Tellico Village Community Church Sermons

July 25, 1999

Scripture Reading: Philippians 2:1-11

Dr. Stephen K.Nash

I want to take just a minute or two to say to you how genuinely and completely delighted we are to be here this morning and how excited we are at the prospect of being in ministry to you and with you here at Tellico Village. From the very beginning of my contact with your search committee, I have been impressed with the thoroughness and thoughtfulness of their work. I have been on both ends of such a search, and their process was exceptional. We'll have to let you be the judge of that product. Everyone has been so warm and welcoming. A special thanks to Bill and Beverly Bauer for their hospitality this weekend, to each of you who made us feel so at home during our visit a couple of weeks ago. It would be an honor to join Marty as an associate pastor here. You have been blessed with excellent pastoral leadership from the genesis of this church, and that is why it is so humbling to be asked to be a part of it. You have a wonderful congregation here, unique in many ways, and I trust that you never take that for granted. So, thank you again, for the chance to be here.

Would you reflect with me for a few moments on the marvelous nature of you mind. The human brain is an incredible thing. It operates at various levels of activity and frenzy. For instance, if the brain is operating at zero to three cycles per second, it is in a theta stage, a coma kind of stage, and death is imminent. If the brain speeds up to a delta-wave condition, four to six cycles per second, it is an occasion mostly of deep sleep and sermon series on the book of Leviticus. If it speeds up to between seven and thirteen cycles per second, it's in a beta stage, which is a creative, restful stage. If it speeds up to fourteen to twenty-one cycles per second, it is in the alpha stage, the typical church activity stage perfect for baking casseroles and going to pot-luck dinners, meetings, that sort of thing. And at twenty-one plus, it is in the gamma stage, which is a hassled, hurried, frenzied state of life, typical of Marty when it's late Saturday night, been a busy week, and his sermon isn't ready yet.

About the size of a softball, you brain perches like a flower on the top of the spinal column and is connected by the finest of fibers and filaments to every nook and cranny of your body. There are an estimated thirteen billion nerve cells inside the brain itself, and most of these cells have junction with five thousand other nearby nerve cells. Billions of these synapses, or junctions, exist in our bodies.

The word astronomical isn't big enough to describe this, because the number of known cells in the brain far exceeds the number of stars we know about in the galaxies of the universe.

Brains are impressive, even in those who my kids, when they were teenagers referred to as dweebs or dorks, and I would add, even in television evangelists. What amazes me about this is that they are all about the same size. It amazes me for instance, that Madame Curie and Tina Turner would have about the same size. Or Werner Von Braun and your average professional wrestler -- all about the same size. Albert Einstein and Bob Puckett -- same size brains…amazing! And when they tell me that the average human uses only a very small percentage of his or her brain's potential -- it blows me away!

But the most amazing thing of all, beyond its beauty and complexity and power and intricacy is the realization, that it is a dwelling place of God. Our brains are there for a reason, and that beautiful Pauline hymn of Philippians chapter 2 affirms that they are to be the place where God takes residence in us. "let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus," the old King James Version puts it poetically. It is the mind of Christ that is to inhabit us. And that is the most amazing truth of all about the human mind. Pastor and writer Calvin Miller penned this sonnet to his own brain:

"Gray, wrinkled, three-pound thing, I clearly see

I cannot trap you with an EEG

You nervy organ, you, skull cased, yet free,

A brazen challenge to psychiatry.

Soft mass, I cannot help resenting you

Each time they search and probe for my IQ.

Half of Einstein's lobe was twice of you,

You joyless megavolt computer shoe.

Be careful Judas organ, or you'll find

God cauterizes every rebel mind.

You small gray lump, you always seethe and grind,

Spend small electric currents thinking blind.

Yet, you're the only shabby place I see

That God's Great Mind may come to dwell in me."

The mind of Christ is that which is to inhabit us. To understand what that means, we get a clue in the text of the Philippians passages which says that Jesus, being found in appearance as a man, humbled himself and became obedient. This verse is troublesome to some, that Jesus BECAME obedient. There is an emphasis in Jesus life, as well as mine, on development, growth, BECOMING. This Jesus who is my Lord, who would be my divine mind implant - this Christ had to learn it all in human existence too. He was not born as St. Alphonsis suggests. St. Alphonsis said that shortly after birth, Jesus sat up in the straw and said, "Hello, Mary, I'm Jesus, the Son of God." Now that's a caricature, to be sure, of a view that sees Jesus as less than fully incarnate and human. But the emphasis that he, like all of us, had a mind that was in the process of becoming is important to me, if he is the model of what it means to be fully human. The moment we stop growing, expanding, nurturing our intellect… the moment we stop learning, is the moment we start dying. You would expect someone who you are calling to direct Christian education to believe that, now wouldn't you?

These are some interesting statistics, I think. In 1900 the half-life of all human knowledge was 50 years. In 1920 the half-life of all human knowledge was 20 years. In 1980, it was 2 years. And now it is doubling at a rate far less than one year. How foolish to think we can get by without growing in understanding, even in things religious. To fall into the trap of being defenders of the true faith, instead of pilgrims and pioneers sojourn. The Quaker writer/theologian Elton Trueblood said that the church should be a theological seminary for laypersons. It's exciting to me to see that Tellico Village wants to take the task of Christian nurture/education/and spiritual formation seriously.

But not only is the mind in the process of becoming, but the mind is always forced to live with mystery. That is true in spite of the doubling of scientific knowledge, in fact, because of it. The amazing realities of quarks and quasars and quantum physics, or relativity and black holes--hints of dimensions beyond the three we inhabit leads us to an ever-greater appreciation of the mysterious elements of this amazing physical/spiritual universe. The scientific community itself is more and more congenial to the reality of an open universe that is shot through with spiritual meaning.

The more we learn, the more ignorant we become. I like one person's definition of education: "to make the simple complex." I would revise that to say that it is to understand that the simple was never simple to begin with.

I like that passages and sequences in Jesus life when he so up front had to say, "I don't know everything." There's part of this "emptying" described in Philippians 2. I love that time when the disciples came to him and said, "When will you kingdom come?" Not having read today's prophetic best sellers he was forced to say, "I don't know when it will be." They asked him, "Can we sit one on your right and one on your left?" He said, "I don't know…not mine to give." And so Jesus demonstrates how the mind of Christ lived, as we all do and must, with mystery. It's the greatest thing, I think, not to have it all spelled out, because not knowing it all, we must become people of trust, and people of community who share the journey of faith. Someone has observed that we crave mystery as much as we crave certainty. Not so everyone. The greatest heresy is in thinking we have the truth nailed down in a neat three-point outline, and that everything is black and white. We have certainties, but not everything is certain. Not everything is black and white. T.S. Eliot in fact, defines heresy as "an attempt to simplify the truth by reducing it to the limits of ordinary understanding, instead of enlarging our reason to the apprehension of the truth."

And when we try to enlarge our reason to apprehend the truth, we're not able to state it in a proposition. Instead, we're forced into doxology - with the Apostle, "O the depth of the riches, the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are the divine judgements, and God's paths beyond tracing out. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been God's advisor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from God and through God and to God are all things. To God be the glory, forever, amen."

When we genuinely feel that sense of doxology, it leads us to the final brief thing to be said about possessing the mind of Christ. Beyond growing in awareness (being life-long students), and beyond living with a sense of mystery (being worshippers), the Christological hymn of Philippians above all demonstrates that we live lives of humility and compassion as servants. "No servant is greater than his Lord." If our Lord can lay aside his prerogatives, maybe we too can learn to live in simplicity of spirit, to give up selfish ambition and vain conceit, and be a people of compassion and servanthood. Maybe we too can have the mind of Christ.

A woman dreamed she visited a museum of the celestial city. No throne or king's miter were there, not even Martin Luther's inkpot. A widow's mite, a tattered robe, a hammer and some nails were in view. She inquired of the curator, "do you have a towel and basin?" No, was the reply, "for you see that they are in constant use." In was then the woman knew that she was in the holy city.