SERMON FOR SEPTEMBER 27, 2020
     I learned to love all kinds of music from my dad. We went to symphony concerts and Broadway shows; we listened to the Navy Band perform Sousa marches on the parade ground at the Academy; we played Crystal Gayle, Linda Ronstadt, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary on the stereo. And he introduced me to the wonder of opera through the Saturday afternoon Texaco  broadcasts “live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.” My senior year in college I had turned in my thesis and my music major friend Claudia had given her senior recital, so we celebrated with a trip to the Met to see a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. 
     Jess Thomas and Birgit Nilsson, the premier Wagnerian duo of the era, were singing. We got tickets for Valentine’s Day, and at one point when Mr. Thomas came on stage, someone in the upper balcony showered him with a gracefully fluttering cascade of red paper hearts. It was the perfect occasion for this tale of passionate love that cannot be contained or denied. It ends tragically in death, and yet even death does not break the bond between Tristan and Isolde. Wagner’s lush orchestration throughout the opera conveys the driving energy of longing, the hunger for union and fulfillment. The concluding aria of the opera, sung by Isolde over Tristan’s dead body, is entitled Liebestod, which translates as “love death.” As the Wikipedia entry for Liebestod points out, this music is often used in film and television productions of doomed lovers. Yet in Wagner’s score, the urgent harmonies of the opera, insistent yet unresolved, here at last find their resolution. Loving through death, Isolde is triumphant, not defeated.
     The passage we have just heard from Paul’s letter to the Philippians is not an operatic aria, but it is believed to be a musical offering, a very early Christian hymn. And it is a declaration of fierce love. Verse 6, “[Christ Jesus] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,” has been generally understood as presenting the primary relationship of importance here to be that between the Father and the Son. Although Jesus, being in the form of God and equal to God, could rightly lay claim to all the prerogatives of divinity, he freely chose not to. Rather, he “emptied” himself, he “humbled” himself,” limiting his divine powers so that he might become truly human. The New Testament scholar David Fredrickson concludes, “As the New Adam, he demonstrated what is demanded of us: voluntary submission to the Father’s will . . . . In brief, the Son set aside the privileges of divinity and demonstrated humble obedience, even slavery, to the Father.” And, as Professor Fredrickson points out, “This way of telling Christ’s story obviously has appealed through the ages to those at the top of hierarchies.”
     But what if Christ Jesus acted out of yearning love for humankind, for us, rather than simply out of humble obedience to his Father’s will? What if, rather than providing us with a salutary example of how we should empty ourselves before God, our sovereign, he shows us how God empties Himself for us? For some Christians the Christ Hymn from Philippians has been best understood as a love song. Here, for example, is a paraphrase of the text from the 13th century:
You did not defend Yourself against that Love
that made You come down from heaven to earth;
Love, in trodding this earth
You humbled and humiliated Yourself,
Demanding neither dwelling place nor possessions
Taking on such poverty so that we might be enriched!
In Your life and in Your death You revealed
The infinite love that burned in your heart.
You went about the world as if you were drunk,
Led by Love as if You were a slave...
      Driven by love that cannot let go, even at the cost of one’s life, Liebestod, Christ then presses beyond death to bring this longing to fulfillment. Jesus promises his disciples, “And if I go and prepare a place for you I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2-3). The Lord empties himself so that he might be filled; he humbles himself, so that he might be in union with us. 
     The biblical image of the bridegroom and the bride used to describe our relationship with our Savior, makes this clear. Everything that he has is ours, and all that we have is his. Just as husband and wife become one flesh, so we are joined with our Savior, and nothing can come between us. What God has joined together cannot be put asunder. Martin Luther calls this der froehliche Wechsel, the happy exchange. He writes: “. . . faith unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom. By this mystery . . . Christ and the soul become one flesh. And if they are one flesh and there is between them a true marriage . . . it follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil. . . . Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is a bridegroom he must take upon himself the things which are his bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?”
     Paul urges his readers, “[I]n humility regard others as better than yourselves” (v. 3). But first he tells them, “[B]e of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” Christ’s love for us, ardent and indestructible, is now communal property through the happy exchange. It is at work in us so that we learn to love one another, turning from selfish ambition and conceit and resting securely in the embrace of our Lord. Amen.