If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 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.
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.
Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
Philippians 2:1-13
As my wife and I get ready to move, I have been surprised to see old books and stuff that I thought I’d gotten rid of. Some of these are welcome surprises, some not so much. And this isn’t the first time that’s happened: each time I move, I think I’ve gotten rid of something, I keep carrying it with me from place to place, cross-country, up-country, upsize, downsize, ah, there it is again.
No doubt much of my psychological stuff is the same way over the course of a life. I used to be “Spiritual But Not Religious” (SBNR), and sometimes rather than being simply grateful that God graced me with a life in Christ again, I can feel a bit holier-than-thou against my old SBNR self, as if my hypocrisies didn’t travel with me throughout life. Like finding an old box, “Wait, I still have that?”
So many people identify as SBNR that it’s hard to define. For me, when I was living in Los Angeles, it would be something like, “My mind and my beliefs feel vaguely enchanted, and I see the world as magical, but my body doesn’t come along for that ride more than what is reasonable.” Or, “I meditate, I make art, I sometimes do the Venice Beach drum circle, I think about weird stuff, and then I do what I want.” A day in the life for me might be driving around LA for hours, listening to every spiritual podcast, a hippie on the inside, then spending my nights in bars with comics, waking up to work at a hedge fund, and feel like I was making spiritual progress.
One night at my bar comedy show, I met this traveling Spanish artist who was temporarily living in a walk-in closet in Silverlake. We got to talking about spiritual stuff and connected on that. As fellow SBNR people, we decided to check out the Malibu Hindu Temple, which we learned isn’t a place for white Westerners to find ourselves, but a real, fully active Hindu temple. We were shocked to find these people really believed it. You could tell because they did the practices, the prostrations, the sacrifices. They were nice, but their religiosity confronted us in its sincerity. Everyone else is in pants and button-ups and reverent attire, and meanwhile, here I am, a jerk in shorts and some shirt I bought online with Hindu art on it.
If you’ve ever encountered folks who actually live their faith in visible, binding ways, the Holy Spirit might also confront you with an uncomfortable question: what does it mean to have your spiritual life actually matter?
This is the heart of our Philippians reading today, one of the most important in Christianity. We have Paul reciting what seems to be an old hymn that teaches what spiritual formation in Christ looks like. At first, it might almost sound like something that is purely spiritual, mental: “Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” (Phil 2:2-3) You might think, okay, if I just have the right mindset, I can do what I want, as long as I feel humble about it. As long as I say, “I love you,” and in my mind I believe it, then what I do doesn’t matter because I’m saved by faith. But pay close attention to what follows—what does it mean to have the same mind of Christ? It is to live it, with your body, your being, in self-giving love: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped or exploited, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave,” and as a human, “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:5-8)
If this passage hits us hard, it’s because it gets at a tension in Christianity about as old as it gets: how do our bodies, our minds, and our spirit interact? How should they interact in Christ? The most influential Greek philosophies had a dualistic view of mind, or soul, and body being separate, while Judaism saw our bodies and our souls as enmeshed. And depending on what you held, you might think some ancient version of, “I’m spiritual, I love Jesus, but I don’t let that dictate my life, and because I’m a spiritual being, I’m free to do whatever I want.” Or you might think, “God is signing us up to be at war with our bodies.” Or a lot of other varieties, depending on what was inside the old boxes of your worldview.
And in comes Christ, who reveals God is actually in the flesh, fully God, fully human; you can’t split the two. Ever since Christianity brought the Jewish view of the world to the gentiles, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, Western civilization has been tangling, untangling, and retangling how we think of the relationship between mind and body. Over and over, competing philosophies, historical trends, spiritual movements, they all tend to favor one over the other—are we just natural creatures who should live within nature, or rational and spiritual beings to rise above it? Are we primarily animals driven by animal instincts, or rational spiritual souls?
Our Philippians hymn tells us that the distilled answer, in Jesus Christ, is that we are both embodied and spiritual; they are inextricable, and they are given by God. Yes, we are in Christ by faith and saved by faith. But Christian discipleship says that Christ has made a claim on your life. Jesus also taught us that religion without the spiritual life at its heart is worse than nothing, it’s a force of sin that leads to death. So why are Christians “spiritual but also religious”? Because the man we have faith in said: “Follow me.”
If it’s the mind of Christ, it doesn’t stop at the mind. The mind of Christ follows with the body we have. To share in the mind of Christ is to ask, “Just as God took on the form of a servant in a real body, how can I take on the form of a servant in my real body? How can I be a servant in my actions, not to earn grace, but respond to the gift?” Asking these questions lets us do as Paul encourages: “To work out your own salvation in fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Phil 2:12-13)
Paul tells us that if we take Christ seriously—if we take it seriously that God came down as a human, that he incarnated in real human flesh, and upon his death, resurrected that same flesh—then that has a real claim on our life. If God decided to live in the world not oppressing us in his might, who doesn’t take advantage of his power, who doesn’t impose himself, then we are to set aside the power and freedom that we have in order to serve those who have less, wherever they may be, just as he did. The mind of Christ says what we do matters.
You ever think about that word, “matters”? Maybe when we say something “matters,” we’re saying something that seems abstract and elusive, is real, tangible, physical. It matters. In Jesus, God literally matters—he’s physical. God is not just a great intelligence in the sky, God matters; he comes in the flesh. And on the flip side, Jesus isn’t just a wise human. He’s the son of God who sees humanity not only from without, but from within. Not just from within, but beneath; for the Lord said he came not to be served, but to serve. (Matt 20:28)
And so it’s not the mind of Christ unless the fruits of the Spirit are moving us towards serving. It doesn’t negate who we are in our bodies, instead, it fulfills them. It makes our bodies the fullest, most vibrant expression of our spirits while being reformed by the Holy Spirit. It’s what makes a true artist who doesn’t make art just to express herself, but the artist who says, “I’m going to make art that costs me something because I know it will enliven someone else.”
And as Scripture tells us, after humility and obedience to the cross, it didn’t end on the cross, but Christ was exalted. And that’s glorious. But sometimes, our Christian minds that grapple with sin will hear that and just see service as a means to an end, to be “one of the ‘good ones.’” But the thing about the cross is you can’t fool the cross. Nobody chooses to put themselves on the cross just for show. Nobody finds themselves on a cross just to feel enlightened. We’ll do all kinds of stuff that makes us look good and doesn’t actually cost us anything. But the mind of Christ follows all the way to a cross that can’t be fooled. Almost nobody follows Jesus all the way to it.
Jesus knows this. And he still loves us. And he still calls us to follow him to the cross anyway. And so each week we come to be confronted by the cross, which shows what a perfectly spiritual man actually looks like, and reminds us we aren’t. Each week we are confronted by the mind of Christ, who came in the same flesh as us, who shows us that we could never live up to what he did because we can never live up to the kind of love he has.
But then, each week, in our simple liturgies and humble country churches, we can also remember a miracle: the very person who confronts us saves us. Because this God really loves us, because His mind, His Spirit, really is of love, he continues loving us in Christ. To the mind of Christ, loving and accepting us in our failures was part of the walk to the cross. Part of the walk of our cross is loving and accepting each other in our failures too.
For while we can never live up to his love, we can move in his direction—empty ourselves, and follow him. When we come to a fork in the road between right and wrong, we can ask, “What’s the one that would serve? What’s the one that is setting aside our power, our privilege, our things, our advantages that could be for personal gain? What can we do to serve those who need it?” For Christ has empowered us to disempower ourselves for the sake of each other, to be spiritual and religious.
We might feel quite low after our falsely spiritual ways lead us to another dead end, after we realize no matter how many times we move, we haven’t gotten rid of the boxes of our hypocrisies. We might be annoyed that we are still carrying around some of our empty vanities. We might feel so low that we almost miss the mind of Christ reaching out in the hand of Christ, picking us up. And we might hear the mind of Christ in the voice of Christ saying what he said to those he healed, “Beloved, get up! Now pick up your mat, and follow me down. For there you were, and there again I must go.” Amen.
