Why Not Both?  Philippians 2:1-13

What does it mean to be human and yet Christlike? The story is told of our 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, who invited some people from his hometown to dinner at the White House. Coolidge was from the small Vermont town of Plymouth, so small that it didn’t even appear on some maps. Coolidge’s guests were simple people, and since they did not know how to behave at such an occasion, they thought the best policy would be just to do what the President did. The time came for serving coffee. The President poured his coffee into a
saucer. As soon as the home folk saw it, they did the same. The next step for the President was to pour some milk and add a little sugar to the coffee in the saucer. The home folks did the same. They thought for sure that the next step would be for the President to take the saucer with the coffee and begin sipping it. But the President didn't do so. He leaned over, placed the saucer on the floor and called the cat.

Our problem as human beings who are called to follow Christ is that we get mixed up in who it is we are to follow, who we are to imitate, who we are to be like. We human beings tend to look at other human beings for direction, for imitation, for role models. Children look to parents and grandparents; teens look to rock musicians, movie stars, and professional athletes; and adults look to people who seem to have it all: money, power, fame, and grown-up toys. At all ages we see people who look like they have it all because of what they do,
because of what they have, or because promoters push them into our public consciousness. Throughout my life I have read books or watched shows about the biographies of well-known and famous people, probably a couple of thousand people in all. And what I have found interesting is that almost everyone of these persons, whether they lived in the past or are alive today, have lived personal and professional lives that have been filled with great failures, weaknesses, problems, or needs. I can’t remember one famous or prominent
person whose life, once I delved into it, made me want to imitate them.

So it is that Paul’s words in Philippians redirect our attention and craving for a role model. Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus...” If you want somebody famous to follow, to model your life after, to imitate, be like Jesus, who though he was filled with the spirit of God and was God come among us, showed us what a real human being is like and how a real human being ought to live. The problem with following human beings is that we end up doing dumb things like imitating the feeding of a cat or worse. Christ
calls us to follow him in doing the right things each and every time, and it won’t be dumb or embarrassing or sinful and evil. If we imitate Christ and do what Christ has done and is doing, we will always be assured that we have lived the best life, given the best to the world, and lived our faith to the fullest.

But to do that, we have to look in the right place: we have to look to Christ. And we have to be willing to surrender our lives to Christ, to let Christ direct us and live through us. Too often we give as our excuse that we are just human and thus we can’t be expected to live Christlike. So we try to find someone to admire who will endorse our sins and our jealousies and our desires, helping to ensure that there is a separation between the human and divine in Jesus.

Yet the truth of the Gospel is that Jesus was fully human and fully God. While Jesus was God wrapped in human form, Jesus submitted himself not only to God, but to the human life, living life as we have to live it. And in living life as a human being, Jesus showed the rest of us that it was possible to live this life in a Godlike or Christlike manner. It can be done because it was done by someone who was human. We don’t have to embrace sin, we can embrace grace. Jesus didn’t come to us to show us that we could only make the choice between
being human or being a child of God; Jesus placed before us the hope and promise that if we choose to follow God completely, we can have both, we can have it all. And by having it all, he means that we can have the best possible life both here on earth and in all of eternity.

That’s what we are called to in this Holy Communion today. In Christ, we can have it all if only we become like Christ, that is, becoming fully obedient to God and letting God be Lord of your life, living life as Christ lived life.
Christ died for your sins so that you could have it all. Take and eat that Christ may live in you and through you.