The Infectious Lyric

“The Infectious Lyric”—December 27, 2017

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…. [Philippians 2:5-7a]

Be careful what songs you let get stuck in your head: they will change the way you think… and speak… and act… and love.

In all seriousness, today’s verses are a call to get a song stuck in our head—a particular song.

It is widely believed that these verses that we know as Philippians 2:5-11 are actually part of a song, a hymn, which Paul is quoting here.  (That’s why the words are set off with those strange line breaks and indentations in your Bible and up above, too: these are lines of poetry.)  Whether this hymn was something of Paul’s own creation (pastors have been known to write a song or two over the years) or was a familiar song Paul is referring to, we just don’t know for certain.  But if you are willing to trust the scholars who know about such things on this one, let it be enough to say that these verses have the feel of a hymn about Christ in the original Greek.

And Paul leads into that hymn by calling us to listen to the lyrics of that song, and to let them shape our thinking.  He is daring us to let this song about Christ get stuck in our heads and hearts, to infect us like a divine computer virus.

And this is how the song goes:  Christ Jesus, who is fully God, didn’t use his divine position for a cushy seat or position of safety, but rather entered in our humanity as one of us, poured himself out, and placed himself in the role of a fully human servant.  That’s a lot to put in as single verse of a song! 

Really, the claims that this hymn makes about Jesus are breath-taking.  We Christians believe that in Jesus, no less than God the Son entered into a human life and gave himself up completely into the role of a servant.  Even down to washing feet.  That’s really an amazing thing to say about God.  It really is.  What makes the Christian Good News so unbelievably, wonderfully odd is our belief that none other than God “emptied” himself to enter into our human experience, to go to death on a cross for us, picking the thankless, mundane, difficult work of serving, and then laying down his own life, his very last breath, for our sake.  Plenty of other religious or off-shoots from the Christian faith believe in God, sure; and plenty of them even say pleasant things about Jesus.  But the Gospel goes even further—not just that there is a God, and not even just that Jesus had some nice teachings, too.  The Gospel starts with the radical claim that in Jesus, God was willing to take on a life like ours.

Now, that by itself is amazingly good news.  And given the likely reality that Paul is quoting a source that his readers already knew by the time he wrote this letter we call Philippians, well that means that Christians believed in Jesus’ divinity from the very earliest years of our existence!  (Sometimes, religion scholars make the claim that Christians “invented” the idea of Jesus’ divinity several centuries later, but this verse gives very early evidence that Christians believed Jesus is fully divine, and it is so ancient that even Paul, a writer of the New Testament, already was singing this song in his hymnal and got the words stuck in his head by the time he wrote this letter.)

Now, all of that may be well and good, but there’s more to this.  Notice that Paul doesn’t just stop with intellectual information about Jesus, but he insists we make the connection to how we live, we followers of Jesus.  Christmas isn't just a story you hear, or a lesson you learn in your head--but Jesus' humanity becomes the pattern for the ways we live, as well.

Paul doesn’t just want to get a song stuck in our heads—he is trying to get that song to affect our relationships, our actions, and our words.  This isn’t just a head trip or a list of Jesus-related facts that Christians are supposed to believe to get into the heaven club.  Paul takes the picture of Jesus and says, “Let this shape your brains.”  He says, essentially, “Learn to let your minds follow the pattern of Jesus—and Jesus, by the way, poured himself out for all of us.”  The point is that if Jesus could be humble enough to leave the throne of heaven to live a human lifetime of washing scuzzy feet, touching contagious sick people, and dying a criminal’s death, well, then you and I can be humble enough to let someone else get the credit or attention for some accomplishment, or to do the grubby, thankless job without needing to have a parade thrown in your honor, or keeping on with life without having to toot our own horns.  You and I can be considerate enough to look out for the needs of others before our own.  You and I can find what Wendell Berry calls “the infinite longing of the self to be given away.”  That’s what happens when you let a song like Philippians 2:5-7 get stuck in your head.

The same way that the classic hymns of your childhood stay with you and come back to you when you are going through a crisis—the way that you might just have sung "Silent Night” by heart on Christmas Eve, the way the words of "Amazing Grace" can just roll off your tongue without effort, or the way you can find courage in “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” or comfort in “How Great Thou Art”—Paul wants this song to become so engrained in our hearts and lives that it changes the way we act. 

It’s not just about head knowledge and memorized creedal talking points—it’s about getting the Gospel song stuck in your head, letting it take root in your heart, and letting it stir your hands and feet to action, like you are nodding your head to the rhythm and tapping your toes to the beat.

Today, let the song of Jesus get stuck in you… and see what happens.

Lord Jesus, let your own mindset become our mindset, that our actions and words may witness to you, and that our love would come to look like yours.