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March 29, 2009
First Friends
Philippians 3:4b-16
‘Compost’
Doug Gwyn
Like many of you, I’ve recycled and composted for many years
now. There’s something very satisfying about seeing how
little you can put in the trash. Seeing how much you can recycle
and reuse. My recycling pile turns kitchen scraps and leaves from
my yard into fertilizer for my garden and my shrubs.
There’s something very satisfying in the sense that nothing, or
very little, is wasted, that most of it can go into new purposes.
As we approach Easter, we’re continuing this morning to reflect
on the life and death of Jesus, and what it means for our lives.
This year, we’re listening to the apostle Paul’s great
reflections on what the cross of Jesus meant to him, and how it changed
his life. This passage Charles just read is one of
Paul’s great ones.
When we first hear it, it sounds like the opposite of recycling.
It sounds as if he has put his past in the trash. Paul boasts
that his credentials as a model Jew and teacher of the law were
outstanding. His pedigree, his training, his moral life were
impeccable. And yet, he adds, “whatever gains I had, these
I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 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, in order that I may gain
Christ and be found in him…. I want to know Christ and the
power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming
like him in his death….” All his rabbinic training,
all his moral striving – he now counts all this is rubbish.
The New English Version translates it “garbage.”
But “compost” might fit this passage better. Because
when you study Paul’s writings, you realize that he didn’t
really put it out there Rumpke’s next pick-up. Biblical
scholars hear Paul recycling his rabbinic training, re-using that
training to preach Christ. They also hear him re-using his
knowledge of Greek philosophy as he struggles to make sense of Christ
for his Greek-speaking readers. Paul has composted his
past. He didn’t have it hauled away to landfill somewhere,
out of sight and out of mind. He’s been breaking it down
and letting it fertilize and nourish a new season of growth. And
that takes some time. When Saul the persecutor of the Church was
struck down on the Damascus Road and converted to Christ, he
didn’t get back up fully formed as the apostle Paul. It
took some years for him to break down the way he had thought and acted
before, and let Christ reform those basic materials into a new person,
ready to work toward a new purpose. Christ was able to use even
his worst aspect Paul’s past life as a persecutor of
Christians. That was folded into the new Paul too, as motivation
– to be and do the opposite. To accept and include others,
instead of reject and stigmatize. Even to be persecuted himself,
rather than to harm another soul. Paul had a lot to live
down. And he lived it down gloriously.
Sometimes people wonder if Paul took it too far. Did he become a
masochist? Was he punishing himself for his past as a
persecutor? Did he harbor a death-wish in his quest to imitate
Christ, to be like Christ to the point of martyrdom? I suppose we
can’t really answer that question for sure. But I do know
this, there’s a lot of dying involved in being reborn.
There’s a lot of letting go in starting over. Sometimes we
want to believe we can put it all in the trash and forget about
it. Let Rumpke take it to the landfill and cover it up. And
it has to be said that sometimes, Christian faith degenerates to that
kind of thinking. Jesus died for my sins, covered them up, and
I’m off the hook. I can just walk away from it all.
Jesus hit the easy-button for me!
But it doesn’t turn out to be that easy. We find the past
coming back to haunt us. Old habits die hard. We cycle
around in guilt and shame. Then we find ourselves blaming
others. We don’t forgive others, because we haven’t
really found forgiveness for ourselves yet. We’re cycling
and not recycling. It’s festering inside because
we’re not offering it up, letting God re-work it into something
truly new. This is true not only of our mistakes, our sins.
It’s also true for the ways we’ve been wounded and wronged
by others. We sometimes have the hardest time letting go of the
way’s we’ve been wronged. Our wounds become our
handiest excuses, our most satisfying grudges.
Not just these liabilities, but even our best assets, our best natural
talents and hard-earned training – these are all things to offer
up to God. All of us, have excelled at something or worked hard
at something that turned out to be a dead-end. Either it
didn’t pan out, or we turned in a different direction, for one
reason or another. But none of that is really wasted. My
undergraduate major was in zoology. I didn’t become a
scientist or a science teacher as I originally thought. But that
training has been useful over the years of my ministry. At Pendle
Hill and at Woodbrooke, I worked on programs for Quaker scientists, to
help with facing the ethical challenges of their work. Nothing is
really wasted. My mistakes in life, painful as some of them still
are, have been put to good use by Christ in leading me on. The
hurts I have received from others have made me stronger, once I offered
them up.
Jesus summed it all up when he told that parable of the beautiful
pearl. When the merchant found that pearl on the market one day,
he liquidated everything he had to buy that one amazing pearl.
That’s what we keep doing in our lives – in our vocations,
in our committed relationship, with our children and
grand-children. We keep offering it all up for the pearl of great
price, don’t we?
Jesus also said that his way is not broad but narrow. He
didn’t mean that we need to be narrow-minded, to put blinders on
our eyes, or to shun the many good and beautiful things in this
life. What Jesus meant is that we have to make every step count.
We have to stay focused and purposeful. And that does narrow our
path, but not our hearts and our minds. And in this passage this
morning, Paul speaks similarly of pressing on: “this one thing I
do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies
ahead, I press on to the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God
in Christ Jesus.” His eyes are on the prize, the goal ahead
of him. He’s living according to a future hope. And
yet, that’s exactly how we live more fully in the present.
That’s how we make every step count.
And the more focused and purposeful we become in our lives, the more we
can see and appreciate that quality in others. We see people
being faithful in different ways, in different circumstances. One
of the joys of a being part of a congregation is recycling our
different talents and gifts into the various tasks of our life
together. Thank God I’m not our Treasurer or on Stewardship
& Finance, or Trustees, or other roles that others here perform so
faithfully and creatively for us. We play out our roles as faithfully
as we can alongside each other. We offer these things up in faith
with each other. In faith that God will create something of us
that is more than the sum of our parts.
I can think of no better way of summing it up than that great passage
in the Letter to the Hebrews: “Therefore, since we are surrounded
by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight
and sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the
race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter
of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him
endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at
the right hand of the throne of God.”
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