Everybody Likes Jesus?

Everybody Likes Jesus?

Philippians 2:5-11

February 26, 2020 (Ash Wednesday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

There are two songs I know of that can only really be sung on this night, Ash Wednesday. One of them we sang at the beginning of the service tonight: “Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days.” The other is called “Sunday’s Palms Are Wednesday’s Ashes.” I know, those titles just roll off the tongue, don’t they? But that latter song refers to the older practice of keeping some of the branches we use on Palm Sunday so that we can burn them to make the ash for Ash Wednesday. I tried that the first year I was here. Pastor Aaron had left behind the palms from the previous year, so I took them down to the parking lot and set them on fire. Easy, peasy! Yeah, I nearly burned the building down, which would have been a real problem since we were, at that point, just about finished with the rebuild project. So, since then, I’ve chosen to get my ashes not from the previous year’s Palm Sunday, but from Cokesbury!

Lent is a strange time of year, though. I know a lot of traditions don’t observe it, partly because it is so intrusive, so demanding. If we think of Lent at all, it’s usually as the time we’re supposed to “give something up” or the time when Catholics don’t eat meat on Fridays. Savvy marketing pros have tapped into that so that restaurants who could care less about religion the rest of the year start advertising their fish specialities during Lent. Even Chick-fil-a serves fish during Lent (but of course not on Sundays)! (Cod-fil-a!)

When I was growing up, we didn’t observe Ash Wednesday at my home church, so the only way I knew Lent had begun was when we began getting up early on Sunday mornings to go to breakfast. The United Methodist churches in our area had a long tradition of hosting round-robin Lenten breakfasts on Sunday mornings. Each church would take a Sunday, provide a breakfast and a brief program, but we all had to be done in time to get back to our own churches for worship. So, yes, my earliest memory of Methodist Lent is egg casseroles—what else for a good Methodist, right? Though, as I learned more about the actual season, I came to realize that’s really the opposite of the spirit of Lent. Lent is supposed to be a season of fasting, of self-denial, of going without so that we can focus on the main reason for these forty days. This season is not about breakfast or fish or fasting or even giving something up. The main point of this season is to refocus on Jesus. It’s meant to be a time that prepares us to walk with him to the cross and the empty tomb.

The season of Lent developed early in the history of the church in part as a time for those who had walked away from Jesus and the church to return, to seek forgiveness and to, on Easter, be welcomed back into the fellowship of the church. So Lent took on a penitential atmosphere, a time for repentance and growing faith (cf. Walt, Listen to Him, pg. xiii). But in the center of it all was always Jesus, always the awareness that at the end of this 40-day journey is a cross, a death, and ultimately a resurrection (though that’s actually in the season of Easter, not Lent). If you count the days from today until the Saturday before Easter, however, you will come up with forty-six days, not forty. That’s because Sundays are not considered part of Lent. Sundays are not part of Lent because they are always days of celebration, celebrations of the resurrection, feast days rather than fasting days. A friend of mine several years ago decided that if he gave up watching sports on television during Lent, he would have a whole lot more time to spend with Jesus, so he said he was going to give up televised sports for Lent. Then someone pointed out to him that March Madness happened during Lent, and my friend loves basketball. Thankfully, he remembered that Sundays are not a part of Lent, so he could watch basketball on Sundays. Well, while that might be within the bounds of Lent, I’m not sure it captures the spirit of Lent, because the whole point of whatever we do during this season should be that it helps us draw closer to Jesus. Every bit as much (and maybe more) as in Advent, Jesus is the reason for this season.

But which Jesus? That’s really the challenge today. Which Jesus is it you are trying to get close to? If you’ll pardon my bad grammar, there are a lot of “Jesuses” out there today. There’s the conservative Jesus and the liberal Jesus. There is the Democrat Jesus and the Republican Jesus. There’s the Jesus who prefers hymns and the Jesus who prefers contemporary music. There’s “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” and the Mr. Rogers look-alike Jesus. There’s the nationalistic Jesus and the legalistic Jesus, the tree-hugger Jesus and the angry Jesus, the Jesus who loves me but hates my enemies, and the Jesus who seems to agree with pretty much everything “I” think. It is amazing how often I remake Jesus in my own image, and how often I end up worshipping a Jesus who is surprisingly just like me, who has my values and who would never question my choices. 18th century French writer Voltaire observed that God created us in his own image and we have since returned the favor.

In our world, a lot of people say they actually do like Jesus. Muslims like Jesus—as a prophet, just a little behind Mohammed. Spiritualists like Jesus—he is one of the most enlightened human beings to ever live. Jews like Jesus, if they look at him historically. He was a reformer who took on the rulers and authorities and unfortunately got himself killed doing so. Even a lot of atheists like Jesus—he was a good man, a social reformer who taught that everyone should just love everybody else. No one who is serious about history denies that Jesus existed, and most people like him—at least they like the Jesus they create in their own thoughts, the Jesus they get when they pick and choose who he was and what he said (cf. Strauss, Jesus Behaving Badly, pgs. 9-10). Everybody likes Jesus—as long as he can be the Jesus we design. Which Jesus do we worship? Which Jesus are we going to pursue this Lenten season?

Paul, the one-time persecutor of the church, encountered Jesus in a powerful and life-changing way. You may remember the story, how on his way to arrest some Christians because of their belief in Jesus he was literally knocked to the ground by a blinding light. And he heard a voice from heaven that asked, “Why do you persecute me?” It was Jesus, and Paul was never the same after that moment. This one who had dedicated his life to wiping out the followers of Jesus became a follower himself. He no longer traveled with murderous intent but with saving hope, and he traveled all across the Roman Empire preaching the good news about Jesus. He also wrote letters, letters which continue to help us not only know how to live the Christian life but also how to understand Jesus. While the Gospels, which we will look at a lot during Lent, help us learn what Jesus did and taught, Paul helps us understand what it all means. In the passage we read tonight, Paul is trying to help the Philippians find a path to unity, and he does that by reminding them what Jesus was like. The real Jesus. Not the Jesus they had made up in their minds. Not Jesus as they wished he was. The Jesus Paul had encountered along the road and the Jesus he had been taught about from those who knew him directly. Most scholars think Paul is quoting an ancient hymn here; a few others think he might have written this poem himself. Either way, it is some of the most moving and beautiful words Paul ever put on paper (cf. Barclay, The Letters to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, pg. 34). In these words—whether they are lyrics borrowed or created—Paul gives us an image of the real, authentic Jesus.

This passage is far too rich for us to cover it in depth tonight, but for our purposes as we launch into this series, I want to give you three words to remember, three hooks on which to hang some thoughts about Jesus tonight—and in good preacher fashion, they all begin with the same letter. The first word is “lowered.” In verses 6-8, Paul very poetically talks about Jesus coming to earth, that this one who was God came down to live and walk among us. “He made himself nothing,” Paul says (2:7). In these verses, we find the basis for the doctrine that Jesus is both fully God and fully human, but unfortunately older translations talked about Jesus emptying himself. That gives us the image of something being poured out, how we empty a glass or a box, leaving nothing behind. That’s not what Paul is saying. Jesus gave up none of his divinity when he came to earth. There’s a whole lot of technical stuff that goes into the original language here which I’m not going to bore you with tonight, but here’s what Paul is saying in a nutshell: Jesus’ nature (his essence) did not change. When he became human he was every bit as much God as he was before. But his outward appearance changed. He added to what he was before. He became human. He was fully God and fully human, both at the same time. Mind blown. Because it is a mind-blowing, hard to understand idea. But how else could he reach us? As God, he was far beyond our comprehension. He had to become like us in order to reach us, in order for us to pay attention to him or even be in his presence. He lowered himself, by choice. In fact, he came (Paul says) as a slave (2:7); “servant” is not strong enough a translation in verse 7. When we think of servant, we usually think of something like what we see on Downton Abbey or some other historical show, where the “servants,” while certainly “lesser” in status, are often treated somewhat like extended family. No, the image Paul has in mind is a slave, a person without advantages, rights or privileges. A nobody. A nothing. Someone who would be, as the prophet Isaiah put it centuries before, “despised and rejected,” thought of as nothing (Isaiah 53:3). Jesus lowered himself—but we don’t like that kind of Jesus. We’d rather have someone important, a celebrity, a somebody, rich and powerful and prosperous—not a slave who “made himself nothing” (Fee, Philippians, pg. 91, 98; Barclay 35-37). Yet that’s the way Scripture says he came. Lowered.

The second word for tonight is love; we see that in verse 8: “He humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” Elsewhere, Paul reminds us that it’s hard to find someone who would die for you. While we often say we would die for members of our family, beyond that most people aren’t willing to die for someone else, no matter how “good” a person they are (cf. Romans 5:6-8). But Jesus died for us even when we weren’t “good,” while we were still sinners, while we were still rebelling against him, while we had nothing good to say about him. Jesus died for us even then. And yes, he did a lot of teaching about how people ought to live, but his main purpose in coming (in lowering himself) was to love us all by offering his life in our place. He took our sin on himself and, in some way we don’t fully understand, he dealt with it through his death on the cross. He looked down through the hallways of history, and he saw you and me and the sin we would get ourselves into—and he still loved us. “Greater love has no one than this,” Jesus told his disciples, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). And on that same evening, his last night with them, he reminded them that his main command to them was to love one another the way he loved them (cf. John 15:12). Love one another with your lives, he says. Love looks like a cross, and Jesus ultimately won our hearts not with a demonstration of power but by showing us a love we could not resist (cf. Barclay 38). His death was not an accident or a mistake in judgment. It wasn’t something engineered by Rome or planned by the Jewish leaders. It was his reason for coming. His death was an act of love.

Our response then is to acknowledge who Jesus is. Paul puts it this way: “At the name of Jesus every knee should bow…and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (2:10-11). The third word for tonight is “Lord.” That’s who Jesus is. The very first Christian creed or statement of belief consisted of three words: “Jesus is Lord.” Today, we have longer creeds like the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed, developed through the centuries as the church sorted out theological issues, but in the early church, all they knew was, “Jesus is Lord.” The danger of that creed, however, is he was not the only one claiming to be Lord in the first century. Caesar also claimed to be “Lord.” Augustus Caesar, the current Roman emperor at the time, had put an end to the Roman civil war. He had brought in the pax Romana, the “peace of Rome,” to the whole known world. He had military savvy and organizational skills, and it wasn’t long before people began to see him as more than a man. He must be divine; he must be a god. So “Caesar is Lord” was the accepted creed of the Empire. Before Augustus, there had been another lord: Alexander the Great. By the age of 33 he had conquered much of the known world for Greece and he himself suggested people might view him as divine. Now, that takes some ego to say, “I might be a god.” Nevertheless, for a while, “Alexander is Lord” was the creed of the known world. And now along come these Christians who claim that Jesus is Lord. Jesus—son of a carpenter from a little, dinky town in the northern part of an insignificant province (a town not even important enough to be mentioned on maps of the time). Jesus—who had gained some notoriety with his teaching but then was executed as a criminal. That Jesus is Lord, not these great mean like Alexander and Augustus. These crazy Christians dared to claim that Jesus “was the reality, and Alexander and Augustus were the caricature” (Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters, pg. 101). And we still claim that, two thousand years later. There is no other Lord than Jesus, and that’s quickly becoming every bit as radical an idea in our time as it was in the first century. There are lots of Lord vying for our attention, our allegiance, our worship. And every year, Lent comes along and asks us: who will you follow? Who is your Lord?

This is the Biblical Jesus: one who was lowered to the place of a slave, one who loves without condition and without end, and one who is Lord over everything we see and know. He is more fearsome and more loving than we have ever imagined. He is not the meek and mild savior we imagine, nor is he the personal assistant we seem to think we want. Jesus is so much more than the god create in our minds, so shouldn’t we “start from Jesus himself and rethink our whole picture of God around him” (Wright 104)? We’re going to do that this Lenten season, but we’re going to go about it by looking at some assumptions, even some objections, people have to Jesus. We’re going to look at some times when Jesus seems to have been behaving badly: like when he talked about scorching the earth, or when he preached about hell, or when he seemed to be legalistic or racist. Along the way, we’ll find some surprising pictures because Jesus is anything but “meek and mild.” He just might challenge some of our own sacred cows.

One of my favorite scenes in The Chronicles of Narnia comes early on in the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The children are trying to figure out who this Aslan character is that Mr. and Mrs. Beaver keep talking about. He’s a lion, king of the beasts, and it’s obvious he’s rather fearsome, so they ask, “Is he safe?” Mr. Beaver responds, “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king, I tell you” (Lewis 64). That’s as good a description of Jesus as I have ever come across. He’s not safe, but he’s good. He’s the king. He’s the Lord.

And so tonight, we have a chance to begin this Lenten journey by acknowledging our own mortality. We have a chance to, at least symbolically, lower ourselves with Jesus. Ashes have always been a symbol of mourning (Job sits in ashes when he is mourning the loss of all his property and family, Job 2:8), and early in church history ashes became a symbol of mourning our sins. Tonight as we begin another Lenten journey with Jesus, you’re invited to come and receive the ashes marked on your forehead in the shape of a cross as a symbolic way of saying, “I want to walk with Jesus, wherever he leads.” As the band comes to help prepare our hearts for these ashes, I want to share the words of one of those songs I mentioned a few minutes ago, and use these words as a prayer tonight.

Sunday’s palms are Wednesday’s ashes,As another Lent begins;Thus we kneel before our MakerIn contrition for our sins.We have marred baptismal pledges,In rebellion gone astray;Now, returning, seek forgiveness;Grant us pardon, God, this day! (FWS 2138)

Amen.