Humanity
Humanity
Rev. Chandler Stokes Philippians 2:1-11
The Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
June 14, 2015
Opening Sentences 26 Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness… 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them… [and] 31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. 1 Scripture Introduction Today’s message is especially brief, as we want to be sure to get the camp staff back up to Newaygo, as the first group of young people arrive today. Our text today is one of the classic texts of our tradition that describes the Incarnation, that central and powerful mystery of the Christian faith that God became human. How God is human is how we are to be human. “Have this mind,” Paul says, “that was in Christ Jesus.” We can have that mind because as he was human, so are we. Scripture 2 If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, 2 make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5
Let 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. 9 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. 2 I have been thinking in particular about you who are being commissioned today for the middle school and high school trips and for work at Camp Henry. I’ve been remembering some of my experiences when I was younger. When I hurt someone that I loved, when I let someone down,
1
Genesis 1:26–31, excerpted.
2
Philippians 2:1–11. Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Humanity whom I respected, when I made a mistake—and I did it plenty—I felt like hiding from everything. I felt worthless. I felt like junk, like there was nothing good in me, in this human body of mine. I was visiting at my old seminary one day, and I ran into Greg Love, one of the professors, and he asked, “How are you?” I playfully quipped, “Better than I deserve.” He said, “I know you meant it as a joke, Chandler, but it’s bad theology.” He said, “That may sound Calvinist, but it’s not Calvin himself. Calvin believed in originary blessing. God created humans good, and, although deserving isn’t the issue, you can’t say that humans in their goodness don’t ’deserve‘ the good things of God.” Greg was right. Sometimes it’s important to be careful how we refer to ourselves, how we think of and use the word “human.” When we say, “I’m only human,” or “To err is human,” it can say something askew and diminish ourselves and others. As we heard at the start of the service, in the beginning, God created human beings and blessed them. In their origin, human beings are blessed, created good and blessed, created very good and blessed. That’s who we were created to be. Greg went on to explain, “Sin is simply a ‘way of being for which God never created humans to live.’” We were not made sinful. When we fail, fall short, or mess up, it’s a mistake; it’s not fulfilling our destiny. So, if our destiny is not that, if failure is not our created path, what is? What is the humanity for which we were birthed? It’s what we see in Christ. That’s what true humanity looks like. When God became human, it was in Jesus Christ. And it was true humanity, and not some kind of supercharged, extra-special humanity. It was not a humanity that wasn’t quite human. We call Christ fully human. The humanity for which we were created, our destiny, is what we see in Christ. That’s our true humanity. When we fail, it’s not because we’re human, it’s because we fail to be human. To be human is to be beautiful. It is to have the mind of Christ. The second sermon I preached here at Westminster, some years ago, included this story. It’s one of my friend Tom’s stories, and I tell it as often as I can. He begins, “Every father knows, but not every father tells that the only way to catch a bird is to sprinkle salt on its tail. I told my father that I wanted a bird. ‘A bird,’ he said. ‘Great day, son, we already have three cats, two dogs, and a yard full of squirrels! What do you want a bird for?’ ‘Not a pet store bird, Dad. I want that blue one in the back yard.’ He smiled a little, ‘Well, for sure, son, all you have to do is take this salt shaker, sprinkle salt on his tail, and then he can’t fly. You just scoop him up, bring him inside, and give him to your mama.’ Tom says, “There’s a flaw in this system. The bird seldom holds still for this exercise. I chased that bird all spring. I would have killed all the grass in the back yard if I had been a little more persistent.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 2 of 3
June 14, 2015
Humanity “But I changed strategy. I built a trap. I got a box. Propped it up with a stick. Under the box I put peanut butter and Twinkies, Kool-Aid and bananas. I tied a string around the stick and hid behind the garage, and I waited. Several birds flew down and hopped around, then finally a blue jay stepped under the box. I pulled the string, the stick came out, and the box came down. I had a bird. He was the maddest blue jay in Alabama, but he was a bird. I had put a window screen under the box, so I flipped the whole thing over, and I had the box, the bird in the box, the screen on top of the box, and I was standing there ready with a whole package of ‘when it rains it pours.’3 “I poured salt on that bird’s tail. I got it on his wings, his head, his back; I just chased him around the box. By the time I emptied the package that bird was knee deep in salt. I opened the screen— justthatmuch. My daddy lied to me. That bird flew out of there so fast I didn’t even see him. “I can trap the bird. I can salt the bird. I can put him in a cage and keep him in my room. What I can’t do is change the fact that God made the bird to fly.”4 It’s the same with us. The bird is made to fly; we are made to be human. “Our hatred and our hurtings and our failings and our violence are not displays of our humanness, but of our inhumanity. Sin is not that which defines us but rather distorts us.”5 When you have to make the hard decisions about friendships, and co-workers, and about how to be in your family… when you know you’ve made a mistake and hurt people you hate to hurt and you feel weighed down and like hiding from everything—when all that’s hard about your being eleven or twenty or sixty-five begins to make you think that you are just no good, that you are really not ok—remember: you are an invention of the Creator of the Universe, and God doesn’t make junk. And the stuff that God is working with in you is plenty good; it is “very good.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “We are in fact made for goodness. We are created by God. You and I are created by God, not by some junior, subordinate God. We are created by the transcendent one… That is the God who creates us.”6 And in Jesus we saw what God made us to be. That’s the humanity you were made to be. Go and fulfill your destiny.
3
Tom Are, Paper for The Moveable Feast, Ordinary 26, 2002.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Commencement Address to the graduates of Brandeis University, May 21, 2000,
6
found at http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/joyanyway/joy101.html.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 3 of 3
June 14, 2015
Rev. Chandler Stokes Philippians 2:1-11
The Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
June 14, 2015
Opening Sentences 26 Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness… 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them… [and] 31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. 1 Scripture Introduction Today’s message is especially brief, as we want to be sure to get the camp staff back up to Newaygo, as the first group of young people arrive today. Our text today is one of the classic texts of our tradition that describes the Incarnation, that central and powerful mystery of the Christian faith that God became human. How God is human is how we are to be human. “Have this mind,” Paul says, “that was in Christ Jesus.” We can have that mind because as he was human, so are we. Scripture 2 If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, 2 make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5
Let 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. 9 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. 2 I have been thinking in particular about you who are being commissioned today for the middle school and high school trips and for work at Camp Henry. I’ve been remembering some of my experiences when I was younger. When I hurt someone that I loved, when I let someone down,
1
Genesis 1:26–31, excerpted.
2
Philippians 2:1–11. Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Humanity whom I respected, when I made a mistake—and I did it plenty—I felt like hiding from everything. I felt worthless. I felt like junk, like there was nothing good in me, in this human body of mine. I was visiting at my old seminary one day, and I ran into Greg Love, one of the professors, and he asked, “How are you?” I playfully quipped, “Better than I deserve.” He said, “I know you meant it as a joke, Chandler, but it’s bad theology.” He said, “That may sound Calvinist, but it’s not Calvin himself. Calvin believed in originary blessing. God created humans good, and, although deserving isn’t the issue, you can’t say that humans in their goodness don’t ’deserve‘ the good things of God.” Greg was right. Sometimes it’s important to be careful how we refer to ourselves, how we think of and use the word “human.” When we say, “I’m only human,” or “To err is human,” it can say something askew and diminish ourselves and others. As we heard at the start of the service, in the beginning, God created human beings and blessed them. In their origin, human beings are blessed, created good and blessed, created very good and blessed. That’s who we were created to be. Greg went on to explain, “Sin is simply a ‘way of being for which God never created humans to live.’” We were not made sinful. When we fail, fall short, or mess up, it’s a mistake; it’s not fulfilling our destiny. So, if our destiny is not that, if failure is not our created path, what is? What is the humanity for which we were birthed? It’s what we see in Christ. That’s what true humanity looks like. When God became human, it was in Jesus Christ. And it was true humanity, and not some kind of supercharged, extra-special humanity. It was not a humanity that wasn’t quite human. We call Christ fully human. The humanity for which we were created, our destiny, is what we see in Christ. That’s our true humanity. When we fail, it’s not because we’re human, it’s because we fail to be human. To be human is to be beautiful. It is to have the mind of Christ. The second sermon I preached here at Westminster, some years ago, included this story. It’s one of my friend Tom’s stories, and I tell it as often as I can. He begins, “Every father knows, but not every father tells that the only way to catch a bird is to sprinkle salt on its tail. I told my father that I wanted a bird. ‘A bird,’ he said. ‘Great day, son, we already have three cats, two dogs, and a yard full of squirrels! What do you want a bird for?’ ‘Not a pet store bird, Dad. I want that blue one in the back yard.’ He smiled a little, ‘Well, for sure, son, all you have to do is take this salt shaker, sprinkle salt on his tail, and then he can’t fly. You just scoop him up, bring him inside, and give him to your mama.’ Tom says, “There’s a flaw in this system. The bird seldom holds still for this exercise. I chased that bird all spring. I would have killed all the grass in the back yard if I had been a little more persistent.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 2 of 3
June 14, 2015
Humanity “But I changed strategy. I built a trap. I got a box. Propped it up with a stick. Under the box I put peanut butter and Twinkies, Kool-Aid and bananas. I tied a string around the stick and hid behind the garage, and I waited. Several birds flew down and hopped around, then finally a blue jay stepped under the box. I pulled the string, the stick came out, and the box came down. I had a bird. He was the maddest blue jay in Alabama, but he was a bird. I had put a window screen under the box, so I flipped the whole thing over, and I had the box, the bird in the box, the screen on top of the box, and I was standing there ready with a whole package of ‘when it rains it pours.’3 “I poured salt on that bird’s tail. I got it on his wings, his head, his back; I just chased him around the box. By the time I emptied the package that bird was knee deep in salt. I opened the screen— justthatmuch. My daddy lied to me. That bird flew out of there so fast I didn’t even see him. “I can trap the bird. I can salt the bird. I can put him in a cage and keep him in my room. What I can’t do is change the fact that God made the bird to fly.”4 It’s the same with us. The bird is made to fly; we are made to be human. “Our hatred and our hurtings and our failings and our violence are not displays of our humanness, but of our inhumanity. Sin is not that which defines us but rather distorts us.”5 When you have to make the hard decisions about friendships, and co-workers, and about how to be in your family… when you know you’ve made a mistake and hurt people you hate to hurt and you feel weighed down and like hiding from everything—when all that’s hard about your being eleven or twenty or sixty-five begins to make you think that you are just no good, that you are really not ok—remember: you are an invention of the Creator of the Universe, and God doesn’t make junk. And the stuff that God is working with in you is plenty good; it is “very good.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “We are in fact made for goodness. We are created by God. You and I are created by God, not by some junior, subordinate God. We are created by the transcendent one… That is the God who creates us.”6 And in Jesus we saw what God made us to be. That’s the humanity you were made to be. Go and fulfill your destiny.
3
Tom Are, Paper for The Moveable Feast, Ordinary 26, 2002.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Commencement Address to the graduates of Brandeis University, May 21, 2000,
6
found at http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/joyanyway/joy101.html.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 3 of 3
June 14, 2015
