I got to read in Church today from Paul’s letter to the Philippians 3:4b-14. My congregation is one that struggles with Paul. Paul is too easily dismissed. Paul who wrote “women should be silent in church” or “it is better to stay single than be married” is easy to hate, especially in the modern age of Outrage Society. But I was assigned to read his words to my community today.
If anyone has else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
This is the kind of stuff we love to hate about Paul. I have to appreciate the editors who this list of not-so-humblebrags and punctuated them in a way that let me read them in a crescendo, a litany of self-praise that we like to think is what Paul is really about.
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
This is a powerful statement. There’s a lot of bang for the buck here. It’s pure attention grabbing.
More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.
I swear there’s a Marie Kondo joke in here somewhere. Paul held all of these attributes as special to him, and then he realized they weren’t making him special. I don’t know if he thanked these attributes before disavowing them. They are not like stuff we surround ourselves with. They are not the things we purchased over the years to fill our lives. Even after the road to Damascus he was still of the tribe of Benjamin, he had still been circumcised on the eighth day.
But Paul calls them a loss. It’s a little tricky. I tried to imply with my interpretation that these things weren’t simply attributes he no longer considered his own, but things that held him back if he spent any time dwelling on them.
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 of the dead.
Here again is one of Paul’s “bad ideas”: That we must suffer for our faith. That’s a hard one to push in modern America where “Christian” is the default in most of the country.
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, 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.
Yeah, I emphasized the “not that I have already obtained this” line because it felt important to knock Paul of the high horse we frequently read him to be on. (I’m pretty sure that sentence makes sense.) I also emphasized the phrase “press on” because it’s important to me, in any way that I act as a teacher, to urge people to avoid complacency. Thinking we have it made because we’re baptized is not really what the Episcopal Church is about.
The lesson I take from this is we must move forward, constantly. We can’t let our pasts drag us down. Change is possible. It’s not always easy, but it is possible. Habits form easy neural pathways that channel our thoughts and keep us repeating the same behaviors. I could wake up on any morning and think “I’m not going to be self-disparaging today” and as soon as anyone even hints that I’m doing a good job at something, or am a nice person, before I can even think about my reaction I’m already saying something cruel about myself.h
I still do not do what I do in the hopes of getting to heaven when I die. I believe that I do the right and good thing (when I do them (which is hopefully most of the time)) because it is the good and right thing. That’s an artifact of my Philosophy classes right there.
In other practical terms, I really hope people could understand every word, because I try to enunciate clearly.