The Mind of Christ: A Sermon for Palm Sunday

This sermon was given on Palm Sunday, March 24th, in the new sanctuary at Christ Church Cambridge, by our Kellogg Fellow, Emily Garcia.The readings for the day can be found here.

Philippians 2:5-11 is as familiar to my ear as John 3:16 (“for God so loved the world”) or 1 Corinthians 13 (“but have not love, I am but a clanging cymbal”). And it’s familiar for the same reason: I had to memorize these verses for Bible class at least once a year. I really didn’t like this passage—I thought it was rhythmically unsatisfying, and it seemed to me to have that extended anaphoric quality that Paul probably enjoyed writing but that middle schoolers hate memorizing.

            But it turns out that Paul probably didn’t write this little apparent list, and in fact, it’s not so boring as it first seemed to me. These seven verses were originally a hymn, an early Christian hymn, earlier than the Gospels, sung by the faithful when they gathered. I wonder, what was it like to sing this, back then? What would it be like, to sing these words in a world where you were not really welcome? What could it be like for a group of people from traditionally disparate even antagonistic backgrounds to sing this hymn together? “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, emptied himself, humbled himself, and become obedient to the point of death.”

            This word, “mind,” the mind of Christ, is translated from the Greek word “nous.” It doesn’t really mean “mind” as in the mind and the body, the thinking mind, mind and soul, brain, head, intellect. Rather, “nous” in Greek has the sense of a way of comprehending, a way of coming to comprehend.

            As Frederica Mathews-Green explains in her essay on the Jesus Prayer, the nous is the receptive faculty of the mind, the part of the mind that engages directly with life, which comprehends and takes things in. The nous is also the perceptive faculty, the part that perceives truth in a direct, intuitive way. “Nous” is our understanding.

            “Let the same nous—the same understanding—that was in Christ Jesus be in you.”

            On Ash Wednesday this year, I had a very different hymn going through my head. There’s a song by the Alabama Shakes whose refrain says, “You—you ain’ alone / Just let me be / Your ticket home.” These words are sung over and over again to close the song; they sound almost wrung from the singer after she has described another’s confused sorrow. But there’s a kind of triumph or strength in them too—the same triumph we hear when she sings, “If you’re gonna cry / Come on, cry with me.” She sings all these words slowly, heavily, hitting every sound in every word, the lines equal part invitation—and challenge.

            Today on Palm Sunday, it strikes me that these lines are the lines that Lent sings to us, that Christ sings in his Passion. “So if you’re gonna cry / Well come on, cry with me.” “You, you ain’ alone / Just let me be / Your ticket home.”

            This is the nous, the mind, the way of understanding that Christ shows us in his Passion. Did you notice, in his triumphant entry, he’s all but silent, letting his followers and friends praise him, but keeping quiet himself. In the Passion according to St. Luke, though, he has many words to share. Not words of pain or petition, but words of compassion and forgiveness.

            As he makes his way to the place called The Skull, he turns to the women wailing for him. He says, Don’t weep for me, but for you yourselves, and your children. He knows that Jerusalem will see more suffering in the future than he is feeling now, and his response is to warn them, to share their pain.

            And then, crucified, humiliated, he asks for forgiveness for those who have done this to him. Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing. Even in pain his gaze is on these people’s hearts and souls. He sees a way they can be redeemed, transformed.

            And again, almost the last thing he says—words of comfort to the criminal dying next to him. This man’s heart was still open even as he hung there and in a desperate moment asks this innocent man just to be remembered. And Christ doesn’t say, You should’ve thought of this earlier, before you committed a crime—he doesn’t pause and he doesn’t hold back. He responds with generous, generous love and forgiveness: Today you will be with me, in Paradise.

           

            Let the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus.

            That passage in Philippians is one of the foundations for “the imitation of Christ”, an understanding of Christian discipleship as an attempt to become more and more like the Christ we know in the Gospels. (That’s why my Bible teacher had us memorize these verses so many times.) We should imitate Christ.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who emptied himself, humbled himself, and became obedient to the point of death.

The mind, the nous, the understanding of Christ that we see in the Passion is not just servanthood and humility, but generous love. On the cross, Christ set a pattern for us to imitate, and this pattern is a way of comprehending our own and others’ suffering. A way of responding to impossible outcomes, the death of innocents, the unacceptable pain in the world. Theologian Simone Weil says that the glory of the cross—the point of the cross—was that Jesus felt himself lost and abandoned, but he kept (as she says) loving into the void. He loved the women who were crying; he loved these people killing him slowly; he loved the two men hanging there beside him. THIS, is the mind of Christ. This is what we should imitate.

          In this, in Christ’s Passion, it’s God who says, “So if you’re gonna cry, come on / cry with me. / You, you ain’ alone /   Just let me be / Your ticket home.” Amen.

Our Own Weapons

 My dad wrote me an email a few days ago telling me about this new dramatized series on the Bible that is running on the History Channel. Growing up in a fairly devout Christian household, I have always had a bit of a soft spot for Bible stories. I remember watching biblical cartoons on the Evangelical television network, and I even had a biblical "barbie" of Ruth--she wore a red robe with a brown sash, had sensible flat feet, and came with a cassette tape of the story of Ruth. Childhood stories aside, I am intrigued by this new series, although I actually don't watch television so I have yet to see any of it. (Why do biblical dramatizations so often use British accents for the biblical people?!) But I did watch a few clips where Sojourners' Jim Wallis reviews some of his favorite moments from the series. One of them is this one, about David & Goliath. It's a classic story, of course, and an inspiring one to those of us who may think of ourselves as the "little guy" in the world--the one who is ignored, who isn't strong, who doesn't have much money or prestige, the lone activist crying out in the wilderness. Apparently it's one of Jim Wallis' favorite stories, and he uses it to make a simple yet important point: David doesn't fight Goliath with spears or swords--the weapons of the strong and militarily mighty. Rather, David uses that which he knows, that which is his unique gift. And he is successful. He defeats the tyrant. I wonder: what are our unique gifts, our weapons of choice against injustice? How are we called to reverse the weapons of the powerful?

Be still: A Morning Prayers Homily by Greg Johnston

This homily was given by Greg Johnston '13 at the Morning Prayers service in Appleton Chapel (Memorial Church) on Harvard Yard. Greg is a faithful member of ECH and will be confirmed this year into the Anglican Communion.

A Reading from Psalm 46 (verses 1-4, and 9-12):

God is our refuge and strength, *
      a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, *
      and though the mountains be toppled into the
        depths of the sea;

Though its waters rage and foam, *
      and though the mountains tremble at its tumult.

The LORD of hosts is with us; *
      the God of Jacob is our stronghold.

Come now and look upon the works of the LORD, *
      what awesome things he has done on earth.

It is he who makes war to cease in all the world; *
      he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear,
      and burns the shields with fire.

“Be still, then, and know that I am God; *
      I will be exalted among the nations;
      I will be exalted in the earth.”

The LORD of hosts is with us; *
      the God of Jacob is our stronghold. 

            It wasn't until I was sitting in the waiting room at the psychiatric ER that I realized I had left my book behind. So now I'm sitting there while a social worker talks with my best friend, without my book. It hadn't been a problem while she had been curled up unresponsively in my bed, or while I had been calling the HUPD officer, or while he had been calling the paramedics, or while they had been wheeling her down the stairs in their special chair, or while we had been riding in the ambulance to the hospital, her in the back and me in the front seat with the driver And it wasn't that I'm a particularly forgetful person: I had remembered her shoes and her ID and her bag and my wallet. This was in one of my late-semester research-paper-writing hazes, when I spent every Friday reading something or other, and I had somehow left whatever I was reading behind. I'll tell you a secret: I don't know what that book was, or what paper it was for, or even—unless you gave me a few minutes—the classes I was taking that semester. But at the moment it seemed important.

            And it was something like that the day there was no food in the refrigerator, which was also—coincidentally—the day that my dad moved out of the house. He and I had driven back from a week-long vacation together, with my mom and my sister in a separate car. “Should we stop at the store for groceries?” I asked on the way home. “No,” he said, “I'm sure Mom will want to do her big back-in-town shop on Monday.” And so on Sunday morning when he sat us all down in the kitchen, and told us he had to go, and took his suitcase and left, all I could think of as my mom and my sister sat there crying was that there were no groceries, and that I needed to go get some. And I'll tell you another secret: I have no idea—absolutely no idea—what we ate for dinner.

            “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble. ...Be still, then, and know that I am God.” And yet when we are in trouble, God seems far off, and stillness even further. For me, there's a little voice, instead: a voice that tries to distract me with thoughts of being helpful in a time and a place when there is nothing to be done to help; a voice that tries to control something, some little thing—a book, or groceries—in an uncontrollable situation.

            Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and mystic, offered this prayer: “Lord, I have not lived like a contemplative....My actions prove that the one I trust is myself — and that I am still afraid of You. Take my life into Your hands, at last, and do what ever You want with it. I give myself to Your love and mean to keep on giving myself to Your love — rejecting neither the hard things nor the pleasant things You have arranged for me.” That little worried voice, I suspect, comes from something like this: trust in myself, and fear of what the psalmist calls “the works of the Lord.” Now, this distraction has its very real benefits: it keeps us from feeling our feelings, from giving in to emotion entirely, until we are in a place we feel safe. And it has its very real drawbacks: it keeps us from feeling our feelings, from giving in to emotion, until we are in a place we feel entirely safe. So often, we misjudge that safety. If there's a safer place to feel emotions than the psychiatric emergency room, I haven't found it. If there's a more loving place to be upset than at the kitchen table, only God knows.

            So how can we feel safe? How can we feel those emotions in a healthy way? How, in other words, can we quiet that anxious little voice and be still in the presence of God? The answer, for many people, is prayer. Not prayer the way we usually think of it, full of words and impressive-sounding phrases and pleas and praises, but contemplative, meditative prayer. After all, as the now-retired Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes, prayer is primarily a matter of “putting aside our defences and disguises, coming into silence and stillness so that what stands before God is not the performer, the mask, the habits of self-promotion and self-protection but the naked me.”

            Now meditation is primarily about one thing: stillness. It's about quieting those worried thoughts, calming that voice that tries to distract us from our pain. It's about being silent in the presence of God. And most importantly, it's about loving yourself even more when you realize that—for the thirtieth or fortieth time in the last five minutes—you've failed at the seemingly-simple task of stillness and quiet.

            God, somehow, is “our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the mountains be toppled into the depths of the sea; Though its waters rage and foam, and though the mountains tremble at its tumult.” Though our friends are in pain and our families are falling apart. Though our wars have not ceased, our bows are not broken, our spears are not shattered. “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Israel is our stronghold.”

            “Be still, then, and know that I am God.” If only it were so easy as saying the words. But the beautiful thing about us as human beings is that we are not hopeless, we are not helpless. We are in a process of re-building ourselves, every day, into something new, with God's help. Be still, then, and know that I am God.

Let us pray.

O God of peace, you have taught us that in returning and in rest
we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength:
By the might of your Spirit life us, we pray, to Your presence,
where we may be still and know that you are God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who taught us to pray, saying,

Our Father . . .

 

“Another year”: Thoughts on Repentance

This sermon was written by Emily J. Garcia, our Kellogg Fellow, for the third Sunday in Lent, March 3, 2013.

Tonight’s Gospel features one of my favorite words : “repent.” I don’t like this word when people shout it at other people in the street; I don’t like this word when it’s used to flay others into guilt, when it’s just a way of saying “You’re bad.”

But repentance isn’t really like that at all!

Contrition and penitence are feelings of sorrow or conviction for the wrong we’ve done. But repentance doesn’t stop there—repentance follows this acknowledgement with a turn towards the right thing, the good thing—towards God. When we repent, we stop doing one thing and start doing something better. I like this word, “repent,” because I know I can trust the God we’re turning towards. I know that when we repent, we can say with the Psalmist, You have been my helper, and under the shadow of your wings I will rejoice.

             

Our reading from Luke starts off with a cryptic statement about Pilate and some Galileans. Bishop N. T. Wright explains that some Galilean pilgrims had been offering sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem. Pilate—perhaps fearing rebellion or a riot—had ordered in the troops and had them killed. Jesus immediately dismisses the idea that these Galileans deserved this sudden and violent death, or that it was a punishment of some sort. Jesus turns these sudden deaths towards his listeners—“unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” Commentator Luke Timothy Johnson says Jesus’s point is that “death itself, with the judgment of God, is always so close. It can happen when engaged in ritual. It can happen standing under a wall. And when it happens so suddenly, there is no time to repent.” This repentance is “not simply a turning from sin, but an acceptance of the visitation of God in the proclamation of God’s kingdom.”

This is certainly one motivation to repent. If we keep in mind that any day may be our last, why would we waste time?! If our time here is short and fragile, certainly NOW is the time to ask for forgiveness from those you’ve hurt, to set things right with those you love, to start treating every person you meet with the dignity they deserve, to spend your time and energy on the things that actually matter.

I’m a nervous, worrying person, and this awareness of the fragility of my life has always been a strong motivator. But I found after a while that if this is your only motivation, it runs you down quick. It might get you sprinting, it might quicken your pulse, but if you end up living a marathon rather than a sprint, this fear of death might turn you bitter, instead of helping you live a holy and Godly life. Fear only goes so far.

Luckily, the second half of our reading from Luke holds another, longer-burning motivation for repentance. At first glance, it seems like this is another threat-filled story—our attention is definitely caught by those three words, “Cut it down!”

But I think that this parable shows the mystery of God’s righteousness and love. I think God is the vineyard owner, but God is also the gardener.

God looks at us and knows fully our pettiness, every hidden place where we are crooked and thorny, our nastiness, our dismissiveness, our small and petty cruelties. God sees all of this. And God says, This is not good enough. What have you done with all the sunlight and good soil and care, to produce these dry branches? We’re like the Israelites who Paul talks about in First Corinthians, who take the gifts and guidance of God and then—because they’re human—keep messing up.

But see, God is also the gardener, who says, Give her another year. In fact, I think God says this year after year—Give her another year.  He knows where we have hidden new roots, new branches, new leaves which we can’t even see in ourselves. He sees somewhere a capacity for generosity, giving without expectation of receiving. He sees that we can be patient and kind; we can be self-controlled, and at peace. And he sees, most importantly, that we can learn to love others even as he loves us—selflessly, entirely, joyfully. We look at ourselves and see the dried tree which gives no fruit; God sees that, but sees also what we might become, if we accept his love and help.

And THIS is in fact the best motivation to repent: God’s relentless compassion, his mercy.

This mercy and compassion is like the burning bush which Moses sees—strange, and apparently impossible. God’s mercy and compassion are so unexpected and wonderful that they draw us away from our usual paths, and closer to God’s flame.

And caught in his flame, how could we not change? As we’re drawn closer to him, we give up things that are not good enough for God. We give up things, and God takes them away, and the line between each gesture is sometimes blurred, so that we can’t tell where our will and God’s mysterious action interact exactly. As we come closer to God, these things are burnt away, discarded like Moses’s sandals. This is the mystery of sanctification, the lifelong process of being sanctified, made holy by and for God’s glory.

So, let us repent! Let’s leave behind whatever is not loving and good. Turn towards this God who loves us right now, as we are. Repent, and move closer to this God who wants to change us from glory into glory. Let us repent, and say with the Psalmist, “My soul clings to you; your right hand holds me fast.”