A Sermon based upon Philippians 3: 4-14
By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Fourth Sunday after Easter, May 19th, 2019
In the 1960’s and 70’s the Minnesota Vikings had the best ranked defensive line in the NFL. Carl Eller, Alan Page, Gary Larson, and Jim Marshall were nicked named ‘the purple people eaters. Their intimidating defensive play made it possible for the Vikings to have one of the most intimating defenses in professional football, leading the Vikings to several Super-bowls.
In one particular 1964 game, Vikings’ defensive lineman Jim Marshall scooped up a fumble by a San Francisco 49ers receiver and saw daylight ahead of him: none of the opposing team’s red uniforms stood between him and the end zone, some 60 yards away. So he took off running, as fast as a big defensive lineman could go, churning in his purple helmet, purple pants and white jersey, dreams of a touchdown dancing in his head. He heard the crowd roaring around him. He saw his teammates running alongside him waving their arms on the sideline. He cruised the last few yards into the end zone and celebrated his touchdown by jubilantly tossing the football up into the stands.
Then a player on the other team walked up and gave him a hug. His eyes were opened. You see, Jim Marshall had just run to the wrong end zone, and scored two points for the guys in red. When you watch the television replay, you hear the announcer yelling, over and over, “He’s running the wrong way! Marshall is running the wrong way!” The only person in the stadium who didn’t realize Jim Marshall was running the wrong way was Jim Marshall.
Marshall was like the man driving down the highway whose wife called him on his cellphone to tell him to watch out, because she had heard on the news that there was a crazy person driving the wrong way down that same highway. The man replied, “You’re not kidding, honey -- there’s not just one crazy person going the wrong way; I can see hundreds of them!”
In today’s Bible text, the Apostle Paul explained how he was once a man going the wrong way, sincerely believing he was right to murder Christians. He claimed pedigrees, accolades and reason upon reason to be self-satisfied with himself and his status in life. Everything was just the way he wanted it. He believed sincerely that only his way was right, and all other ways were wrong. He also believed that Christians were a dangerous threat to true Judaism. Then, he encountered Jesus and realized, on the contrary that what he was doing was wrong. He found something in Jesus that he had missed. Now, before he could move forward, he had to lose, before he could win.
I CONSIDER EVERYTHING A LOSS. (8)
Sam Wells, a pastor from England, who used to be campus minister at Duke, raises an interesting question concerning the Christian life. He wonders that maybe the nature of Christian living is not only about being certain about what you believe, but maybe, he says, becoming and being a Christian is also about allowing yourself to become ‘‘uncertain’ about some other things you were once sure about. Isn’t that part of what Paul explains in today’s text? Saul was once a person who was self-assured about his views of God and life, but when he met Jesus, he became unsure of just about everything.
Saul’s encounter with Jesus could be understood to be something similar to re-booting, or re-installing software on a computer. When you reboot, if you do not save the information you will lose everything you’ve been working on. Or, more positively, when you re-install Software, you will have a fresh, uncorrupted program to work with. Sometimes, in most everything we do, it can be a good thing to occasionally reboot your life, so you can have a new, fresh start.
I recall when my home pastor, during my youth days, reported to the church that his home had been broken into, but the only thing the thief took was his briefcase containing all his old sermons. One of the men in the church later said it was a great thing and the thief ironically did a good service for the church. After the theft, the pastors sermons greatly improved.
Sometimes we all need new reinstall of how we are living. Of course, it is something that should happen when we meet Jesus for the first time, but isn’t it something that could keep happening as we get to know Jesus better and better, more and more? Couldn’t it still be just as important to wake up in the morning and have some type of fresh, new adventure into the unknown waiting for you rather than the same ole monotonous, same ole life? Isn’t it good that we can still be challenge by what don’t yet know, not just be reassured of what we think we already know and are sure about?
The greatest part of Paul’s religious story is that when he started following Jesus, he had to lose before he could have new gains in his life. Paul’s new life in Christ was a lot like it was for my Father when he left the security of working at JC Penny’s and started a partnership with his brother in their own grocery and service station business. It was risky. It was hard work. It meant leaving his old life behind. It meant stepping out into the unknown. It also meant that the whole family had to adjust to a whole new, and sometimes an even more demanding way of life. But even with all that was risky, it was also adventurous, exciting, and it was the most rewarding days of his life. Instead of going through the daily monotony of punching his time card, life ‘hummed’ with new energies from connection and service to the community where he, and we all lived.
I can’t help but think that Saul’s conversion to become Paul was something like what our family experienced way back in 1965 and 1966. Even as a child, I too had to let go of a few things. I had to leave our little city home of 1300 square feet. I had to leave the great little school in town in the middle of the third grade. I also had to leave the church where I had been going since birth, and I had to leave all my friends in the city. Everything I had to count as loss for the new life I was going to have in the country.
At that time, however, a new life in the country ‘stunk’ literally. I had never smelled a skunk until we moved out on Tomlin Mill Road. I had never walked in the woods in absolute darkness, until I moved into the country. I had to count all those city lights as loss, for the excellency of sleeping out under the stars in the dark. Did I make a good trade? Was it a good move? Was losing everything I had known as a 8 year old boy, worth losing for the adventure of walking, living, and now spending the rest of my young years exploring a life I hadn’t known or ever thought about before?
I guess, you who have always lived in the country, know already, that this was a good loss---losing my city life. Maybe my parents knew it would be good for me too. But as a child, having to leave my neighborhood and friends to enter a world where I knew nothing and no one was frightening, disconcerting and strange. But, I came to realize later, that losing the city, and that neighborhood, which was dying even then, was one of the best things that ever happened in my life.
PAnd I could add that there have been some other great ‘losing adventures too; like when at 18 years, I left my home to go off to college, or when I left home to move in with a girl I married, but still didn’t know, or when we left the security of being alone together to adopt a child, or when we left the security of the US to move to Europe; in most every time I have lost the security and surety of one way of life, striking out into the adventure of leaving one way of life behind to go toward another, I have found ‘uncertainty’ can be also be a great blessing rather than the frightful curse one might think.
After Thanksgiving last year, the CBS Morning News interviewed a 40 year old man who had recently established a multimillion dollar business, which produced and marketed a skin-care business that was even being used by certain movie stars. The guy came up with the skin care product from dealing with own skin problems, which developed from his having to spend the rest of his life in a wheel chair. At age 24, as an athletic young man, he drove into what he thought was the deep part of the pool, only to see the ladder to the shallow side beside where he dove. He remembered his chin striking the ladder, then his neck snapping back when he hit the concrete bottom. When after surgery, the doctor told his parents, he’d never walk, raise his arms, or breathe on his own, his Italian mother immediately ask him to move his arm, and he was able to shock the doctor by raising his shoulder. He still remains in a wheelchair, but out of his loss and having to deal with skin problems, he has found a new purpose for living in developing a business that not only enables him to provide for himself, but he can still help others too. Out of great loss, came a surprising new gain of hope, meaning and purpose of life.
I WANT TO KNOW CHRIST (10)
All of us, if we are somewhat reflective about life’s purpose and meaning, will wonder why bad things happen to good people. The whole question of why God allows evil, hurt, pain and loss, is the most difficult theological question of all. In fact, most theology scholars today think there is no answer to why, and shouldn’t be. Life is not finally about having all our questions answered, they suggest, but living life is much more about asking the right questions and learning to live the into these questions, than settling for having answers.
Isn’t this the ‘turn’ Paul makes in his life? Instead of living a life built on what he already thinks he knows, Paul finds, not just adventure, but also wisdom in building his new life around what he ‘wants’ to know. Do you notice here that Paul does not describe his Christian life as having come to know everything about Jesus, but he describes it as his ‘wanting’ to know Christ. For Paul, knowing Jesus is much more a journey for your whole life, than it can ever be a single destination in life. Like one person has said, ‘someday I hope to be a Christian.’ That person did not mean that they hoped one day to believe in Jesus, but they meant that becoming a Christian was so consuming it would take their whole life.
You can understand how limited and unreasonable it is to say you that you already ‘know Jesus’ when you try to tell outsiders about your faith in Jesus. How can you know someone who has been dead 2000 years? But when you tell someone you want to know Jesus more and more, you don’t claim anything except your hearts desire, so it could make an outsider wonder, not about how superior or crazy you are, but they might begin to see how spiritually hungry you are, just like they may be too. To ‘want’ to know something puts us all on a much more shared foundation in life, than to talk about what we already know, doesn’t it? Paul’s way of looking at faith as a process and a journey, makes us all pilgrims who are much more alike, than different.
For if you read on, you understand that Paul’s new desire to know Christ is also a way of living that is much less about being right about everything, and is much more about trying and learning to do right in everything you do. This idea of constantly learning what is right is much more in tune with what Paul means by the righteousness of God. It remains God’s righteousness, so that what is right and good can be constantly renewed and followed throughout your whole life. If you ever settle for or think you already know everything righteousness is, or means once and for all, ironically even what came from God once, now becomes yours, and you limit what God can do for you, and in you for the rest of your life. You settle down with what God has done, or what you once did, rather than to stay with a living God who still leads you. When you allow God’s righteousness to remain God’s, which you draw from daily to live and guide you life, then God’s righteousness doesn’t become limited by your own ‘rightness’. This is how God keeps leading you, instead of you taking the lead, by making a false god who not alive in you, but is now dead, and will mistakenly cause you to end up with a self-made, dead-end life. You certainly don’t want to end up there.
Last fall, as I was leading some youth through a study of the Bible, the lesson was about the rise of prophets in ancient Israel. We discussed that prophets were seers, who told the truth few wanted to hear. Prophets could see the future, not because they knew the future, but they could see into the future because they knew the truth. I also explained that a prophet could see into the future much like their parents when they told them to be careful when went out the door. Their parents could look into the future, not because they actually saw the future, but because parents know their children they know how to warn them about the future.
And one of those things prophets constantly warned the people of God about was making or having idols. The reason that idols or false gods were so dangerous was not what worshipping them did to God, but what having false gods and worshipping idols did to people. When the people worshipped idols they stopped caring about the poor, the needy, and the disadvantaged among them. When they turned their focus on the false gods, they lost their focus on who and what the true God cares most about---people showing their love for God by sharing that love with people, especially those who are struggling or need the love and care that only a human will give to another when they know God expects this kind of love from them.
When we think about the righteousness of God revealed fully and finally in Jesus Christ, how do we picture it? Of course we think about the good God did for us by sending Jesus to reveal God’s forgiveness. That’s still most important, and ‘once for all’ in establishing God’s Love, but it not all God wants to do in and for us. It’s also important to understand that God’s righteousness was revealed as Jesus went about doing good to show us how to do good too. If we want to know more and more about this Jesus, we must keep following him. This is the true Jesus, who not only came to promise heaven, but he also came preaching and praying for God’s rule and God’s righteousness to be realized now, on earth, as it already is in heaven. This is a righteousness that comes from God and keeps coming from God, as we keep serving Jesus day and day after day, taking us to places we haven’t been to do things we would have never done, if we hadn’t see Jesus doing them, or have a living Christ in us, who keeps showing us what we should do.
I PRESS ON TOWARD…THE PRIZE (14)
The final thing Paul says about the Christian life is to consider where Jesus is taking him. Jesus not only takes Paul away from things he thought were important, but weren’t. Jesus not only keeps revealing to Paul what he should do and know, but Jesus also takes Paul toward a finish line that Paul will never cross, until after the very last day of his life
Does that sound bad; that in this life you will never finally have arrived? For a Christian, the greatest thing about living in Christ is not what we have or know now, but what is still to come. As Christians we don’t have to be afraid to sacrifice or lose, and we don’t have to know, have, or experience everything in life, or have to finish some kind of unwritten ‘bucket list’. In Christ we not only have a life that is already worth living all by itself, but can also live, lose, learn, and keep on living, learning and even losing too, because we trust, hope and believe, that the best is yet to come. This well worn phrase means that the Christian life has a finish line that is always ahead and before us, so that we have always have someone to run with and something to run toward, until the very end of our journey in this life. To live in Christ is to never get stuck in the past, but to keep our focus on the future and the finishing line that always remains ahead.
Several years ago, a NC pastor, JD GREER, wrote a controversial book asking people to stop asking Jesus into their heart. His point was not that people should stop ‘getting saved’ but his point was that some people have mistakenly made faith in Jesus into a vicious cycle that goes nowhere. Life in Christ begins by trusting in what God has done, and life in Christ moves ahead by trusting that Christ can take us through life to its rightful purpose. But to be in Christ, you must stay with Christ and keep your eye on the ‘prize of the high calling.’ For Paul understood, and wanted the Philippians to understand too, and for us as well, that the only right way to live your life is to keep your focus on how you should ‘finish’. The only way to live your life toward the finish is to live your life as your answer to God’s call.
Isn’t this where we are all headed? We come from God and we end with God. Because life is a gift and not ‘a given’, or something we have created ourselves, life comes to us not just as a gift, but it also comes with a responsibility. So, the right question to ask yourself is not, ‘what do you want to do’ or ‘what do you you want in life’, but the right question is ‘what is God calling you to do with your life’? How does your life answer God’s call? For Paul the voice of God came to him, not just through following rules and laws, but the voice of God spoke most clearly through the Christ who called him toward love; a love that was answered not just with words, but also with deeds.
Paul answered the high call to move toward a Christ-like love that was so big, so great, that this call came not just once, but it kept coming to him over and over, so that it could only be answered by how he lived everyday for the rest of his life. What about you? Is your answer a one shot deal, or is it a purpose, a goal, and a race that you are still running, and will keep running until you come to the finish line? As the best athletes will say, what matters most is how you start and how you finish. A good race most always comes down to a runner mastering these two most basic skills, a good start and finishing well. Then, the rest will fall into place. In the much the same way, Paul’s understanding of living a life in Christ also focused on the start; what he needed to leave behind, and the finish; how Christ was calling him to finish. Paul was no longer living for what was behind, but he was living toward what was still ahead. That was how Jesus helped Paul stop living in the wrong direction and start living in the right direction. Could Jesus do the same kind of ‘course-correction’ for you? Could Jesus move you from ‘rightness’ to God’s righteousness that only comes through a living, and life-long relationship with Jesus Christ? Amen.
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