Lent 2C: What Are You Worshipping? Imitation in the Wake of New Zealand

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Lent 2C: Genesis 15:1-12,17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean and Rector

One of the interesting things about human beings is that we are highly imitative creatures. I saw my father at Christmas and we were standing in from of a full length mirror together before dinner and I noticed that not only did we look quite alike, but we had many of the same habits and mannerism—the way we adjusted our glasses, the way we stood, the same furrow of the brow when our woebegone Toronto Maple Leafs came up as a topic of discussion. We even showed up to dinner wearing the same outfit a couple of times. Because human beings are inherently relational, it makes sense that we are also imitative. We become what see. We are what we worship. We will see that this has profound implications for how we reflect on the terrible tragedy in Christchurch, New Zealand where now 50 Muslim worshippers were killed in hate-fueled attack.

The question of us is: What are we looking at?; What are we worshipping? Paul, in his Letter to the Philippians counsels the nascent church full of new converts, “Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.” At first glance, this can seem a little hubristic. Is Paul seriously telling the Philippians to imitate him? Is discipleship about creating a whole world of little Paul clones?

Yes and no. You see Paul is inviting the Philippians to join him in imitating the one who Paul imitates. And who is that? Christ Jesus, of course. Paul is reminding the Philippians that it’s not about imitating Paul per se, but imitating the direction Paul faces—looking where Paul looks, beholding as Paul beholds, turning to the source of all beauty, goodness, and truth as Paul has turned.

Today’s passage from Philippians needs to heard in the light of the passage that is the key to this entire letter, the so-called “kenotic hymn” in 2: 5-8 that we will hear read on Passion Sunday. You’ll recognize it immediately, I’m sure:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
   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. 

We see here the basic pattern, the fundamental pattern, the gestalt of Jesus’ life captured in poetically evocative language. Jesus is self-forgetful, self-emptying love. Jesus is boundary crossing love that touches the untouchable, sees those rendered invisible, heals the sick, and eats with outcasts and sinners. God in his great love for in Jesus stoops down, bows, bends low to meet us exactly where we are to drawn us, lure us, into fullness of life, abundance and joy. The key to understanding how Jesus is that phrase “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.” The Greek word for exploited is ἁρπαγμός—and means something closer to grasp, hold, fast or seize. Jesus is the ungrasping one. Jesus is the one who opens his hand, the surrendering one who trusts in the goodness of his Father. Jesus is the one who perfectly embodies the surrender, the letting go, that gives birth to Love in human form.

What is it Jesus says to Mary in the garden when she first mistakes him for the gardener? “Do not hold on to me. Do not cling to me. Don’t grasp me.” For Mary to perceive and live from the truth of Jesus’ ascension to his Father in heaven and his filling of all things, Mary has to let go of her image Jesus. Mary has to enter into the stream of ungrasping love to realize that Jesus loving presence is not locatable in a single place, or merely in his human form. Christ is all in all. She sees the truth of Paul’s words that it is in possessing nothing that she possesses all.

Now the startling about this way of seeing and being in the world is that the potential for its realization has already been given, gifted, to us as human beings created in the image and likeness of God. Notice Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that is in Christ Jesus.” Let the same be in you—not “run around and work hard trying to acquire something you don’t already have.” Acquiring the mind of Christ is letting that mind come to fruition in you. Letting it well up. Letting the love we see manifested in the person of Jesus be more and more the ground from which we live and permeate our being.

If we are imitative creatures, it matters deeply what we imitate, in whose image we are shaped and formed. Paul is telling us that our Lenten journey with Jesus in the wilderness should have the self-emptying, self-forgetful, pouring out love of Jesus as our model. When we look to him—regularly, steadily, adoringly, worshipfully—we become with Paul, with the Philippians, a little more like the one whom we gaze upon. Looking upon self-forgetful love that pours itself out indiscriminately on others, we begin to participate more and more in that same basic movement, that same pouring out. We spill out of this place as anointing oil for all we meet.

That is the role, of course, of all the various forms we engage in in worship and life of discipleship. When we fall down on our knees at the altar shoulder-to-shoulder with someone we wouldn’t otherwise know in our daily life—our hands out-stretched to receive the most precious body and blood of Christ—we are taking into ourselves that which we already are. “The reception  of the Eucharist is not a passing visit from Christ, but an awakening to his abiding presence in us, leading us into the further experience of the Father.” We are practicing living from openness, receptivity, gift and givenness. We are practicing letting the mind of Christ be in us and live itself in and through us.

When we prayer for others, we are practicing that kind of open-hearted attention to the world of suffering outside the cramped confines of self-enclosure. When we dwell with the word of God in Holy Scripture, we are opening to running out to greet the stranger other like Abraham under the oaks at Mamre. Getting out of tents to encounter God. When we serve others in the spirit of sacrificial love, we are imitating the life see manifest in the person of Jesus. Imitation begins with a very intentional act of imitating. But over time, the imitation becomes almost second nature. Like how my dad and I adjust out glasses in the same way, put on the same khakis and button-down for dinner and become forlorn at every mention of the hapless Toronto Maple Leafs, imitation becomes second nature.

That’s how Paul again can say in his Letter to the Galatians—“it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Paul’s journey is our journey. Paul’s imitation of Christ Jesus is to be our imitation of Christ Jesus. And our journey with Jesus in the wilderness is really a journey into putting on the mind of Christ. A journey to the love that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. A journey to who we really are, and to a place we already are.

When we get to our gospel for today, we see two different models for imitation held up for us. We see foxes and hens. Foxes scatter and hens gather. Foxes scapegoat, cast out, and maintain power by threat, and violence—“Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” Jesus, the hen, is trying to show us another way to live, another model to imitate. That’s why God became human, to show us what a truly human human life looks like. When Jesus speaks of “finishing his work” he is speaking of the refashioning of humanity in the image of Divine Love. Jesus comes among us to teach us to walk in the way the love, to know love and be that love for others. When Jesus utters the words, “it is finished” from cross in John’s gospel, he is not saying something like “Thank goodness this whole crucifixion thing is over.” What is finished is the project that God began at the very outset of creation of fashioning for himself a people who live for and from God. By going with love and forgiveness to Jerusalem and the cross, not with retaliatory violence, Jesus shows us a different way to be in the world, a way that frees us from the endless cycle of scapegoating and securing our deluded temporary peace on the backs of innocent victims. Jesus’ life is the completion of what our lives are called to become. In him we see who we are made to be our true potential in Christ.

Sadly, what we imitate, and its effects has become horrifyingly real in these past few days. What did the shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand imitate when he perpetrated that cowardly act of murder that took lives of 48 Muslim worshippers at their Friday prayers? He imitated the hatred, fear, racism, and bigotry he’d imbibed on White Nationalist websites and twitter feeds. He became what gazed at, he became what he worshipped and in the process he became less human, less like the grand calling to love for which he was made. He became a fox, a scatterer, an accuser with the blood of innocents—men women and children—on his hands. As we pray for the victims and their families and for the communities of worship torn apart by this act of violence, we should also pray for the perpetrator’s soul.

God is always reaching out to us—in the calling of the people of Israel, in the law and the prophets, in becoming fully divine and fully human in person of Jesus. “How often have I desired to your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and yet you were not willing!” God the mother hen desires nothing but our union and communion with God in love. God the mother hen wants to shelter us under her wings. God the mother hen wants to form a true community, where love, forgiveness, and gathering are at the center. But we human beings are addicted to scapegoating. We’ve been trained to imitate to wrong the thing. And Lent is that time in the church year when we look at what we look at. Whose image are we being made in? Is it the scattering of Herod, the fox, who maintains power by violence, sowing dissention and casting out? Or is it the image of God the mother hen, Jesus, the gathering one, whose call to walk in love rings with saints and angels throughout eternity?