Jesus, Should We Call You Lord?
Preached for Wollaston Congregational Church on March 19th, 2023
Scripture: Philippians 2:5-11
He is Lord, He is Lord
He is risen from the dead and He is Lord
Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess
That Jesus Christ is Lord
We sat on the floor of the chaplaincy and sang. I lifted my hands in worship with the other members of the Christian Union (the CU). Father Tom lived in the chaplaincy. He had given the CU group a cheery wave and headed off to the student bar for a couple of pints while they had their weekly Wednesday meeting. Tom was a beloved character on campus – with his thick coke bottle lens. His thin, unkempt frame was a familiar fixture in the bar.
Father Tom was on campus for the Catholic students, should they need him, but also he was the one who got alongside students who were struggling. He sometimes took students groups to join peace marches against the nuclear threat. He had been arrested on at least one occasion for civil disobedience.
The CU choruses held no appeal for him. And I noticed. In the back of my mind there was the troubling question: which is the better way? To gather in these heady meetings and sing the songs of worship to Jesus, the Lord? Or, to forget about all that and get up and act in ways Jesus might have done?
And for many years since then, I’ve resisted calling Jesus Lord. Perhaps this a natural reaction, having left the group that referred to him as “the Lord” ALL THE TIME. I only heard the name Jesus of Nazareth in scripture readings with the CU. And then, most of the readings were from the Epistles, not the Gospel. Often someone would say “the Lord” is calling me to do this or that, and I would wonder “who are you talking about: Jesus or about God?”
As I read chapter 4 of the book “Freeing Jesus” by Diana Butler Bass on Jesus as Lord, I pondered the word associations I have with “Lord”: the Lord of the Manor, the House of Lords, someone who “lords it over” others, a feudal lord. [1]
A lord is always a man (otherwise the title would be Lady). So does that mean that Christ – not the man Jesus, but the resurrected and ascended Christ - is male? And, because the word is interchangeable with God, does that make God also always male?
As I began to challenge my own habit of using male pronouns for God, I also began to challenge the designation as Lord. For a person who grew up in England, the term “Lord” ought to conjure an image of a shameful domination system in which the Lord is at the top of the hierarchy.
This terminology may not provoke Americans in quite the same way. And yet, perhaps you are equally provoked by the term “Master” for Jesus as it occurs in our scriptures. When we heard the verse “taking the form of a slave” from today’s reading from Philippians, I hope we all recoiled. In American memory, the terms master and slave conjure an equally shameful domination system.
And so we’re left with the question: “does proclaiming Jesus as Lord or Master simply mean that he is just another ‘man in charge’: another feudal lord, another enslaver, another oppressor?”
Of course, the feudal domination systems and slavery in the Americas existed centuries after the life of Jesus. When the Apostle Paul recited the early Christian hymn we read together this morning, the domination system was the Roman Empire.
As Diana Butler Bass writes in the book “Freeing Jesus”: “Early Christians often proclaimed their faith in three words: ‘Jesus is Lord.’” But, as Bass says, for the Romans, Caesar was Lord and God. Every faithful Roman citizen they must proclaim “Kaisar Kyrios” Caesar is Lord. [2]
In the times of persecution, repeating the phrase “Christos Kyrios” (Jesus is Lord) to the Roman authorities would get early Christians into deep trouble. And, still, they insisted on doing it at every opportunity.
Bass says that many members of the early church were slaves themselves, or employees of their lords and masters, or students who were instructed to revere and obey their teachers as their master. “In a world where millions were held in slavery and millions of others lived in poverty and powerlessness at the bottom of a rigid social hierarchy, claiming Jesus as ‘Lord’” meant Caesar doesn’t own me, Jesus does. “It announced one’s liberation from oppression.”[3]
But, what does “Jesus is Lord” mean for us, here today?
As a young student, Diana Butler Bass was attracted to the idea of becoming a missionary. That was the greatest commitment a young evangelical woman could make. As she notes “Missionaries are to evangelicals as saints are to Catholics—heroes of faith to be emulated.” [4]
As a missionary, Bass would bring the Lord Jesus to the less fortunate and she would be revered as a saint. Bass chose to go as a missionary to “Secular Europe” and she was sent to work in the Netherlands.
The Dutch had little tolerance for missionaries going door to door with tracts and Bibles, and so she was sent to assist an elderly disabled man. Her task was to clean the man’s kitchen, which was caked in grease and dirt accumulated over many years. It wasn’t easy for Bass and the man to communicate, but he was clearly thankful for her efforts and wheeled himself into the kitchen occasionally to say “danke je wel” as she worked. And in order to connect with her, he brought out his New Testament and began to read out loud.
When Bass had completed the job as best she could, she says “he smiled and handed me a half dozen tulips as a kindness, and it became obvious that I was the one who had been evangelized by his gratitude. Jesus had shown up in an odd reversal of roles, for my heart was probably changed more than that of my host.” [5]
Diana Butler Bass had set out to be the one who had the good news of Jesus Christ, the Lord to share. But in the end, she was humbled. The cleaning work was overwhelming and uninspiring. What she received was the gift of kinship with a man she thought she had come to help.
My own experiences of “going to help” are not that different from Bass’s. During my first year in college I gravitated away from the CU and toward an alternative Christian group – Ichthus. This group organized a series of open meetings on campus, inviting speakers from the social justice movement. We learned a lot and yet the group members became restless with this format. We said to one another that we really ought to be doing something, and helping people. As Jesus would have done.
And so a plan came about to go and volunteer at the local hospital one Wednesday evening. We were assigned to a unit that was caring for elderly patients. I remember being instructed to go and assist with their dinner. And so I stood in the room, as the patients sat and ate. They didn’t know why I was there and they want to be helped to eat. Meanwhile the nursing staff was sarcastic. One said, “Oh we have little girl scouts and boy scouts come to help today, do we?” I decided that this plan was not working. I never returned to the hospital to volunteer again.
I didn’t give up, though. Later in the year, our group was invited to host students from all over Europe for an international ecumenical meeting with the monastic Taizé brothers of France. This meeting took place in the week after Christmas, and so some of the students returned to campus to host students from Germany and Spain.
We traveled together to meetings with members of the Taizé community being held in London. We sang together and we ate together. We were sent to places of “suffering and hope” together: a home run by nuns for runaway girls, and the homes of the elderly and lonely poor. There we made connections and listened to stories. We never once said “Jesus is Lord” nor did we “help” but we made some deep connections. We found we were “kin” with the students from overseas and also with the forgotten people of our own community.
Today’s scripture from Philippians says that Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave … and humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on the cross.”
Sometimes, we read this as a “done deal.” Jesus went to the cross for us, meaning that we wouldn’t have to. But, during his lifetime Jesus made clear to the disciples that in order to follow him, they too would need to deny themselves, pick up their crosses and follow him. (Matt 16:24)
I don’t think that Jesus meant that his followers should be literally crucified, rather than they should humble themselves and empty themselves in his service. This is not “helping” for Brownie points. And it is not telling less fortunate people that they should accept Jesus as their Lord. Emptying ourselves means letting go of our grandiose notions of being “the helpers.”
It is being emptied out by connecting in relationship. It is going, like Jesus and like Father Tom, to those who suffer most under the dominant culture and simply being present with them … whether the dominant culture is greedy corporations who abuse the environment, or drug companies that profit from addictions … whether it is a dominant culture of competitiveness and loneliness, or the dominant culture of white, settled Americans over immigrants.
Emptying out, for us followers of Jesus, means making those who are “lorded over” our kin, our family. We are equal and one with them.
Friends, this week we continue our walk toward Jerusalem with Jesus. Next week we will accompany him on his meek parade into the city, riding on a donkey. Palm Sunday comes just in time for us to study Jesus as “the Way.”
But for today, hear these words of meditation from Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Jesus emptied himself.
—Philippians 2.7
Give yourself away
and be empty of all
but God.
Lose your grip on your life
and it becomes
infinite.
Let go of it all,
and you have at your disposal
all of heaven.
Pour yourself out
and God never stops
pouring through you. [6]
May all God’s people say,
Amen
[1] Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way and Presence (New York: HarperCollins, 2021)
[2] Bass, Diana Butler. Freeing Jesus (p. 140). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
[3] Ibid., p 120
[4] Ibid., p 143
[5] Ibid., p 147
[6] https://unfoldinglight.net/2018/03/19/xnpdflm3cfpwae9kmdsnzkk5c3cdkz/