clutch, grab, fuss, fiddle, fix, hold on, thinking we know better than God how things should go and then find ourselves locked into a litany of complaint… “the parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”
No one quite gets at this like Ruth Burrows, the pen name of the British Carmelite Sr. Rachel. She writes,
“If the heart of Christianity is the God who gives nothing less than God’s own Self, it follows… that the fundamental stance a Christian must take is that of receiving Him…. We must accept to be loved, allow God to love us, let God be the doer, the giver, let God be God to us.”
The risk, of course, is that in all the sour grape busyness of “serving God” and “doing things for God,” and “offering God something” with our teeth set on edge, we miss the stunning fact that God loves us first. That while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That there is no strange country to which we can stray into which Jesus won’t journey and offer us his very body, his very blood, if we would just stop munching pig pods. Maybe it’s as simple as opening the hand. Maybe it’s as simple as letting ourselves be loved. Maybe it’s as simple as seeing how what we take for stones is eucharistic bread and the only thing to do is give humble thanks for the gift of what miraculously is. Maybe that’s the song Christ is singing now in our hearts and we’ve just never heard it over all the chatter.
Amen.