A sermon delivered on October 1, 2023, by the Rev. Dr. Patrick H. Wrisley

This morning we celebrate World Communion Sunday whereby churches of all ilks and denominations celebrate the power of the unifying work of Jesus Christ. It began in 1933 by Presbyterian Pastor Dr. Hugh Thomson Kerr of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. It serves to remind us that all Christian churches are interrelated and connected to one another. In essence, we are stronger when we work together.[1] There is no better way for us to remember this that than we remember that on the night Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you, take and eat! Similarly, he took the cup and told his followers, “This is the cup of the new covenant sealed in my blood. Drink this, in remembrance of me.”

World Communion reminds us that all of us are bound with Jesus in his life and all of us are bound with him in his death. The Gospel news of World Communion Sunday reminds us that all of us are united with him in his resurrection as well   Our scripture lesson this morning from Paul’s letter to the Philippian church is a perfect text for our commemorating World Communion Sunday.  Open your Bible or the Pew Bible to Philippians 2 as we will read verses 1 through 13.

Our reading this morning hits all the high notes for what Paul was trying to tell them in this letter. He reminds them that as Church, they are to make Paul’s sense of joy and accomplishment complete by becoming like-minded in all they do in ministry. They were to cease from grumbling and having parking lot, cigarette-stomping conversations after church and instead look out for each other by eagerly exhibiting expressions of out-gracing other church members by following the example that Jesus gave.  

Listen to that again: It’s a love letter from a pastor to his beloved congregation that they are to eagerly exhibit expressions of out-gracing their fellow church members.

Eagerly exhibit expressions of out-gracing each other. In other words, they are to imitate Jesus. Listen to the Word of God.

Paul enjoins the Church to work out their salvation with fear and trembling and then describes to them how to do that. First, the members of the community are to agree with one another for the purpose of unified ministry. Second, the only ambition any member of the church should have is to insist that others take their preferred place in line. Third, each member of the church is to place the needs and interests of other church members above their own needs, interests, desires, and ambitions. We do this, Church, by becoming like Jesus.

Paul encourages the Church to do this by quoting what is thought to be one of the oldest Christian hymns ever written in verses 6-11. Known as the Christ-hymn, Paul quotes a hymn the early church had already been singing for some time and whose words hold the secret of what it means to be like Jesus.

We may rush to say that to be like Jesus means we must love others and though that is very true, there is a prerequisite for being able to love like Jesus loved. Like Jesus, we must empty ourselves.

The King James Version translates verse 7 as, “But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and made in the likeness of men.” The NRSV translates that as “emptied himself.” The KJV sounds like a line from a country song, “Jesus made himself of no reputation!” I kind of like that! A person has to go out of his or her own way to publicly demonstrate they are ruining their own reputation! Just look at what is going on in Washington, D.C. this past week, for example. What that means for Jesus is that he was not riding the coattails of his being the Son of God. Nope. Jesus emptied himself. He became an ordinary ragamuffin, as Brennan Manning would say; he became a nobody like you and me.

Beloved, to be able to love others as Jesus loves means we have to empty ourselves. We have to get out of the way. We have to identify all that is within us that makes us proud and feel better than others. We must shine light upon all our prejudices and biases. We must fight and clamor to get to the back of the line. It means, like the late Trappist monk, contemplative, and writer Thomas Merton says, to address our false self and put it to death. He believed that each of us constructs and is shadowed by an illusory person that does not really reflect who we really are on the inside, and which prevents us from fully knowing God in the deep places in our hearts.

Our false self is constructed initially to keep us protected from the harms of the big wide world as we grew up but as our knowledge of how to relate with the world matured, we still cling to the false self we relied on as children. In other words, we may have learned as a child that to get ahead in life requires us to be aggressive and fight for everything. It may have meant suffering from abuse or some other trauma that created a false self that is shrouded in fear, suspicion, or anger.  Each of us created this false self as children for protection but as we grew up as adults, we still clung to those childish ways of looking, relating, and behaving^[3].

Beloved, what is your false self composed of? What do you and I need to empty ourselves of in order to love God as God loved us in Jesus’ life and death? What are those things in our life and soul prohibiting us from humbling ourselves, from making other people’s ambitions greater than our own, and from looking out for other people’s interests instead of our own?

If we are honest, we cannot kill our false self without help. We cannot humble ourselves without help. We cannot empty ourselves without help. It’s because we need this help that our Lord emptied himself, was broken, shed, and given. This Lord’s Supper is the penultimate expression of our Lord’s self-emptying for us and all Creation. And it’s through this bread and through this cup, we are strengthened to address our own false self and empty ourselves. Church let’s be like Jesus. Church, empty the buckets of your souls of all that keeps you separated from God and one another. Empty the buckets of your souls in order to be filled with the Living Water of Christ.

In the name of the One who is, was, and is yet to come. Amen.

© 2023 Patrick H. Wrisley, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, 8 West Notre Dame Street, Glens Falls, NY 12801.  Sermon manuscripts are available for the edification of members and friends of First Presbyterian Church of Glens Falls, New York and may not be altered, re-purposed, published, or preached without permission. All rights reserved.

[1] Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Communion_Sunday.

[2] New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[3] Merton says it this way: All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus, I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge, and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. Thomas Merton, The New Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1961), 117-118,