An Unenviable Indulgence September 25, 2011 Proper 21 Ordinary Time, Year A Philippians 2.1-13

            If you set a bunch of monkeys to work to earn slices of cucumber they toil away industriously. But start paying one member of the group in grapes and the rest suddenly lose their taste for gourds and go on strike.

            This is called envy, and it can make monkeys out of us all.

            Science writer Natalie Angier marvels at our race’s addiction to a sin that hurts like a hair shirt. “It is,” she observes, “a vice few can avoid yet nobody craves, for to experience envy is to feel small and inferior, a loser shrink-wrapped in spite.” (See more at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/science/17angi.html.) Envy is a Mobius strip of selfishness, a twisted, single-sided spiritual prison which offers no reward beyond the opportunity to go on feeling bad.

            Paul offers Christians an escape from this zero-sum game envy, and the exit is shaped like a cross.

            “Be like minded . . . let this mind be in you.” The old King James preserves the underlying link between verse two and verse five in the original Greek. In the middle comes the mandate to avoid “selfishness,” a word that originally referred to a day-laborer who saw nothing in a job but what he could get out of it in the short-term. Not surprisingly, it quickly migrated to politicians and party squabbles. This selfishness sits at the center of two lists of virtues which amount to unity (v.2) and selflessness (v.3).

            So all pursuit of virtue and all avoidance of vice comes from having the right mindset. William James famously defined conversion as a shift in the habitual center of one’s personal energy. Paul says the Christian is one whose habitual center shifts from self to self-sacrifice, whose bull’s eye in life lies at the cross-hairs of Calvary, whose focus on the absolute glory of God obliterates all awareness of her own relative rank.

            Christian unity can never consist of an effort to get in harmony with one another. We are far too inconsistent – and too envious – for that. Oneness instead arises from each individual clawing his way downward toward the standard of the cross. And when we get to the very bottom, Paul claims, we will realize we have arrived at the top. Or, better still, we will discover that top and bottom no longer matter, and that we are free at last.

Enviously,

Doug

Collect

Heavenly Father, your Son sacrificed glory for the bankruptcy of the cross. Grant that we, taking up our crosses, might set aside self in the service of others, that in the unity of the church the world might see the unity of the One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.

Benediction

When you feel small

            May the mind of Christ enlarge your love for others.

When you feel ignored

May the mind of Christ make you aware of others.

When you feel worthless

            May the mind of Christ deepen your delight in others.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.