Worthless
Philippians 3:4-14[1]
When I was younger, I did something some of you may have done. I
used to look over my resume from time to time. I had worked hard from before I
even graduated High School, and it was satisfying at times to “review my
progress.” I’m not particularly proud of that fact now. As I continued to “rack
up” achievements—degrees, publications, speaking engagements, and honors—I
continued to “review my progress” with satisfaction. And I expected that
progress to continue. At the ripe old age of 31, as a brand, spanking new
Seminary Professor, I had my whole career planned out before me. Of course, as
it so often does, “life” intruded in my plans.
While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having goals and
feeling the satisfaction of meeting them, that aspect of my life just stopped
being important somewhere along the way. It’s not that any of my achievements
or plans were selfish or harmful or in any way dishonorable. I started serving
the church before I graduated from High School! I simply lost interest in
“reviewing my progress.” Maybe it was that life changed my plans so drastically
I recognized that I needed more. I’d like to think that I “grew up” a bit and learned
that life isn’t all about achievements. At some point I started focusing more
on the present moment with the prayer, “into your hands I commend my life”! I
realized that I needed God more than anything else.
It may be hard for us to understand St. Paul’s reasons for
“boasting in the flesh” in our Scripture lesson from Philippians for today. His
achievements belong to a very different time and place. But in essence, Paul is
saying that came from an elite family, he attended the finest prep school, he
knocked the top out of his test scores, made it into an Ivy League University,
and graduated at the top of his class. Among the leadership of the Jewish
people, he was known as a rising star. But on the road to Damascus, he met the
living Christ, and everything changed for him. All that he valued previously
suddenly became worthless in his eyes.
Again, it’s not as if there had been anything inherently wrong
with most of Paul’s achievements. They were all noble and honorable. But they
were his achievements. When he met
Christ everything changed. In comparison with the amazing gift of new life
through faith in Jesus Christ, Paul says that he counted everything he once saw
to be an advantage to him as a “loss.”
In fact he uses much stronger language than that. The holy Apostle
himself says that in comparison with knowing Christ he now considered his
previous achievements as rubbish, filth, or as the KJV so bluntly translates
it, as dung! What he had previously valued was now worthless to him.
Part of what we have to understand here is that Paul was in the
middle of a serious debate about what constitutes true faith. Other Christian
preachers in Paul’s day were demanding that Gentiles first had to convert to
Judaism before they could truly embrace the Christian faith. To some, that
might have seemed logical. After all, the Scriptures of the Law and the
Prophets served as the foundation not only for the teachings of the Apostles,
but also of Jesus himself. And so it seemed logical that a person who came out
of a pagan context would have to embrace the truth of the Jewish Scriptures
before coming to faith in Christ.
But I think Paul knew by personal experience the major pitfall
with that kind of approach. It makes salvation all about what we do, not about
what God has done for us in Christ. Paul knew what it was to do one’s best to
fulfill all expectations and yet to find that seeking your life in those
self-achievements is ultimately hollow. He knew that it’s impossible to build
one’s own “stairway to heaven” through doing all the “right” things. He knew
that when it comes to ultimate things, like life and death, salvation and
eternal destiny, we have to rely on God’s grace, not the works of our own
hands.
So one side of Paul’s personal revelation is that it’s impossible
to ever do enough good to earn God’s grace. But the other side is that we don’t
have to! The reason he knew this was because he had discovered a whole new way
of life centered in Christ. In this new life he found the fulfillment he could
never find on his own. And it came to him purely as a gift from God, not as
something he had reach for or work hard enough to achieve. In comparison with what
he had gained in Christ, Paul could write the word “worthless” across his whole
previous life.
That’s the way life works. When we accept it as a gift, we find
the joy and peace we’ve always been looking for. When we go out and try to
force life to work out the way we planned, we only make ourselves miserable
(and perhaps those around us). To some extent, this Scripture lesson cuts
against the grain of what makes sense to us. We think we’re supposed to do our
best to work as hard as we can. And in fact, there’s nothing wrong with seeking
to do well. But life teaches us that we can never find our sense of worth
solely from these things.
That especially
includes the notion that we could somehow “earn” God’s grace. If anyone could
have done this, it was St. Paul. But as he discovered, it’s impossible to ever
do enough to earn God’s grace. When it comes to our relationship with God, it’s
not about what we do at all. In Christ, we receive everything God has to offer
us as a gift. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu says it, “There is nothing we can do
to make God love us more” and “there is nothing we can do to make God love us
less."[2]
[1] ©
2019 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 4/7/2019 at
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Desmond
Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope
for Our Time, 32.
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