Whle We Were Yet Sinners

“What Jesus modeled was living his life for others, living for someone beyond himself, and in so doing, he lived out his

true vocation.”

A mong the most comforting words in the New Testament are these from the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” God didn’t send Jesus in to the world as a reward for our good behavior. God didn’t wait to act until we had our act together. Jesus says in the Gospel of John that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, but it’s not even clear we were Jesus’ friends. This is the proof of God’s amazing grace: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

This is what enables us to enter Holy Week with hope and not just fear. This is the difference between optimism and hope. In Holy Week we confronted with the awful truth that optimism is over-rated. If the future depends upon us, all we can do is lift up our hands in despair. In Holy Week we acknowledge that in the relationship between us and God, we are not the reliable partner. No, the proof of God’s amazing love is this: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

This is particularly important when we look at the state of the world around us. We have been focusing on the environment during this Lenten season, but we could just as well focus on any number of issues, including our own lives and relationships. When we are honest with ourselves, we can all relate to Paul’s words where he writes in that same letter “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” That is as true in our most personal relationships as it is in relation to things like war and climate change.

Yet despite our falling short, what Paul encourages us to do in our passage this morning from his letter to the Philippians, is to have “the mind of Christ.” This is not about our thoughts, but about the disposition of our will. It means something like “be intent on” or “be disposed toward.” The New English Bible translation puts it in this way: “Let your bearing toward one another arise out of your life in Christ Jesus.”

Then, in what follows, Paul lays out exactly what this means. Quoting what most scholars take to be an early Christian hymns, Paul writes,

“Though he was in the form of God, he 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.”

W e need to be cautious as we seek to understand what that means for us. Being humble in our culture can have a very different meaning than it did for Jesus or for Paul. Whatever attributes you might assign to Paul, being humble is generally not one of them. And Jesus may have entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey, a pretty humble image, but no sooner does he come to town than he storms the Temple– sending the money-changers running for cover– and then directly confronts the Chief Priests and the Scribes on their own turf. If anything, Jesus’ actions during Holy Week were acts of bold self-assertion. The religious leaders did not conspire with the Romans to bring about Jesus’ death for silently slinking about in the shadows of the Temple, but because he directly and publically challenged their power and authority. They perceived him as a threat, and they were not wrong in their perceptions. If Jesus’ life models what it means to be humble, then most of us are going to have to redefine what we mean by that word.

There is nothing self-deprecating in Jesus’ behavior. There is no false modesty. The crucifixion was not an act of self-sacrifice. Rather, what Jesus modeled was living his life for others, living for someone beyond himself, and in so doing, he lived out his true vocation. At the very beginning of the season of Lent, when Jesus enters the wilderness for forty days, he is tempted by wealth, power, and comfort. Instead, he chose to live among the poor, to share his power with others, and to risk his own comfort in order to confront the powerful. These are our temptations as well. And the gospel promises that we will find our true vocation in the same way.

I n our focus on the environment during Lent we have lifted up the theological term kenosis, which means self-limitation or self-emptying. This is what Paul is writing about in his letter to the Philippians. This is what God did in Jesus Christ, this is what Jesus Christ did on the cross, this is what we are called to do in our daily lives for the sake of our neighbor and for the sake of this planet in peril: to take up less space, to consume fewer resources, to make room for others. This is the Lenten discipline we are called to in the 21st century. This is not about self-sacrifice or self-deprecation, but about learning to live our lives in relation to others, finding our own lives grounded indelibly with the earth of which we are a part, learning to live simply so that others might simply live. This does not come to us naturally, but in the process we discover our true nature. This requires practice.

In a sense, what we do every Sunday in worship is to practice what it means to live our lives like Jesus. So unnatural is this for us that we have to come back again and again every week, practicing until we get it right, practicing until it becomes our practice in and out of the church, practicing until our lives actually conform to his. Theologian Mark Searle puts it in this way:

Human worship that has any hope of being acceptable to God has to be the worship not of lips but of obedience: an offering of one’s whole self, with and in Christ, to God. That is our participation in the paschal mystery of Christ’s obedience unto death. Without that, we might as well stay in bed on Sunday morning; without that, all the praying and singing in the world is besides the point.

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your lives as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

S o here we are, on this first day of Holy Week, the sanctuary stripped bare, none of the symbols of hope that have graced our space these past five weeks. Gone is the rainbow, the reminder of God’s promise to never again destroy the earth. Gone are the plants that surrounded our communion table, a reminder that the earth itself is filled with God’s glory. Gone are the gifts of bread and wine to sustain us on our journey. If we could have done so, I would have taken down the banners and boarded up the stained glass windows.

Next week on Easter Sunday we will celebrate in full regalia the good news that the cross is not the last word, that Jesus’ scandalous death is not the end of the story. But today, this week, we must walk first with him through the valley of the shadow of death. The discipleship journey does not go straight from palm waving to Easter lilies, but must pass through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday on the way. In Holy Week we practice what it means to live like Jesus in a hostile world.

All we are left with on today are the palms and our prayers. When you came in, you were given a palm branch. Like the fickle crowds during Holy Week, who shouted Hosanna on Sunday and then “Crucify him!” on Thursday, our own lives alternate between moments of glad praise and reckless betrayal. As we sing our hymn, you are invited to come forward and lay your palm branch at the foot of the cross, an act of recognition that like the first disciples, we are not prepared to follow Jesus all the way to the cross.

Yet we do not despair, for we are still left with our prayers. Earlier in our service Ashley invited you to write your own prayer on the slip of paper provided in your bulletin. In a moment, you will be invited to come forward to stick your prayer up on the Wailing Wall, an act of recognition that we place our trust in God, and not in ourselves. If we are to “put on the mind of Christ,” the first step is to come before God in prayer, remembering that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” ✞