Whom Do You Imitate?

Philippians 2:5-18



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I remember when our oldest daughter was in junior high school in Mexico. She started to dress in black and wear her hair so that it covered half of her face. Judy and I were mortified. She had such a beautiful face. Why did she want to hide it? It turns out that in Mexico parents aren’t as free to walk on a school campus as they are here, so it was several months before we did so. The day we did we walked onto the schoolyard during a break and encountered a sea of girls dressed in black with their hair covering their faces.

It’s not that we didn’t know that teenagers imitate each other. We had certainly done it ourselves. We had simply forgotten how pervasive & decisive it is among teenagers. Teenagers want to belong; to have frie nds, be part of a group, be popular, and be accepted. The pressure to conform is incredible, as we all rediscovered in the murder of 15 year old Lawrence King, the Oxnard middle schooler who decided to be true to who he was rather than conform. It cost him his life. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle that people ever find themselves again after adolescence. I’m grateful that my daughter did find herself.

Each of us is born with a uniqueness that comes from eternity. That uniqueness is meant to be lived out in the world. If it’s not, the world is the poorer for it, and so is the person. But the world is not usually very receptive to our uniqueness. Adolescence is only one of the places where that uniqueness is put to a severe test. By the time most children become adolescents, much of it has already been socialized out of them. On the other side of adolescence, young adulthood has its own pressures that make claiming our uniqueness challenging, to say the least. By that time our uniqueness is often deeply buried under a sea of conformity.

The Apostle Paul presents Jesus as one who knew who he was, and was able to claim that identity so deeply that he was actually able to renounce it. In the early Christian hymn Paul quotes, it is evident that already by that time the early church believed that Jesus’ particular uniqueness from eternity was to be part of the godhead. The hymn claims that Jesus was equal to God. But it does so in the context of Jesus’ renouncing it: “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.” On Maundy Thursday evening we will read and then re-enact a passage from John’s Gospel in which Jesus washed the disciples’ feet. John grounds that action in the same place Paul does: “Knowing that God had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, Jesus … began to wash the disciples’ feet.” Taking the form of the servant was grounded in knowing and claiming his eternal uniqueness.

Most of us aren’t as aware as Jesus seems to have been of our eternal uniqueness. As I said, that has a negative impact both on us and on the world. We miss out on experiencing the flow of being fully who we are, and the world misses the unique contribution that we, and no one else, can make. Often it often seems like there is a competition between being ourselves & belonging to a community. Most teenagers sacrifice part of their true identity in order to belong to the community. Many adults continue to do the same – fulfilling society’s expectations about what their lives should look like. Other adults somehow get clear about claiming their true identity, but believe they have to sacrifice belonging to a community in order to do so.

Paul seems to be offering a way to experience both; but there is a great cost involved. In Jesus’ case, as we bear witness to each Holy Week, it literally cost him his life. It cost Paul his freedom, as underlined by the fact that he wrote this letter from prison. He seems to be saying to the community at Philippi that the cost for them involved holding more lightly some of the beliefs and practices they considered important as Christians. Instead of defining salvation in ways that excluded some in the community, Paul encouraged them to “keep working out [their] salvation with fear and trembling… [and] without murmuring and arguing.

This passage from the letter to the Philippians puts the events of Holy Week in the context of creating and maintaining human community – both locally and globally. Paul’s purpose in the letter is to heal and reconcile a community in conflict. We have already begun to see how the ancient hymn he quotes in the middle of the letter summarizes the events of Holy Week. On Maundy Thursday we commemorate Jesus’ taking the form of a servant as we wash each others’ feet. On Friday we re-enact his path of obedience to the point of death – even death on a cross. Then on Sunday we celebrate his exaltation in receiving the name that is above every name. In Philippians, all of that serves as a call to practice community against a backdrop of rivalry and complaining: “Do nothing from selfish ambition… let each of you look not at your own interests but to the interests of others… Do all things without murmuring and arguing.”

The question that confronts me this Holy Week is, “How do we remain true to ourselves and true to community when there are so many things to argue about?” Is it simply a matter of choosing between myself and others? Do I have to either sacrifice who I truly am or I sacrifice being part of a particular community?

I believe that one way of getting at this is to ask, what was Jesus obedient to? God? God’s will? His true calling? The principle of putting others first? It turns out that to be true to oneself has many dimensions. I constantly read how institutional religion has lost its integrity for so many because it makes them deny who they really are in order to be accepted by the god that religion is promoting. When religion does that, it should be rejected, because it is doing more damage than good. So it is that many spiritual leaders inside and outside the church are inviting people to reject false rules in order to be true to who we really are.

Jesus was clear about who he really was throughout his ministry. We don’t really know at what point he became clear. We aren’t really told much about what he thought about himself before his baptism by John. What we can surmise, though, is that there was at least enough of a change in his sense of identity to lead to his being rejected by the community that knew him best – the town of Nazareth where he had grown up. When he returned there after his baptism, he was invited to preach. The congregation tried to kill him afterwards. Clearly, something had changed about the way he saw himself.

In whatever way he arrived at the point of claiming and accepting his unique vocation and mission, at some point he realized that he had to expose it to the acceptance or rejection of others. In Nazareth it turned out to be rejection. Elsewhere, it was acceptance – at least for a while. As a result of allowing his true self to flow freely through him, people flocked to him As long as it was just about allowing healing energy to flow through him, people were all in favor of being part of his community. But when he started confronting those who thought they had it all figured out, the leaders turned against him. He refused to conform to the institutional religion of his day. Then, when he started talking about the cost involved in following his path, almost everyone else turned against him. Even his closest disciples weren’t willing to let him do what Paul describes so poetically as “not regarding equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptying himself, taking the form of a slave.”

Now this is where it becomes interesting to follow Jesus through the events of Holy Week. Jesus had gone to Jerusalem precisely because he was being true to who he really was. It was precisely Jesus’ willingness and ability to keep listening to the inner voice that allowed him to become open to renouncing what he had been claiming. When he went to Nazareth he described himself as God’s special servant. That claim alienated him from his community. But when through prayer and reflection, he came to understand that he needed to renounce the rights that accompanied that vocation and mission, it alienated him from his new community. When he announced that he was going to be killed in Jerusalem, Peter, his closest follower, said, “Stop it.” Jesus rebuked him, “Get behind me Satan!”

The key here seems to be to keep listening and following the voice. If we have been hiding who we really are from others, becoming true involves claiming that hidden part of ourselves. Otherwise we are not really giving up anything. We are just fooling themselves or others that we were that person in the first place. This is where institutional religion has often done a lot of damage: asking people to give up something they haven’t claimed for themselves yet. After we claim it for ourselves we will have to expose it to others in a way that may lead to their rejection of us, as Jesus experienced in Nazareth. Later on, when we have been claiming our uniqueness with some success, the inner voice may call us to crank it up a notch and risk the rejection of the very ones who are following us. We may need to become willing to let go of certain aspects of what we understood as our uniqueness for the sake of others. The Gospel, and the hymn that Paul quotes, tells us that if we do let go of it when that inner voice is calling us to do so, some new expression of life will come that is different and better than what we would have if we simply held on to what we have a right to.

Here at the beginning of Holy Week we are invited to decide what matters most. In Spanish they call this week “La Semana Mayor” – the Great Week. What makes it great? Is it what Jesus does for us as a sacrifice that saves us once and for all from sin and death? Or is it how Jesus responds to what happens to him because of the choices he made to put the interests of others ahead of his own? It seems to me that the first answer invites us to observe the events of Holy Week with deep gratitude and awe. The second answer invites us to participate in re-enactments of the events of Holy Week in order to make connections with how we put the interests of others ahead of our own.

I invite you to participate in Holy Week as a way of joining Jesus’ alternate reign and rule, which subverted major aspects of the way most societies in history have been organized. Most societies have normalized a status quo of political oppression that marginalizes ordinary people, economic exploitation whereby the rich take advantage of the poor, and religious legitimation that says, "don't try to change things because God wants things this way." To participate means to open ourselves and remain open to the call of God to be who we are in community.

Let me close with one picture of what that looks like. Remember the story that came out about 2 years ago about a Christian Peacemaker Team that had been captured in Iraq in 2005 and held for 118 days? On March 9, 2006, Tom Fox, one of the team members, was shot and killed execution style, and his body dumped in a residential neighborhood in western Baghdad. On March 23, the three remaining team members were released by British forces. The surviving team members refused to testify against their captors, and as a result, the people who murdered Tom Fox have been released. The reasons for not testifying include that their captors would be subject to the death penalty, and that they are involved in a struggle for survival. (Sea Raven’s blog)

Those Christians stood against the status quo and took a lot of heat for it. But they knew deep in their core the source of a wondrous love that called them to different behavior. That love is available to us. As we claim it, we are invited to both grow into who we are and to keep listening in order to allow the form of our uniqueness to keep dying and rising, dying and rising. That is the rhythm of Holy Week, and of life itself.