Emptying Works Two Ways, or Grasping Humility
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After some words of introduction, I want to start with a very tough illustration about a suicide and end with a very touching one about a man who was saved. In between I will say a couple more things about this self-emptying that Jesus does and that Paul does himself. The overall message: humility, in relation to God, is not about giving up our power, but about understanding and connecting with God's power. This means that letting go and even giving up our mastery can help us keep things together. I think a lot of our lives are spent running away from emptiness and I think God's strategy, and Jesus' strategy and Paul's strategy is to take it head-on and reverse the flow. As the bulletin cover is supposed to show: Christ crucified within a field of force-God emptied, self-limited, concentrated, incarnated, given for us-but then God's presence in that one man magnified, lifted up above every name so that if you are not worshipping God in him, you are worshipping somebody or something else.
This past week brought terrible news that a college aged son of one-time members of the Palisades Church had committed suicide. It was unclear why he took the pills, he had just qualified for one of skiing events with the US Olympic team. I did not go to the service yesterday, but as Caroline and I drove through Palisades on the way to the Metropolitan to see the tapestries (and Surrealism and Gentileschi exhibits), we saw the enormous number of cars already filling the streets around the church. The idea of a gifted and privileged young person's suicide both horrifies and fascinates us. We all know that somewhere, when we have looked at the real sins in our lives, that there is that self-destructive piece-the snake in the garden, (the asp Cleopatra loved and which she allowed to bite her to death-painted often by Gentileschi).
I know the parents and I will probably hear about the service. Some will have found it a catharsis-a form of purifying and self-emptying by getting the feelings out. Worship in the church, especially at funerals, is supposed to be such a container. On the other hand, I can think of all the introverts in that room, perhaps including the college student's father, who might have felt it an exploitative spectacle, a kind of reverse communion service which might further tear apart. Either way, we think of the terrible emptying of grief.
Even before I had heard of the suicide I had thought of the bulletin cover kind of painting-it is a kind of cosmic pieta of God the Father holding his dying son-letting Jesus go into the hands of evil and ignorant people-allowing Himself to be split by evil in order to overcome all splitting. God is not simply a human parent, however, God is the Holy One and part of the field of force is God's holiness, not simply God's love. Hallowed be Thy name-it is holiness that takes away the sting of death. I can not say more about this today, but God's holiness is not emptied and it is God's holiness that is the true source of glory. God's holiness is the motive of God's self-giving as it is finally of all our giving because if we don't give we don't become whole either.
But I also have to admit to you that my spirituality is largely extroverted and that you who are introverts may always be better at the inner life that is the core of humility. And you who do some Eastern disciplines of meditation in your prayer life-taking the rushing ideas, slowing them down, letting them go-this discipline of self-emptying can complement the Christian calling to be in the world but not of it. That, I think, is the big directional difference between prayer and meditation; Christian self-emptying does not take you out of the world, but more deeply into it. Thus the self-emptying passage has been used to understand how the incarnation works and I will tell you it remains paradoxical. (Some of the next section spoken earlier, not with full detail).
The dynamics of this passage have a concrete application in the master plan for this church. The whole cloister idea which all of us wonder whether we can afford-that cloister is to be the opposite, empty yet deepening space to move us down and inward in contrast to the soaring tower we have above. It is not just about nature and being close to the soil, too, but it is about a place for introverted sometimes individualized spirituality. It is space to remember that God created all things, visible and invisible, and gives everything life in the divine economy. So it is to be a garden of wholeness, a memory of the garden of Eden and the garden of Gethsemane and a look forward to the garden of Paradise, so that I urge two trees, the tree of wisdom and the tree of life, maybe one an evergreen and one a flowering dogwood. And where I don't feel sure is whether we might have the trees and fountain more centered than they are in plan posted in the parish house.
One other scripture text pressed itself upon me as I thought about these friends' son. I thought of Jesus experiencing the tremendous high of his baptism, joining his mentor John the Baptist in the water, feeling the exaltation of the Spirit descending and God's blessing blasting through him-and then you know the Spirit casts him, drives him, into the wilderness. After the enormous experience of inflation, a terrible deflation and he is tempted by the devil, tested, weakened, isolated-and yet he does not take the power the devil offers. He does not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped. He accepts the form of a servant, the mission of being a new kind of Messiah. In a way he understands God as Father enough so that he wants God to be everybody's Father in heaven.
To my mind, the young man who committed suicide last Monday experienced the great inflation of making the Olympic team and then, like all of us after a great achievement, the self-doubts come in: who did we do this for? did we deserve it? was it worth all that trouble? What difference will it make? He is cast into the wilderness but this young man has more pills than faith. And what is faith here but that self-knowledge that goes with the knowledge of God. Filled up with a moment's glory-perhaps-emptied by so much outside effort of the heroic self-the vacuum, the void, the sirens call.
As I will say on Pentecost, when the new members join, that suicide was not the most grievous sin against the Holy Spirit, though it was a sin and causes a particular kind of wound. Each of us knows pressures and impossible situations, most of us in this room have felt panic mount and shame and guilt and fear-and also the resenting desire to show somebody-that mis-shapen spirit of sacrifice. Some of you know it in addictions and self-abandonment. Those things may even humiliate you, but they aren't the humility of getting down to the core. When Albert Schweitzer had proved he was one of the greatest young organists of his time, and a world authority on Johann Sebastian Bach and a brilliant theologian-he addressed the whole inflation of Western Europe by switching fields to medicine and leaving for a remote part of Africa, what is now part of Gabon. This is kenosis, the self-emptying that creates the field of force. For you young people I would remember Schweitzer himself as a young man unsure of his path-he headed into the Alps on a solo camping trip-I don't think for 40 days-but he took only his New Testament with him. This is the man who could later say, in his Nobel acceptance speech in 1958, that nuclear weapons were threatening the whole world with suicide.
And so now we have suicide bombers as the only response perceived by a people who have been humiliated so totally by their Israeli occupiers. Humility allows our eyes of empathy to operate-to know that if we were Jews, loyal to our calling to survive, we might be ruthless--- and if we were Palestinians, whose fathers had been tortured and whose mothers shamed at checkpoints-would we not know hate? And so we re-enter the struggle of the Christian as Paul describes it-to understand this great Christ, who he at first despised, and now he is called to follow: Think of him in jail, dictating these words: Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also... can you top this... circumcized on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, tribe of Benjamin, pharisee beta kappa, perfect prosecutor... But now whatever gain I had, I count as loss for the sake of Christ. ... Who cares if I lose everything if I can be found in Him, not having a righteousness-or a fulfillment-based in my own striving, but one based in my acceptance of the gift of grace, so that I may know him and the power of the resurrection."
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