Poured Out

Sept. 25 sermon on Philippians 2:1-13

Susan is a mother of four.  Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, she piles a table with food, corrals her kids in one room, wrangles them into seats, and loads their plates.  Once everybody is served, she wanders around the table with a milk jug in her hand, filling empty glasses, topping off half-full glasses, cutting everybody off at thirds because milk is expensive, and these kids drink it like water.  Susan never sits.  When all is done and the children run away, she clears the table and gets down to dishes.  She eats leftovers as she works.  If you knew her, you would see that she is tired.  You'd be able to tell that something is missing, something is too much, some piece of Susan is getting lost in the shuffle of her life.  She tells herself, "This is just how it is - I've got a lot of kids, I've got a lot to do," but she knows other mothers, other fathers who seem to take it all in stride - or, at least they laugh a little more than she does.  All around her the world grinds on, and Susan feels as though she's being poured out, day by day, like that gallon of milk. 

Depending on where she goes looking for it, Susan might not find a lot of help in the Christian tradition where "pouring out" is concerned.  The idea that self-effacement, self-erasure, or self-abnegation is required to be a disciple is one that's been taught and preached in many times and places.  There are popular understandings of the idea: the lyrics to a catchy devotional song repeat, "Less of me and more of him."  A famous hymn gets at this idea some with the chorus, "Have thine own way" and the image of a person being like malleable clay.  The apostle Paul wrote of himself, more than once, "I am being poured out like a drink offering.” 

It's often around Paul's letters that issues about self-sacrifice come up.  Paul writes to a lot of people that are being persecuted, so that accounts for some of it.   But Paul's christology - his teaching about who Jesus is and how Jesus works - can be hard to understand.  Today, he writes to a small church in Greece, and recites his own hymn that describes what it's like to have the mind of Christ:  "he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness ..."  Paul continues, "he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross." 

For many people who first heard Paul’s words this song wasn't just telling a story about Jesus.  It solved a huge theological problem.  The very earliest Christians may have known people who actually knew Jesus, but they didn't have any sort of a developed way of thinking about how it was that he was God.  They relied on people like Paul, on the stories about Jesus that became our Gospels, and on their experiences of the Holy Spirit in worship to help them understand who this man was and what he meant for them.  So here, in this song, was a clue: Jesus emptied himself and took on human form.  He purged himself of all divine attributes like knowing everything, seeing everything, or having all power, and took on the limitations of human knowledge, human sight, and human power.  In doing so, he suffered.  He poured himself out.  He became something other than what he was and gave up what he had a right to in order to save us.  If you follow this - and, quite frankly, we're diving in to some deep stuff here - it means that Jesus didn't simply die once on the cross to release us from our sins ... he sacrificed his essential self at his birth by being incarnated and becoming a person.

So that's a very clever way to solve a metaphysical quandary.  You pour out the God, fill up on human, and you've got a God-man.  It explained how two such opposite things as divine and human being could be united in one person.  It explained confusing things, like how Jesus didn't save himself from being killed. 

But it sends you down a tricky road if you're looking to be a disciple - because Paul is telling us to be like this, right?  Paul wants us to have the same mind in us that was in Christ.  So here begins not only a theological tradition - a particular way of thinking about how Jesus is God - but an attitude tradition.  Here begins a way of thinking about how Christians should regard themselves and their suffering that has hard consequences.  For it suggests to be like Jesus we have to empty ourselves - we have to pour ourselves out.  And if, for Jesus, that meant that he sacrificed his identity, giving up his divine self in order to live for us, then how can we be concerned with maintaining our selves?  How can you count yourself as a person worth preservation or protection if self-emptying, being poured out, is the defining pattern of life in Christ?  

This is a critique that feminist and liberation theologians who write about poor or oppressed groups of people have leveled against the idea of Jesus' self-emptying because it's been used in the past to keep people "in their place."  You want to fight for freedom and equality?  Well Jesus took the form of a servant.  You want to think more highly of yourself?  Jesus humbled himself.  You can even set the big issues of marginalized groups of people aside, and we all know somebody whose personal faith tells them that it's ok if they suffer because Jesus suffered; or they won't stick up for themselves because Jesus was lowly and meek.  There are Susan’s in this world who brush aside this horrifying feeling that they are losing themselves because nothing has convinced them that they are worth finding. 

It may not seem like this is something a gathering of people like us would have such trouble with.  Mainline Christians - people who are not Roman Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant Fundamentalists - don't really go in for self-abnegation or self-obliteration these days.  A lot of us may even be here this morning because of that.  I, for one, was drawn to a tradition like ours because I hated feeling like I was such a lump of clay, needing to be molded into another shape.  I hated being guilty all of the time and having the sense that I should be poured out and something else should be poured into me.

But here, this gathering of friends and neighbors, this larger community outside these walls?  We just do self-emptying a little differently.  We pour ourselves out every day like drink offerings on all kinds of altars.  Ask the attorney crouched over a brief at 3:00 AM whether she knows about self-emptying.  Ask the parent for whom "stay-at-home" means board meetings and sports and fundraisers and committees and rarely setting foot inside the four walls of a house.  Ask the analyst and trader as their stomachs plummet with the economy.  Ask the person who worries that she has to perform well enough at work or at parties or who worries that he has to look good enough and have good enough things in order to be loved whether they know what it feels like to have self pouring out of you like milk, or to feel self draining out of you like water. 

In August, I attended a conference where a presenter told the story of sitting with a group of leaders of huge churches, all of whom confessed that their personal lives were falling apart.  They found it hard to pray, they worked all the time, and they couldn't remember why they had gotten into ministry in the first place.  They were depleted, completely drained.  These men and women had vision, direction, talent, prestige, money - and they were totally bereft. 

At the same conference, an international aid worker told the story of a pastor in Ethiopia during a time of state persecution of the church.  Like the apostle Paul, he had no family but wandered the countryside tending to these little churches, taking whatever food or money was given to him.  He was captured one day while preaching and thrown in prison.  Three times he was scheduled to be executed, and each time the electrical apparatus failed, so finally he was released and banished from the village.  On his way out of town, this aid worker met him, and knowing that the man had just escaped death, asked where he was going.  "I'm on my way to preach a funeral," the pastor nodded, and locked arms with another friend as they took off over the hill.  This pastor was wounded, threatened, probably physically hungry - but he was full. 

And that's the thing.  He was full.  The Ethiopian pastor was living in an immediate and perspective-enhancing situation and was being spiritually fed in a way that allowed him to go out, day by day, and offer himself to the world without losing himself.  He was a character - he was full and vibrant, not erased or effaced, and yet he gave of himself, he donated his spirit freely.  He could pour himself out because he was constantly drinking something in.

That's the thing about Jesus' self-emptying, too.  The idea that Jesus sacrificed a part of himself to be like us results in a tidy theological package, but shies away from the bold claim of our faith that Jesus offered his whole self on behalf of humanity.  His self-emptying was a giving of his whole self, God giving everything for us.  Jesus didn't empty himself of God; he poured all of himself out in love and service for us because he was drinking freely from his Father all of the time. 

So then there's us, and our self-emptying.  We may not always feel like Jesus calls us to self-abnegation, but our lives often look like we're in a race to pour ourselves out.  We work hard, we meet all sorts of obligations, we keep up the pace and give time, money, and energy to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.  But we can't pour ourselves out without drinking something in.  To be sure, God always gives us the grace we need to keep going - but that's manna for the day, which you can't store up.  That's water from the rock, which is a miracle - a temporary solution to the problem of thirst.  We're come here, to places like this, because we're thirsty, and because we're hungry, and we need something that lasts.  Week after week we come back because we believe that in these books and these prayers and this music and this food and this fellowship we will find living water and bread from heaven.  And we must.  We must find it here.  God has brought us together to feed us, and being a disciple doesn't mean starving yourself to emptiness - it means eating God's food while your appetite for it grows and grows and grows. 

God doesn’t want you to hoard yourself or measure yourself out sparingly.  God does want all of you – but God wants you to give yourself for the things that give you life; and God wants you, not the husk of you that’s left after you’ve been emptied out.  And many of us probably want that too: we want to give ourselves to God, or at least we want to start to understand what that look likes.  But it’s our selves we give to God, standing up like the resurrection people we are.  There is a message of comfort for everybody who feels like Susan, that even when you lose yourself you’re never lost by God.  But there’s a message of hope that is stronger: there is food and drink that will keep you full, and when you find it, you can give as freely as you receive. 

(The Rev. Danielle Thompson, preacher)