Human Holiness
A sermon on Philippians 2:1-13 by Monique Lisbon, 25 September 2005
© LaughingBird.net

Message
Understanding who we are as human beings, including our vulnerability, is dependent on understanding the vulnerability of God.

Sermon

God and humans: completely separate?

A couple of years ago, I heard a talk by a Christian leader who was relating his experience at a large inter-church conference. He told a long and quite humorous story about finding that rather than being appointed facilitator of a Bible study group, someone working in administration had screwed up and he ended up being rostered to clean the toilets! He felt too humiliated to kick up a fuss, and set about cleaning the toilets with not a small degree of annoyance and embarrassment, hoping desperately that no-one from his church would walk past and see him.

As he scrubbed away, he began to pray and sing Christian choruses. The way he described it, doing this ‘lifted him spiritually out of the toilet block.’ By focussing on God’s power and majesty, he was able to lift his focus from the dirty toilet bowls and be transported to a much holier place. His point was that even in the most degrading of situations, we can all choose to focus our eyes on things above, on the God who is completely separate from the mundane and debasing parts of life (and, presumably, from the realities of human excrement).

This talk raised more questions than it answered for me. I wondered: What kind of image of God does this paint? Is God unconcerned with the ordinary and mundane realities of the world God had created? What was this person’s perception of Christian leadership? And most of all, what did he think the incarnation was all about? Did God just pretend to be human? Was Jesus’ human body just a temporary fancy dress costume until God could find something better to wear? Or was Jesus actually a real flesh-and-blood human... including even going to the toilet himself?

Despite how this last question might sound, I don’t actually mean to be facetious. To me, the questions raised by this talk were profound in that they grappled with the very issue of what it means to be truly and fully human — and, completely connected to this issue, what it means to be God.

It seems to me that these two issues — what it means to be human and what it means to be God — are central to how we understand the Philippians passage we heard read a short while ago.

Christians often think of God and humans as completely separate. We live as though God were not intimately connected with our everyday human experience, believing that this is an expression of God’s ‘holiness.’ What are some of the ways Christians sometimes reinforce this idea? Here’s a couple of examples:

People often talk about putting aside their daily worries when they come to church, in order to focus on God. The idea behind this is that our daily worries are not ‘of God’. God is completely separate from our credit card overdraft... or the persistent cough that keeps us awake at night and drains all our energy during the day... or the fact that our housemate still hasn’t washed his dishes from five days ago and we’re pretty damn pissed off about it. Coming to church, being ‘holy’, is about keeping these ‘petty’ human realities separate from our more important focus on God.

Preachers coming from certain theological traditions often spend so long dissecting a biblical passage, taking such care to explain its original literary context and the complexities of Greek or Hebrew grammar, that they make the bible sound as though it has no connection to our own lives. You get to the end of a sermon like that, and it could have been a highly accurate and precise technical talk on the sound wave-forms of a whale’s mating cry, for all of its relevance or connection to us as human beings! Sermons like these are a denial that even if a person or community lives in a profoundly different historical and socio-political context, we all share the universal experience of being human. And if the bible is described as ‘God’s word’ in situations like this, then this reinforces the idea that what God has to say to humans, is totally irrelevant to our lives — irrelevant to what it means to be struggling with a baby who won’t stop crying... or to be finding it so hard to get a job that we just stop opening our bills because that’s easier than facing the reality of our situation.

Christians often talk about God’s grand or even miraculous actions as being the clearest expression of God’s presence in our world. ‘We prayed for our sick son not to die and God answered our prayer — this proves that God is there and loves us.’ Or ‘The clearest indication to me that God is real is the intricacy of creation. There must be a Creator because there is such complexity in the tiniest flower, and such endlessness to outer space.’ Or from a different perspective — ‘I trusted God to save my marriage and my partner ran off with someone else anyway — so I’ll never trust God again.’ In all these examples, God is defined primarily by difference from us — the logic goes, only God can do these things, so that shows that God is God, and we are not.

But maybe we think we’re more enlightened than the people who hold these somewhat simplistic views. We have a complex nuanced theology that knows that this kind of dichotomised view is not what real Christianity is about.

Or do we? How might we act as though we believe God and humans are completely separate?

What do we choose to share with each other about our lives when we eat together after our service each week? Does our pride, or our fear of others’ judgment, stop us talking about our vulnerability with each other? Is it easier to talk about what’s happened at work this week, than our self-doubts or struggles or the anger that we feel in a particular situation, which we know is illogical but we just can’t seem to get over it? Is this a statement that we believe that some parts of human experience are more acceptable and palatable than others (that is, that they’re more a reflection of the way things ‘should be’, or dare I say it: more how God would want things to be?)

Vulnerable humans, vulnerable God

Each of tonight’s lectionary readings contain descriptions of human frailty and vulnerability. In the Exodus reading, the Israelites felt so frustrated and desperate in the face of their uncertainty in transition from slavery to freedom, and so physically thirsty, that they lost all perspective and actually wished that they were back in Egypt, living as slaves. They reframed Moses’ actions in liberating them from Pharoah, as ‘dragging us out of Egypt.’ These people didn’t feel that their human experience was completely separate from God — on the contrary, they saw it as so connected to God that they openly questioned God and God’s appointed leader Moses, doubting God’s loyalty and even doubting whether being liberated by God was better than being slaves. They were nothing if not honest about how they felt!

The Psalm talks about Israel’s recognition of the need to keep the stories of their experience alive for future generations: the stories about where God’s provision met God’s people at their point of greatest need and vulnerability.

Even the gospel reading demonstrates how easily threatened the religious leaders of Jesus’ day were when he challenged their traditions, teaching with authority and reframing their whole belief systems. Yet even in their indignation, they felt too scared of the crowd’s reaction to answer Jesus’ counter-question openly.

The bible tells stories about real human feelings and reactions. Ironically, it’s that fact that scares a lot of Christians, who feel embarrassed and defensive if people criticise the bible because of the messy, volatile reactions of a lot of the human characters described in its pages. Yet, to me, it’s precisely those messy, authentic descriptions of people that give the bible a ring of truth.

Neither the Old nor New Testament presents a picture of God as separate from humans. Rather, the bible consistently paints a picture of a God who is profoundly affected by humans, who enters into human experience as much, perhaps more, than any of us. God is not an abstract philosophical concept, but a jilted Lover who feels angry and devastated when that love is unrequited. God does not ask us to ascend above our vulnerable and mundane experiences, but rather, God descends into human vulnerability and mundaneness alike.

We have so sanitised the cross of Jesus, that we forget the humiliation and degradation it involved. Today, even brides will adorn themselves with diamond-studded golden crosses to accentuate the elegance and beauty of their flowing white satin dresses. But in AD30 the cross was far from elegant or beautiful. Crucifixion was reserved for the most despised of criminals, paedophiles like Mr Stinky and dictators like Hitler. In those days, hanging a cross above your wedding dress would have been like tying an electric chair around your neck.

Religious art down through the centuries depicts Jesus along a continuum of palatability, most with a carefully placed loincloth covering that most stark expression of vulnerability. But the reality was that Jesus was completely naked. At the point of his execution, Jesus was stripped bare, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

The ancient Greeks believed that God was ‘impassible’; that is, that God could not feel anything because that would mean that God was affected by people. To them, that was the opposite of what it meant to be God, changeless and eternal. So in Philippians, when Paul writes about the vulnerability that God chose to enter into, the frail human body wrapped around God’s very self, with the ultimate fate of execution by electric chair, this was an incredibly shocking idea.

Each week in our liturgy we hold the affirmation of ourselves as holy (‘holy things for holy people’) in tension with the affirmation of Christians through the centuries, that ‘only one is holy, Jesus Christ.’ Real humanity is frail and flawed and vulnerable, yet there is a holiness in that humanity, not just in spite of it.

Paul tells us that we are to model ourselves on Jesus, who chose to embrace the vulnerability of being human... really human, not just dressing up in a human body costume.

Different types of vulnerability

Now there’s vulnerability and there’s vulnerability. Sometimes people use their ‘vulnerability’ as a perverted form of power — to use a term from Nathan’s translation of Philippians 2, ‘milking it for all its worth’. When we confess our sins each week in the service, we ask for forgiveness ‘when we use our power to dominate and our weaknesses to manipulate.’ Sometimes we might maintain a sense of power in our vulnerability by manipulating people’s response to that vulnerability. We might push others to feel guilty if they respond in any way other than what we want. If we express our weakness without taking any responsibility for ourselves in the process, we ironically end up with all the power, because others’ reactions are largely determined by our needs, not by their freedom to respond honestly.

So there are different types of vulnerability, healthy and unhealthy. What is healthy vulnerability? Well, I think Paul gives us a description of the best model of healthy human vulnerability. Like many profound truths, this was actually probably expressed in music (not that I’m at all biased in saying that!). Many commentators believe that in this letter to the Christians at Philippi, Paul was quoting an early church hymn.

By becoming a human being, Jesus sanctifies our weak, frail, vulnerable human experience — declaring it to be ‘of God.’ In this one act of becoming human, God enters into weak, frail, vulnerable human experience. This act is named the ‘incarnation’ in theological lingo. But the incarnation was more than just a one-off event. God becoming human refers to every act of Jesus’ life, from being a baby too powerless even to change his own nappy, to being a 33 year old man, too powerless even to cover his exposed genitals from those who had come to watch the spectacle of his death with the bloodthirsty lust of dyed-in-the-wool boxing fans.

So what makes God’s choice to become vulnerable different from just another perverted form of power — a way to manipulate the human race by making us feel so guilty that we become God’s friends to try to make ‘poor old God’ feel better?

Here are a few of the ways I think God’s vulnerability was healthy vulnerability:

First, God did not choose vulnerability as an end in itself. There was a purpose for this choice. In choosing to become vulnerable, Jesus broke the otherwise unending cycle of a world lost in strength, continually trying to prove that ‘might is right.’

Second, in choosing to become vulnerable, Jesus modelled humility for us — he showed us a better way to live in community with other vulnerable, frail human beings. Indeed, this is how Paul introduces these verses about Jesus’ humility: he ties together the very real experience of living in Christian community with the need to embrace the humble attitude that Jesus demonstrated.

Incidentally, true humility is not about denying our own worth, but about having a broad enough perspective to see ourselves as in the same boat as all other people. In other words, true humility is about honouring and dignifying others’ experience as much as our own.

Third, for Jesus, the opposite of human humility was not deity in and of itself, but rather, milking the privileges that come with the power of being God for all they were worth. So Jesus’ choice to embrace vulnerability was a healthy alternative to hoarding his power and using it only for his own selfish gain.

And I think most importantly, the demise that comes at the end of Jesus’ life of profound vulnerability is not the end of the story. The resurrection was God’s way of saying ‘yes’ to Jesus’ expression of human holiness, with all it involved. Jesus has been elevated to the position of ‘number one’, in such a powerful way that eventually everyone who has ever lived or ever will, will be unable to deny it.

Incidentally, this is not a statement that Jesus stopped embodying human vulnerability when he rose from the dead. The book of Revelation talks about the slain lamb being worshipped on the throne — a wonderful juxtaposition of vulnerability and strength, of ‘human holiness.’ When the risen Christ showed his wounded hands and side to Thomas, it was precisely the wounds that he still bore, that moved Thomas from a point of doubt and denial to the strongest declaration of faith: ‘my Lord and my God!’ It is the wounds that the resurrected Christ still bears that are actually the identifying feature of his Godhood! An amazing thought!

So what?

So what does all this mean for us? What does it mean to model our attitude on the attitude of Christ?

This will be different for each of us. For some of us, it will be recognising and acting on the need to give up our ‘vulnerability’ — if that ‘vulnerability’ is a perverted form of power, a weakness we hold onto at all costs, by which we manipulate people to act as we want them to, because they feel sorry for us or feel they need to protect us from their refusal to act as we want.

For others of us, it will be about looking at ourselves and asking what privileges and rights we hold onto and milk for all they are worth. Looking at ourselves in this way may have financial implications, as we recognise that part of our humanness is our equality with all people. We may need to acknowledge that our choice to surround ourselves with financial luxuries can be our way of denying our own vulnerability by widening the gulf between our privileged lives and the neediness of others. So modelling ourselves on Jesus’ attitude of humility might mean making conscious decisions to narrow that gulf financially.

Or modelling our attitude on Jesus’, might mean choosing to take risks in our personal relationships. It might mean allowing ourselves to get angry with those we care about if we find that difficult to do, because we recognise that that is about being real and vulnerable with people. On the other hand, it might mean choosing to bite our tongue if we find anger an easy option to protect us from others seeing our pain.

As we share in communion with one another shortly, we might like to think about this sharing as an act of healthy vulnerability. First, it reminds us of God’s choice to become weak to serve and save a world lost in strength. Second, it is an invitation to us to ‘become what we receive’ — to live the holy human life of God for all around us... broken and shared.

In the end, embracing healthy vulnerability, human holiness, is not about forgetting our power. In fact, when we deny our power, we are much more likely to act out of it destructively. Rather, it is about recognising our power and making the choice to use it for good and not for ill. It is about embracing the Christ-part within ourselves; the holy human part of ourselves; in worship of the One who still bears the scars of choosing to dignify and honour human life for all people.