February 21, 2010
 
Scripture:         Philippians 2:1-13
 
Sermon:           “Take Care of Yourself—Mind”
 
            Turning our hearts and minds now to the word of God, let us read together the scripture lesson for the day.  Turn with me to the Paul’s letter to the Philippians, chapter 2, where we will read together verses 1 through 13.  You can find that easily on page 266 of the New Testament in the pew Bible.
            For these first three weeks of Lent I am going to be preaching a series of sermons on taking care of yourself.  We’re in the business here of taking this time to discipline ourselves to be more faithful disciples, followers of Jesus.  So, I want to look with you at how to listen to the Bible and the life it describes as faithful to Jesus.
            Think of it this way.  Jesus once taught his followers with these words:  “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?  Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’, while the log is in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”
            So, the faithful life of following Jesus has to pay attention, first, to what is going on with you.  Take care of yourself.  We have to have some sort of transformation ourselves, first, before being instruments of change in the world around us.
            I want to look at two aspects of taking care of ourselves with you over the next few weeks.  We’ll start with taking care of your mind.  How do you follow Jesus by taking care of your mind?  Next week we will consider what it means to follow Jesus by taking care of your body.
            I’ll be taking a break for a week after that.  My wife, Julie, will be with us to preach and she won’t be continuing this series.  I will, however, shift our focus for the Sunday before Palm Sunday and look at what it means to follow Jesus by taking care of others.
            The Apostle Paul once wrote to the church in Philippi these very helpful words about aligning the mind with the mind of Jesus.  Let’s read them together.  The word of the Lord…
 
            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.
 
            Boy, it is a hard thing to follow this man Jesus.  I’m not kidding you.  It’s a fairly easy thing to worship him and praise him.  But following?  It’s downright hard.
            Here’s an example:  Over the past few years we’ve learned a great deal about the labor practices in other countries.  BusinessWeek ran this scathing article in 2006 about how many factories in China falsify their records so that the underpayment of workers can continue.  These folks aren’t earning enough to live on themselves, let alone raise children.  And it’s happening in just about every industry in every country, including our own.  Sweatshops.  Child labor.  Some people refer to it as the newest form of slavery.
            And you know what?  I don’t want to be a part of that.  I don’t want my own life, the choices I make about the way that I live and my family lives—I don’t want to be a part of that.  I don’t want to be oblivious to the suffering of others that I myself participate in simply because I am buying clothes or office supplies or any number of things.  There is something about it that makes me think of that story Jesus once told.  It was about a rich man who wore the finest clothes and ate all the best foods every day.  And then there was a poor man named Lazarus who used to sit outside the rich man’s gate begging for scraps from the table.  Both men died, you know.  As we all tend to do, both men died.  The poor man, Lazarus, ended up in heaven where he was satisfied with all of God’s goodness.  The rich man, however, ended up in a place of fiery torment.  And he said, “somebody send Lazarus to me to give me just a drop of water!”
            The gospel makes no bones about it.  God is interested in justice.  And God is interested in justice for the poor.  And I don’t want to be a part of making other people suffer just so that I can surround myself with more things than I truly need.  It terrifies me sometimes.
            So, feeling all kinds of self-righteous and purposeful, I marched myself out to the car so that I could drive a few blocks over to this store that promotes itself as organic and wholesome and earth-friendly and all that.  Amazing Grace.  That’s what the store is called.  Amazing Grace.  Had kind of a religious and righteous ring to it, don’t you think.  I was going to buy my daughter a toy that was not produced in a sweatshop somewhere out of cheap plastic with toxic paint.  I was going to start participating in a revolutionary new economy that promoted human rights and ecological friendliness.
            Y’all know that I live over in the Highlands, right?  You have to go through these refining moments just to prove that you can live there.
            And there it was.  A puzzle.  A wooden puzzle.  No plastic at all.  A wooden puzzle with farm animals and a barn.  It was right up her ally.  And I could feel good about buying it.  Then, I saw the name of the company.  Melissa and Doug.  I thought to myself, these are my kind of people.  Melissa and Doug.  Wooden toys.  Classical.  And before I could think twice about it, I took it to the counter, bought it, and went home.  I had started my own little revolution!  See how easy it is to follow Jesus a little more consciously?
            Do you know that when I got home and unwrapped it I found this disturbing little sign on the back.  I’d seen it before.  I’d seen it before many times.  I just couldn’t quite believe I was seeing it again.  Not here.  But, there it was.  It said:  Made in China.  See how hard it is?
            John Stuart Mill was a very influential thinker back in the 1800s.  The way he described and defined the economy still shapes the ways we think and live.  He said that we should consider “man…solely as a being who desires to possess wealth.”  In other words, you and I, and everyone that we know and don’t know, what we are really are consumers.  According to this way of seeing ourselves and seeing the world we are concerned primarily with the “present enjoyment of costly indulgences.”  We want nice things.  We are, as he put it, self-interested wealth maximizers.  Self-interested.
            My God!  Is that really true?  We’re really just consumers who put our own self-interest in having nice things above all other considerations?
            Consider what Paul wrote to the Philippians:  Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  Do you hear the contrast?  Self-interested maximizers.  Look to the interest of others.
            What I’m suggesting is that you and I have been shaped by an entirely different perspective than what is offered by Jesus.  More than that, I’m suggesting that Jesus calls us to question the very foundations of everything we’ve ever learned and consider instead that there is an alternative way of being in the world.
            And it is a dangerous thing to propose to someone that the very values promoted around them, the very values they’ve accepted, the very values of their own families and loved ones might be at odds with the way things ought to be.  It’s a dangerous thing.
            But, Paul put it like this:  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.  See the world through his eyes.  Use his perspective to see yourself and the world around you.  Don’t forget, now, that he is the one that humbled himself and died on a cross in order to give the most amazing gift of love to others.
            Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, Paul said.  But, in humility regard others as better than yourselves.  This is the mind of Jesus.  And I’ll tell you, it’s like nothing else I’ve ever learned.
            So, take care of your mind.  First, take care of yourself in order to be useful to God in taking care of others.  The first step might be the hardest.  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.  Are you willing to put into question everything you’ve ever known?  Boy, that’s hard.
            There was a great spiritual leader in India during the time of that country’s independence from Great Britain, Mohandas K. Gandhi.  Do you know that he was able to lead a non-violent revolution to overthrow the powerful British?  Not only that, Gandhi was a powerful influence in movements to end poverty, expand women’s rights, and end the practice of untouchability.  Untouchables were the lowest of the low in India and seen as less than human.
            It is interesting to me that Gandhi’s life achieved so much good in the world based upon a very similar way of approaching things as Jesus might have us do.  Yes, he impacted the world around him.  But, it all began with himself.  It all began by looking, first, inward.  He would say, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  Did you hear that?  Begin with yourself.  Be the change you want to see in the world.  It starts with you.  It starts with your own mind.
            Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.
            Now, I suppose you could take away from this morning that your preacher has some very serious questions about the foundations of our economy and there is some kind of political thing going on here.  But, what I’m really trying to do is get us to see that we’ve been learning our entire lives a way of being and a set of values that ultimately are very destructive to ourselves and our world.  That sense deep within each of us that there is something very wrong with the world—it comes from somewhere.
            In the perspective of the Bible, it sounds like this:  the very first of our ancestors, a man named Adam, turned to his own way instead of the way of God.  We’ve been lost as people ever since.  In Romans 5 Paul says “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners.”  It is where we get the notion that ours is a “fallen” world.  So, of course, we have been learning the wrong things with our minds.  Now, let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.
            In practical terms:  you’ve learned that you are nothing more than a body worth ogling by members of the opposite sex.  Or, you’ve learned that people despise you because you are not the model of health and good looks!  Christ tells you that your entire being is of infinite worth to the God who created all things.  Let that mind be in you instead.
            You’ve learned that you are never going to amount to anything given the family you grew up and the neighborhood you call home.  Christ tells you that all things are possible because He strengthens you.  Let that mind be in you instead.
            You’ve learned the hard way that risking yourself to love another person brings nothing but heartache and betrayal in the end.  Christ tells you that God’s love knows no end and that He will be with you even until the end of the age.  Let that mind be in you instead.
            You’ve learned that people don’t change.  Why are you going to change?  People don’t change.  Christ tells you that you are a new creation in him.  Let that mind be in you instead.
            You’ve learned that folks write you off once they know about your past or the sins that you are struggling with.  Christ tells you that you’re forgiven and that you can use your own experiences to bless the lives of others who are struggling, too.  Let that mind be in you instead.
            Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.  Take care of yourself.  You will be well on your way to following Jesus more faithfully.
 
Rev. David James Brown
Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)