Philippians 2:1-13
My hometown was and still is a B- market when it comes to professional sports.
When I was a kid, there was semi-pro football – the Norfolk Neptunes, AHL hockey – the Norfolk Admirals, Triple A Baseball, then called the Tidewater Tides, and even an ABA basketball team, before that league merged with the NBA. The Virginia Squires featured a kid from New York named Julius Erving who would go on to have a bit of success in the sport.
But that short-lived ABA franchise was the closest we came to the majors. There were pro teams up in D.C. and Baltimore, several hours north, or all the way down to Atlanta to the south. Panthers, Hurricanes, and Hornets did not yet exist, at least not as sports franchises. So I really don’t have a “hometown” team, and even if I did, half of my life has passed since I lived in that area.
Today, my sports tastes are eclectic if not eccentric. I’m okay cheering on the Bills, though I like Toronto for hockey, and Milwaukee for basketball. The team I have rooted for the longest, though, is the New York Yankees. Yeah, about that…
What a miserable year from those multi-millionaires working for multi-billionaires! And to be honest, I just didn’t have the Baltimore Orioles winning the division on my bingo card.
I like the Orioles. I mean, they play in the same division as my preferred team, but the owner is not as repugnant as Daniel Snyder or James Dolan, the ballpark at Camden Yards is great, and most of us are old enough to remember Cal Ripken Jr.’s amazing streak of games played, 2,632 in a row.
He was payed very well to do a job, and he did that job very well, making the All-Star team 19 times. Ripkin had a great role model with the Orioles, the legendary Brooks Robinson, who died this week at the age of 86. Playing in the age before free agency, Robinson only made $35k one year when he was the league MVP. He was an 18 time All-Star, and won the Golden Glove a remarkable 16 times in a row. He was inducted into Cooperstown in 1983, receiving 91% of the votes in his first year of eligibility.
And here’s the thing: Brooks Robinson was good. Not good at baseball, though he was remarkable at baseball. He was a good human being.
These days, sports broadcasters spend time, maybe too much time, on what players are wearing when they enter the stadium. Half of the country seems obsessed with Traylor, the supposed match-up of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, though we all know how that love story ends. College football players change teams almost as often as their schools change conferences. So we might be romanticizing a bit, toying with that addictive drug nostalgia, but there is something to be said for athletes like Brooks Robinson.
To be fair, there are still players out there who are loyal. Giannis Antetokounmpo with the Milwaukee Bucks comes to mind, after he chose to stay with the team that chose him when he was still the “Greek freak,” despite the opportunity to be a star in a major market.
It seems so simple. Just be a decent human. Work hard. Be kind. Tell the truth. Do what you do with integrity. And don’t make it all about you, because it is only rarely all about you.
Our scripture reading this morning is from Paul’s letter to the church gathered at Philippi. Notice that I said Paul’s letter, not a letter attributed to Paul.
The Pauline epistles generally fall into four categories, those that are mostly authentic, except for minor editorial changes, those that appear to be stitched together from separate but authentic texts, those that are most certainly not by Paul, and finally, one epistle traditionally attributed to Paul that is neither, not written by Paul and not even a letter. This text falls in the second category, a compilation of authentic texts.
And here, in what we have come to call the second chapter, we have a particular passage, 6-11 in our modern system of verse numbers. You cannot hear the distinction, especially in translation, but if you look at the text in a quality translation, you will see that it is not left aligned, but is rather printed as a poem. Some have erroneously labeled it a hymn, but it does not have the meter of a hymn in the original Koine Greek. Still, it appears that Paul has inserted a passage that was familiar to early Christians, possibly part of their worship, a text that describes Christ as emptying and humbling himself, even to the point of death on a cross. Just as some of the psalms may be the earliest surviving texts from the Israelite tradition, this small portion of Philippians may be the earliest surviving text we have from Christianity, evidence of worship within the first decades after the execution of Jesus.
Today, crucifixion and cross are largely synonymous with Christ, but at the time Jesus was executed, it was a common form of public torture and execution, with bodies intentionally left rotting as a warning. It was most often used for escaped slaves and those who would rebel against Roman rule. There is a reason crucifix and excruciating share a common root. But there is a second level of meaning here, one that would have been apparent to those who followed Jesus during his lifetime but lost to us.
Much of the debate between Jesus and the Pharisees in scripture has to do with concepts of ritual cleanliness and defilement. It was part of a wide ranging debate between major Jewish movements. The Sadducees advocated for strict observance of Torah but no more. The Pharisees had developed a tradition of interpreting Torah that some saw as simplifying observance while others believed added many unnecessary complications to Jewish practice. The Essenes appear to have been fanatics, strict in their observance and separating themselves into communitarian settlements. Jesus was like the Pharisees in interpreting the Torah, but his emphasis was always on the spirit of the Torah, his firm belief that God was a God of grace and love, a God who thought healing, being made whole, was more important than sabbath prohibitions.
You might think of this as being much like the debate over how the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted, with “originalists” believing we should be tied to what they guess was the intent of those who negotiated a document that preserved slavery and treated women as property. Most of us know they are just guessing, and if we are going to guess, maybe the opinions of misogynists and racists shouldn’t be our guide.
One thing that every sect of First Century Judaism could agree on was this: dying on a tree was ritually defiling.
Theology has a technical term for the idea that Jesus, the eternal second-person of the Godhead, emptied himself through incarnation and crucifixion. That word is kenosis. Of course, it all gets wrapped up in impossible ancient debates about how Jesus is divine, with a whole slew of other technical terms, mostly in Greek, like homoousian and hypostasis. And honestly, I find it all a little silly. I don’t need to know exactly how Jesus was God-with-us, and I don’t need God to kill God in order for me to believe in the way of Jesus. I’m happy to leave that to people who are smarter than me, or maybe dumber, depending on how you look at it.
But there is something to be said for the idea that Jesus chose humility, even if it is coming from Paul, who never knew Jesus, because the gospels basically say the same thing… the scene at the Last Supper, of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, his many lessons about service.
I think Jesus would have liked Brooks Robinson, and not because he was a Christian. But I’m not sure most Americans today would, like Brooks Robinson or Jesus. Definitely not Jesus, who would have been accused of being a woke Marxist.
After all, this is a country where a sizable portion of the population, a sizable portion of so-called Christians, worship a man courts have determined is a con man and sexual predator.
The moral decay of this nation is a reality, but it isn’t because a middle-schooler in Florida doesn’t fit into traditional constructs of gender, and it isn’t because some high school kid in Wisconsin learned about the Tulsa race massacre, and it isn’t because some college student at Ohio State wants to make decisions about her own body.
In 1987, Gordon Gekko, a character played by Michael Douglas in the film “Wall Street,” declared greed is good. And most Americans did not consider it to be a problem. The Houston Astros still have a World Series trophy though it is universally recognized that they cheated. The late Dianne Feinstein was there as Harvey Milk was bleeding out, after a beauty queen had whipped the nation into a frenzy of fear and hatred in the 1970s. And while her campaign of medieval cruelty failed in many ways, violence and vandalism are a daily reality for the LGBTQI+ community and their allies.
So many care about some made up ideas of purity and righteousness that have nothing to do with Jesus, racial purity when race is a fiction, albeit a powerful one, a magic formula called the sinner’s prayer that appeases a narcissistic god … which sort of explains a lot about their political choices.
Refuse to idolize evil. Celebrate the good. Take the time to find them, because they are too busy to call attention to themselves.
It isn’t complicated. Be good. Be humble. Work hard. Don’t make it about you. Be like Brooks.
It won’t always be easy. But it doesn’t have to mean suffering. Unless, of course, like me, you are a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. But that is a sermon for another day.
Amen.