This sermon was delivered at Unfinished Community on April 3, 2022 - the second-to-last Sunday in the Advent season.
So I think we can all agree that, theologically speaking, this is a really awkward place to start for our first in-person worship, yeah?
I mean, there are so many awesome things going on here, we’re in a new place, we’ve got awesome music, kids are playing, and that dark shadow of depression that hangs over so many churches these days just…doesn’t seem to be here today, does it?
But, at the same time…we’re smack dab in the middle of Lent. As far as the rhythm and cycle of the Christian year goes, this is a time for meditation, self-reflection and repentance, rather than joyous celebration.
In this moment it feels, quite understandably I might add, as though the desires of our heart are at odds for where God tells us our heart ought to be. There’s a conflict here, made all the more difficult for the fact that victory, celebration, and joy are the hallmarks of the Christian faith. After all, we’re a victory-minded people, always with our eyes turned heavenward as our lives move in a consistently upward directions as the seeds we plant with faith reap a harvest that can only ever serve to make things better for everyone.
Right?
As Christians today, we have this innate drive to measure all the things; to apply a reasoned, rational metric to everything in our lives so that we can prove, unequivocally, that there is clear and concrete benefit to our determined faith in Christ Jesus. We want to measure everything - from attendance numbers and tithing, to minutes in a service; from the number of courses and classes we offer down to the number of compliments received after a sermon. We want to measure it all and, when we do, we love to use whatever numbers we find to justify…well…whatever it is that we were doing in the first place.
This practice of metric-driven ministry, always judging God’s work by the numbers, turns us into what I call Kaizen Christians - believers who tend to be obsessed with identifying the upward trend and placing all our value only upon that which shows measurable increase, expansion, and growth.
For those of you who don’t know (and can’t tell by listening to me for more than ten seconds) I’m an American. I come from an extremely capitalist culture that believes that believes in the sacred principle of constant positive growth. Every aspect of my culture nearly worships the idea of growth, reveres the notion that every choice, every decision, every act, change, or slight course correction must result in some net gain if it is to have value. It is the principle on which our economy, our government, indeed our entire way of life has been founded.
And, I’m sorry to report, it’s even seeped into our religion too.
Take the story of Paul, for instance. The testimony of Paul’s conversion to the brand-new Christian faith is so well known that most of us can recite the basic points without even looking it up:
Paul, known originally as Saul, was once a member of the strong arm of the Jewish religious authorities, and a persecutor of Christians. A man who was not merely skilled in hunting down this new Christian sect, but reveled in their persecution, he was laid low by God along the road - blinded, but then led out from the darkness by the Prince of Peace himself only to become the great missionary in the history of the Christian faith: one of the heroes of the early church, who spread word of the resurrection throughout the Mediterranean and beyond.
Paul is so often used as an example of what greatness we can aspire to when we turn away from the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad ways of the world and dedicate ourselves to following Jesus. Here was a man who started off as little more than a mediocre (if talented) thug and, through the grace of God and the acceptance of the call of Jesus, ascended into greatness. Paul is our archetype, our model of conversion, the guy we look up to on our faith journeys and aspire to imitate. Aspirational stories like Paul are the reason we embrace those new things as they spring forth, because we never know when it might be our turn, our time to rise in the Spirit!
I’m sorry to have to say this, but Paul’s story is many things…but what it definitely is not is a story of an aspirational journey to greatness.
The truth is that Paul didn’t start out as some mid-level enforcer who wandered around chasing Christians like a bounty-hunter on some third-rate reality TV show. Both in today’s text and elsewhere Paul outlines exactly who and what he was before his conversion - in Acts he describes himself as a Pharisee born of Pharisees, here as someone, “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.” Young Saul of Tarsus was an educated man - not only did he study in the well-known school of Gamaliel while in the university at Tarsus, but he was educated under the direct supervision of Rabbi Gamaliel himself. Though not of the priesthood himself, Saul was extremely religious, well respected and trained to be a powerful advocate of the ruling Shammai school of legal and rabbinical thought - a member of an exclusive social class that we often reductively call “the Pharisees.”
Saul had it all as a member of Jewish society; less bounty hunter and more like a prototype Joel Osteen or something - rich, powerful, and incredibly well connected. His persecution of Christians was incidental by the way; something that most of the hardcore Hebrew sect set out to do in their time - Paul just happened to be particularly good at that part of the job.
Once we understand that, it becomes easy to see that while Paul’s conversion on the Damascus road might have been a revelation for his personal faith, it was a disaster for every other part of his life. He went from a life of privilege and power, from knowing exactly where he belonged in the world, to a life on the run, bouncing from church plant to church plant, living on boats and in tents with a career trajectory screaming rapidly downward towards prison, prison again, and eventual execution.
It’s the sort of career path that would make the average capitalist have a heart attack!
In order to take hold of the new thing that God was bringing forth into the world, Paul had to give up his upward career path, surrender his place of privilege, power, and comfort, and content himself with working towards a victory he would never live to see.
Well that’s rough but, you know…sacrifice, right? It might not be as fun as being all…victory-minded and whatnot, but I think most of us can get behind the idea of sacrifice as a faith discipline. We may stumble a bit at practicing it, but I think everyone here can get with sacrificing these things in order to make a clean break with what came before, and embrace God’s new thing.
But I want to call your attention to one other, somewhat terrifying fact.
Christianity didn’t even consider itself a separate religion until many, many years after Paul’s death. This means that, from Paul’s perspective, his didn’t actually change religion. He didn’t wipe the mud from his eyes and suddenly stop being Jewish, switch all his allegiances completely, and abandon everything about him that had defined him for his entire life up to that point.
What Paul experienced wasn’t a conversion so much as a revelation - a revelation that inspired ongoing repentance. As we all ought to know (since a far wiser and much better-looking preacher than I has been talking about it a lot lately), repentance isn’t just making a hard break with the past and doing a new thing: it means “to turn around or turn back.” It’s not abandoning ship and jumping on an entirely new ship so much as it is the far harder task of grabbing the rudder and forcing a major course correction.
And as he mentions in verse 12 as well, his conversion to the ways of Christ isn’t just a one-and-done sort of thing either. He hasn’t simply “obtained” anything, since the surrender of his power, privilege, and position in society was an ongoing act. Not a goal that he can reach, but an ongoing discipline - the spiritual self-discipline of constant course-correction.
It’s easy for us to want to grab hold of that chunk around verse 7 - “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ” and to attempt to forcibly drag some kind of hope out of it by reading this as Paul saying that “Christ is better than all these things that were in my life, so even though it might look like everything got worse, I still feel like it’s an upgrade.”
But what he’s describing here isn’t an upgrade that just happens to be wearing a surprisingly convincing disguise. It’s the acceptance that following Christ means surrendering all these great and wonderful worldly things, and embracing a new thing that springs forth from much more humble foundations - not having a righteousness entirely of our own that comes from the law, from bigger budgets, newer equipment all the latest bells and whistles, and a giant stone church with six pastors but no savior - but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith, fellowship, and the mutual love we bear for one another through Christ Jesus.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be pretty. In fact, it will probably be quite difficult, not to mention fairly messy, and you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time frantically trying to make ends meet in weirder and more creative ways, but somewhere between the ninth cup of coffee, the fifth last-minute scheduling change, the eighth shoulder cried into and the “I’ve forgotten how many this is now”-th hungry mouth fed, as we’re straining forward to what lies ahead, we’ll start to see that small, humble way made in the wilderness. And while others bust out the chariot and the horse, clanging gongs and cymbals to announce their gains to the world…
…who will we choose to be?
Discussion Questions
Our personal journeys aren’t going to be the same as Paul’s, obviously. What gains might we be called to write off as loss in order to embrace God’s new thing?
As members of Christian communities (both here and elsewhere), how have we allowed ourselves to get mired in Kaizen Christianity, looking for an upward trajectory rather than discerning the active work of the Spirit?
How can we, personally and as a community, strain forward to what lies ahead, pressing on to make the call of the Spirit our own?
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