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We continue in Philippians and here, in chapter 2, is the central theme of Paul’s theology and this letter–Christ, incarnation, and the cross written in verses 6-11. We call it the Christ hymn, and scholars have mostly decided that it was a hymn known in Christian communities of the time already. Maybe like joyful, joyful or silent night.
When we looked at chapter 1 last week, looked at Joy and rejoicing and doing good and loving as something we do even though. Even though it doesn’t return anything to us even though we don’t get the text message back, even though it doesn’t fix things, we love and rejoice anyway.
In this chapter Paul says that love that we ought to be of one love and be of one mind, which can be a little terrifying for fans of science fiction where the idea of a hive mind where people lose their autonomy and are just forced to do the thing that the leader demands, but that’s not how bees in hives work. Every bee member of the hive has their own job. They all have their same goal, same purpose, but they do their own job. That is what it means to of one mind, of one loved, to have the same values, the same, the same principles, the same mission. We’re going in the same direction. The earliest days of the church, before church had really been settled as a name or Christian as a description, they were followers of the way of Jesus. The First Nations Bible talks about how we are traveling Jesus’ good road. When we are of one mind, one heart, one love, one mission, we are traveling together in the same direction on Jesus’ good road; even we are walking at different speeds or running or crawling or wheeling or skating or dancing. We’re going in the same way. Because that is how we take on the mind of Christ by following the ways and the teachings of Jesus on his good road, one with the Christ who took on flesh, became enfleshed, lived fully human with all of the pain and the pangs and the desires and the wants and longings of being human and suffered even suffered the lowliest and loneliest of death on a cross. Sometimes walking the road doesn’t work out the way we think it should and yet we love anyway and we live in community anyway and we practice walking and dancing and rolling and skating together down Jesus good road.
That’s our sacred story, that we are called to live into and live out of the one, as one.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu taught us a word for that, ubuntu, saying, “One of the sayings of our country is Ubuntu. The essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality- ubuntu you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.”
Nelson Mandela explained it as a story: “A traveler through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food and attend him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore, is are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve.”
Mlk “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated. All men are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be… this is the interrelated structure of reality.” letter from a Birmingham jail
I have a surprise for you, Paul has continued to send letters to the faithful. And I could keep a sermon, but I thought I would read to you as the earliest churches did when they received a letter from Paul
THE SUSTAINING COMMUNITY:
Paul’s Letter to the Faithful
by Gary Holthaus The Unauthorized Bible
Dear companions of the Way,
Sorry about this e-mail,
instead of a real letter to each
one, but snail mail is so slow
and the price of postage
keeps going up!
I send you greetings
from our brother Ehrenpreis
the Hutterite, who told me,
“True love means growth
for the whole organism,
whose members are all
interdependent and serve
each other. That is the outward
form of the inner working of
the spirit… We see the
same thing among the bees…”
And I bring you greetings
from our companion Mary Oliver
of the community on the Cape,
Who writes us,
“There is only one question:
How to love this world.”
In my travels I have seen
much of this world
with all its frequent beauty and
inevitable pain, its occasional
gentleness and nearly ubiquitous
violence, our own personal
mix of creative impulses and
those destructive tendencies
(you know of burdens I bear
in that regard) that humble us,
and all those gifts and losses
that mark our every day…
It is hard to look upon this world
and recognize its violent face, and
some days, I admit, it is
a hard world to love.
Men talk about globalization
as if it were new. What has
Been more global than violence?
What has been global longer?
The global economy is not even in it.
Its violence, still to come,
is not inevitable, but poised,
waiting just below the horizon
if we lack the will
or wisdom
to oppose it.
You have seen images of atrocities
on the internet, on CNN –
images of uncivilized war between
civilized nations, of revolution against
tyrants both petty and deadly.
And you are aware of domestic abuse
so sad it makes one quake
with fear and wonder.
I, too, have seen the worst.
My stomach turns still:
Babies with cigarette burns
patterned across the back
as if tattooed, pulped faces
of women attacked by
husbands or lovers…
We all rest together
within Nature’s intricate nest.
None should have to
cower there in fear.
Every battered woman,
every abused child,
every soldier wounded or dead
falls like a felled tree,
a blight on society
and on the face of Nature,
ugly and easy to see
as a clear-cut.
So, yes, it is sometimes
a hard world to love,
fearsome with anger,
anguished with pain.
Awful enough to swallow
our words, such violence
may yet be the end of language.
Underneath all, the world’s pain
stems from a spiritual source
within ourselves, a failure to
cultivate a right spirit in us.
If we wish to get at the root,
we must begin with ourselves
for we are the root.
When we do not cultivate
our lives in ritual and song
and praise of all,
seed shrivels in the ground,
grain fails.
There is no bread.
Even the cattle are perplexed,
the prophet Joel says,
for there is no pasture,
and even the sheep are dismayed.
Wild beasts cry before desiccate
water holes.
Chapped and cracked,
the very land mourns.
All who dwell in it languish,
Hosea says.
Birds of the air,
beasts of the field,
even the fish of the sea
are taken away;
there is lying and killing,
and all is laid desolate
for our failure to reverence
and praise.
So we have much to work on,
cannot accomplish alone
all that needs to be done.
So I am writing to remind you
of the sustaining community
created by the little man
who taught us so much,
and to remind you of its primary
symbols, the bread and wine.
and to remind you, and myself too,
of what lies behind the bread and wine,
for these are the elements of a community
that can sustain itself and nurture the world,
a community so expansive and inclusive
it reaches beyond stars, includes every
aspect the cosmos has shown us thus far
including spaces where none need fear.
What lies behind the wine:
Good fruit.
What lies behind the bread:
Good grain.
And behind the grain and the fruit:
Good soil.
What lies behind good soil:
Dung.
teeming with micro-organisms.
And behind and beyond
micro-organisms-
the stuff of the stars…
source of transforming light,
a cosmos wheeling beyond sight,
greening all the growing world,
beyond comprehension,
though we are coming
to learn more of it.
Our community is neither Jew nor Greek
neither East nor West, North nor South
but all, and everything else human,
all colors, classes, genders, and
everything other than human as well:
All creatures, land forms, sea forms,
circling currents of the oceans,
ever-changing countenance of sky
and all that lies beyond sky.
There is no end to this inclusiveness
because there is nothing that does not
depend on all the rest, is not linked to all.
Thus we sip our wine and taste the stars,
eat our bread and taste not grain only
but all that comes from soil and what goes into soil,
and what goes into what goes into soil,
and what goes into all that and all that,
and what comes behind all that
and all that and all that…
All these are part of our beloved community
filled with the richest, most intricate,
interdependence imaginable.
The name of this interdependence
is Nature. We nest within Nature
on a scale grander than any can yet explain,
created with minds to assist in the
unfolding of all Nature,
as the whole cosmos unfolds,
our tiny Earth unfolds, and
we unfold, growing into
whatever wisdom and stature
we can achieve,
everything growing into
the mind of Heaven and Earth.
All the gods agree on this.
Old Aurelius, ever seeking the good
yet ever so human,
gave it plain as any has:
“Without an understanding of the
nature of the universe
one cannot know oneself;
without an understanding of its
purpose, one cannot know
what one is, nor what the universe
itself is. Let either of these
discoveries be hid from us,
we will not be able so much as
to give a reason for our existence.”
What binds us and saves us
is our place in Nature’s web,
our willingness to find that place,
to nurture it as we succor one another,
for there is no place where anyone is
independent; that is a fantasy born of
desire to do as we please, the gateway
to loneliness, to poverty of spirit.
There is no place without risk;
that is a fantasy
born of our desire to be safe.
For all our creative imagination
we cannot create safety,
so there will always be scars.
We are born to bear them,
not inflict them.
Tiny, insignificant as we may feel
against the starscape of the cosmos,
we may be certain, our beloved Lorna
says, that we “have a function
in the universe.” The fulfillment
of the cosmos depends upon
our capacity to praise and revere
and constrain our desire.
There is no other Nature,
no other cosmos for us.
There is only here.
We do not live at the center
of Nature’s indifference,
We live at
the center of awe,
our boon to have
a place in the marvelous.
From farthest star to sea anemone,
back alley to broad avenue;
from garbage bin to glass towers,
granite boulders capping mountains,
limestone bluffs stretched
above the river’s deep channel;
from the oat field at our feet in the morning,
to the stream we will fish this evening –
that riffle under the hawk’s nest,
and the hawk too we are all one body,
all connected, and when our hearts
are right, it will all come right.
Thus,
the hand cannot say to the arm
I have no need of you.
The anemone cannot say to the coral
I have no need of you.
The city cannot say to the farm
I have no need of you.
The straight cannot say to the gay
I have no need of you.
The mind cannot say to the heart
I have no need of you.
Neither black nor white, brown,
yellow or red can say to the others
I have no need of you.
My friend Martin says,
“When there is injustice anywhere
there is injustice everywhere.”
I say to you, when any part of this
cosmos feels pain,
every part feels pain.
We have yet to learn
when any one part rejoices,
we may all rejoice.
When any one part is deprived,
all are deprived.
And we must share what we have
to end that deprivation.
Thus the nourishment of the cosmos
may flow throughout the cosmos,
light years speeding to
flow through us as well.
Our nourishment can do no less
than flow from our doorstep
to our neighbor’s, to the farthest galaxy.
Cultivate yourself, our wise men urge,
to do the right, and this one body
will sustain you forever.
You are the root.
If the root be in confusion,
nothing will come right.
If the root is holy,
so are the branches,
out to the farthest tip.
That odd little man
whom we loved
made this clear:
We must never be conformed
to this world’s desire for false power,
never conformed to its willingness
to oppress and humiliate the poor,
never conformed to its derision
of race, or gender, or religion,
never conformed to the desire of transnational
corporations to satisfy stockholders,
never conformed to those who do violence
– physical, intellectual, spiritual –
in the name of religion,
never conformed to exploitation of soil
or streams or peasants or plants,
never conformed to damage
to the warp and woof
of Nature’s colorful fabrics.
Be not conformed, he said,
but be transformed by
the only prayer necessary,
“Create in me a clean heart.”
“Dig within,” says Aurelius,
“There lies the well-spring of good;
ever dig; it will ever flow.”
We are all one body,
all of us spring from the twin
sources of life,
participate in one Nature,
“All things interwoven,
one with another,
united by a sacred bond.”
Good and evil, too,
connected, latent or overt
in each of us, at least for now,
all of it sacred.
The little man
came, he told us, not to die
but to bring life, and to
bring it more abundantly.
His is the work of the cosmos;
our work is the same:
to bring life more abundantly to all.
So this reminder of bread and wine,
symbols of Nature’s sustaining community.
Nourishing bread,
wine from the grapes of the vine –
Well, OK, an occasional steak and eggs,
pork chop or lamb, or fish…
maybe a bit of cheese,
a Danish! I love it all –
all signs, when well produced.
of our gratitude and commitment
to care for the gifts
that are ours to share.
I send you greetings, acceptance and love
from every corner of the cosmos.
I will soon visit, and we will share a meal.
What more could we ask than
a little bread, a little wine,
and faithful companions
together under a starlit sky?