Sunday's Sermon - 17 March, 2013 - Lent V

(Since this Sunday was also St. Patrick's Day, I wore my saffron kilt under my vestments.)

I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

• What Paul says here is pretty radical. He says that everything that has been in his life will count as nothing or less than nothing compared to knowing Jesus Christ. Truth to tell, I'm not sure I could say the same at the present time.
• It's been said that Paul was saying this toward the end of his life. He is actually writing from prison and anticipates a judgement of death against him. Still, he writes out of concern for the church at Philippi and thanks them for their continued generosity to him and to the entire Christian community. It's been said that the imminence of death clears the mind and this might be the case for Paul. He can say this because he has taken stock of his life and has his priorities straight.
• In any event, he lays out his history and resume for the Philippians: his circumcision, his membership in the tribe of Benjamin, one of the constantly faithful tribes of Israel, a blameless Pharisee and a perfect keeper of the law.
• Then he says it's all loss, not gain, all rubbish (although he uses a much stronger word, more like “dung” which Luther translated as “ich erachte es für Dreck, damit ich Christus gewinne”) Even in prison, Paul is not one to mince words!
• So why is Paul so confident? Why is he so ready to give up everything, even his life?
• One thing is for sure – Paul's confidence is not in himself. He has quite a resume for a faithful Jewish person of his time, but he pushes it off. He has an powerful history as a Christian apostle... which he makes no mention of. He is in prison and expects execution for his beliefs, but he's not overly impressed with himself. He's pleased to have friends who remain with him in his sufferings and is grateful to the Philippians for their physical and spiritual support.
• What he really relies on is something else entirely: the righteousness from God based on faith. He says that not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law..., all his hope is in Christ Jesus.
• His hope is not yet fulfilled and he has a ways to go, but he knows what he wants: I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
• So knowing where he wants to go, how does he get there? By putting his trust and hope in his own life and his achievements? No; he's discounted them and called them loss and trash. He doesn't even put his trust in his own faith, for this could be a personal work like all other things he's laid aside.
• It is in the mercy and grace of God found in Jesus Christ that Paul's hope is laid, and safely too.
• We know what became of Paul and we know that his preaching still rings true today so many years after his ministry.
• We also know that we are like him. We might not be able to preach like he did, nor have we been called to make the same sacrifices he had. But, in a large part because of Paul's ministry, our trust is in that same grace and mercy of God found in Jesus. We grasp stand in this grace through our faith, but our faith does not earn it, as though it were something to be rewarded. Don't get me wrong;faith will be rewarded when the time comes, but not because our faith attracts God. Our faith will be rewarded in how we live out our faith in our lives. This is faith as faithfulness or fidelity to what God calls us to rather than faith as subscribing to a certain set of beliefs. The first flows from grace while the second could be considered a type of work. And we all know the old slogan – grace, not works.
• If we look at the Gospel for today, we see an example of this fidelity. Mary, whose faith we only see by her actions here, anoints Jesus' feet with an expensive perfume in a hugely extravagant gesture. Judas – and rightly, in fact – points out the cost of this and how the money could have benefited the poor. The evangelist takes pains to point out that Mary's actions are motivated by love while Judas' are motivated by greed. Mary responds to grace and acts in grace. Judas... not so much.
• So here we are... living our lives in grace that surrounds us so throughly that we often don't even notice it. It is that grace that saves us and motivates us to be the face and hands of Jesus in this world.
• In this we, too, have a ways to go. So in our daily lives, we resemble Paul: I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.