Let the same mind be in you

Being one with Christ

Some reflections on Philippians 2 and the Litany of Humility

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 
who, though he was in the form of God,
 did not regard equality with God
 as something to be exploited, 
but emptied himself,
 taking the form of a slave,
 being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 
 he humbled himself
 and became obedient to the point of death—
 even death on a cross. Philippians 2

We can barely begin to imagine what it might be like

to not use all our power

and influence

to get people

to do what we think

is the right thing.

Yet we are told that Jesus

THOUGH HE WAS IN THE FORM OF GOD

did not use his Godliness

to get people to do what he wanted

He chose rather to stand before them

as himself

and say

Here I am

take me or leave me

as we think today about our human relationships

who is of most concern to us.

Is it our friend, our child

our husband or wife

Our brother or our sister.

Perhaps it is some powerful person

who we think could and should make a difference

Are we disgusted, embarrassed, ashamed

disappointed

that people haven’t done what we think they should have done?

The critique of this passage is that we have to have the sort of courage

that says

I need to let go

I need to be brave enough

to allow others to be themselves

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.

From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being loved...Deliver…

From the desire of being extolled Deliver..

From the desire of being honored .Deliver..

From the desire of being praised .Deliver..

From the desire of being preferred to others. Deliver…

I need to let go

to be brave enough

to allow other to be themselves

and to allow myself to be me.

This Litany of Humility that we might reflect on today

invites us to remember

that the model of Jesus

is to understand that we do not come into our own

by being self-centred

but rather by seeing that

we are at our best when we help others to realize their own potential

As we think about Peter, about Nicodemus

about St Mary Magdalene

we see that Jesus’s concern for them is not that they should become

like him

but that they should become the people God wants them to be

That Peter should be able to accept his own inadequacy

that Mary Magdalene might confront her own immorality

that Nicodemus might move beyond

religious formalism

to true relationship

with God

I need to let go

to be brave enough

to allow others to be themselves

and to not desire that everyone

and everything

might be what I want or think it should be.

From the desire of being consulted .Deliver..

From the desire of being approved ... Deliver..

From the fear of being humiliated ... ... Deliver

From the fear of being despised..... Deliver…

From the fear of suffering rebukes ... Deliver..

I need to let go

to be brave enough

to allow others to be themselves

So much of what I want others

to be

is often about the way I think about myself

When I disapprove of someone else’s behaviour

am I actually seeing in other’s what I dislike about myself

When I feel I am humiliated

am I doing to others what I accuse them of doing to me.

Do I despise in others what I most readily see in myself is less than it should be?

Therefore God also highly exalted him
 and gave him the name
 that is above every name, 
so that at the name of Jesus
 every knee should bend,
 in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 
and every tongue should confess
 that Jesus Christ is Lord,
 to the glory of God the Father. Philippians 2

I wonder if we actually appreciate

how important the name of Jesus is

in a world that so often mocks him directly

and indeed that even uses his name as swear word.

Why should we be surprised

that the world continues to do to good people

what it so clearly did to Jesus.

The hatred, bitterness

that so often characterizes anti-Christian sentiment

is also an invitation

to decide that we will not be like that ourselves.

St Paul reminds his fellow Christians

that We have been made for freedom.

Freedom to decide that we will not just respond

but that rather we will

choose

to be different

to act differently.

It requires courage

and may expose us to bitterness

and hatred

but it is, nevertheless, a choice

From the fear of being calumniated ... Deliver

From the fear of being forgotten ... Deliver

From the fear of being ridiculed ... Deliver

From the fear of being wronged ... Deliver From the fear of being suspected ... Deliver

Much of our poor behaviour

is driven by fear

St John tells us that the antidote

to fear

is love.

Perfect love casts out fear

Where ever we feel hated, overlooked

ridiculed, wronged

or picked upon

may we have the courage to pray for love

for the very one who hurts us

That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be esteemed more than I Jesus, grant…

That, in the opinion of the world, others may, increase and I may decrease Jesus, grant..

That others may be chosen and I set aside Jesus, grant…

That others may be praised and I unnoticed Jesus, grant…

That others may be preferred to me in everything Jesus, grant….

That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should Jesus, grant…

Our prayer might be that we might

allow a deep and radical transformation

to take place in our lives

that we will want to love more than be loved

that we will put the needs of others before our own narrow concerns

and that I may do better than seek my own personal glory

In the end

as a person who seeks holiness

my deepest desire should not be that I draw close to God

but that others are drawn into God’s love.

Jesus died…not that he might be good

but that we might know God’s love.

The voice of the prophets in Holy Week

Some short reflections from the prophets for Holy Week

Palm Sunday

Amos 5: ²³Take away from me the noise of your songs;

I will not listen to the melody of your harps. ²⁴But let justice roll down like waters,

and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream

It is not as if God's people do not know that justice is the preferred way.

Amos 9: ¹⁴I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,

and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,

and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.

God will restore, and restore properly. Not without pain, but through the very gift of his holy Son

Holy Monday

Obadiah 1: ²I will surely make you least among the nations;

you shall be utterly despised. ³Your proud heart has deceived you, you that live in the clefts of the rock, "> whose dwelling is in the heights. You say in your heart, ‘Who will bring me down to the ground?’ ⁴Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, from there I will bring you down,

says the Lord.

How easily we misplace our trust.

Jonah 2: ⁷As my life was ebbing away,

I remembered the Lord; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. ⁸Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty. ⁹But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay.

Deliverance belongs to the Lord!’

I make a mistake when I think I am the source of justice and holiness.

Holy Tuesday

Micah 1: ³For lo, the Lord is coming out of his place,

and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. ⁴Then the mountains will melt under him and the valleys will burst open, like wax near the fire, like waters poured down a steep place. ⁵All this is for the transgression of Jacob

and for the sins of the house of Israel.

The Lord's will to deal with my sin is unremitting and determined. He will forgive me. He will have me, even if I am slow and unwilling to respond.

Holy Wednesday

Micah 4

In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, ² and many nations shall come and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,

and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

In hope, not desperation; in faith not in decline. I come to the Lord because he draws me to himself.

Maundy Thursday

Habbakuk 3

His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise. ⁴The brightness was like the sun; rays came forth from his hand,

where his power lay hidden.

There is no way to overlook the glory of the Lord

Good Friday

Zephaniah 2

¹¹The Lord will be terrible against them; he will shrivel all the gods of the earth, and to him shall bow down, each in its place,

all the coasts and islands of the nations.

Everything that would wrongly demand our attention and our worship will be destroyed before Jesus, that we his sisters and brothers may live with the freedom and dignity that God destined us to share.

Holy Saturday-Easter Eve

Zephaniah 3

¹⁵The Lord has taken away the judgements against you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst;

you shall fear disaster no more. .

The Lord completes all that he sets out to complete

The road goes ever on!

Sixth Sunday in Lent _ commonly called Palm Sunday. 17th April 2011 Readings of the Eucharist are: Isaiah 50:4-9a Psalm 31:9-16 Philippians 2:5-11 and the Passion according to Matthew 26:14-27:66 or Matthew 27:11-54

The last time i thought about this particular cycle of reading (Year A) I had just been to Europe a few months before so I had done some thinking about what did and what did not work when you plan a complex trip.

A few months later my wife and I took another journey

when we made a decision to journey separately.

We all make

all sorts of journeys.

And journeys require tenacity

they need planning

and they change us

As Holy Week begins we take something of a journey

it is undergirded by the story of Jesus last days before his death.

We have also been taking a journey through Lent,

in these weeks we have been thinking about what it means to be Christian

we have been trying to hear the voice of Jesus

(chiefly through the witness of John's gospel)

about how we might try to live faithfully in the spirit of the promises we made

or which were made for us at Baptism.

How do we continue the journey begun at our baptism

when we were asked :

Do you turn to Christ?
Do you repent of sin?

Do you reject selfishness?

Do you renounce evil?

These promises are reaffirmed on Easter Day

We have also reflected on the mystery of life and death
and hear that there is a great overshadowing promise of Jesus:
"I am the Resurrection and the Life!"
It is the promise which breathes life back into our deadness.
And which open the eyes of the blind heart.

The reading from the letter to the Philippians this week

addresses this journey, this transition, this growth,
in a more poetic and philisophical way

St Paul writes

Philippians 2:5-11

2:5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

2:6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

2:7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,

2:8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.

2:9 Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name,

2:10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

2:11 and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

The purpose of the journey is that we may become like Christ.
Not presuming on our Godly nature

but acting out of it.
It is a journey of suffering
a journey of challenge
which will transform us that we may be like him

Such journeys require tenacity

they need planning

and they change us

as we enact it liturgically

the real goal is to pursue it

in reality

The Resurrection & The Life

Sunday April 10th (formerly known as Passion Sunday) you could read from the selection of readings which includes Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11;John 11:1-45 - The Fifth Sunday of Lent

We encounter one of the hardest stories for modern Christians to come to grips with

because this story of the resurrection of Lazarus confronts us with a dead person

who is brought back to life

But when I think about it

I have had a number of resurrection experiences

where a dead person has been revived.

We live, for example, in an era where the miracle of modern medicine

means life for any number of people

who a generation ago would have died prematurely.

I don't want to belittle what Jesus did for Lazarus;

that we don't fully understand it

is obvious.

Most of us would find that as our lives go on

our encounter with

the 'death event'

is a curious and mixed-bag

and is not easily described

either physically, spiritually or emotionally.

If we try to get straight just what happened

and to focus solely on the mechanics of the event

This is, I suspect, rather to miss the point of this narrative

that we read today.

Change of focus

The commentators on John's Gospel

often make the point

that this chapter 11 marks a point of transition

in the Gospel

it moves away from the miraculous signs

to the engagement with the resurrection

...what one writer says is 'the end of the Book of Signs

and the beginning of the Book of Glory'...

the two are connected of course

But we are reminded that the greatest sign of Christ's glory

is his death and resurrection.

Death is at least one of, and probably, the most important thing

that happens to us

This almost seems trite to say.

Yet we can be in danger of not getting it right

and missing what is important.

We do this because we are fearful, sad, angry, guilty....and any other range of things

The Christian mystery is that

Death is the gate to eternal life.

This doesn't just happen

even for Martha and Mary

it has to be carefully teased out.

And the key insight that this passage reveals

is that death is transformed

when Jesus is brought into the situation

If we do nothing else

when confronted

with death

we need to be with Jesus.

I do not pretend this is easy.

It does not make the pain go away.

This is not what is on offer.

What is on offer is the transformation of death

into resurrection and life.

We all have sneaking glimmers of what this might be like.

Not always, usually, or even someone standing outside a tomb

and shouting "Come Out!"

but the transformation is as profound.

We are to come to faith in Jesus

and hear Jesus says what he says to Martha

11:25 Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life.

Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live"

This is not, I suggest, a formula

but rather an experience

How does Jesus speak LIFE

into our experience of DEATH?

If we do not listen

if we do not ask

if we do not allow Jesus to breathe life into the dry bones

then we are missing out

on the key transformation.

Death is, I suggest,

the most wonderful experience of life.

In it we encounter the fulness of Jesus.

It is, as we enter into it,

not without pain.

But also with the possibility of great hope.

Jesus stands at the door of our life

and shouts "Come Out"

We do not, and will not

fully understand what is going on.

There is not the promise of no pain

or no sadness

rather that the gate of death will become

the way to a new way of living.

This only happens

when we allow Jesus to transform it.

in the related story in Ezekiel 37 that we read today

the prophet speaks God's word

over a valley of dead bones

(It is almost a bizarre experience...but we are dealing in highly imaginal language here)

The idea is the same

God transforms what is dead

to a new way of living.

This week

• Where am I beseiged by death? My own, someone else's, or...?
• Can I give a little time to allow Jesus to speak to this...what does he say?
• Can I believe this.....pray for belief (Lord I believe...but help my unbelief?)
• Can we prophesy over the death that surrounds us on every side..."I am the Resurrection and the Life says the Lord"

In the valley of darkness
surrounded by bones
speak the words I need to hear
I am the resurrection and the life.
Lord I want to believe
let my unbelief crumble in the face of your Word

Come on down!

Sunday 10th April 2011 (formerly known as Passion Sunday) you could read from the selection of readings which includes Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11;John 11:1-45 - The Fifth Sunday of Lent

Perhaps one of the hardest stories for modern Christians to come to grips with

because this story of the resurrection of Lazarus confronts us with a dead person

who is brought back to life

But when I think about it

I have had a number of resurrection experiences where a dead person has been revived.

We live, for example, in an era where the miracle of modern medicine

means life for any number of people

who a generation ago would have died prematurely.

I don't want to belittle what Jesus did for Lazarus;

that we don't fully understand it

is obvious.

Most of us would find that as our lives go on

our encounter with

the 'death event'

is a curious and mixed-bag

and is not easily described

either physically, spiritually or emotionally.

If we try to get straight just what happened

and to focus solely on the mechanics of the event

This is, I suspect, rather to miss the point of this narrative

that we read today.

Change of focus

The commentators on John's Gospel

often make the point

that this chapter 11 marks a point of transition

in the Gospel

it moves away from the miraculous signs

to the engagement with the resurrection

...what one writer says is 'the end of the Book of Signs

and the beginning of the Book of Glory'...

the two are connected of course

But we are reminded that the greatest sign of Christ's glory

is his death and resurrection.

Death is at least one of, and probably, the most important things

that happen to us

This almost seems trite to say.

Yet we can be in danger of not getting it right

and missing what is important.

We do this because we are fearful, sad, angry, guilty....and any other range of things

The Christian mystery is that

Death is the gate to eternal life.

This doesn't just happen

even for Martha and Mary

it has to be carefully teased out.

And the key insight that this passage reveals

is that death is transformed

when Jesus is brought to bear.

If we do nothing else

when confronted

with death

we need to be with Jesus.

I do not pretend this is easy.

It does not make the pain go away.

This is not what is on offer.

What is on offer is the transfromation of death

into resurrection and life.

We all have sneaking glimmers of what this might be like.

Not always someone standing outside a tomb

and shouting "Come Out!"

but the transformation is as profound.

We are to come to faith in Jesus

and hear Jesus says what he says to Martha

11:25 Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life.

Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live"

This is not, I suggest, a formula

but rather an experience

How does Jesus speak LIFE

into your experience of DEATH?

If we do not listen

if we do not ask

if we do not allow Jesus to breathe life into the dry bones

then we are missing out

on the key transformation.

Death is, I suggest,

the most wonderful experience of life.

In it we encounter the fulness of Jesus.

It is, as we enter into it,

not without pain.

But also with the possibility of great hope.

Jesus stands at the door of our life

and shouts "Come Out"

We do not, and will not

fully understand what is going on.

There is not the promise of no pain

or no sadness

rather that the gate of death will become

the way to a new way of living.

This only happens

when we allow Jesus to transform it.

in the related story in Ezekiel 37 that we read today

the prophet speaks God's word

over a valley of dead bones

(It is almost a bizarre experience...but we are dealing in highly imaginal language here)

The idea is the same

God transforms what is dead

to a new way of living.

This week

Where am I beseiged by death? My own, someone else's or...?

Can I give a little time to allow Jesus to speak to this...what does he say?

Can I believe this.....pray for belief (Lord I believe...but help my unbelief?)

Can we prophesy over the death that surrounds us on every side..."I am the Resurrection and the Life says the Lord"

In the valley of darkness
surrounded by bones
speak the words I need to hear
I am the resurrection and the life.
Lord I want to believe
let my unbelief crumble in the face of your Word