Nothing good ever happens after the words “Hold My Beer†are spoken. For those not in the know, this phrase usually proceeds some idiotic stunt, possibly a trip to the emergency room, and are most often spoken by under 30 members of one gender, mine to be exact, though not always. Women and old men can, at times, have a “hold my beer†moment. Hold my beer means a burn or a broken bone, if you’re lucky. If you aren’t, it could well result in a Darwin Award.
Started in 1993, the Darwin Awards claim to:
[…] commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives: by eliminating themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chance of long-term survival. In other words, they are cautionary tales about people who kill themselves in really stupid ways, and in doing so, significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race.
A Darwin is not awarded, however, if your stupidity kills others, nor do things like drinking and driving or texting and driving qualify, for that is ordinary idiocy, nothing extraordinary about it.
I’ve never really known how to feel about the Darwin awards. Death is not funny, and someone is left grieving, yet humans have always told cautionary tales, and these are indeed cautionary tales. Scripture is full of cautionary tales too, as are fairy tales and fiction. But to be honest, I’m probably not a good judge of what is funny, as I’m not a huge fan of slapstick. I even get uneasy with things like the “funniest home video†program, where all too often we are asked to laugh at someone being injured.
Current Darwin Award listings include Jonathan Chow of Singapore, who did a virtual “hold my beer†when he opened SnapChat, a popular video messaging app, handed his phone to a friend, and jumped over a railing, intending to land on a parapet below. Unfortunately, the parapet wasn’t really a parapet. In fact, it was flimsy gypsum board, and Chow fell four stories to his death.
Another story involves Nitzia Corral and Clarissa Miranda who were attending a horse race next to the airstrip in ChÃnipas, Mexico. They really really wanted that cool selfie, so they stood up on the truck to get a good angle. They never heard the small plane that was trying to land, but they felt its wing.
These stories are part of a growing body of anecdotes that suggests selfies kill. In fact, in 2015, a story ping-ponged across the internet claiming that selfies killed more people each year than did sharks. Caitlin Dewey, writing for The Washington Post, took the authors of the study, and I use that term loosely, to task, noting that selfies, or more specifically, the distraction caused when focusing on taking a selfie, was an “intermediate mechanism†rather than a “direct mechanism†of death, while a shark ripping your arm off is unquestionably a “direct mechanism.†Other stories in the world of clickbait journalism claim that more than half of all selfie deaths take place in India, but again, this is highly debatable.
We see people taking selfies everywhere. Disney had to ban selfie sticks, those extending poles people use to get the right angle, as they were being used on rollercoasters and shoved through crowds at parades and fireworks, injuring others.
Whether or not selfies kill or selfie sticks injure, most will agree that we have a problem, one that social scientists have noticed and around which there is a growing body of real data. It turns out physical injury is not the biggest threat in selfie-land. The social media depression that is stalking our kids isn’t narcissism run amok, though there is plenty of narcissism run amok in our culture. Instead, selfie-land is a self-esteem arms race in which someone else always had a better vacation, a better prom dress, a better campus tour. The cult of selfies and social media leaves people feeling worthless.
On a good day, those who are self-aware walk the razor’s edge between self-esteem and a sense of utter worthlessness, painfully aware of our own failures. “Fake it ’til you make it†may work for some, but many of us still feel like fakes even when we’ve made it, cataloging each and every time we have made a mistake, gotten it wrong. Others may see us as gifted and giving, but we often cannot see that in ourselves. This is the blessing and the curse of our reflexive consciousness, of eyes that can see and a mind and heart that know we did not call ourselves into the world, and we have frightfully little control of what happens while we are here. We are surfers doing our best on waves we did not create and cannot contain.
True, there are actual real live sociopaths out there who think they earned their existence and it is better and more important than the existence of others, but all of the rest of us are fragile and fearful at times. All too often, we mask that fear with bravado and confidence, but the mask is papier-mâché, falling apart when wet with tears. But oh, that bravado… it is the greatest bravado ever. It is huge.
Then we have these stories, this three thousand year old tradition in which we find ourselves, locate ourselves. It is a tradition of the fragile and imperfect. We are not given impossible models. We are given Moses, who stutters and doubts his own abilities. We are given David who is filled with lust, who sins, who has troubled relationships with his own children. Scripture is filled with dysfunctional families, with the story of God and the power of God passing through families that are every bit as messed up and more so than your own… after all, I don’t think any of you have impregnated your widowed daughter-in-law like Judah does. But I could be wrong…
We get disciples who don’t get it and say dumb things sometimes. Peter says dumb things. James and John say dumb things. They step on one another’s toes. And these are the ones Jesus chooses to lead the church!
Humility is hard coded into our faith tradition long before Jesus. Micah 6:8, the closest the Hebrew scriptures come to the core expectations of the Way of Jesus, tells us to walk “humbly†with our God. And in Jesus, we claim an experience of God with us.
Jesus, “though he was in the form of God…†In many Bible translations, you will see this portion of the text, verses 6-11, written in staggered lines like a psalm or poem. The reason for this is that we believe these verses were a hymn used in the worship of those home churches, the first Christian hymn we have, in widespread use just thirty years after the death of Jesus. It is a hymn that contains some pretty sophisticated and somewhat problematic theology, the most important aspect being kenosis, the Koine Greek word for emptying.
The hymn certainly pre-dates anything we might call a gospel, but already they were dealing with contradictions. How could Jesus be God and not know when the “Day of the Lord†would occur? Jesus says “only my Father knows.†How could a divine being that is omnipotent suffer and die? For the death had to be real for the resurrection to be real, and if there is no real resurrection for him, there is little hope for a post-mortem existence for us. This christological hymn captured in Paul’s letter to the Philippians suggests that a pre-existant Christ emptied himself of divine attributes to become human. It is the incarnation of this Christ-self, vulnerable, that is to be celebrated in ancient hymns and in Paul’s theology and by those who would follow. This isn’t about blood sacrifice, though Paul will go there as well. It is about Christ’s choice to empty himself, to become like us in all our frailty, that leads God to highly exalt him and give him the name that is above every name.
Many of us no longer get wrapped up in whether or not God suffered when Jesus suffered, the dilemma of patripassionism. We no longer feel that we need to know how exactly divine mystery was in Jesus, for it is enough for us to know that the experience of Jesus, this outpouring of love that changed lives and even seemed to heal bodies convinced them that they were experiencing God-made-flesh. We don’t need kenosis in order to believe, and we certainly don’t need it to negate parts of our human definition of God that don’t square with what the gospels teach us about Jesus, for human definitions of God are human definitions of God, and the person of Jesus, while still echoing across the planet two millennia later, was most certainly more than the scant pages we find in an ancient text.
But I don’t think negation is the only way to approach kenosis anymore than I believe that negation is the only approach to Christian humility.
Jesus, in becoming one of us, invites us to see divine mystery at work in human form, then challenges us to see him as divine presence in others. He forces us to see the godliness, the mysterious working of divine serendipitous creativity, in other people, and as a result, to see it in ourselves as well. He became what we are so that we might become what he is, more than just meat. Which is to say, we always were more than just meat, were always vessels ferrying a cargo of mystery and wonder.
You ever have those mornings when you pour too much coffee into the cup and there is no room for the half and half? But you try to put it in anyway, and it isn’t enough and the cup is too full and you have to wipe the counter, if you’re lucky, and change shirts if you’re not? Yeah… maybe a little emptying, a little kenosis, is just what is needed…
Albert Einstein famously said “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.†I’d like to suggest that it works both ways, and this is where kenosis and Christian humility come together, and where we too can practice a form of emptying as a spiritual practice that connects to the use of the word empty among our sisters and brothers in the Buddhist tradition. For Einstein might well have said “The more I realize how much I don’t know, the more I can learn.â€
All too often we are that over-filled coffee cup, and sometimes just as dark and bitter. We are too full to let divine mystery or even human love in. We are too full, of our anger or our grief or our fear or just plain hubris, for new ideas or divine intervention or even human love to get in.
Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh famously teaches that the English word “emptiness†is a poor translation of a beautiful concept. He suggests that we focus not on negation but on what is in, on what we are. You are empty of self in that you are full, of the sunshine that grew the grain that fed the chicken that laid the egg that fed the third grade teacher that taught you thing you know, and so too do you contain the teacher’s teacher and the farmer, and the rain that fell and the ship that carried the teacher’s parent across the sea from Poland. You are not empty so much as you are full of creation. You are a universe, a supernova.
The kenosis of Jesus tells us to see Christ, this divine being so filled with love that it became on of us, even “unto death,†in one another. Our kenosis, our emptying of self-ness, of fear and anger and certainty, our humility, need not be a negation, need not emphasize our vulnerability, for we know our vulnerability, are reminded of it all too often.
We can guard our certainty, our rage and our sense that we are right, always, or we can make room for God. We are not called to empty ourselves of omniscience or omnipotence or omnipresence. We are called to empty ourselves of machine gun nests and ICBMs and mutual assured destruction.
I need a spiritual and intellectual yard sale, a bonfire or a dumpster. I need a good emptying to make room for what is new, new ideas, new mysterious God-stuff, new love. I need kenosis so that the Spirit we will proclaim next week can blow in. I need to consciously let go of some anger and some certainty and some fear. I bet you do too…
I might need a spiritual “hold my beer†moment, might need to do something daring. I promise not to take a selfie, and trust that you will be there if I fall…
Amen.