On grasping equality with God (an address for choral evensong)

Writing a sermon where you chose the readings is a strange power trip (I don’t think we should do it very often, I quite like the lectionary). It also makes it very hard to narrow down what of ALL THE THINGS you feel like you should say (and sometimes you don’t help yourself, b/c hands up if you know why I thought the Jeremiah reading was a good pairing, but anyway).

This was for a series called words from Paul, and my verse was Philippians 2:6:

Who, though he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped

The first reading was Jeremiah 29:1, 4-9, and the second was Philippians 2:1-13. Thanks to Trinity College for having me.

I. 

I’d like to start with a slightly cheeky third reading:

"In my sixth and seventh consulships, when I had extinguished the flames of civil war, after receiving by universal consent the absolute control of affairs, I transferred the republic from my own control to the will of the senate and the Roman people. For this service on my part I was given the title of Augustus by decree of the senate, and the doorposts of my house were covered with laurels by public act, and a civic crown was fixed above my door, and a golden shield was placed in the Curia Julia whose inscription testified that the senate and the Roman people gave me this in recognition of my valour, my clemency, my justice, and my piety. After that time, I took precedence of all in rank, but of power I possessed no more than those who were my colleagues in any magistracy."[1]

So runs the Res Gestae, the achievements of the deified Emperor Augustus, as it draws to its conclusion.  You can see a copy of the text today in Rome, inscribed next to the Ara Pacis—Augustus’ altar of peace—and in the first century AD copies of it were sent out across Rome’s provinces after Augustus’ death.

As far as I know, there’s no record of a copy inscribed in Philippi—though it is perhaps not beyond the realms of possibility.  Philippi was strategically placed garrison settlement along the west-to-east route from ancient Macedonia to the Bosphorus, and it had strong connections to Augustus and the imperial family. It is perhaps most generally famous as the site of the battle at which the young Augustus with Mark Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar. It was a Roman colony, home to a number of Augustus’s former troops, and among its religious buildings and practices was a cult of devotion to the deified Livia, Augustus’s wife. Its loyalty to the empire was a part of its identity.

And into this town came Paul. The book of Acts makes it clear that Paul was a disruptive force in the town, eventually landing himself in jail. By the time he was writing letters to the church he had catalysed, he was in jail again, in Rome.

So much for the brief history lesson. What has it got to do with the words from Paul we’ve heard this evening? 

Who, though he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped.

II.

What would it have meant to hear these words—the words of this whole hymn—in Philippi in the mid-first century?

By this time, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus was dead—but he continued to loom large in the life of the empire, as the deified Augustus.

What would it have meant to hear these words? To affirm them and to let them shape your life?

And what could it mean to hear and affirm them today?

In a world in which autocracy seems to be rising and ‘strong leaders’ stake their claims. A world in which self-determination, self-promotion, self-support seem necessary to success, perhaps even to survival?

Read through the Res Gestae and Augustus’s litany of I dids can feel a little like the ancient progenitors of the LinkedIn profile.

It is a narrative of wanting, working, and getting. The good works that Augustus lists—and he lists many—come from an abundance of power and wealth. He might have said he possessed no more power than anyone else—but everyone knew that wasn’t how it worked.

Augustus claimed the status of the son of a god and on his death, the status of a God himself.

And the world, Rome’s spreading empire, seemed to revolve around him, in a way his heirs sought to emulate. This was what it meant to succeed. And this was what seemed to take, to hold one’s world together.

In Philippians Paul offers an alternative to his audience.

A picture of a different world with a different kind of God.

A different organising power, who walked with his people, rather than exercising dominion over them.

A different paradigm to inhabit, to be inspired and shaped by.

Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.

Look to the interests of others.

Do not regard equality with God as something to be grasped.  

Recognise that the best use of your power and capabilities is to accompany others through life.

Love each other – with the kind of love that led God the Son to become incarnate and take on the form of a slave in order to offer fullness of life.

III.

A university is a formative space. (In case you hadn’t noticed)

And of course, what university students are being formed for is a matter of debate right now. But whatever you think the answer to that debate is—the knowledge, skills, connections, associated prestige that one gathers studying or researching or teaching somewhere like this, are all a part of one’s formation for being in the world. A process in which you always participate: the question is always how.

Perhaps a question for reflection is whether you find yourselves becoming people who see equality with God as something to be grasped—or not—and what effect might that have upon the world around yourself? Who and how do you want to be in the world?

IV.

In our reading from Jeremiah, a letter to people who had been defeated and deported to the heart of an older empire, the prophet encourages them to seek the welfare of the city, in order to survive and thrive, while holding onto their own dream of another world.

I confess that I have heard so many sermons citing this verse as an argument for being a good citizen, for showing that Christianity isn’t a threat to stability or order or doing well in the world, that I’m actually pretty sceptical of it. What is the welfare of the city, really? Who decides? The Babylonians, in Jeremiah? The Roman emperors, in Philippi? The markets today? Perhaps it’s the TikTok algorithm.

What kinds of actions and behaviour does this line justify? To seek the welfare of the city in the manner of an Augustus, through a consolidation of authority and wealth, and a grasping at the power and status of a god breeds repression and conflict. There can only be one Augustus.

What might it mean, rather, to seek the welfare of the city in the light of Paul’s description of Christ’s humility, God stepping in to human life?

In May 1944, the German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer quoted this verse of Jeremiah in a letter written from prison to a new godson whose baptism he could not attend. It feels like a strange line to call on: seeking the welfare of the city in the Third Reich? But in this letter Bonhoeffer writes of the changing of the world: 

“We have grown up with the experience of our parents and grandparents that a man can and must plan, develop, and shape his own life… which he must then pursue with all his strength. But we have learnt by experience that we cannot plan even for the coming day…  [As Christians and a church] We are once again being driven back right to the beginnings of our understanding…”[2]

These words of Paul to the Philippians are a part of the beginnings of Christian theology and of the Christian understanding of what it means to be faithful to Christ—to seek the welfare of one’s city, or country or community in loving, faithful service, rather than by exercising power.

To participate in the world in ways that aren’t just focused on wanting, working, and getting.

To give oneself to the world in ways that don’t just come from what we have to spare, but which demand something of oneself. 

A few years earlier, in The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer had written “If only Christians will concentrate on perceiving what is good and on doing it as God commands, they can live ‘without fear of the authorities’… If they meet with suffering instead of praise, his conscience is clear in the sight of God”[3]

To affirm the alternate vision of the world that Paul offers the Philippians, and to seek the welfare of the city in the light of it, is to risk finding oneself on the kind of path that Bonhoeffer found himself on.

No one expects to find themselves living in Germany in 1944, I think. Perhaps not even Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the late 1930s. We may not be.  But we stumble around in time and it becomes history around us, coming to judgements and opinions about the ways we lived and the choices we made.  We don’t make those choices only in the moments they appear: by the time we face them, we have become people who are likely to face them in particular ways.  

The world around us is changing, as surely as it was around Bonhoeffer. We do not lack aspiring Augustuses, and we should be ready to ask ourselves how we will seek the welfare of the city. To take responsibility for the people we are becoming and the ways in which we inhabit in the world.

The paradigms offered by Augustus in the Res Gestae, and by Christ in Paul’s letters are, perhaps, the poles of our possibilities—to find security in grasping for power and control, or to lay it aside for the wellbeing of others. But they are possibilities towards which we look and move, which inspire and shape us. 

Do we want to grasp equality with God, or will we, in humility and love, look to interests beyond our own?

[1] Augustus Res Gestae, 34.

[2] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

[3] Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 197