Philippians 2.1-13 5 April 2009
“GOD’S DOWNWARD MOBILITY”
Like it or not, we have all learned about downward mobility over the past year. We all have our own stories about the hit we’ve taken in this economic downturn. For example, as I made calls to refinance my home, I learned it has lost 24% of its value in 3 years. As for my pension, it has been halved twice over two years. As for my savings, my mutual funds are a crumpled balloon, wrinkled and empty.
Analysts say it is a great time to invest or buy. The answer comes back, yes, but with what? Still, the climate of current investment opportunity is worth pondering. Speaking from this pulpit, poised with you at the edge of Holy Week, by invest-ment, I’m not talking about precious metals, equities, bonds, CDs, or derivatives.
This most promising investments now, I am convinced, have little to do with the instruments of wealth of the empires of this earth. I refer instead to the reign of God and reevaluating the investment of our lives, our souls, and our days in God.
But let us first notice the extravagant, far-seeing investment God has made in us.
“Let the same mind be in you,” Paul charged the Philippians, “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 him-self and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name.”
Paul brings this bold and beautiful message about the God of downward mobility. This is God’s strategy to redeem the earth. These are God’s plans for rescuing humankind. To follow Jesus, is to buy in, to invest ourselves in the life he brings. Are we willing to partner in this project or movement? That is what discipleship is.
Of course, upward mobility is an easier sell than downward mobility. I recall the story of a physician driving her four-year old daughter to pre-school. The little girl noticed her mom’s stethoscope on the car seat. She picked it up and began play-ing with it. “Be still, my heart,” thought the mother physician. “Will she rise to chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins? Head of research at Sloane-Kettering?” The girl put the stethoscope in her ears and spoke into it. “Welcome to McDonald’s. May I take your order?” Let’s face it. Downward mobility is not the stuff of our dreams.
It cuts against our grain. It is in contrast to the American dream. I mean, it is not about the benefit and privilege of the rich spilling over to the rest—what did we call that, “trickle-down economics”? And that wasn’t working so well even before AIG became part of our vocabulary. Downward mobility has everything to do with God going all of the way down to identify with our deep misery and most pitiful conditions. Then, as God mends the leakiest vessels, all boats rise with the tide.
Downward mobility runs the opposite direction of human dreams of success that celebrate the self-made, conquering, heroic individual at the center of all things. Downward mobility is at the heart of God’s dream, what Jesus called God’s reign.
Here the God of the cross looms large at the center of things. The beauty of this plan is how it propels us toward our exaltation, our vindication, and our rightful elevation. Yet it refuses to deny the tragic. How the power of the cross promises long-awaited deliverance, but at the expense of no one and with no one left be-hind. How could this happen? Not by any human plan or dream. “(Jesus) hum-bled himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross.”
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross tells of the first time she made up her mind to talk to a dying man in order to learn what he was experiencing. She found an excuse to put it off until the next day, as most of us very naturally might. He died before she could speak to him. In all of the essential work Kubler-Ross did with the dying, she never got over that. Her honesty reveals our deep unwillingness to face life’s tragic side, to go down into it with Jesus. So where do we find courage to do so?
In the 1930’s, a young Jewish woman named Simone Weil applied for a one-year leave of absence from a teaching job in England to work as an unskilled laborer, first in an electrical plant and then as a machine operator at Renault Motors. Over the objections of her family, she changed her name, rented a room near the factory, and set about living a life no different from that of other factory workers. She was not a strong woman. She soon grew frail working long days for low pay.
When Hitler occupied
Why would she do something like this?! we want to protest. It makes no sense! The answer was Christ had encountered her and she took him at his word. Although Weil was never baptized, thinking it would make her an insider instead of an outsider like Jesus, she believed it was possible for us to take on the suffering of others. She invested herself—in this world, and in the world to come.
We despair of the cross’s power because we believe it solves nothing. But what if the cross wasn’t meant as a solution to fix our struggles? What if it was meant as a sign to point us toward life’s beautiful fullness despite our problems? What if our faith—with the cross smack dab in the middle—has less to do with the pros-pect of removing all suffering? What if the cross means to transform all suffering? To witness to everyone that God does understand our life at its worst. To signal everyone that God has not forgotten or abandoned us. Our sufferings can then become like those of Jesus, redeeming and reclaiming dark places for good, at worst; aglow with holiness, at best. Yes, the cross is less a solution, more a sign.
“What I call the haven,” writes Weil in her Waiting for God, “as you know, is the Cross. If it cannot be given me to deserve one day to share the Cross of Christ, at least may I share that of the good thief. Of all the beings other than Christ of whom the Gospel tells us, the good thief is by far the one I most envy. To have been at the side of Christ and in the same state during the crucifixion seems to me a far more enviable privilege than to be seated at the right hand of his glory.”
Downward mobility is about God sinking as low as the lowest low of the least person that all would be caught up in his glory at Christ’s resurrection. Our cour-age for downward movement is borne of trust in Jesus eventual upward move-ment. It identifies with suffering, yes. Yet, its final destination is not darkness, but exaltation. Still, this dream of God intimidates us. Where do we begin in this maze? The answer is to start small. A legend from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov reminds us that we might begin with something so small as an onion.
Once upon a time there lived a nasty, horrible old woman. When she died, she didn’t leave behind one single good deed. So the devils got a hold of her and threw her into the flaming lake. Meantime, her guardian angel stood there, trying to remember one good deed that he could mention to God in order to save her. Then he remembered and told God: ‘Once she pulled up an onion in her garden and gave it to the beggar woman.’ So God said to the angel, ‘Take that onion, hold it out to her over the lake, let her hold on to it, and try to pull herself out. If she does, let her enter heaven; if the onion breaks, she will remain where she is.’
So the angel hurried to the woman, held out the onion to her, and told her to take hold of it, and to pull for all she was worth. Then he himself began to pull her out carefully. And she was almost entirely out of the lake. Then the other sinners saw she was being pulled out, and grabbed her feet, so they would be pulled out of the flames as well. But when she saw them, that wicked, horrible woman started kicking them, saying, ‘I’m being pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours!’ Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as she uttered those words, the onion snapped, and she fell back into the lake of fire. Her guardian angel wept and walked away.
Dostoyevsky understood God’s downward mobility. So what is your onion, your spiritual gift? It need not massive or impressive. But don’t cling to it or hoard it. Share it with the struggling, the suffering, even the dying, rather than recoil and retreat. That’s what it means to follow Christ upward through the downward way. Amen.
