Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commcommons.church for more information.

Hope As we're jumping in today, let me just start by saying one teaching more time, happy Eastertide to everybody. And I know for some of you Easter feels like a long time ago in your brain and it's helpful though to note that this is the last Sunday in our yearly Easter feast. We've mentioned this a couple of times over the past few weeks that Easter isn't just a day, it's actually a whole season, several weeks in fact in Christian timekeeping where each spring we do our best to be alert to the signs of resurrection life that are out there in the world with us. It's also a time when we commit ourselves to the work of resurrection. The efforts we make to spark life with art and affection and play and advocacy and generosity in all the ways that we give ourselves to imagining and creating renewal and so I hope that you have been leaning into your world these past few weeks that you've been unapologetic with your hope and fiercely imaginative with your words and your affection and your local service and yes, I know some of you are doing it with your garden plots too.

I know some of you have green thumb plans this year that are going to grow and flourish and make the world better. Thanks for doing that And with that said, we are quickly approaching summer mode as a community and I want to quickly remind you actually of an opportunity that we are offering on the heels of this Easter season. See, Commons has always aspired to be a place where you can learn, where you can grow, where the questions and the negotiation and the complexity of faith are given an appropriate amount of space, actually expansive space where we search and we unearth and we find new pathways together as a community. And this is just some of what we hope happens during our upcoming expanded theologies course. And this course is just a series of four conversations that we are gonna be hosting on Tuesday nights here in June starting next week.

And in each of these conversations where you've asked a practitioner and thinker from outside of Commons to come in virtually and help us understand some theological perspectives that have in many cases been marginalized in our tradition and we are super excited to be making some space for queer and liberation and womanist and ecologically engaged perspectives and we're excited to invite you into conversation with our guests to give you an opportunity to ask the questions that you might have and then also to have our theology. Our theology is really just our thinking and our living in God. Our goal is to have that living stretched and made more whole through events like these. So these chats are gonna be running here in person at our Kensington Parish. There's also gonna be an online option for those who can't make it.

For a few more details, if you need more details, can find those on our website. We invite you to register there if you wanna join us. Just do that by clicking on the next steps tab and proceed to our events page. And just for the record, you don't have to be a theology nerd to think that this is for you. It's actually just going be a space for anyone who's curious, who's working out things as they go along, anybody who's open to a thoughtful conversation, and I think that's probably most of us today.

Right? I hope so. Anyway, just want you to be aware of that. Now today, we are wrapping up this series that we've been in called the old songs and it's been super fun to make our way through these places in Christian scripture where some poets and some singer songwriters have made squeezed their way into the Bible. And these discoveries are great because they're a reminder of how profoundly human these texts are.

It's fun to think about how scripture is actually a collection of writings that are pulled from and inspired by the breadth of human experience. How lyrics formed in the minds of ancient authors and made their way into incredible theological poems like John one, which we looked at a few weeks ago. How we know and we see by looking at these songs that people were writing tunes for the earliest Christian communities to encourage and form solidarity. It's also so fun to see how songs made their way into personal correspondence like Philippians two, which we are going to explore a bit today as we talk through scripture as playlist. I'm gonna talk about the emptiness of God.

I'm gonna talk about why we sing. But first, let's just maybe take a breath. Let's make some space for one another. Let's pause for a moment. Would you pray with me?

Creator God, whose voice sparked and shaped creation. We ask, would you tune our ears to the melodies of freedom and embrace that you know so well? And help us to hear the echo of your great love in the affection that we receive and we share today. Even as you teach us to sing and speak and encourage with abandon, as we find ourselves in awe of the beauty that we discover in your world, in awe of the ways that our siblings around us reflect your radiant joy, in awe of the ways that grace is like melody that we can't get out of our heads. And as we pause, be near to every heavy heart today.

There is so much going on in our world. There's so many reasons to be weighed down. And we ask this would be a moment of reprieve where we sense the peace and the clarity, the mercy that we seek and need. Guide us now. As we turn to ancient words, we ask in the name of Christ, our hope.

Amen. Alright. So today, we are gonna finish up by looking at Philippians two, and I wanna begin simply by reading these lyrics to you. Christ Jesus, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.

And therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him a name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Now the reality is that if you've spent some time around the church in your life, this song or these lyrics sound familiar. In part, this is because this is arguably the quintessential song in the Christian scriptures. Its themes and theology are the stuff that Christian thinkers and writers have given a lot of time to exploring, which makes it the title track of sorts if this series was a kind of album review. The point is just here that you may have heard this song before even if you can't place when or where.

But it also might sound familiar coincidentally because we actually took a look at this passage last year during our everything is awful series. You can check that out on YouTube if you would like. We were teaching our way through the book of Philippians, And in that series, I actually dealt with these same verses that we're looking at today, which sometimes happens when you're a pastor. You have to return to something that you've already looked at. You've already studied.

You've already said what you thought you could about a certain story or image or metaphor. But what's been interesting for me is how coming back to this ancient song in a series about songs, how this has opened up my thinking about the scriptures in general. To explain this a little bit, I need to tell you a quick story. See, several several years ago now, I stumbled onto National Public Radio's Tiny Desk Concert series on YouTube and if you know what Tiny Desk is, then you're already a fan. You don't need me to say anything more.

Right? If you don't know what it is, the explanation is in the name. Basically, Tiny Desk concerts were started by a musician and producer at NPR where quite literally they invite musical acts, bands, and artists to perform on or around or behind this guy's desk. Just in an office to a live audience of staffers and interns. And they often do so with a more stripped down acoustic version of their art and that might not sound amazing to you but it is because over the years so many incredible moments have happened in that office.

There's too many to mention here, I'm not going to tell you what my favorites are, can come ask me after. But as someone who watches the videos of these performances regularly, Tiny Desk has done a couple of things for me. First, it's exposed me to artists from around the world that I wouldn't have otherwise found, which is a gift. But second, it's also given me some perspective on some artists that I thought I knew. And the case in point I want to tell you about actually happened in 2020.

Just as pandemic life was settling in, you guys remember that? Anyways, Tiny Desk hosted the band Coldplay in a session recorded just before lockdowns and restrictions were a thing. And here's the deal, if you don't know who Coldplay is, you just need to know that you've likely heard their music because some of their songs are anthems or they were because they've played football stadiums all around the world before thousands of adoring fans. And yet here they were behind this desk, two band members singing their hit Viva La Vida backed by a gospel choir, which is not their normal setup, and I was blown away. It might have been the fact that there was so much that felt uncertain in those days.

The world felt like it was closing in, but by the end of their unplugged, unflinchingly joyful performance, my perspective had changed. I mean, yes, I known this band, but I had never seen them like this. And I had heard this song, but I'd never felt it like that, Nor had I realized that it was written from the perspective of a king who had lost it all and then given up on revenge. Such good stuff. Go listen to it.

But also, I think I was really sensing the bleakness of that 2020 moment we were all living in, but this reimagined arrangement sparked new hope for me and I couldn't even stop it from happening. And like tiny desk concerts like this, I think the scriptures have this same kind of latent potential to come to us where we are, to bring us back to a thing that we thought we knew and surprise us. Because it's so easy to let our familiarity, if we have it with the scriptures, that familiarity sometimes blunts the potency of these words. It's so easy to think of them as ancient texts and then let that thinking mute the ways that those words offer clarity for where we are in this moment. It's so easy to forget that so much of the Scripture, so much of what we call sacred texts including these songs of the ancient church, It emerged from creative attempts to make meaning.

And maybe, just maybe, that realization has changed the way that you think of scripture during this series. Maybe it makes old words easier to hear, or maybe it helps you think of using the scriptures more as a playlist that you explore and you travel with and you come back to in different seasons with new perspective. Now with this in mind, we are returning to a familiar text today. I've already read it to you. There's a couple things I wanna note about what I've already read to you.

First, there's some debate about these words among biblical scholars of whether or not Paul actually composed the hymn that we've read or whether he was pulling from a contemporary early Christian song, whether his juices were just flowing while he was writing a letter, or whether he plagiarized the lyrics from somebody else without siding, or maybe he just had this tune in his head and he couldn't stop himself. We don't really know what was going on. But second, the reality is that there's a lot going on in the theology of this song. And again, people have written whole books on these verses, so let's just admit that one tiny sermon isn't gonna untie all of the knots, but we can take a listen. And we're going to come back to why Paul works a song in in the first place in a moment.

But before that, let's look at the richness of imagery here. Verse six is the opening line and it begins, Jesus, being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his advantage. And in English, it's easy to miss the significance here because this song is saying something similar to what we've seen in passages like the prologue in John's gospel from a couple weeks ago where early Christians in the decades right after Jesus' life, they started to use grand cosmological language to describe the mystery of who Jesus was. And the inference here is not just that Jesus is divine. But like John's gospel, this hymn puts Jesus back at the beginning of the Hebrew story, at the genesis of the Hebrew imagination in darkness and formlessness before all things where God was.

Jesus, this hymn says, was in his very nature, in his basic essence, God before all things. And that sounds really vague and the truth is is that that's true. Christians have been holding this mystery since they first tried to make sense of Jesus. And we've often resorted to the depths of poetry to do it justice, which for the record is what the best theology should always be doing, being more poetic. Now the next line says that Jesus did not consider this divine form that he had as something to be leveraged or manipulated for advantage.

And the Greek here draws on the imagery of clutching and grabbing of robbers who would take what isn't theirs. And there are some scholars that actually think there's a political edge hidden here with a possible reference to the Roman Emperor Nero who in the early sixties of the first century, right around the time that this letter is actually being written by Paul in a jail, Nero's life was starting to fall apart. He murdered his mother. He accused and executed his rivals in an attempt to hold on to power, which just hints at potentially how early Christian songwriters were not above throwing a little shade or making a not so subtle comparison in penning songs for the church, which leads us to the song's main assertion. That Jesus did not clutch at power but made himself nothing.

Taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness, becoming obedient to death on a cross and we need to press pause here. First, this language of taking the very nature of a servant. This is a poetic recall to the earlier phrase about Christ's divine presence before creation, stating that Jesus in his basic essence, in his truest form, wow, God before time became a servant or a slave. And second, the songwriter states that Jesus took on this form by making himself nothing. And the terminology here draws on the verb, which literally means to strip of power or to give up or to empty.

And the truth is that this terminology is the source of a whole stream of Christian thought, sometimes called kenotic theory, which tries to understand and explore this self effacing impulse that Jesus shows us. And as an example of how this stream helps us think of God, theologian, Jurgen Moltmann wrote that all modern theology, he was writing in the middle of the twentieth century, All modern theology has to be developed, he said, within earshot of the dying Christ. Within earshot of the God who became obedient to the point of death, Philippians two says. See, for Maltmann who lived through the horrors of violence and genocide in World War two and was complicit in them to some degree, Jesus' cry of anguish and despair and abandonment from the cross is the beginning of Christian thought. That's the only justifiable place to begin thinking of the divine there in the face of the worst of human experience.

And it seems to me that this ancient songwriter understood this too and named it in describing how Jesus made himself nothing. And what's the songwriter getting at? Well, it's just this, that sometimes the only way to speak of God truly, the only way to sing a song of worship is to speak and sing of the emptiness of God. And I I don't know how that language strikes you today. But for me, after a week in which war persists and intensifies, and a week in which children die at school, and a week in which religious institutions are again exposed for their abuses and their crimes against the vulnerable.

This seems like the right place to start. Where we do not come to worship Jesus because of his position or his authority or because he is above it all, but rather because as the old song says, Jesus takes all these divine images that we struggle to reconcile ourselves to. Images that are often mirrored in the worst of human behavior from Roman emperors to our own power brokers today, the images of our violence and our injustice and our unchecked privilege. Jesus takes all those things and he dumps them out, offering us an image of a God who would rather give up godness than use it as a right and a privilege and all to step toward and into our human likeness. Step toward the emptiness maybe that you feel over relationships and opportunities that have been lost or afraid these past couple years.

Jesus steps toward the emptiness that you feel because nothing ever seems to change for those that you care about, those that you advocate for. Jesus steps toward the emptiness we all feel in those moments where we're rejected or we're passed over or we're cast aside and we're left alone. And this leaves me wanting more songs like this. Now the song doesn't stay there. It goes on to finish by saying that Jesus' willful emptying, that's the thing that makes him worthy of devotion.

It's the thing that sets him apart as a different kind of Lord than Caesar, which is why it's no surprise that the early Christians took these words, they sang them and they shaped their creeds and their commitments around them. Now that said, I actually want to look back at why Paul throws this song into a letter in the first place because this is something that gets overlooked when we come to these verses. There's so much theological richness and complexity and familiarity to us that we can forget that Paul isn't writing a Disney script here. He's not just suddenly bursting into song because he feels it and it's easy to skip over the fact that Paul inserts this song in the middle of pleading with this small Christian community. It's a group of collected Jews and Gentiles, a group of people that includes the rich and the disenfranchised, a group that welcomed masters and slaves to the same table and naturally those differences between people would have sparked conflict which is why Paul is writing to them and he's encouraging them to step towards one another.

In verses three to five, right before our section today, he tells them this, don't do anything out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility, value others above yourself. Not looking to your own interests, but each to the interests of the other. In your relationships, please have the mind of Jesus. And then the song starts.

Now we have to pay attention there because that instruction to avoid vain conceit, it's curious. It's actually built on the Greek verb, which is a derivative of, that emptying verb that I already mentioned to you, which means it might better be translated empty conceit. It shows that Paul's actually using some deliberate wordplay here. Same thing with Paul's instruction to his friends to be humble and value each other. That's built on the same verb that he is used in the song to describe how Jesus humbled himself by becoming obedient to death.

Now what's unclear here is whether Paul's like that person, we all have one of them in our life, that person who in the middle of a regular conversation can hear or use a phrase and then remember or sing the matching song lyric. Anybody know anybody like this? Maybe you are that person. That's fine. No shame here today.

It's possible that that's what's going on. Paul's writing and then he just thinks of a relevant song to make his point. Paul is giving instructions to a community but then he records the lyrics of a song that just happened to hold up Jesus as an alternative model for being human. Don't be motivated by empty conceit because Jesus emptied himself for you. And please be humble and gracious with one another because Jesus humbled himself for you.

And with this wordplay and creativity, Paul does give us a snapshot of how early Christians thought and worshiped. But more than this, I think we can see hints of why we sing together at all anymore. Because in tying hymn lyrics to kind and generous action in the world, Paul teaches us something about worship. Yes. There's this encouragement to think poetically and beautifully about God, to develop a poetics of belief.

But but there's something more significant implied here and it's this, it's that our worship and singing don't change the world. They don't somehow alter reality and they never have, but they do change us. As we look again at Jesus and we sing of a world that reflects God's character and compassion and then live to make it more tangible for each other. And what happens when we do this is perhaps we discover as we go that as one poet says, human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God, but it's also God's means of manifesting God's self to us, which just means that our poetry and our music and all the old songs we've looked at in this series, they're all hints to us of God's great goodness that resounds and resounds and resounds. A soaring chorus that becomes the rhythm and the melody of the new life that we compose and we rebuild and we flourish in every day in the love that we share and the communities that we form, in the forgiveness that we offer to our friends and our enemies when we can, and in the changes that we make and the ones that we work for.

Let's pray. God, source of all good words and good rhythm and the melodies that get into our bones. We are present again to the mystery of how you work and in the ways that ancient lyrics can tap into the depths of our imagination. And we find ourselves caught up in how scripture comes to us as a new song, as a fresh perspective, and sometimes it comes to us as an old song, as a familiar voice, as a comfort in the dark place where we find ourselves. And even as we gather today, we ask, would you help us to be open to the ways that your voice is carrying over space and time?

Help us as we bring our sorrow and our heartache and all we can in praise of your emptiness. Emptiness that we trust as the thing that brings you close, as close as our own breath. And as we go, give us courage now to live to the roaring rhythms of grace, grace that sets us to singing new songs of hope. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.