Doulos 1
Philippians 2:1-11
September 20, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, 2 make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

6 who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
    and gave him the name
    that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

As I was reading the gospel text for last week, I had one of those familiar waves of embarrassment wash over me as I read the text aloud. It’s not that I hadn’t read the text before, but that in my reading and study through the prior days, I was focused only on the sermon I would preach. With a famous line about forgiving “70 x 7 times,” I was focused in my writing about the radical nature of forgiveness being articulated by Jesus. To embody this practice of forgiveness was to renounce a culture of retribution and punishment that benefits the rich and oppresses the poor. After that sermon, I felt so clearly (in what we might have called conviction of the Holy Spirit in other times): I am comfortable talking ABOUT the radical nature of God’s love and the revolutionary consequences of following the Jesus path. But I am much less comfortable doing the radical and revolutionary work.

Then I read the words of Matthew 18:21-35 (though this has happened with many other texts at many other times), and I was mortified to be casually speaking the word “slave” out loud in a context of worship an in the illustration of a parable without a critique. Suddenly I’m knee-deep in a muddy mess of ancient text but not acknowledging how our sacred text has been used to exploit, dominate, and in the hands of white people, justify our role as dominators and exploiters. Most often when this happens, I am physically standing in the pulpit with a microphone in front of me and feel utterly self-conscious about stopping mid-sentence to say, “this is deeply problematic. I’m embarrassed to be mentioning the reality of slavery without commenting on it or calling attention to the problems with our sacred story.” 

And so, knowing what little Koine Greek I know and a dash of knowledge about interpretive choices scholars make, I recognize to myself that the word being translated is doulos and is often translated “servant” just as it is “slave.” And even if the English word in our New Revised Standard Version says “slave,” I will change my reading to, “servant.”

Here’s the problem with that. Well, here’s A problem with that: to swap out words for possible interpretive similarities is to fully dismiss not only the millennia of oppression that word represents but to ignore the much more recent 300-something years of abuse that word has caused at the hands of people who have manipulated these texts to support the ownership and subjugation of other human beings. It may be the cheaper, faster way to work around a problem, but surely those cheap and fast ways malnourish us spiritually in the same ways cheap and fast food malnourish us physically.

Friends, even as I’m saying this, I recognize how completely tired I am. Do I really want to take us down this rabbit hole right now? Surely with everything on our hearts and minds, this is another Sunday to remind us to be still, to hear God’s voice with us, to not be afraid, to breathe deeply, to be community for one another. All of that. Yes. I believe it all. All of that is completely and fully true. And also…

And also. We are a people who have agreed we will address and work toward undoing the racism we have either consciously or unconsciously embodied. As Christians who were, almost to a person, raised by these texts, part of our undoing work MUST BE addressing the parts that embarrass us, that make us wince with their wording, and that we (or that I) have chosen to re-interpret and quickly move on instead of standing in front of the text and questioning it. We question it because we love it, because it has shaped us and is shaping us. We question it because this is still the story that is guiding us, and it cannot rightly guide us without putting in the work to better understand the language we are using, its context, and the layers of meaning slathered onto it that need to be stripped away.

So today, we begin to question the world doulos and its frequent use across the New Testament. First, there will be literal references, translated both as “slave” and as “servant,” for people born into slavery, debtors taken into temporary slavery to pay off their debts, a servant working-class that was subjugated to service of the wealthy because of their social status at birth, and enslaved people taken as prisoners in war and domination between empires.

There will also be texts like today when Christ himself is compared to a slave or servant, and that willing submission, “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” has been held up as an ideal for the path we are to walk.

I’m not a Greek scholar. We are severely limited in our study by my B-student level of Biblical languages taken more than 15 and 20 years ago. In this, I am very much a student alongside you, and you may well become the teacher who points us to greater resources and scholarship. Honestly, I have found myself limited not only by my own lack of Koine Greek skills but in recognizing my personal library is shaped by moderate and progressive white voices of the 20th century who ignored the very same problems in the text that we have avoided. They did more overt work around the role of women and the clobber verses used against the LGBTQ+ community than around racism and white supremacy. I was shaped by the old structure I am hoping to dismantle. I welcome a broad sharing of scholarship and interpretation as we go.

For today, the Philippians text before us is widely considered to be an early hymn of the church and likely throwing shade at Adam who, in his own myth, very much wanted to be equal to God and not secondary. So Jesus is being praised as the new Adam who makes humanity over again and chooses the humble path of a servant. Even when the text says slave, we switch to servant immediately. I grew up hearing about having a servant’s heart and being a servant leader. I can hear the dripping saccharine of that now, but these attributes were held up as the goal for Christian living.

In fact, I am so shaped by this SERVANT language that I have a hard time hearing anything but its beauty. Many of you know that my seminary, the late Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, gave each graduate a towel with our name on it. The servant’s towel was the symbol of BTSR, and I keep my towel in my office along with a pitcher and basin and the scrap of fabric I received at my first opening convocation in 2003 when I was brought into that servant community. 

The point of the towel is to remind us that we are not called to be TED Talk pastors and innovation experts and entrepreneurial success stories. I might want to be those things because I want success and I want to win. But that desire is the stuff of ego. Instead, BTSR handed us a towel with our name on it. The idea and the phrase came from Alliance of Baptists pastor Nancy Hastings Sehested who pointed back to the central gospel love story of John 13 and said, “Ministry is finding a towel with your name on it.”

That story, of course, is the one we tell on Maundy Thursday each Holy Week—Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4 got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

After he was finished he said, “16 Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. 17 If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

I hear in those words an equality of the community Jesus was forming around him, a community not to be shaped by ego and celebrity leaders and hierarchy but of a circle of humble folks who do the hard and dirty work of ministry, of life together, of advocating and caring for the poor and the hungry and the incarcerated and the stranger. My hearing and my guiding metaphors are so shaped by this servant language that I make excuses for the problems and dismiss the footnotes in my Bible reminding me “slave” is another word to put in that place. Some scholars would even say it is the ONLY word to put in its place.

We must hear and acknowledge the manipulation these texts have received. If Jesus was a slave, then you can be a slave, too. The texts “SLAVES are not greater than their master” and he “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” were used to keep entire groups of people (particularly the first enslaved Africans in this country) IN THEIR PLACE, and we must acknowledge that white interpreters of scripture were all too complicit in supporting those devastating interpretations. No wonder White Supremacy could so easily take hold in American Christianity! Ego and power are so much a part of our culture here, that manipulative interpreters of these ancient texts came to view Jesus as someone they could also manipulate because he willingly chose to make himself a servant. You can almost hear someone saying a guy like that must be a sucker or a loser. White interpreters of Christian scripture too often came to see themselves as the masters of these stories and of these words and bent them to their own wills.

But even in pointing to “those white people” who have done the damaging work, I am  AGAIN distancing myself as one of the good ones and releasing myself from the undoing work. That’s when I’m grateful to Robert P. Jones for his book White Too Long and his words to us, his target audience, who have grown up in this system to the point that we are unable to see the very structures in need of either repair or destruction. 

Of his own very warm and positive church upbringing he writes, “At church, I learned how to sing, write, date, give a persuasive public speech, and run an efficient meeting using Robert’s Rules of Order. But I didn’t learn much about how my religious tradition, which has undeniably done so much good for so many people, including me, had also been simultaneously entangled in justifying unspeakable racial violence, bigotry, and ongoing indifference to African Americans’ claims to equality and justice.”

He goes on to say, “I think the fact that white churches produced such a strong sense of safety and security for those of us who were inside the institution is why it is so hard for white Christians to see the harm it did to those who were outside it, particularly African Americans, and the other kinds of damage it did to us, numbing our own moral sensibilities and limiting our religious development. The problem was not that the community functioned to enhance the lives of those within it; all good communities do that. Rather, the problem was that it had developed in such a way that its main goal was protecting and improving white Christians’ lives within an unjust social status quo, which is to say a context of extreme racial inequality and injustice.”

We must acknowledge the context in which almost all of us came to hear the Christian scriptures because that context became a framework for understanding citizenship, whiteness, and Jesus. And not just a framework for understanding citizenship, whiteness, and Jesus as three separate things but merged them all into one. We were raised by a culture of false equivalencies that told us to be a good follower of Jesus is to be a good white citizen and vice versa. That is how we have gotten to this very particular and disturbing moment in the American story, and our undoing work is also disentangling work of this old framework. The Jesus story is not the American story anymore than it was the Roman story, and we need to be able to see that distinction very clearly. 

Right now, I have as many questions as I might have answers, and I won’t attempt to tie this up neatly in a bow today. We’ll make a couple of runs at different texts in the weeks ahead as we also launch into community readings of Jones’ White Too Long with our friends at Rayne Memorial UMC. For now, let me hold out some unfinished thoughts:

It had to have meant something that the people writing these narratives down 20 centuries ago wanted their audiences to understand that Jesus was on the side of the servant class. It most definitely meant something that Jesus willingly and purposefully tied a towel around his waist and washed the feet of the people he loved. Some of the very first words shared about the Jesus they understood to be God and the son of God all at once described him as not feeling compelled to walk the earth with force and domination but with humility and love. Even with the abuse and manipulation these texts have withstood, SURELY this word choice means something as we seek to better understand not just the texts themselves but Jesus the Christ and the entire tradition we continue to profess.

As we study and journey together in this complicated work, we have a model before us of how we are to proceed. A model of humility. A model of love. A model of compassion. A model of friendship. A model of presence. A model of affection. A model of open-heartedness. That is how we will seek to live and learn together in this and in all things. 

Amen.