In her book on The Wisdom Jesus the Anglican priest and writer Cynthia Bourgeault quotes a Texas preacher who says, in the end we’re all just supposed to be nice because “Jesus is Nice!”
There’s some truth there, but when we go back to first lesson and the Ten Commandments, the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking — or on to the Gospel with the vineyard workers running amuck, cooking the books, stiffing the stranger, abusing the help, fighting the family, and finally even killing the son who comes to right the wrong; we don’t find a lot of nice and easy models.
So this morning I want to center on Paul’s Epistle, and part of this comes from a series of recorded talks I’ve been listening to by the Franciscan Richard Rohr called, “Great themes of Paul: Life as Participation.” Fr Rohr says the Letter to the Philippians was written by Paul of Tarsus from his confinement in a prison cell some ten years after he helped found the church in Philippi in around 51 AD. According to Rohr, the community at Philippi, one of the first church communities in what is currently Greek Macedonia, would’ve been not much more than 40 people.
Now the original letter was written in Koine Greek but here’s an informal translation of the Greek by the contemporary American Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson — which you might want to compare with the printed version in the order of service:
You know my pedigree: a legitimate birth, circumcised on the eighth day; an Israelite from the elite tribe of Benjamin; a strict and devout adherent to God’s law; a fiery defender of the purity of my religion, even to the point of persecuting the church; a meticulous observer of everything set down in God’s law Book. The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash—along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ. Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant… I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by him. I didn’t want some petty, inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ— I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering, and go all the way with him to death itself. If there was any way to get in on the resurrection from the dead, I wanted to do it. I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.
Isn’t that an exciting translation? And I believe everyone here shares that kind of hunger to hear the voice of God, even though we know God’s word can break us to pieces, can crush our old lives, can call us to judgment; but Paul shows us it is worth the risk of losing this old life in order to come to live in the new light of the resurrection. That’s what his epistle is talking about in a very particular and sometimes nerve-wracking way.
Because Paul is one of those people who answers any question or problem with two alternatives, puts everything into two categories: so you have law and commandments on one hand with grace and love on the other; the people of Israel on one hand with the body of Christ on the other; we can be observing the traditions and doing good works on one hand, or holding faithful hope in the new creation on the other hand. It’s like a juggling act! And I think the reason he spreads the vision so wide is to force us to choose what the most important point, the very crucial thing, might be. He focuses us to listen intently to what the voice of God, the word of Christ, carried by the breath of the spirit, might mean right here and now —to encourage us to decide how we can live out, follow that newborn truth into the larger realms of life, death, resurrection, and return; into that real world where Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
For here Paul is encouraging us by saying he is letting his old life go — with all those deep credentials — in order to walk with Jesus anew into these mysterious depths of the human condition, into death and what might live beyond death, to come to the resurrection enlightening all our old history with a newborn hope. So he farewells his old accounting, accruals, equities, credentials and credibility structures, to allow a life based on history and law and clan and custom to die and to become a new creation as his own naked and immediate response to the love of the God in whom we are called in the light of Jesus Christ. And I believe Paul would say that each of us is also here, to say Yes to the God who is in Christ and calling us here and now.
But that isn’t easy, nor should it be: for being awake and alive today is a life or death situation: a particular time for personal decision and dedication about what matters in the end as well as what we do here and now.
Maybe there are two sides to this:
As C. S. Lewis writes in The Great Divorce, there are two kinds of people, “Those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done;’
As the German pastor Deitrich Bonhoeffer writes in The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls you, he calls you to die;”
But maybe there is just one truth.
As Paul will write in a later letter to the church gathering in Rome, not long before his own martyrdom, “Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.”
Can you hear and see the juggling, focusing on the centre of the situation, pointing to the call coming in the crisis of the present moment when we meet God’s presence in our lives and the necessity of making a choice here and now?
Where do we go when we are at the end of a rope, in the middle of a sentence, at the beginning of the rest of our lives? Maybe we can just take a breath, just like it was the first time, and give it all over, trusting the one that Paul calls us to follow, this God in Christ who offers infinite faith, hope, love, patience, every day and here and now and always.
Maybe we can just trust Jesus to be a lot more than nice.
Like Eugene Peterson puts it:
I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.
May it be so for all of us.
Amen
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