Sermon – Two Gatherings

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, PA on May 17, 2026. It is based on Philippians 2:1-13. You can listen to the audio at https://christlutheranharrisburg.podbean.com/e/two-gatherings/).

In 1797, President John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli. It was a straightforward diplomatic document meant to ensure safe passage for American ships. And tucked right into Article 11 of that treaty is this line: “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

John Adams. One of the actual founding fathers. One of the men who was there. Who helped write the documents. Who shaped the nation from the ground up. He signed that. The Senate ratified it unanimously.

I mention this because right now, as we gather for worship this morning, there is an event taking place in Washington DC called a National Rededication. The people organizing it are billing it as a ceremony to rededicate America to God. Big crowds. Big speeches. Big names. It is happening at this very moment.

But here is what I want you to sit with this morning. What John Adams, one of the men who actually founded the country, understood about the relationship between government and faith, the people running that event in DC seem to have forgotten, to put it nicely. Or maybe they just do not care.

What is happening today in Washington is what people call Christian Nationalism. And since that term gets thrown around a lot, let me just say plainly what it means. Christian Nationalism is the idea that America is a Christian nation chosen by God, that its laws and government should be shaped by a particular kind of Christianity, and that being a good American and being a good Christian are basically the same thing. It wraps the flag around the cross, or maybe wraps the cross around the flag. Either way, the two get tangled up in ways that end up serving political power far more than they serve the Gospel.

And what I want to say this morning is that Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi is one of the most direct challenges to that kind of thinking you will ever find. Because Paul is not writing to prop up an empire. He is writing to people who are suffering under one.

Think about the church in Philippi. These are not powerful people. They are not the ones running things. They are living in a Roman city where the empire’s reach is everywhere. Caesar is called lord. Caesar is called savior. The empire has its own religious system that blesses the powerful, justifies the status quo, and tells people that if they just keep their heads down and trust the rulers, everything will be fine.

And Paul is writing to a little community of people who have decided to follow a different Lord. A Lord who was executed by the empire. A Lord who did not have political power or military might. A Lord who, as Paul writes, “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.”

Paul does not write to this church and say, trust the empire. He does not write and say, God has chosen Caesar. He does not write and say, your faithfulness means God will bless you with wealth and comfort and power.

He writes and says: you are in this together. And that is the only way you are going to make it.

The letter opens with Paul practically pleading. You can feel it in the words. “If there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit.” He is saying, if any of that is real to you, then I am begging you to be of one mind. Be united. Look out for each other.

This is not Paul telling them to all think exactly alike or sign off on the same statement of belief. The commentator Timothy Adkins-Jones from Working Preacher puts it well when he says that what Paul is after here is something called orthopraxis. That is a fancy word for a simple idea: that unity in the church is less about agreeing on everything in your head and more about how you show up for each other in your daily life. It is about what you do, not just what you think.

Like-mindedness, in Paul’s understanding, means orienting yourselves together toward Christ. It means letting Christ be the center around which the community gathers, rather than politics, or personality, or who has the most power in the room.

And the hard part that Paul knew well is that this requires humility. It requires, as he says in verse 3, doing nothing from “selfish ambition or empty conceit.” Looking to the interests of others. Not just your own.

In a culture built on the idea that the individual is the center of everything, that is a radical ask.

We live in a country that has made individualism practically a religion of its own. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Take care of your own. Mind your business. Every person for themselves.

And somewhere along the way, the American church absorbed that way of thinking and made it part of the faith. Faith became a private matter. A personal relationship with Jesus, just between you and God. Your own individual salvation. Your own prayer life. Your own spiritual journey.

Now there is nothing wrong with a personal relationship with Jesus. But Paul never imagined faith as a private matter. For Paul, you cannot separate your relationship with Jesus from your relationship with the community around you. They are the same thing. You cannot follow Christ alone. You were never meant to.

Because the moment faith becomes only about the individual, something important gets lost. The moment it is just me and Jesus, it becomes very easy to stop seeing the suffering of the people around me. It becomes easy to ignore the systemic reasons why some people in Harrisburg do not have enough to eat, or cannot afford a doctor, or are living in fear of what happens to their family next. When it is just me and Jesus, I can keep my head down, mind my private faith, and look away from all of that.

And this is how we have gotten to a place where so many people, including Christians, simply do not care what happens to someone else. They do not care about the family being evicted across town. They do not care about the person who cannot get medicine. They do not care about the child going to bed hungry. They do not start to care until it touches their own life. Until it is their job that disappears. Their family member who cannot get care. Their neighborhood that falls apart.

It should never have to get to that point. That is not a human failing we are just supposed to accept. That is a failure of formation. That is what happens when the church stops teaching people that their neighbor’s suffering is their own. When faith gets reduced to a private transaction between me and God, with nothing owed to anyone else.

Paul says that is not the way of Jesus. The way of Jesus is to look at the interests of others before your own. To orient the whole community around that practice. To make it impossible to worship together on Sunday and ignore each other the rest of the week.

Think about what Christ Lutheran Church is. Think about why we exist.

We exist because people decided that their faith was not a private matter. Churches became funding partners. Foundations and businesses and individual donors saw that the work we do here is connected to their calling too. Volunteers showed up. Community organizations built relationships with us. The clinics that run through this building exist because of that web of connection. Nobody built any of this alone.

If faith were just an individual, private thing, Christ Lutheran would not be here. There would be nothing to hold it together. Suffering would just be your own problem to deal with by yourself.

But we believe something different. We believe that when one person suffers, we all suffer. That when one person cannot breathe, none of us can breathe easy. That we endure what we endure together, because that is the only way through.

Now, back to what is happening in Washington right now. I will be honest with you. I do not expect to hear a message today about Christ emptying himself. A message about how he let go of divine privilege. How he took on human flesh and human struggle and human suffering. How he came down. How he went low. How he washed feet.

Based on what we know about the speakers and the organizers of that event, the past is a pretty good indication of what to expect today. What we have heard from these voices consistently is a message about dominion. About power. About God blessing America and its rulers and how it operates. About who is in and who is out. About a version of Christianity that looks a whole lot more like the Roman empire’s religion than it does like the Jesus who was crucified by Rome.

Empires always do this. They have been doing it since the beginning. They take God’s name and put it on their agenda. They declare themselves blessed. They tell the people: trust us. Trust the state. Trust the powerful. There is nothing beyond us.

And Paul looked the Roman Empire in the eye and said that is a lie.

He said the Lord we serve took the form of a servant. The Lord we serve was put to death on a Roman cross. The Lord we serve did not grasp for power and privilege but let it all go for love of the world.  That is what we are called to imitate.

Yesterday I was at the United in Love Conference hosted by Christian Churches United. Churches from across this region came together. Pastors, laypeople, community leaders, people of different races and backgrounds and traditions and sexualities, all gathered to ask one question. How do we love our neighbors?

And what was so striking to me was how different that felt from what is happening in Washington today.

Because every single speaker, every single session, came back to the same things. Know your neighbors by name. Listen to their stories. Sit with them. Be present. Show up.

Real compassion is not about solving everybody’s problems. Often there are no clean solutions. Real compassion is about being present in the pain. It is about looking at someone who is suffering and saying, I see you. I am not going anywhere. You are not alone.

One story really stayed with me. There was a church that used to ask the people who camped out on their front steps to move before worship, so that the congregation could get inside to worship without being bothered. And somewhere along the way, someone in that church started asking a question. They stopped asking “how do we keep these people away” and started asking “who is my neighbor and how do I love them?” They started learning names. Hearing stories. Building relationships. And eventually that congregation built a tiny house village for the very neighbors they used to turn away.

That is what like-mindedness in Christ produces. That is the church that Paul is describing.

Paul tells us that Christ is with us in our suffering. Not just each of us individually, but the whole body of Christ together. Jesus promised that the church would never be alone. That the Spirit would be present in the community, holding it together, sustaining it through what it has to endure.

Empires need you to believe you are alone. They need you to believe there is no community, no solidarity, no love that transcends what they can offer. Because when people come together, and when they learn each other’s names, and when they share each other’s suffering, and when they show up for each other regardless of what the powerful say, empires start to shake.

The early church knew this. They had nothing by Rome’s standards. No army. No money. No political power. Just each other, and the Spirit that held them together, and a Lord who had gone all the way down into death and come out the other side.

That is the inheritance we have. That is what holds this building together, what holds our clinics together, what holds this beautiful and challenging community together. Every person who walks through these doors is carrying something. Every one of us is in need of healing. That is not a weakness. That is the truth that makes this place what it is. We are a healing community, and healing does not happen alone. It never has.

And it is worth everything.

Let us be like-minded. Let us empty ourselves of whatever is dividing us, separating us, keeping us from seeing the person sitting next to us clearly. Let us learn our neighbors’ names. Let us learn their stories. Let us sit with them long enough to actually hear what they carry.

Because we are in this together. And that is exactly where Jesus is.

Thanks be to God.