Making Room for God

Philippians 2:1-13

If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection 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 empty 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 existed in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

Therefore God exalted him even more highly
    and gave him the name
    that is above every other name,
so that at the name given to 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 on 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.

Imagine for a second that the only verse Sue read for us from our passage today was verse 12: “Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling…” What a perfect verse that would be to fit in perfectly with our modern American society: Work on your own salvation with fear and trembling. It’s a very bootstrappy, individualistic kind of sentence, right? A call to focus on yourself, to focus on your own salvation before God. I only bring up this hypothetical because we see this kind of thing happen a lot—the cherry-picking, the taking passages out of context to support a certain agenda. In fact, in one of my internet rabbit holes recently, I stumbled upon a self-proclaimed tradwife using part of our passage today in an attempt to prove the point that a woman should center her life around her husband and children. She was using verses 3-4: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty 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.” This so-called influencer was using these verses in regard to immediate family; but of course, if you read all or most of Philippians, which we are doing over the next few weeks, you would see quite clearly that Paul is talking about the community as a whole; that Paul (who often actually advised against marriage), is talking about the fact that Jesus emptied himself for all humanity. And we are called, to a certain extent, to do the same. We are not called to strive for a certain status in life, to focus on only ourselves or our immediate family. Rather, the opposite is true: we are called to empty ourselves for the good of our neighbors, for the good of our communities. In order to achieve our own salvation, we must work to serve others.

Paul wants to make sure his friends in Philippi understand, above all else, is that they are called to serve one another as Jesus served us— that they are called to pour themselves out, or empty themselves for the sake of the community, for the sake of love. And Paul does something that meany preachers and teachers do when they really need to emphasize a point, when they really need to drive it home—he uses someone else’s writing. Those who read along with the scripture passage may have noticed that verses 6-11 are written in verse, instead of in prose 1-5 and 12-13. That’s because he’s using a familiar hymn to emphasize his point. This was an early Christ hymn, probably a liturgical hymn, maybe a call-and-response of some kind, likely in use before Paul was even a convert. And the focus of this Christ hymn is all about God’s sacrifice in becoming human. The focus of this hymn is the humility of Christ, the obedience of Christ, his humble and self-sacrificing nature for the good of humanity: “though he existed in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness.” He emptied himself. The theological term for this, is kenosis. Kenosis is something that’s been debated and discussed by everyone Martin Luther to from Hegel to Karl Marx. It’s heady stuff, but it’s something we should  try to understand, because here is Paul telling his beloved Philippians that this is the basis of their new faith, that they must work and love for each other and for the greater good. We must empty ourselves to leave space for what really matters in this world.

Our personal worlds can feel so full these days— and often not in positive “my heart is so full” kind of way… more just full of information, of dread, of scary predictions, of appointments and meetings and errands. If our lives are so full, so busy, so packed with information and things to keep track of, is there even any room for the love and the grace of God? In her book Gravity and Grace, theologian and mystic Simone Weil writes, “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”[i]

If there is no room for pure emptiness, if we leave no space for this void Weil speaks of, then there is no room for God. And the world we live in today leaves little to no room for that kind of mystery, for this acceptance of what we can never really know. We have a void to fill yes—but very few are willing to wait or work for that void to be filled with the grace and love of God. Instead, we’re barraged with targeted ads based on surveillance of our google searches, our conversations with fiends, tempting us to throw our money and time at some new thing that claims to make our lives easier, more fulfilled, make us feel like we’re better off than our peers. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls this a “theology of commodity,” in which we kind of give these inanimate devices divine qualities—think of people in line waiting for the newest iPhone, this tiny piece of glass and plastic we believe will fill a void in our lives.[ii] And I can’t blame people for feeling that way—with a smartphone, we can connect to people across the world, get information in a matter of milliseconds… but in filling the void in this way, in grasping at this kind of power and control, we are pushing God further away. We are leaving no room for the mystery and uncertainty that is the only real truth of life.

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul says, before launching into the hymn:

who, though he existed in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
    as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself…

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” We are called to be self-sacrificing, to be humble as Christ, to think like Christ. Of course we have no divinity of which we can empty ourselves. But in this materialistic and information-overloaded world, there is plenty to let go of.  We are called, not to strive for greatness or power, but to humble ourselves before one another. We are called to serve as Christ served.

Of this emptying that we are called to, Weil writes,

[God] emptied [God]self of [their] divinity. We should empty ourselves of the false divinity with which we were born. Once we have understood we are nothing, the object of all our efforts is to become nothing. It is for this that we suffer with resignation, it is for this that we act, it is for this that we pray. May God grant me to become nothing. In so far as I become nothing, God loves…through me.[iii]

We are to pray to become nothing. That’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s one thing to be humble, it’s a whole other thing to pray into nothingness—but I actually really love this, because I think it speaks to that void. I think it speaks to trying to find ways to empty ourselves enough for grace to sneak in, for that acceptance of the mystery to take over; it’s really just about making room for God in our hearts and in our lives.

“We Should empty ourselves of the false divinity with which we were born.” And later Weil writes, “…we are wrong side upward. We are born thus. To re-establish order is to undo the creature in us.” Emptying ourselves of false divinity... undoing the creature in us. But this goes against everything in our current society. People are trying to become Godlike when it comes to AI. The cruel lizard-brain, human-creature need to strive for status and power at any cost is encouraged. We’re not told to empty ourselves. We’re told to fill, we’re told to hoard, we’re told that we can never have enough. We’re often uncomfortable with open space, with silence. We’re on edge, trying to find the thing that will fulfill us once and for all—the new TV show that we can binge all night and silence the noise of the real world; the new piece of tech we can doomscroll away on; the new supplement that will cure all our anxieties… it all goes against what are faith calls us to do. We are called to empty ourselves. We are called to serve others. This is how we work for our own salvation—but serving others as Christ served us. And we can’t do that if our brains are overwhelmed with stuff. We can’t do that without “undoing the creature in us;” that is to say, only looking out for ourselves and our own survival.

And so, we empty ourselves. We sacrifice productivity and time to take a moment to pray, to meditate, to stop and embrace silence. According to Simone Weil, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” And so with prayer, whatever prayer may mean for us, we are able to sacrifice those intrusive, anxious thought that’s filling our minds with dread, and we will be turned to what is good. And by sacrificing these feelings of dread, we then sacrifice the feeling that we need to know everything, that we need to know the future; we sacrifice to feeling that we do know everything—that feeling of either arrogance or despair. And I think the painter and theologian Makoto Fujimura illustrates the way to do this really well, in the context of his art: “In my experience,” he writes,

when we surrender all to the greatest Artist, that Artist fills us with the Spirit and makes us even more. creative and aware of the greater reality all about us. By "giving up" our "art," we are, paradoxically, made into true artists of the Kingdom.[iv]

While Fujimura is speaking in the context of his painting, he’s ultimately saying that by emptying ourselves of what we think makes us who we are, by emptying ourselves of what this broken world attempts to demand of us, we are allowing the Spirit, allowing grace to enter into that void. And by that surrender, that letting go, that emptying, we are free. It is by taking all that anxiety and energy that’s pent up in us, filling us to the brim, and transforming it into something that serves God, and therefore serves others, and then pouring it out in the community that we will working towards creating the Kingdom, and earth as it is in heaven.

The more we isolate ourselves from what really matters with sensationally frightening information, with sureness, with a need for certainty and control, the more cut-off we will be from community, and therefore, from grace and to God. We will be too stubbornly full to allow the Spirit to enter and to lead, too stubbornly blind to see Christ in others, to really see others at all.  

And so, in one of those beautiful, divine contradictions, we are free by surrending. We are free by serving others. We are free by inviting the call of Christ direct our time, our resources, and our will. We become full and rich by emptying ourselves to make room for the grace, to make room for the Spirit to guide us. It is in the sacred emptiness that we will receive the abundance or new life. Amen.

[i] Weil, Simone. 1987. Gravity and Grace.

[ii] https://religioussocialism.org/why-jesus-marx-and-hegel-matter-in-the-digital-age/

[iii] Weil, Simone. 1987. Gravity and Grace. Medical Entomology and Zoology. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA77820940.

[iv] Fujimura, Makoto. 2020. Art And Faith. Yale University Press eBooks