Scripture Philippians 3:4b-14
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 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.
Yet 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, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
Sermon “The Faith of Christ”
Today we’re reading a somewhat confusing passage from a letter written by the apostle Paul to a church in Philippi, from a Roman prison. We don’t know exactly what has gotten Paul so fired up about his religious background, to want to explain it so thoroughly. In that whole first paragraph Paul is fiercely proud of his parentage, his training in scripture, his achievements… all the kinds of things that might give a person an impressive reputation in his community. And then, he kicks it all to the curb. It’s nothing, he says, in the face of knowing Jesus Christ. What is Paul doing here? Maybe to understand what Paul is all about, we have to go back to what Jesus is all about.
The Confession of 1967, which we have been reading this fall, was written to guide the church at a time of intense conflict around race in our country. In that confession, we read the following:
God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which [God] has called the church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ…
In Jesus Christ, God was reconciling the world to [God]self. Jesus Christ is God with [humanity].
Again: God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which [God] has called the church are the heart of the gospel.
Franciscan theologian Ilia Delio believes that Jesus prioritizes a “love that makes whole” and heals through an ever-greater unity between God, people, and creation. She writes,
Jesus was a “wholemaker,” bringing together those who were divided, separated, or left out of the whole. He initiated a new way of… gathering [people together] in love. …He gathered together what was divided and confronted systems that diminished, marginalized, or excluded human persons. He challenged others not by argument or attack but out of a deep center of love.[i]
Paul is all in on Jesus’ project of “wholemaking,” so much so that he makes it his life’s mission to welcome Gentiles into a church whose roots are Jewish, through and through. This is Paul, who has just reminded us that one thing he used to be proud of was the fact that he persecuted the church! Paul’s heart has undergone a revolution. He now believes there is nothing more important than reconciling the one group to the other, to building bridges where there have been walls.
That’s what Paul is talking about here.
So, in our first paragraph, Paul gives us his religious pedigree, and it is impressive. His family background is impeccable. He is a brilliant man, with remarkable accomplishments. He talks about it as his “confidence in the flesh,” and that word, flesh, is another confusing thing about Paul’s writing. When he says, “the flesh,” he’s not talking about our bodies. He is talking about the world, and the way the world operates when it is not open to the movement of God, to the movement of the Spirit. He is talking about us, when we value our own accomplishments and pedigrees above those God seeks to bring about in us.
So, in our second paragraph, Paul says, this way of looking at the world is nothing—it’s garbage, and believe me when I tell you, it’s a much coarser, earthy word than “garbage” in the original. The King James Version gets this one right: it’s dung. The project of defining ourselves as superior to any other group is nothing—it’s like building castles in the sand. What is everything, to Paul, is Christ. What is everything, to Paul, is Jesus’ project of “wholemaking.”
Right now our book group is reading a novel-based-on-reality called “West With Giraffes.” Our protagonist is Woodrow Wilson Nickel, and he is a seventeen-year-old orphan of the Dust Bowl with a secret that keeps him from ever wanting to sleep, for fear of the nightmares. He loses his last known relative in New York City during the October hurricane of 1938. But Woody survives—beaten up by the storm and near to starving—to witness a wondrous sight: two giraffes arriving in the New York Harbor on the SS Robin Goodfellow. There is something about the giraffes that pierces the heart of this young man. He is overwhelmed by their exotic beauty, and maybe by their survival of a catastrophe. They’ve survived a hurricane at sea and are about to travel across the country to the San Diego Zoo. He decides in an instant that he must follow them there, but the truth is, he wants to be with them. They’re wondrous. We are watching a young person reaching out for the only way he knows, instinctively, to patch his broken life and heart and self together again. He instinctively knows that being with the giraffes will be healing for him—he can’t articulate it, but the reader feels it. He is reaching out for healing. He is reaching out for wholeness.
Have you ever had an experience like that? A feeling of brokenness, but also a feeling that this particular experience, or person, or change of location, will piece you together again? It may have been something as simple as friendship or prayer or as mysterious as needing to be near giraffes. But we were made for wholeness, which means, we were made for union with God and with one another. As the great theologian Augustine ptayed, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
Paul may be seeking his own wholeness—there are hints in his letters about this. He is writing from prison. Elsewhere, he describes himself as being “in chains.” But the way he is seeking to do it, is through helping to bring humanity to wholeness by helping to reconcile these groups that have long been separate, Gentiles and Jews. He writes,
For [the sake of Christ] 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, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. ~Philippians 3:8b-9
This is a critical passage. Everything Paul is doing here is devoted to establishing that it is through God, through Christ, that we are made whole again. But our translation is working against the message. That phrase “faith in Christ,” is a recent translation. It inserts into this paragraph the idea that it is our faith that is paramount, that our faith is, weirdly, a work. This is contrary to the essential message of Paul, that we can’t work our way into grace; the whole point of grace, is that God does it. This is another moment when the King James Version gets it right—it is through the faith of Christ that these things are accomplished. That is undoubtedly what Paul intended, because everything he is saying points to what God does, not what we do.
Sometimes we may find faith a struggle, especially when things go wrong. The awful diagnosis, the heartbreaking loss, the devastating accident. We depend on our faith to carry us through those times. But we are not alone in those moments, because we can also depend on the faith of Christ when our faith is wobbly—he is the one who was able to say, without exaggeration, “The Father and I are one.” He is the one who set his life to “wholemaking,” knowing that it was his faith we needed, above and beyond our own.
God shows us God’s faithfulness, and therefore the paths God offers us to wholeness, in all kinds of ways. Our psalm today shows us the two basic means through which God reaches out to us, the natural world and the Word of God. These are both paths to wholeness. “West With Giraffes” is about a young man who reaches out to giraffes, a near-miraculous part of the world God created, to find wholeness in himself again. Any part of God’s creation can be a part of God’s project of making us whole, much as an ocean breeze or autumn foliage can move our hearts to wonder—and worship. God works in mysterious (sometimes, even humorous) ways to bring us to wholeness—don’t underestimate what God can do. And don’t overestimate the load we have to carry when we are in need of that soul-healing. It is the faith of Christ that carries us, until our faith is restored and reinvigorated and renewed.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), 128–131. As quoted in the Center for Action and Contemplation daily meditation October 2, 2023.