New Life in Christ
Philippians 3:4b-14[1]
I think most of us value a feeling of being
“rooted.” It means having no lack of friends who have known you for a good long
time, perhaps all your life. It means not being able to go anywhere without
running into someone you know. It means stability, and it feels like home to
us. When I first visited this church, in response to their question about
whether I intended to stay here, I replied that I had spent my whole life
looking for a place to set down roots. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond my
control have “conspired” against that. Three years later, it’s still my hope
that I will have the chance to put down roots here.
But one of the problems with roots is that
they get stiff and brittle. At times they may start to rot, and when that
happens, the life that should flow freely gets choked off. Sometimes a
windstorm comes along and blows down trees with roots that have grown brittle
or rotten. We usually see that as a bad thing, but when a storm uproots that
which is dying, it makes room for something new to grow. The same is true for
us: when we find ourselves “uprooted” by our circumstances, it makes room for
new life to grow in us. It may be painful, and we may not like it, but in the
long run, we can see the beauty of the new things that grow in the place of our
old roots.
St. Paul knew what it was like to be uprooted
in life. In our lesson from Philippians for today, he begins by giving us his
“pedigree.” If we translate them from the Jewish world to the Presbyterian
world, I think we could say that he came from a family that could trace its
Presbyterian roots back for generations. He went to the best prep school, he
knocked the top out of his test scores, made it into finest university, and
graduated at the top of his class. He was poised to take his place among the
top leaders of his people. He had roots in his life that had grown deep and
strong.
But something happened to him that ripped up
all of the roots that had given meaning to his life. On the way to Damascus to
arrest as many Christians as he could find there, he met Jesus Christ. And that
meeting was like a great windstorm that uprooted all that had given his life
meaning. In fact, Paul says that he regarded “everything as loss because of the
surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8). Beyond that, he
says that compared with knowing Christ, all the achievements that he had relied
on previously to give meaning to his life he now considered to be “rubbish”
(Phil. 3:9). A better translation would be “filth,” “dung” (KJV), or as one
recent version puts it: “sewer trash” (CEB).
We might wonder why Paul would have such a
dramatic change of heart. After all, most of the achievements of his life were
noble and honorable pursuits—in his eyes and the eyes of his contemporaries. It
may seem rather harsh for him to take it and flush it down the toilet. But I
think Paul may have known something about the achievements that we tend to rely
on to give our lives meaning. They have a way of binding us, of closing us off,
of keeping us stuck in a rut. And when God shows up to bring new life to us we
tend to cling to our roots rather than allowing ourselves to be opened up for
new life to be planted in our hearts.
Make no mistake: the new life he found in
Christ was what motivated St. Paul. He had encountered the living Christ whom
he thought was dead and buried, and he had discovered for himself the power of
what our affirmation of faith calls “resurrection hope.” In light of Jesus’
death and resurrection, Paul says he longed to know “the power of [Jesus’]
resurrection” (Phil. 3:10) in his own life. He longed for this even though he
knew that the path to that new life would mean sharing Christ’s sufferings and
“becoming like him in his death.” But that’s typically the way it is with the
new life God offers us—something has to die in order for new life to be born in
us.
The power of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from
the dead is a power that changes everything. It brings the dead to life. It
overcomes “evil in all its forms.” It makes all things new: a new creation, “a
new heaven and a new earth” where love and peace and justice reign on earth in
the place of violence and oppression and greed and warmongering. But in order
for that new life to take root in this world, there’s a lot that has to be
uprooted first—like our complacency, our self-absorption, and our quest for
comfort above all else. The new life God offers us will not let us cling to
those dead roots.
We talk a lot about the new life in Jesus
Christ as a good thing. And it is that. But the death and resurrection of Jesus
demonstrate that it only comes through radical change. Jesus had to suffer and
die in order to bring the power of resurrection life into this world. Paul knew
that he would have to share the sufferings of Christ in order to truly know the
“power of his resurrection.” I think what that means for us is that we can no
longer go on clinging to the roots in our lives that we think give us meaning
and safety and happiness. In order to truly know the “power of his
resurrection” in our lives, we have to be willing to let some things be
uprooted. But the good news is that when what we’ve been clinging to gets torn
from our hearts, it leaves fresh soil that is open and ripe for new seeds to
grow and blossom and bear fruit in ways that we probably couldn’t imagine:
seeds of new life in Christ!
[1] ©2017
Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 10/8/2017 at Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
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