Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 27, 2026, The Rev. Angela Compton-Nelson

Grant us, O God, the fullness of your grace, that we, running to obtain your promises, may become partakers of your heavenly treasure.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

The Apostle Paul's writings are always happening against two contrasting backdrops, the Jewish world shaped by the story of God, and the world of the Roman Empire.

These backdrops are in sharp relief in Paul's letter to the Philippians, resulting in one of the oldest pieces of liturgy we have from the early church, a hymn we call the Christ hymn.

It begins, he did not count equality with God as something to be grasped.

Paul offers it in this letter as a kind of centerpiece to a theology of the community held before and by God.

Paul is writing from a Roman prison, as you know, a common location for him, sending thanks for comfort, companionship, and the support he receives from the community at Philippi.

On receiving reports from them, Paul implores them to live and work together in unity, offering a vision oriented around mutual love, service, and care.

The whole point for the church, as Paul sees it, is to enact a vision of God that God has had from the very beginning of creation, to have holy, image-bearing ministers restoring and stewarding the world in partnership with God and one another.

It's why God made humankind in God's image and worked with the people of Israel as God's people.

And this work continues in Jesus' own life and mission, his death and resurrection.

In telling this story in the form of a song, Paul offers an image of the world to come that he and the rest of the apostles are working for that would have been repeated over and over by the church.

But there are divisions and fractions among the new Christian followers, and they're arguing over all kinds of things, especially ethnic boundaries.

Paul wants them to see that they are one family in the body of the Messiah through their participation in this singular reality.

This is a very hard argument to make in the context of Rome because there is literally nothing about the Roman order of the day that supports or develops this mode of being.

When Jeff and I visited York a few years ago, we were in the earliest, most northern reaches of Roman Britain, far from Rome, so very far from Rome, and yet in the place where Constantine was first named emperor in front of what is now the cathedral.

We gained a sense of the sheer magnitude of the Roman Empire, how difficult it would have been to maintain such an expanse.

To this end, Rome employed all kinds of strategies, practices of soft power and forms of hard power.

Among the first of these was the giving of land grants to retired military personnel.

These land grants established outposts and extensions of Roman influence.

Retired military personnel used land and wealth to replicate the architectural patterns and lifestyle of major Roman cities, making themselves emperors over miniature domains, and not calling themselves emperors, because that would have just been a terrible idea in a place like Rome, but kind of play acting.

In replicating the symbolic world and vernacular of larger Roman estates, the empire extended its reach through these enclaves of imperial power and influence.

And Philippi was one of the places where this kind of pattern is evident.

A lot was at stake in this exercise of soft power.

The Roman understanding of itself was in terms of the peace of Rome or the Pax Romana.

Through military strength, ongoing expansion, the accumulation of land, wealth, and people, the Roman Empire attempted to secure a prosperous society in which people were sheltered from existential threats of violence and death.

And to do this, it kept anything that threatened this authority in strict order, ironically, employing threat and violence to alleviate a sense of living under threat.

This is almost too on the nose as a comment on the impulse of humans to shield ourselves from vulnerability to risk, weakness, and death.

It's almost a definitional description of the use and threat of nuclear weapons in our own times.

But importantly, it's also what happens in a crucifixion.

Those who dare to exalt themselves as supposed competitors with Rome undermine its delicate peace, so become subjected to a more mode of torture in which they are lifted up, ironically.

In this way, Rome secured power through regular public punishment of anyone it deemed a threat to peace.

And Jesus threatens Rome's illusion of total power.

Rome, in seeking to assure the peace and safety of itself, loses its expression, though, as a human community ordered toward good, the good of human flourishing, and promotes instead a peace which is really no peace at all.

It claims to be total, but at the immense cost of the souls of its citizen, now complicit in endless cycles of violence through the capital murder of anyone whose life seems to threaten it.

And Rome's citizens, who desire to be seekers of peace and wisdom, become spectators and even instruments in murder.

There's no real peace, no real end and full cooperation of human life in the community.

This is the world for the people in Philippi, and they are grappling with a perennial question for Christians.

How do we live in the midst of a world in light of the claim that Jesus Christ is Lord when this claim is contrary to everything that feels powerful and safe, and almost everything we consider worth pursuing?

We grasp for what secures our futures, assurances of safety and stability, but there is always something to fear.

There is always something to lose.

The problem is that this kind of anxiety centers on things which seem to be bring peace and stability, insulating us from harm and risk, but they're often just illusions and lies.

In the midst of these realities, Paul's draw, Paul draws our attention to this central image of Jesus, glorified on the cross and in heaven, contrasting it with the imagination of a world that would see him as a lost cause and a victim of real power.

To the world, Jesus's life leads to a gruesome death and his being wiped from history.

But Paul finds in this image something else entirely.

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.

Paul connects the life of Jesus with the eternal life of God.

Jesus is the full disclosure of this God who is the creator of all that is.

And while this power, the power that Jesus holds, is absolute and unassailable, it is not something that he grasps or holds tightly, but instead releases, becoming human, even though in the form of a slave.

More than a set of practices or principles for ethical living, Paul roots the common life of the people in the story of Jesus.

Rome grasps after power to secure itself, but Jesus releases power and in this is glorified ultimately and wholly.

But in doing this, he also places himself in solidarity with those who are subjected regularly to violence and oppression.

The power is in the inversion of the power of domination.

I don't think, as it is often assumed, that this means emptying oneself of all power.

Remember, Jesus is God.

The difference for Rome is that it puts itself in the place of God, but it isn't God.

For the people of Philippi, Paul asks them to do something more subtle.

Take the story of God's salvation, God's emptying in the sun, and hold it up to their own lives to see where the purposes of God can be born in them over and against the false grasping after power in their own world as an opportunity for reversing the anxieties of their particular community?

What does it mean to follow Jesus, a God who refuses to grasp in the middle of the world in which all forces are attempting to secure status, land, wealth, and security, but often by and for those who already have it?

Where are the places in which the crucified Jesus is in relationship and solidarity with desecrated land and forgotten people?

And in so being turns us towards Jesus' immense love and even his glory.

And what does it mean to join Jesus there?

This is a work of creativity and courage and love, and it calls out our best efforts in our life together.

And it enables us to hold up a mirror to ourselves, these images, this story, to see the impulses of empire and domination that might be present in us, our own tendency to be entangled in types of power and in ways that secure our future at the stake of other people's lives.

That you've been enabled to search for a God whose life is known and alive in your midst is because God descended to take on human flesh and then becomes glorified in a Roman cross.

His life in this hymn from Philippians holds up our own world in comparison to the image of God in Christ and in the truth that is first found, chiefly found in that image.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.