He Stoops to Conquer
A sermon based on Philippians 2:1-11
by Dr. David Rogne

 In Oliver Goldsmith's eighteenth century play, She Stoops to Conquer, he tells the story of a young woman of means who takes on the role of a servant in order to make it easier for the young man she is interested in to approach her and tell her of his love.  She is successful in opening up communication with the one she loves by willingly giving up the advantages of her position.

In the passage that was read for us this morning from Paul's letter to the Philippians, he says that Christ did something like that in order to bring us to God--he stooped to conquer our hearts.  Not only does he attempt to tell us something about Jesus's attitude, he says, "Let the mind that was in Christ be in you also."  In other words, Christ's response to his situation becomes an example of how those who want to follow him are to conduct themselves.

On Palm Sunday it is customary to speak of the acclamation Jesus received as he entered Jerusalem.  It seems to be a time of triumph.  And we have focused on that in the opening part of our worship.  The time of triumph was short-lived, however, for before the week was out Jesus was on a cross.  So this Sunday is also called Passion Sunday, and the passage from Philippians is one of the suggested passages to be read on this day to remind us of the price Christ paid to get his message across.  Let's look at some of the implications of Christ's example for ourselves.

For one thing, he didn't capitalize on his advantages.  Most of us feel that if we have any kind of position, we ought to take advantage of the perks.  It is a maxim in the military that "rank has its privileges."  Christian Herter was running hard for reelection as governor of Massachusetts a number of years ago, and one day he arrived late at a barbeque.  He had had no breakfast or lunch, and he was famished.  As he moved down the serving line, he held out his plate and received only one piece of chicken.  The Governor said to the server, "Excuse me, do you mind if I get another piece of chicken?  I'm very hungry.  I had to skip breakfast and lunch this morning."  "Sorry, I'm supposed to give one piece to each person," the woman replied.  "But I'm starved," he repeated, and again she said, "Only one to a customer."  Herter decided it was time to use the weight of his office and said, "Madam, do you know who I am?  I am the Governor of this very state."  "Do you know who I am?" she answered.  "I'm the lady in charge of giving only one piece of chicken to each person.  Move along."  The perks of position didn't work for the governor at that moment, but like any of us, he tried.

Paul says that Christ shared the nature of God, but he didn't seek to exploit that equality with God.  I have no doubt that in Paul's mind that meant that there was something about Christ which was pre-existent, something which was divine.  We could spend considerable time discussing that aspect of Christ's nature, but I do not think it would advance our understanding of how Christ relates to us.  Instead, I would like to state it in a modern idiom, which admittedly does not tell the whole truth, but gives us a modern appreciation of Christ's situation.  I think we could say that Christ "had it made" in his relationship to God.  He knew who he was, he knew God loved him, he knew he was in a right relationship with God; he had nothing to fear.  One would expect, then, from a purely human standpoint, that Jesus would take advantage of his unique position and get away from any involvement with this messed-up world.  Instead, he suffered for it.

Christ emptied himself, says Paul.  He willingly laid aside his divine rank to identify with the human family.  In Mark Twain's book, The Prince and the Pauper, he tells the story of two boys who lived three hundred years ago in England.  Not only were they bosom buddies, but they looked enough alike to be taken for twins.  However, one of them was Edward, the Prince of Wales, and the other was Tom Canty, a pauper.  One day, for fun, they swapped places.  The Prince of Wales dressed in the rags of a pauper.  Tom Canty put on the royal attire of England's next king.  This went on for some time.  Edward, dressed in rags, wandered through the slums of London, rubbing shoulders with the outcast and the despised.  When Edward tired of his game, he found it difficult to convince people that he, not Tom Canty, was the Prince of Wales.  Indeed, he was even thrown into jail.  But finally, just as Tom Canty was about to be crowned king, Edward convinced the authorities that he is the true prince.  The point of the story is, however, that Edward becomes a compassionate king because he lived among the people.  So Christ humbled himself in order that he might share the sufferings of the human family.

And suffer he did.  Born of a peasant woman, raised in poverty, apprenticed to a trade of weary work, discouraged by failure, saddened by disappointment, a walker of roads, moved to tears, sufferer of pain, knowing betrayal, bearing wounds, feeling abandoned, dying a torturous and humiliating death--Jesus knew it all, and to a degree greater than most of us know.  He emptied himself.

We, too, need to do some emptying.  A Zen master invited one of his less successful students over to his house for afternoon tea.  They talked for a while, and then the time came for tea.  The teacher poured the tea into the student's cup.  Even after the cup was full, he continued to pour.  The cup overflowed and tea spilled out onto the floor.  Finally, the student said, "Master, you must stop pouring; the tea is overflowing.  The cup cannot hold any more."  The teacher replied, "That's very observant of you.  And the same is true with you.  If you are to receive any of my teachings, you must first empty out what you have in your mental cup."

To receive something new in any religion, there are some things that have to be emptied out first--self-importance, arrogance, bravado, pride.  Then we can be filled with something that makes us useful.

The next thing that Paul says, according to the Revised Standard Version of this passage, is that Jesus took the form of a servant.  Being a servant is not easy.  John Alexander, in his book You and Your Money, tells how a couple of years ago he spent a month in Asia, mostly with people who had servants, and he didn't like what he saw.  "I don't want to be a servant," he said.  "Servants are people who drive you to restaurants and sit in the car while you eat.  Servants are people who run in from the next room to get the salt for you because it's a foot out of your reach.  They wash your dirty underwear by hand.  Sometimes they sleep in a closet or on the floor in the hall.  The essence of being a servant is not existing.  If you're a servant, you do all sorts of jobs without anyone ever noticing that you exist.  Whenever I visited a new house during my trip to Asia, I was introduced around.  But a few people were left out.  Eventually, I realized that they were the servants.  They do not exist."

Yet, that is the role that Jesus chose for his life.  On this Palm Sunday we celebrate his triumphant entrance into Jerusalem.  On that occasion he was exalted, but he did not capitalize on it or use it to his own advantage.  Instead, that same week, he fulfilled the role of a domestic slave and washed the feet of his disciples.  He said, "The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve." (Matthew 20:28)

Not only was that the role he chose for his life, he urged it on his followers, suggesting that it would give meaning to their lives.  Church youth groups hold "slave auctions" every so often to raise money.  The members of the group auction off themselves to do any kind of labor (housework, yard work, run errands, etc) for members and friends of their church, whose pay for their services goes into the group's treasury.  In reality, it is not slave labor, because some money is contributed, though the young people receive nothing for themselves in the way of pay.  And yet, some of them do receive something--in fact, a whole lot.  One young man said--after escorting an elderly man to the bank and the supermarket--it was a great experience; he made an ongoing friend.  The man taught the youth how to fly fish and to tie flies.  A teenage girl established a weekly Saturday visit to an elderly woman and they became close friends.  The girl had learned that her senior-citizen friend had been afraid of being mugged on the street, and hadn't been out of her third-floor apartment for two years because of it.  She was also afraid of falling on the stairs.  The girl said it came to her, in her self-giving service to the older woman, what the Christian religion was really about--that it was a serving-without-thought-of-pay action.  She had heard that preached, but until she became a "slave" it hadn't struck home for her.  "Whoever wishes to be first among you," said Jesus, "must be your slave." (Matthew 20:27)

The next characteristic that Paul refers to is that Christ humbled himself.  Pride is a basic human problem.  C. S. Lewis wrote:  "Pride leads to every other vice.  It is the complete anti-God state of mind.  Pride is spiritual cancer," he said, "it eats up the very possibility of love or contentment or even common sense."

Among those in positions of power, pride leads to destruction.  It was said of Mussolini that "He could strut sitting down."  Someone else described him as "a solemn procession of one."  And we know where his arrogant attitude led Italy.  Adolph Hitler appealed to German pride in a similarly destructive way.  Germans, he insisted, were superior in all human endeavors, from food preparation to music, architecture to dog training, poetry to weight lifting.  When shown pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, he said that Germany must build a better bridge in Hamburg.  Told that a span there would not be as long as the one in San Francisco, he sulked for a long time and then said brightly, "Well, we'll build ours wider."  Informed that the widest avenue in the world was in Buenos Aires, he said that his new capital, "Germania," would have a street wider than any other street in the world.  Instead, he gave them bombed-out cities.

Over against this attitude, Jesus urged humility.  It was not a characteristic that the people of the Greek and Roman world of Jesus' day were prepared to honor, for they felt that it was unnatural for human beings willingly to give up an advantage.  Yet, Jesus made it a mark of noblest character.

In his biography of Isaac Newton, Gale Christianson describes Newton as possessing one of the most powerful intellects in the history of humanity, responsible for epoch-making discoveries in mathematics, physics, optics, and astronomy.  Albert Einstein, himself a genius, wrote that Newton "stands before us strong, certain, and alone."  Yet, in describing himself, Newton wrote, "I do not know what I may appear to the world (to be), but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."  What a refreshingly humble attitude from one so gifted!  How in keeping with the mind of Christ!

We may not be national leaders or world-class intellectuals, but we still have our problems with pride.  It damages our relationships and can be resolved only by humility.  A pastor found it necessary to visit a member of his parish, a Mrs. Barnes, with whom he had often been in conflict.  He knocked on the door but no one answered.  Seeing the curtain rustle, he knelt down to peep through the keyhole.  To his surprise, he found himself looking into the eye of Mrs. Barnes.  She opened the door.  He said, "Well, Mrs. Barnes, I guess this is the first time we've ever been able to see 'eye to eye'."  "Yes," she replied, "but we both had to get down on our knees to do it."  A lot of the animosity in the world could be defused if more of us were on our knees and fewer of us on our high horse.

The final thing Paul says in this passage about Jesus’ attitude is that he was obedient.  He was obedient to his calling.  That calling was to proclaim the message of God's love for all God's children.  How much easier and safer it would have been just to back off when the forces arrayed against him began to flex their muscle!  He could have gone back to Nazareth, reopened the carpentry shop, made a career for himself.  Instead, he chose to be obedient, and increasingly it was evident that that obedience would cost him his life.  He didn't want to die.  He wasn't courting death.  But he had surrendered his own ambitions to the carrying out of his mission.  As Paul says, "Christ was obedient to the point of  death, even death on a cross."

For some people, following Christ has led to the death of their bodies, but for most of us, obedience to our calling involves dying to something while we are still alive.  In his book, Once You Were Darkness, Dennis Kastens tells of some children who were choosing up sides for a game of cowboys and Indians.  The first boy who was chosen by the captain of the Indian side came up and whispered to the captain, "Choose Cory next--he's so great at dying!"  So Cory was chosen.  As the game progressed, Kastens could see what the boy meant, for when the cowboys drew a bead on Cory and shot him, he let out a moan, staggered forward and pitched over on his face, twitching once or twice before he went limp to fall over the pretended cliff.  For a moment the game came to a standstill as the cowboys and Indians gathered around to admire Cory's talent for dying.  It might be unthinkable for a captain in real life to choose a person because of that kind of talent, says Kastens, yet, Jesus confronts us with this paradox:  "Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 16:25)  God is seeking people who are great at dying to their advantages, to pride, to self, to ambition.  And Christ has become the example.

Though the way of life that Christ demonstrates is a stringent one, says Paul, it is eminently worth imitating, for God ultimately gave Christ the seal of his approval.  It is a way of life that God blesses.

George Washington's father died when George was ten years old.  George's mother had the burden of raising him from that time on.  When he had finished his preliminary schooling, he wanted to go to sea.  The vessel on which he was to take his journey as an apprentice seaman had docked near his home, and his gear had already been brought aboard.  He came to say goodbye to his mother, but her eyes were full of tears, spilling over her cheeks.  He looked at her, paused a moment, and turned to the man next to him and said, "Get my gear off the boat.  I cannot break my mother's heart."  A short while later his mother looked at him lovingly and said, "George, God promises to bless those who honor their parents.  I think that God must have a great blessing in store for you."  From that very time the hand of God was on George Washington in a marked way, because, as a young man, he had learned how to become great at dying, how to set aside his own interests, his own desires, his own ambitions.  Out of that death to self, God brought forth a richer life of service.  "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus," says Paul.  He stooped to conquer, and so must we.