Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Fr. Ryan Boettcher
October 1, 2023
Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32 • Psalm 25:1-9 • Philippians 2:1-13 • Matthew 21:23-32
We’re so glad you’re here!
This is a community for everyone and all of life’s questions. This is a place where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you. If you would like to connect click here: bit.ly/3RiftL1
Rez is a community where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you.
Life Together In The Goodness Of God
Good morning, Rez. It's so good to have you here with us this morning. Last week, we dug into the lives of three brown saints that have been really influential in the life of Father Sean. If you were here last week, you would have heard that. And as we were talking this past week, we decided, hey, that was great. And in our crash course, we're talking about the history of Anglicanism and we talked about saints and different things like that. We decided that for the following weeks, the next few weeks, we're going to spend some time with the saints as we read our lectionary text together. Some of our favorite saints, so each week we're going to pick one or two or three or however many saints that we want to highlight in our sermons. We don't have a fancy title for this yet. I don't know, Father Sean, if you want to come up with something or not. So we're going to do that. We're going to draw inspiration and encouragement from the saints as we look at our lectionary text. So for today, I wanted to share with you a little bit about the life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. You may have heard of him. He was a saint from the 16th century whose life was actually marked by humility, but not at first. He was born to a wealthy nobility in the north of Spain. He spent the first part of his life, as actually you'll see this as a common thread in some stories of saints, he spent the first part of his life embracing pride, arrogance, and influence. Ignatius was brought up as a young knight in a very influential circle. And it is said that he was driven by a desire for fame. And this is a quote from an early biography of his that says, he strutted about with his cape flying open to reveal his tight fitting hose and boots, a sword and dagger at his waist. Very proud. Kind of weird for us today, but I don't know what the equivalent of that would be today, actually. But you get the picture. Ignatius was full of pride as a young man. Until one day during a battle, his right leg was severely wounded by a cannon shot. And he had to go through multiple painful surgeries at a time where they didn't have anesthetics. And so he was left with this painful severe limp in his right leg and his pride was severely wounded as well. During this long recovery, he discovered a book called De Vita Christa, The Life of Christ. And he began reading this account of all of these stories of Jesus. And it had this profound effect on his life. And so he gave his life over to Christ. He left behind his sword and his dagger. He left it at the altar of the church, actually. He gave up all of his wealth, his clothes, and he lived for a year as a beggar. After that, eventually he grew up in his faith and found a new religious order called the Society of Jesus in the Catholic Church, or as we often know it now as the Jesuit order. At a time when many were breaking away from the Catholic Church, we've been learning this in our class right now, that during the Reformation, we see all these people breaking away from the Catholic Church. Ignatius actually sought to reform within in the Catholic Church, and his life became a model of humility. In our Life Together course, if you've taken our Life Together course before, you might remember that we practiced the Examen together in one of our classes. The Examen is a prayer exercise that was actually developed by Ignatius in his book, The Spiritual Exercises. And in this And in this writing, The Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius also writes about three kinds of humility that he has had to learn over the years. The three kinds of humility are to humble myself to total obedience to God. The second kind of humility is to be ready for honor or dishonor, poverty or wealth or anything else for God. And the third kind of humility is not only to be ready for those things, but to desire poverty, dishonor, and even to be a fool for God, because Christ was. Ignatius had to learn humility. It was such a prominent theme for him and for the Jesuit order that he founded that they have a motto in their constitution that reads, perinde ac cadaver, which means as if a dead body. That's how they viewed themselves. If you want to follow Jesus for the Jesuits, it means emptying yourself of all that pride, all of that ego, as if you were nothing more than a dead body. Apologies for the morbidity. But you can see the contrast here from the beginning of his life to this motto in the Jesuit order that he founded between the pride of Ignatius's early life and the humility that marked the rest of his life. This week, we're going to focus our attention specifically on our passage from Philippians two and talk about this theme of humility that we see in the life of Ignatius. It's a passage you've no doubt heard before. You've probably even memorized parts of it. And honestly, this passage could preach itself if we just read it, read it through again. Paul is painting a picture here in Philippians two of what it looks like to follow Jesus and be in community with one another. He's describing a community of believers like Rez actually, like us. I want to reread just a portion of the passage that we're going to focus in on for today, starting at verse three. It says, do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you not look to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind in you 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 the cross. I would love to keep reading to get to the part where we talk about Jesus being exalted, but I want to focus in on this first part of Paul's passage here. Paul here is describing the incarnation, Jesus descent into the worlds. I've heard this passage be described as a single poetic power. There's so much poetry and lyricism in the way that Paul's talking here. And amongst other things, Paul here is emphasizing the importance of humility when it comes to following Jesus. Do nothing from selfish ambition, right? But in humility, regard others better than yourselves. That's humility. And humility is the foundation for Paul of a life with God and with others. You can't have a life with God. You can't have life in community without humility. Shouldn't be a problem though, right? If we look around at the world, if we look at our own lives, we've got humility down, don't we? Let's get on to the next virtue, Paul. We've got this covered. No, of course not, right? C.S. Lewis thought that pride was the greatest of all human sins. He called it the great sin. It's no wonder why we hear Jesus over and over and over again calling his disciples to humility. It wasn't just nowadays. It's like back then, this was the same problem. Matthew 23, 12 says that Jesus says, whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but whoever humbles himself will be exalted. And there's other passages. You'll know these ones, right? Like the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Or truly, I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. But what do we mean when we're talking about humility? What does life look like when you and I learn what it means to walk humbly before our God? If we look at this passage in Paul's description of Jesus' descent here, I actually think we can learn a few things about what humility looks like. So let's move on in verses five and six. Paul tells us that Jesus is the example of humility. He is the example that we ought to look to, to have this mind of Christ, to learn to live into community here. Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited. What are we saying here? What are we talking about? I think there's two things we can glean from this little passage. First, Jesus was fully secure in his identity. According to Paul here, Jesus fully knew who he was. He knew he was in the form of God. He was God. This may seem like a little thing here in this passage, but so many times I've come across this in my own life and in talking to others that issues of pride and humility come down to a misplaced sense of identity. As humans, we tend to either think too much or too little of ourselves, don't we? It's not that we consciously do this or think this way, but often through the way we live, this is true. We have this misplaced sense of identity. This was true for Adam at the beginning in Genesis, wasn't it? His sin was pride. He was tempted to believe that he was like God. Misplaced sense of identity. But Jesus here, Jesus knew who he was. Jesus knew the words that were spoken by his father in heaven at his baptism were actually true. Remember those words? You are my beloved son and with you I'm well pleased. Jesus was secure in his identity. Mother Teresa was once reflecting on the virtue of humility and she said, if you are humble, nothing will touch you. Neither praise nor disgrace because you know who you are. You are nothing less than nothing more than God's own beloved, created and sustained and loved by the triune God of the universe. Your identity is secure. So the first step into humility is to do this work of remembering who we are, to be secure in our identity as the beloved of God. The second part of this verse, verse six, is equally important because it recognizes how we can often use power and influence and identity in the world. The Greek word Paul is using here is interesting because in our translation of verse six, Paul uses the word exploited. So Jesus did not regard equality with God. In other words, it's something to be exploited, right? That's what he says. Jesus knew he was God but he did not use that identity Jesus knew he was God but he did not use that identity in a way that would exploit other people. He didn't wield his power over and against others for his own gain. And he writes says that Jesus succeeds where Adam failed, refusing to take advantage of his equality with God. But this word exploited in verse six translated from the Greek can also be translated as like grasped, like he's like holding something really tightly. So in other words, Jesus did not see being God as something he had to hold on to, to grasp tightly to. I just want to pause here real quick because I think this is worth reflecting on. We believe in a God by whom all things were made. We believe in a powerful God, a God who is we could say the ultimate influencer, right? When we think about influencers these days, I mean when God spoke the world like came into being. That is influence, right? But we also believe in a humble God, a God who did not need to hold on to or exploit power. There is an invitation there for us church. There's good news in this. The way of Jesus is the way of this kind of humility. And in the economy of the kingdom of God, those who have power and influence need to learn to loosen their grasp. It's important to be clear that not all people have the same power and influence, right? And so this invitation might land differently for for each of us. But the pattern of Jesus here invites us all into a posture of humility to know who we are and the power and influence that we have and to ask ourselves, are we willing to let go, to loosen our grip? I was thinking about how hard it is to do this letting go, allowing ourselves to become vulnerable of letting go to always having to have power and be in control. That is at the heart of this struggle with humility, right? And one of the few places I've seen this worked out in really amazing ways is at actually AA meetings. People who have wrestled with alcohol or substance abuse and have gone through AA are keenly aware of how much humility is actually an essential part of the process. We admit that we were powerless is the very first step of the 12 steps. And I would argue that one of the reasons AA can be so successful is because it builds into its spaces, its meetings, this culture of humility. They know that no real change can occur if a person isn't willing to let go of their control over their addiction. I think the same can be said of our own pursuits of humility. There's a letting go that needs to happen here. Continuing on in verse seven, Jesus emptied himself, taking the form of an enslaved person, being born in human likeness. I was reading this week that in the Greco-Roman worlds, the world that Jesus and Paul inhabited, humility is associated with a low social position. Humility was for the servants and for the enslaved people. If you were humble, you were seen as powerless and subservient and weak. Doesn't actually sound all that different from our world today, actually. But Jesus enters the picture here and in verse seven, he completely flips the script on humility, actually. It's no accident that Paul describes Jesus as taking on the form of an enslaved one. The very thing that the Romans viewed as weak and humble, Jesus here in Philippians two identifies with the lowly and the subjugated, the very ones the Romans looked down upon. I think this is really intentional by Paul, actually. And ultimately, this pattern of humility that we see in Philippians two led Jesus all the way to the cross for the sake of the world. It wasn't a navel gazing kind of humility, a humility that was turned in on itself, but a humility that was completely aligned with the mission of God to redeem and restore the worlds. Are we willing to press into this kind of humility? That's the question that keeps coming to mind for me. Are we willing to take a step into a way of life that is marked by this kind of humility? The kind of humility that turns us not deeper inside of ourselves, but outward to the world, to be able to see and identify the needs of our neighbors. I wonder if we took just a moment of self-reflection, how would you and I seek humility in our lives? Would we see it like the Romans did and so many people do in our world today as something that humility is something that we mock or we avoid it or we run away from it? Do we see weakness as weakness or do we see humility as weakness or foolishness? It may be true that from the outside humility is seen as foolish or weak, but the kingdom of God is not like other kingdoms, friends. As I said earlier, Jesus came to flip the script and as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise and God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. In the kingdom of God, humility is strong. In the kingdom of God, humility is ultimately about having a secure identity as one who is created and sustained by the living God, beloved by God, and who is let go of this tight hold on control, who is let go of this desire to exploit that power and that influence. And in the kingdom of God, humility is seen as someone who is turned outwards to the world, always seeking the welfare of others and joining in the mission of God to restore and redeem all things. It may seem foolish or weak to some, but when we seek after this kind of humility, humility in the way of Jesus, as Ignatius did centuries ago, God's power is truly at work in us, I think. That's where God can work. It's the grounds for where transformation, I believe, can truly happen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.