EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

I watched a documentary this past week called, What Would Jesus Buy? It tells the story of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. They’re on a mission to get Americans to . . . stop shopping. They want to challenge rampant consumerism right where it happens, so they stage interventions at malls, and Wal Marts, and Starbucks.

There are a lot of very funny scenes of the Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping in action, including one of Reverend Billy exorcising a latte at Starbucks. But there are also a lot of scenes that are deeply sad. A woman during the Christmas shopping rush who says, “I don’t have the money, but it’s for the kids. It’s all for the kids.” Another mother, who doesn’t look like she’s very well-off, listing the things she has in her shopping bags: Nintendo, and Wii, and Tickle-Me-Elmo. A young man on Rodeo Drive who says what he wants for Christmas is a Prada dogtag and a pair of Gucci loafers.

There are scenes of people standing in crowds, pressed up against the entrance to big box stores, waiting for the doors to open and the Christmas shopping season to begin. And those are followed by scenes of what happens once the doors do open: people stumble and fall, and get trampled by the crowd rushing in to buy stuff. It’s like the horrific scenes of people getting trampled on haj, but instead of trying to get to Mecca, these folks are trying to get into Best Buy.

It’s madness.

And it’s not that these people are bad, or stupid, or ridiculous. If anything, what they are is well-trained. They live, like we all do, surrounded by billboards, and ads, and magazines, and stores all of which promise that what they’re offering will make us better-looking, smarter, more distinctive, and popular.

We’re vulnerable to those promises because part of what it is to be human is to yearn. Desire is encoded in our DNA. Longing is part of the human condition.

This economy is built on playing to that longing. It’s driven by manufacturing our desire for stuff, by offering us things to buy that will somehow answer the yearning deep inside us.

That hasn’t worked out so well. It turns out the entire country has been caught in a stampede at a big box store. We’ve been caught with our collective noses smushed up against the glass doors trying to get at the stuff inside as if it were the Holy of Holies.

And into this madness comes Paul.

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus who did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, humbling himself and being obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

The yearning that is in us is there because we are created in the image of God. We desire because God desires. God desires us-God loves us so much He sent us His only Son. Only in us, desire gets twisted. St. Augustine said we are created with free will, but that our will gets bent. It gets curved in on itself. And so what is at its source a yearning for God becomes instead a desire for self-fulfillment. We get in our own way of desiring God.

It’s a mess, but it’s not a hopeless mess. It’s not hopeless because God won’t let it be.

Paul is everything the market tells us we should not be. In worldly terms, he has no status, no security, no power, and I’m just guessing here, probably no sex appeal. He’s been flogged, chased from town to town, and tossed in prison. And yet, he’s joyful. His letters are just lit up with joy.

“I thank my God every time I remember you all,” he writes to the Philippians, “constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you . . . . And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more . . . And I will continue to rejoice. . . For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.” To live is Christ and to die is only to have more of Christ.

That is the context for how Paul tells the Philippians to live. They are to have the same mind as Jesus did, to follow him in emptying themselves and looking to serve one another rather than grasping at power or status or whatever else it is the world tells us we want.

Which is something the world is very good at doing. The market will tell us how we are to express ourselves. It will tell us how what we buy describes who we are. It will tell us that the way for a mother to show love for her children is to buy them lots of things, more things than she can possibly afford or that they can enjoy, for that matter. And it’s a very successful system, because the stuff we get in the name of self-fulfillment won’t ever fulfill our yearning. So we’ll keep buying more stuff to fill in the emptiness we feel inside.

And the way out isn’t to punish ourselves. When Paul urges us to follow Jesus who emptied himself, he isn’t calling us to self-punishment any more than he’s calling us to follow Jesus as a means to self-fulfillment. It isn’t really even a question of what we’re supposed to do so much as it is a discovery of what God’s already doing.

“. . . for it is God who is at work in you,” Paul says, “enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” The self-emptying Paul means isn’t about following a rigid list of rules for self-improvement, but about responding to God who’s already living and working in us. The self-emptying Paul has in mind is a deepening awareness of God. The practice of loving humility he describes is about making more and more space for the Creator who longs to be with us.

That’s why we’re to love one another and to seek out one another’s best interests rather than our own. It’s not about restricting our wants but about discovering our freedom, discovering it in the joy of serving Christ by serving one another.

The good news is, it’s already happened. The incredibly good news is that Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us, is here. God has already given us exactly what we want. Jesus is our heart’s desire. Amen.