Pentecost 17A (lectionary 26A)
Text: Philippians 2:1-13
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
September 27, 2020
Poured Out
Many years ago at Faith we had a seminary student working with us, Alex LaChappelle. Those of you who were around back in those days will remember Alex as a beautiful musician, good voice, often used his guitar in his work with our Faith youth group and our Confirmation class.
Once when he was leading a group in song he told them that we were going to sing this one Bob Klonowski style. Our young people broke up laughing. I did not understand the joke. Alex explained that Bob Klonowski style was “loud and proud.” I was kinda disappointed that it didn’t mean “good.” But no: Loud and proud.
Singing is my body’s prayer: when I sing in worship I put my whole self in, and sing with all I’ve got. We all pray with our bodies; think about it: you show up for worship, dragging your old Sunday morning bod into the sanctuary. There’s standing up and sitting down. There’s movement: making the sign of the cross, and processing around to receive God’s grace in Holy Communion. There’s hugging. There’s face-to-face contact. There’s the sharing of food.
St. Paul in the letter to the Romans – not today’s lesson!, but the letter to the Romans – exhorts us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to God. Normally … normally … we do that eagerly, lustily, singing out in worship bodily; loud and proud.
Normally. But in May the Center for Disease Control issued guidelines noting that the “act of singing may contribute to transmission of COVID-19, possibly through emission of aerosols.” The virus is “highly transmissible in … group singing events,” the report said. Or at least, that’s what it said in May. By the time the report was official in June, the objections of churches to that language I just read had become so strident that the Trump administration scrubbed that language out. Just that much, do church people want to pray with our bodies.
The lesson that we *do* get from St. Paul this morning, from the letter to the Philippians, is all about bodies, too, and I’m going to suggest it brings us to a different understanding than the churches that scrubbed the science out of the CDC report. Paul here tells the story of Christ’s kenosis – it’s the Greek word for pouring out. Christ Jesus, though he was God, did not regard being God as something to be clung to. Instead he abandoned that divine privilege and emptied himself – kenosis; he poured himself out – into the body of a servant, into a body of human likeness. Paul reminds us of this as his climax, as his nail-it-down argument, in his exhortation to the Christians of Philippi to “look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Christ’s own kenosis brought salvation, a word that comes from the Latin for “to make safe,” and “to make healthy.” The pouring out of Christ makes us safe. The pouring out of Christ is what restores us to health.
That is what Christ has done, says St. Paul, and you? You are to imitate Christ.
I wonder if in this time, when we live with so much loss and under such strict disciplines of denial, I wonder if we could understand those things as part of our imitation of Christ, part of our pouring out for the sake of health and for the sake of others.
The Christian writer Roger Owens likens our present days to the times of lament in the book of Psalms. “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” the exiled Israelites cried by the river of Babylon, and we, too, who cannot sing our song – not if we want to comply with CDC guidelines! – and whose land is strange indeed these days, we cry out, too. The silences and the emptiness we know in this time – all the stuff we can’t do; every dark theater, every locked-up school, and every empty pew in a cavernous sanctuary – is a lament not only over the destruction and fear caused by the virus but also over the ways in which our own arrogance, our ignorance, and our messing up of this thing have compounded the tragedy. Our vibrant, humming, whole-self-in “normal” life, now poured out as lament.
But can we see these things as part of our imitation of Christ, part of our pouring out for the sake of others? The silencing of our song is how we look out for the health of others. It’s the same reason we wear the mask, we fight our way through remote school, and drive ourselves buggy staying at home so much. Because St. Paul says that Christians look not to their own interests but to the interests of others. Because Christians imitate Christ, who gave up what he had, for the salvation, the safety, the health of others.
You may know that John and Charles Wesley, the two brothers who were the great founding leaders of the Methodist church movement, were both great singers and musicians. Even in our own Lutheran hymnal and there are no fewer than ten Wesleyan hymns.
To this day, in the very front of every Methodist hymnal, there is a great little one-page piece by John Wesley called “Directions for Singing.” Wesley knew that how we sing reflects our values, and being a Methodist he wanted to set up rules and make sure everybody gets it right. “Sing lustily,” not “as if you were … half asleep,” is Direction #4, so maybe I would have made a good Methodist. But then comes Direction #5: “Sing modestly,” so all voices would be united. So maybe I have to stay a Lutheran after all. “Sing spiritually” with an “eye to God” in every note.
And, Wesley notes, if any of these disciplines “is a cross to you, take it up, and you will find it a blessing.”
We live under many strict disciplines these days, and there are crosses for us to bear. In the middle of it I had a remarkable conversation with my wife 10 days ago. Of the nation’s pandemic response she said … “It’s working.”
She’s a medical researcher and a medical clinic director so she should know, but I didn’t buy it. “Deb, there are two hundred thousand dead in our country.”
Yes, she replied. And millions and millions who have been saved, because we have done this.
We are those who imitate Christ. We pour ourselves out, for the sake of others. If that is a cross to you, well, take it up, and you will find it a blessing. In the end, Jesus found it so. And we will, too.