18th Sunday After Pentecost

Matt 21:23:32; Philippians 2:1-13

It’s fighting season in the lectionary.  Today in the Gospel of Matthew we see the religious authorities go and pick a fight with Jesus.  And this fight that they start with Jesus today goes on in our readings for the next 7 weeks.  These people, they just keep arguing, they keep attacking Jesus, one group after another, for like the next month and a half.

And I just can’t.  I can’t do it.  Not this year.  I have preached through this series of readings before, and it does have a lot to teach us.  It’s good, see me in 3 years, we’ll talk about it, we’ll do it all.  But not this year.  Not when every time I turn on the TV, I see some of the most ridiculous political ads I have ever seen in my life (are we really fighting over which candidate likes football more?).  Not when we seem to have forgotten even the most basic rules of civil discourse.  Not when our church recently literally caught on fire.  I’m not doing it this year. I don’t have it in me.  So we are going to skip about half of this fight and celebrate a whole bunch of Saint’s Day’s days this fall. But unfortunately, just like our real lives, we can’t actually avoid all the conflict around us. So, we do have to deal with it this week. 

And I think what really gets me is that no one here, no one in the Gospel reading, and increasingly few people in our wider world is arguing in good faith.  These aren’t debates, these aren’t earnest attempts to understand the thoughts and feeling of people who are different from you, these aren’t attempts to bridge differences, create shared values or learn and grow.  Instead the religious authorities in our Gospel today decide to engage in an a bad faith effort to try to discredit Jesus and get him to publicly embarrass himself.

Starting to sound like our national politics at all?  So, what are we to do?  What are we to say, when we are faced with these situations?

Jesus does a thing, which is clever, but honestly really today I think Paul does an even better job, of answering these questions.  So we are going to look to Philippians to our 2^nd lesson today.   Because Paul gets at something even deeper and truer and more long lasting.  His answer comes to us not in the bracing confrontation & urge to argue we see in Matthew, an argument where we see Jesus have to go on and on round after round with various assailants for weeks, but instead Paul answers with the simplicity and joy.

You see the Philippians are in conflict too, they too are fighting amongst themselves, but Paul decides not to chide or admonish them.  Instead he opens by encouraging them and reminding them of the love he has for them and the joy he finds in being in relationship with them.  And then he sings to them.

Yes, he sings to them.  The bulk of this passage is actually just quoted lyrics from a hymn, and the way it is copied it was likely a song they all already knew and shared together, perhaps a very early piece of liturgy.  Maybe Paul had sung it with them or taught it to them when he was still there in Phillipi, when he was first founding their community.

And these lyrics, these jotted down hymn verses, are believed to be the oldest recorded words in the whole New testament.  They long predate all the written gospels, and quite possibly their source material, and as Paul seems to be quoting something that was well known from before he wrote this rather early letter, it likely predates all of Paul’s letters as well.  This little hymn is the earliest known shared wisdom of the church of Jesus Christ.

Which tells us a few things.  First, that fundamentally who are we are, is a people who sing together, that before Christians learned to do almost anything else, before we created church buildings and liturgies, and even the Bible as we know it, we sang to together.  We sang about Jesus to remind each other of the truth.

And then listen to the song, and hear that truth we sing about in this earliest wisdom that we share is about humility and obedience.

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.

Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

That is the first thing we learned was that to be like Jesus is to be humble. That Jesus is  Lord, and we are not.  That the path to exultation is not dominance but humility.

How much would knowing that, living that change how we look at conflict? How we look at arguments with people with whom we deeply disagree?  What would it mean to approach these situations with humility, curiosity and love?

And I know this hard, because as Canon Ellen likes to say, ‘the people, they be peopling’.  And the world is peopling hard right now.  There is a lot of bad faith arguing, and traps, and cruelty and lies and misinformation. 

But what if we are people who are first called to sing, and to live in harmony?  But I am specific about what I think harmony means here.  Because good harmony in music is all about singing a bunch of different notes at the same time.  

Now I personally have a hard time singing the harmony. I tend to be a melody or bust kind or singer because I usually don’t know what I am doing.  But I know that we have all heard really beautiful 4 or even 8 part harmony choirs or a full symphony orchestra.  Where people or instruments are all singing or playing multiple different notes but through the magic of musical harmony, they all blend together seamlessly to create something bigger and more beautiful than any of its parts.  The perfect chord ringing out in the world.

Maybe that is the vision, Paul’s vision for the church in Phillipi, our vision for the church and the world today.  Can we be brave enough to sing in harmony, to hit the note we are called to hit even and especially when others are singing something else?  To sing and find joy in the face of cruelty and exclusion and division.  And be humble enough to listen, to truly listen to seek the place where your notes can blend in harmony with others.  And to remember as Paul tells us “for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”  In time in all place, in conflict in strife, in good times and bad.  God is at work in us bringing us into a great choir of song that echoes through the ages.  Amen.