When was the last time you had that sinking feeling in your stomach? Was it on the downward plummet of a roller coaster or in the sudden drop of a plane? Was it upon hearing tragic news? Was it when you suddenly remembered that you had forgotten something very, very important? Do you know the feeling I’m talking about: in the pit of your stomach, a hollow, lifeless feeling?
It could have been something personal that caused a disorientation in your inner geography. But try to remember the last time you had that feeling, in the bowels of your body, when someone else was undergoing trauma, pain, or suffering, when the world was suddenly upended, when the rug of life seemed to be pulled right out from under you.
These days, we usually attribute the anatomical location of the feelings to our hearts. We hold our hands over our hearts or display heart emoticons to express our empathy for someone else. But in ancient times, such feelings were identified not with the heart, but with the bowels. It’s more accurate in a way, because we all know that visceral feeling is way down in the hollowness of our stomach.
If we were to graph this sensation, it would be a downward arc, with the knot of suffering at the bottom of the parabola. In the charting of life, it’s the place at the bottom of the valley, that dry, lifeless place of abandonment. In the trajectory of Scripture, we journey into the bowels in the wilderness wanderings of the newly-freed Israelites as they cried out to God in hunger and thirst. Later, it was in the intensely lonely Babylonian exile when the spiritual center of God’s chosen people had been overthrown by enemies. In the life of Jesus, it was during the solitary prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, and at its nadir, in the cry of dereliction from the hard wood of the cross.
Of course, no one wants to be in that place. We are all told to climb out of the pit as quickly as we can. A successful life, we are told, is one that climbs the ladder of success, transposing the sinking feeling of the pit with the light-headed revelry of the top of the mountain. Didn’t Moses speak to God on the mountain? Didn’t he see the Promised Land from a high place? Didn’t the Transfiguration of Jesus occur way up in the clouds?
We are routinely told that, if you set your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. If you work hard enough, you won’t suffer. If you are a health fanatic and an exercise maniac, you can avoid death. Pop enough pills, and you can life forever.
Even the Church itself has fallen prey to the attraction of this upward climb. Prosperity gospel advocates tell us that our place is always at the top of the curve, that somehow the mountaintop is the only place where God dwells. God wants you to be perpetually happy, with a phony smile always pasted on your face.
But we can always count on St. Paul to bring us back to basics. Paul pops the balloon at the party, or, we might more accurately say, puts the right kind of air in the balloon so it can rise. Paul, writing in his Letter to the Philippians, testifies from a valley while alone in prison. Surprisingly, it’s not so much a cry of forsakenness as it is a testament of hope, a call to eternal joy, and not mere earthly joy. Paul’s testimonial is one that rises from the bowels of quiet suffering to voice the true mind of Christ.
Paul, addressing the Church at Philippi, is not complaining. He’s not griping about the poor quality of food or the discomfort of the jail cell. He’s not having a pity party. Paul is proclaiming that even in the valley of life, he knows true joy will find its completion.
Paul’s cry for his brothers and sisters to find the unifying joy even under hardship has been echoed down the ages in others: in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in Nelson Mandela’s quiet confidence in South African prison cells for nearly thirty years, in Dieterich Bonhoeffer’s hymn singing while locked up by the Nazis and awaiting execution.
A cursory review of the newspaper these days is enough to put anyone down in the valley. Our world is a mess. In a society bent on punitiveness, many are at risk of being locked up for minor offenses or for none at all. There is no shortage of suffering and pain in our midst. A hurricane could wipe your community off the map, and raging wildfires are lighting the sky red on the West Coast. There are plenty of laments groaning their way into the ether. But too often they go unheard and unfelt in the bowels of fellow brothers and sisters.
And if we were to listen only to the world, we would gather that in the valley we are farthest from God. It is the place that shall not be named. Every commercial, ad, and much of our civic understanding tells us that the valleys are hell itself. And we should fear them with all of our being.
How then can Paul write such an encouraging letter from the bowels of hell while locked away in prison? How is Paul able to maintain hope and confidence while staring persecution in the face? Many would suggest that Paul was out of his mind or a hopeless pollyana, imbibing the opiate of the people, and drunk with foolishness.
But Paul brings us down into the bowels because that is so often where life is. Paul reacquaints us with the pits of our stomachs and reminds us that part of the human condition is an inability to escape that sinking feeling, whether upon filing for bankruptcy as the stock market crashes, upon learning of the death of a friend, or on being diagnosed with cancer.
And Paul also tells us that there, in the depths of despair and suffering, in what seems like hell itself, the mind of Christ is to be found. What silly wisdom this seems to be! But after all, we hear these words of encouragement from the one who calls us to be fools for Christ.
Paul tells us that in the lowest places, we become friends again with the hollow feeling in our insides, and thereby, we are reconnected with one another. The affection of which Paul speaks to the Philippians is where we begin to reconnect with the mind of Christ. Just as our hunger pangs remind us of the gift of food, our pangs of suffering remind us that we are part of a body of people oriented towards God and one another.
In a world that increasingly suggests we have nothing in common with one another, Paul reminds us that the one thing we do have in common is the suffering of the human condition. This is not bad news or cause for despair. This is cause for hope, because it means that we are never alone in this condition, that every person on this planet knows intimately that painful feeling down in the depths of their bowels. And that, paradoxically, through our time in the valley, we find everlasting life.
We learn, too, that the downward movement to the valley, to the bottom of the parabola, is the very movement of God himself. This is the sweep of the Incarnation, of God taking on human flesh in Jesus Christ. This is the self-emptying of Christ living among us and walking on the soil of the Middle East and cutting his feet on the pebbles of the roads of ministry and feeling the piercing weight of the nails in his hands and feet. This is Christ’s journey into hell itself on that lonely Holy Saturday where our Lord demonstrated that no place is too low for the salvation of the living God.
And this incredible, ancient hymn in Philippians—the Christ Hymn—shows us in its very structure that like a pendulum gaining momentum at the bottom of its arc, the pit itself is the fulcrum to swing upwards into everlasting life. In our own self-emptying, where we are hollowed out by the vicissitudes of life, we gain momentum for God to thrust us into heaven. In our own hunger pangs, we sense the aching bellies of the destitute, living in squalor just miles from here. In our own loneliness, we feel the abject despair of those locked up for no just reason. In our own inability to speak, we feel the frustration of those whose voices are constantly silenced. In our own fear, we also smell the fear of those who do not know where to get their next meal.
Perhaps the greatest sin among us today is an inability to be moved in our very bowels by the plight of those around us. We’d rather place our hands on our hearts and smile or send vapid emoticons by text. We seem unable, at times, to strive for one mind, because we are scared of losing control of ourselves. But where we strive for one mind, we seek not to eradicate difference, but to part with the grasping of our own desires and mindsets in order to submit to a greater mindset. And we can only do so if we live for a while in the bottom of the pit.
In some sense, my heart is always with the underdog. And it is the people who have suffered the most or lost the most that remind me what being a Christian is about. The communities that have been reduced to utter poverty of spirit and resources are sometimes the most generous. The people who think the least of themselves are the ones I often respect the most. In such people who have truly emptied themselves to something larger, I catch a glimpse of the mind of Christ.
If we can stop clinging to our own desire to climb out of the pit, we will find God. God will meet us in the pit. When we can part with our perfectionism and the desire to be perpetually happy and content, God will fill our emptiness with his lifegiving and loving Spirit. God will draw us together into the mind of Christ, and God will lift us up, as Christ was lifted up on that cross, to be with him in glory forever.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 27, 2020