Being found in human form, Jesus humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross.

At our Wednesday Lenten program last week we were Dwelling in the Word with this passage from Paul's Letter to the Philippians, and in response the first question--"What words or images catch your attention?"--one of the people in my little group said the word that always caught his attention was obedient, that Jesus' death on the cross was an act of obedience. And that in turn got me to thinking: In dying on the cross, just what was Jesus obeying? Who or what demanded Jesus' obedience even to the point of death?

One way of answering that is to say that Jesus was obeying God, that it was God's plan from all eternity that the Word should be incarnate in Jesus, the Word should take flesh in Jesus, so that Jesus could be killed, so that the shedding of Jesus' sacrificial blood could pay the price humanity owed to God because of sin. It was God's plan from all eternity that Jesus should be punished so that we could be set free--and when Jesus died on the cross, he did so out of obedience to God's eternal plan.

But I have to admit that I have some trouble with that interpretation. You see, the Bible speaks over and over again--Jesus speaks over and over again--about how God forgives sins, and forgiveness doesn't mean punishing one person so that other people can go free. Forgiveness means not punishing, deciding intentionally not to punish, even though one has the right. The more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've done theological reflection on it, the more I've come to think that it was not God's plan for Jesus to be killed so that we could be forgiven. When Jesus was "obedient to the point of death," it wasn't God he was obeying.

So what then did Jesus obey? I think Paul gives us the answer in the very same verse that mentions obedience: "Being found in human form,"he says, "Jesus became obedient." What Jesus was obeying, even to the point of death, was human form, human nature, the basic ground and condition of what it means to be a human being.

Because whether we like it or not, it is part of human nature that we die. We are mortal. We are transient. We are here for a few years, a few decades, then we're gone. We began this Lenten season on Ash Wednesday with a mark of our mortality, with ashes that say to us "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." It is a part of "being found in human form" that we die.

We could even say that dying is part of our life. We die a little every day. Every moment is a little bit of passing away. Think about it: Right now, in this moment, you are having an experience, and the experience is vivid and vibrant and present and alive. But after this moment comes another moment, and that moment brings a new experience, and the experience you're having now will pass away to make room for that new experience, and as it passes away it becomes less vivid, less vibrant, less present, less alive. As moment by moment comes to us, all our experiences fade and dwindle and pass away, until some of them we can't even capture in memory anymore. The philosopher Whitehead says that our life is a "perpetual perishing"--because the moments fade, because we can't hold on, because nothing for us ever stays the same, because we are always changing, because everything we put together sooner or later falls apart, because everything we accomplish has its moment and then passes away--and we must either accomplish something new, something different, or we become forever prisoners of the past. It is part of human nature that we die, and we die a little every day.

And Jesus, being found in human form, became obedient, obedient to human nature, obedient to human nature even to the point of death.

And therefore, Paul says, God exalted him, therefore God raised him up, therefore God gave him a name above all other names, therefore God took his death and made it the source of life.

The death and resurrection of Jesus--this tragic and triumphant tale we tell in the Solemn Reading of the Passion and the celebration of the Eucharist on this Palm Sunday--the death and resurrection of Jesus is simultaneously the deepest mystery of our faith and the most basic truth about being human. The death and resurrection of Jesus tells us that it is part of human nature that we die, and that if we will be obedient even to that, if we will surrender even that to God, then God will take our death and raise it up to the possibility of new life. The death and resurrection of Jesus tells us that all our human form--even our transience, even our passingness, even the way each moment fades when the new moment comes--all our human form can be the channel and the instrument for God's creative grace, for God's creating energy, which can take up all the fading moments of our lives and make out of them possibilities for doing something new. The death and resurrection of Jesus tells us that we must be ready to die to what is, so that we can be alive to what in God we can yet become.

That's true for us in our individual lives. How well we grow up into our futures depends at least in part on how willing we are to let go of our pasts. I knew a man once who was really struggling with retirement. He had had the sort of career where he was always working hard, always giving 110%, always the one other people looked to to get the job done, always the one who delivered. When he retired, all that was gone--and without all that activity his self-image just collapsed. People would tell him he should enjoy retirement--now he could travel, now he could do volunteer work, now he could do anything he wanted to--but his whole understanding of who he was was tied up with that job, and without the job, he didn't make sense to himself anymore. It wasn't until he reached a difficult and painful decision to let go of that self-image, it wasn't until he was able to let that part of his life end so that he could embrace a new stage of life, it wasn't until he was willing to let the career-guy inside him die, that he was able to engage his retirement and his wife and his grown kids and his grandkids and start living a really rewarding new chapter in his life. We all have life-transitions like that to go through--graduation, marriage, parenthood, career change, divorce, new relationships, retirement--we all have life transitions that happen sometimes whether we want them or not. And how well we can grow in our transitions depends at least in part on how willing we are to let go of our pasts. We must be ready to die to what is, so that we can be alive to what in God we can yet become.

And that's true for us in our communal life as well. Like each of us, our congregation, St George's, has life-cycles, has changes and transitions to go through as we grow up into the Body of Christ God calls us to be. I think sometimes that some of us have a very definite picture in our heads of what a "successful church" should be like--with jam-packed services every Sunday, and a huge Sunday school, and lots of projects and activities, and dozens of enthusiastic volunteers to do all those projects and activities. Some of us remember when St George's was that kind of a church, and look around now and can't help but feel that St George's is fading away. But that's not the whole story about St George's. We have very dedicated and committed and spiritually energized people. We have pastoral care volunteers and Lay Eucharistic Visitors who provide deeply important ministries to members of the congregation. We have teens who bring their friends to church movie nights, because the fellowship and the Christian formation and the movie are things they value enough to really want to share with their friends. We have people who say their prayers and study the scriptures and seek to have in them the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, people who offer themselves to be transformed and to transform the world for Christ's sake. We have good things going on here. And when our picture of what a "successful church" should be like gets in the way of seeing the real ministry and the real mission and the real Spirit among us--then it is time to let that picture die, it is time to let those expectations pass away, it is time to let go of one notion of success so that we can be open to the new thing God is doing in our midst. For us at St George's, it may be time to let one image of who we are as a church die, it might be time to be obedient to the form of church we find ourselves to be, so that we can start where we really are, and grow into the church we can yet be. As it is in our personal lives, as it was for Jesus, for us as a church, we must be ready to die to what is, so that we can be alive to what in God we can yet become.

So on this Palm Sunday, we have set before us the deepest mystery of our faith and the most basic truth about being human. On this Palm Sunday we have set before us the Good News that, following Jesus, we can encounter death and resurrection in every day, in every moment, of our lives. On this Palm Sunday we pray that we may have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, and in Jesus we may live the life that comes from God. Amen.