Grace for Losers
Philippians 3:4-14
A couple of weeks ago The New York Times profiled a 31-year-old New Zealand man who collects advanced academic degrees the way some people collect vintage baseball cards or comic books. In 2016, at age 21, Jamie Beaton graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with both undergraduate and graduate degrees in applied mathematics and economics, completing what is typically a five-year course of study in just three years. What might be the capstone of many people’s academic careers was for Beaton but a warmup.
A man with eclectic interests, insatiable curiosity, and a lot of free time, apparently, over the next 10 years Beaton earned the following master’s degrees: an MBA from Stanford, a law degree from Yale, and a doctor of philosophy in public policy from Oxford University in the UK, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Those were followed by master’s degrees in education entrepreneurship from UPenn, in education technology from Stanford, in finance from Princeton, in healthcare policy and economics from Cornell, in implementation science (whatever that is) from Dartmouth, and in war studies (!) from King’s College London.
Beaton’s most recent degree is in global affairs, which he received, appropriately enough, from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Not one to rest on his laurels, or to rest at all, he’s currently studying journalism at Columbia.
When Beaton is not busy advancing his education, he is the chief executive of Crimson Education, a college-admissions counseling service that he started in high school and that has been valued at $600 million. And to think that when I was in my twenties, I was in a rock band playing dive bars in the East Village, making maybe $50 on a good night, plus one free beer.
Reading of Jamie Beaton’s prodigious educational accomplishments makes me think of Paul’s personal pedigree that he highlights in today’s reading from Philippians chapter 3. “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh,” he begins, “I have more.” He then proceeds to produce a litany of traits that by any standard place him in the elite of Israelite society. “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.” The litany is less a humble brag than a full-throated touting of his impeccable credentials.
For context, Paul is touting his Jewish bona fides in order to respond to certain theological opponents within the church. These were Jewish Christians who insisted that male gentile converts to the way of Jesus Christ, the Jewish Messiah, must follow Jewish law and be circumcised. This was an issue of intense debate in the early church. The basic question was, Must gentile converts become Jewish in order to be Christian? Do the men have to get circumcised? Does everyone need to follow the dietary laws of the Hebrew Bible?
We have to remember that not only were the twelve disciples of Jesus all Jews (and Jesus himself, of course), but virtually all of the earliest Christians came from a Jewish background. Even to call them Christians is not really accurate because Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism, as we understand it today, had not yet happened at the time Paul was writing Philippians. What eventually became Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.
The church in Philippi was an exception. I mentioned two weeks ago, when we looked at chapter 1, that Philippi was a Roman colony that had been settled largely by veterans of the Roman legions and their descendants. Administratively and culturally, Philippi was much closer to Rome than it was to Jerusalem or to any other city in the empire with a sizable Jewish population. In fact, the Jewish population of Philippi was quite small—so small that when Paul first arrived in Philippi he didn’t find an actual synagogue to preach in but instead went to a riverbank where there was an informal gathering of worshipers.
The reason that Paul brings up his Jewish pedigree to a church that is almost, if not entirely gentile, is to make the case that, when it comes to the gospel of Jesus Christ, pedigree is an entirely worthless category. It buys nothing. It means nothing, in so far as making one more worthy or more favorable in the eyes of God.
Mind you, Paul is not disparaging Judaism. He likely still regarded himself as a Jew. Rather, Paul cites his impressive Jewish credentials to make the case that those credentials don’t advantage him in the slightest. That he is a Hebrew born of Hebrews, that he was circumcised on the eighth day, that as a Pharisee he was deeply versed in the law—none of that raises his standing or makes him more righteous in the eyes of Jesus Christ, who was crucified just as much for Paul—a Pharisee blameless under the law—as he was for tax collectors, prostitutes, and others who were regarded as the worst of sinners.
But because our context is far removed from Paul’s, his Jewish credentials may not sound so impressive to our ears, so let’s put it in terms that we can more readily appreciate. Imagine Paul the Presbyterian saying, “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: baptized as a child, the head of my confirmation class, a lifelong member of the oldest and largest Presbyterian church in town, a Presbyterian born of Presbyterians who came over on the Mayflower; a ruling elder who has served on session for decades; as to the presbytery, the chair of the property committee; as to polity, able to cite the Book of Order chapter and verse.
“Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.” Translation: All these things that earned me adulation in the eyes of my peers, I’d just as soon throw away like yesterday’s newspaper. And you know what? “More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ.” I regard it all as rubbish.
Rubbish. I generally like the NRSV translation that we use (those blue Bibles with the tiny print), but sometimes it’s a little too academic. A little too polite. Another popular translation, the NIV (the larger black Bibles), is a bit more direct, opting for “garbage” rather than “rubbish.” Still, even “garbage” is polishing the roughness of Paul’s language.
The King James version, while often sounding lofty to our ears with all of its “thee’s” and “thou’s,” is actually quite explicit with this verse. “I have suffered the loss of all things,” Paul writes, “and do count them but dung.”
Dung! Now we’re talking! The Greek word Paul uses, skubala, often refers to the excrement of an animal.
Dung! Now we’re talking! The Greek word Paul uses, skubala, often refers to the excrement of an animal. Skubala is what I scoop from my cats’ litter boxes every morning. And trust me, it’s utterly worthless.
And speaking of skubala, two weeks ago I promised you that another famous phrase from Stanley Hauerwas, the co-author the book that we’ll be discussing in the Tea-ology book club, would be forthcoming. You may remember my quoting Hauerwas’s line that “The first task of the church is to be the church.” Well, whereas that line is somewhat enigmatic, this other line is more direct and more memorable. The context is Hauerwas wanting to convey just how much knowing Christ upends and reorients a believer’s life, which he captures by saying, “Jesus Christ is Lord…and everything else is bullshit.”
Yes, Hauerwas is intentionally crude, just as Paul is intentionally crude despite the polishing of his language by Bible translators. What both Paul and Hauerwas are getting at is that faith in Jesus Christ is not some polite affair that makes us kinder, gentler people, nicer to our neighbors, and better citizens who gladly sort our recyclables. No, without Christ we were utterly lost. We had no hope. We had no vision. We had no understanding that everything we pursued, everything we desired—career success, building wealth, being liked, being respected, making a name for ourselves—only revealed how lost we were.
faith in Jesus Christ is not some polite affair that makes us kinder, gentler people, nicer to our neighbors, and better citizens who gladly sort our recyclables.
“For the sake of Christ Jesus I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as dung, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” That I may be found in him. For all his education, his achievements, and his status as an expert in the law, Paul confesses that he was lost without Christ. He was lost and needed to be found. He was lost while trying to forge his own way, serving his own interests, relying upon his own righteousness.
As for all those attempts at self-actualization, at being his best self, living his best life, Paul writes, “I regard them as dung, 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.”
Understand what Paul is saying here. He’s not talking about making some changes around the edges of his life. He’s not adopting a new diet, changing his wardrobe, or parting his hair differently. He’s not even vowing—Ebenezer Scrooge style—to become a kinder, gentler person. Faith in Christ has completely upended his life and entirely reordered his priorities. He’s gone from being someone who zealously persecuted the church to someone who is now imprisoned for preaching the gospel!
He was lost, but he was found. He was dead, but he has been raised. When Paul writes, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection,” he’s not only saying that he regards everything as loss because of Christ, he’s saying that he has died to the person that he was. In Paul’s society, he was regarded as a winner. His pedigree placed him among society’s elite. But the grace of Jesus Christ transformed Paul into a loser, into someone willing to toss that pedigree, and all the power and privilege with which it came, into the trash can.
You see, Christ isn’t interested in winners, in people who think they have it all figured out and therefore have no need of him. Christ is looking for losers, for followers willing to regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing him as Lord.
Christ doesn’t help those who help themselves; he saves those who were utterly helpless.
Christ doesn’t improve the lives of the living; he raises the dead.
Christ doesn’t seek to build an army with which to conquer; he forms a church willing to serve and even suffer.
Does that sound terrifying? Does that sound exciting? Maybe a bit of both? That is all for the good, because it is no small thing to be found in Christ and to be raised with Christ. As Paul wrote in chapter 1, salvation is something that we work out with fear and trembling. But in that regard, we press on, as Paul says, “to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me.”
Jesus Christ has laid hold of you, and he has laid hold of us, his church, and together we press on, letting go of selfish ambition, all self-justification, and even self-preservation, in order that we might cling to Christ and know him as Lord. Everything else is, well, you know….