The Humility of Love
Category: Sundays after Pentecost
Speaker: The Rev. John Shellito
Before the calling of the disciples, before healing people, before confronting those in authority, before the cross, before the resurrection, and before the ascension, God took on the limitations of being born in human form. God “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” God chose to give up God’s power and go to a place of servanthood, even of slavery.
And maybe you are thinking that you have heard this story before. And yes, in part, this is what we do as Christians—we gather to tell and re-tell God’s story, in times past and in our own lives now.
And when we talk about God taking human form, we are reflecting on the Word becoming incarnate—God coming to us in our own cultural and communal context. The story of God begins with God’s own deep humility, to come to us in our frailty and brokenness. And this presence of love empowers us to be present with the frailty and brokenness of others. And in the presence of love, we find frailty and brokenness transformed into God’s strength and love.
The Word, Davar in Hebrew, the Person often described as the Son in the Holy Trinity, indicates more than simply a unit within a sentence, or a collection of syllables gathered to contain a unit of meaning. What we translate as the Word in Scripture also carries the meanings of order, speech, speaking, communication, an idea, a story, or a thing. It is an arrangement to create order. Logos, the Word in Greek, has resonance with counting, accounting, enumerating, reflecting, and considering, all in addition to speech and narrative.
In royal terms, the command of a ruler is all that is needed to make something happen. A king or queen speaks, and the will of that sovereign is accomplished. God said, let their be light, and there was light. God said “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” and we were made, each in the image of God.
The Word is God’s communication with us and the world.
In the first century culture into which Jesus was born, the commands of God were understood in terms of Scripture--especially the first five books, along with Scriptural interpretation, Oral tradition, Second Temple tradition, and other conduits for passing on faithful action, including teachers, mothers, grandmothers, fathers, and occasionally, if they lived long enough, grandfathers.
But what does it mean if we say that God’s interaction with humanity is contained in the life, death, and resurrection of a single person? It means that Jesus, in his healing power, his authority in Scripture, his victory over evil, and his loving relationship with each person contains the seed, the DNA, for the whole family tree of Christianity.
In thinking about the Word as the Story of God, what if we read the beginning of John’s Gospel with a different translation of Logos?
In the beginning was the Story, and the Story was with God, and the Story was God. The Story was in the beginning with God.
If we continued with this translation of John’s Gospel, we could go farther:
and the Story became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
We are invited into this Story, and we are called to receive the incarnate Story and embody the incarnate Story, with and for others. The story is the unfolding power of a life lived in humility.
I think we need to keep telling ourselves Jesus’ story of love, and we need to keep telling our stories of love in community, because in community is where we can be reminded of that which is still true, and good, and faithful. It is in community that we can be shown the new leadings of the Holy Spirit among us, to allow for love to unfold in unexpected and unanticipated ways.
So, what does it mean for the Word to become flesh, and dwell among us?
God shows us the way by choosing to live within the confines of a human life, experiencing human emotions and human challenges with us, as our Companion. God doesn’t choose to remain ensconced in the heavenly realm, comfortably above the pain of a fallen world, and untainted by the moral compromise of a sinful humanity—God is with us in our pain and moral questioning, because God refuses to abandon us. God joins us in the pain of death—joining even those who experience a shameful death. The crucifixion, after all, was a tool not only of physical pain, but also of emotional pain, deployed through ridicule and shame. God in Christ has already descended to the darkest hells of human experience, and calls all of us to be part of God’s larger plan of servant leadership in love.
The God of love is the God who heard the cries of God’s people in Egypt, and came down, to deliver the people through Moses. The God of love is the God who provided water from the rock in the desert, to a people who were quarreling and testing the Lord in the wilderness. The God of love is the God who came down to be a human companion with us as a struggling and confused humanity, to spread the Good Word of healing and deliverance, even to those who had been disobedient, and those who had questioned his authority.
God’s movement to join us in our humanity is the ultimate movement of humility—a refusal of the world’s advertising campaign for the tyranny of more—more status, more money, more consumption, and more independence. Instead, God gives us a vision of caring for a child, and learning like a child--discipling others and being a disciple in community, companioning and being a companion, nurturing and being nurtured. At times this means moving slower, doing more with less, and relinquishing consumption for the deeper joy found in connection with others, drawing on our own unique gifts. By choosing to live in deeper relationship with those around us, we might give up status in the eyes of the world, but what we gain in the process is the spiritual wisdom and authority to follow God’s lead in how we will use our time and resources. What is gained is the opportunity to be part of God’s creative and abundant vision for how our life can be transformed in service, as we embrace our own life, and our own opportunities to give as well as receive, from within our own circumstances.
It is in abandoning our pride, and emptying ourselves of our authority, that we can embrace our calling to serve—to share and receive the amazing divine generosity in a system that is dramatically different from that of the world.
Paul wrote:
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.
Amen.