Worthless, Worthless Garbage
Phil 3:1-11 Feb 6, 2011
Intro:
How many of you know what this is:
I’ll give you a hint: it is the world’s third most valuable commodity, after sugar and coffee. I’ll give you another hint – next week is valentines’ day and millions of pounds of it will be sold to men as gifts which they will probably eat a lot of themselves…
This is a picture of chocolate. Technically, it isn’t chocolate yet. These are cacao pods, growing on the trunk of a tree, but this is where chocolate comes from. But it must be transformed first… The process, as described by wikipedia, is this: “The seeds of the cacao tree have an intense bitter taste, and must be fermented to develop the flavor. After fermentation, the beans are dried, then cleaned, and then roasted, and the shell is removed to produce cacao nibs. The nibs are then ground to cocoa mass, pure chocolate in rough form. Because this cocoa mass usually is liquefied then molded with or without other ingredients, it is called chocolate liquor. The liquor also may be processed into two components: cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Unsweetened baking chocolate (bitter chocolate) contains primarily cocoa solids and cocoa butter in varying proportions. Much of the chocolate consumed today is in the form of sweet chocolate, combining cocoa solids, cocoa butter or other fat, and sugar.” (“Chocolate”, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate).
After all that work, those funny looking pods are transformed into something that many of us love – but it takes a lot of change, a lot of effort, and an outside hand. The cacao pod cannot change itself, it takes the hand of an experienced master to transform it.
Context:
The last few weeks in our study of Philippians we have been talking about this idea of transformation – of moving from some external, forced attempt to “do what we are supposed to do”, through a place of authenticity where we are genuine and honest about who we are but then remain unchanged (we are authentically sinful), to a place where we receive and experience the transforming love of God that acts on us like the chocolate maker acts on the cacao pods to transform them into chocolate. That theme continues as we begin chapter 3.
There are four parts to the 11 verses we are going to look at this morning. Verse 1 is a general command. Verses 2-4 are a warning, which lead into verses 5-6 where Paul describes himself as a supreme example of one whose own efforts should be enough, and finally verses 7-11 describe how Paul now sees those efforts. Let’s look at these one at a time.
Rejoice (vs 1):
“1 Whatever happens, my dear brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord. I never get tired of telling you these things, and I do it to safeguard your faith.”
The idea of “rejoicing” is a theme throughout Philippians, and it introduces this new section of the letter. Here it is a general command, “rejoice in the Lord”. Paul knows he is being repetitive, “I never get tired of telling you”, and this very repetition tells us something important about the process of transformation. And it goes further, Paul describes it as “safeguarding your faith”. What is he saying? How does “rejoicing” work with “transformation”, and how does it “safeguard” our faith? Let’s do a little exercise together. Earlier we shared in corporate prayer – let’s take one of those and see how we might “rejoice in the Lord” in that situation.
As we do, let’s get past the idea that “joy” is the same as happiness. Happiness is a feeling dependent on circumstances; Christian joy is an attitude. From Peter O’Brien, “This is not an admonition to some kind of superficial cheerfulness that closes its eyes to the surrounding circumstances. Rather, the apostle is inculcating a positive Christian attitude of joy that finds outward expression in their lives and that realistically takes into account the adverse circumstances, trials, and pressures through which the Philippians were called to pass. It also recognizes God’s mighty working in and through those circumstances to fulfill his own gracious purposes in Christ.” (The Epistle to the Philippians, NIGNT, p. 349). So let’s pick one of our CP requests and apply this verse to it.
How does that transform us? How does that “safeguard” our faith?
The Warning (vs 2-4):
“2 Watch out for those dogs, those people who do evil, those mutilators who say you must be circumcised to be saved. 3 For we who worship by the Spirit of God are the ones who are truly circumcised. We rely on what Christ Jesus has done for us. We put no confidence in human effort, 4 though I could have confidence in my own effort if anyone could. Indeed, if others have reason for confidence in their own efforts, I have even more!”
Last week I mentioned the idea of hearing only one side of a phone conversation, and having to try to reconstruct the rest of it from just the bit we hear. Applies again here – obviously Paul has something important to respond to that he sees as a threat to the Philippians, perhaps something he has heard from Epaphroditus, or something he expects to become a problem. Basically, the threat is that others are going to come to the Philippians with a message that there is some external, “religious ritual”, which they can do through their own human effort, to earn salvation. In Paul’s context, it is the idea of circumcision, but the specific is not really the issue. At issue is this, perhaps best expressed in the words of one of the Philippians themselves, a man who had been the jailer where Paul and Silas were imprisoned the night of the earthquake that broke open the gates, was about to kill himself until Paul cried out to him with the news that all the prisoners were still there, and who then fell to his knees and cried “what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30).
A good question. What must I do? One we still ask today, and one we still tend to get wrong. One whose answers often take us back to a place of externals, which we then through our own force of will attempt to live by, and end up either with a false pretense masking a decrepit soul, or a deep disillusionment and conclusion that this “doesn’t work”. And sadly, the message of the Christian church has not always helped – that message has too often been “do this, don’t do that, be involved in a bunch of externals, do some rituals, and then, if you do them well enough/often enough, you will be accepted”. This external focus becomes what our broader society now calls “religion” with all the hostility and negativity appropriate to that sort of understanding.
Paul begins to address this when he says, “We rely on what Christ Jesus has done for us”, but then for emphasis and to really drive the point home he comes back to this idea of human effort. And he says some remarkable things:
Paul’s Resume (vs. 4-6):
“4 though I could have confidence in my own effort if anyone could. Indeed, if others have reason for confidence in their own efforts, I have even more! 5 I was circumcised when I was eight days old. I am a pure-blooded citizen of Israel and a member of the tribe of Benjamin—a real Hebrew if there ever was one! I was a member of the Pharisees, who demand the strictest obedience to the Jewish law. 6 I was so zealous that I harshly persecuted the church. And as for righteousness, I obeyed the law without fault.”
Here is Paul’s resume, the outlining of his many considerable efforts, which establish him as “the best of the best”. I won’t take the time to walk through each of the details, but instead ask you to simply accept that Paul is demonstrating that he is at the pinnacle of any Jewish system of personal effort leading to being accepted by God. Perhaps best summed up by Paul’s last phrase: “I obeyed the law without fault”. In other words, Paul was the perfect candidate. If anyone had earned it, it was Paul. He had spared nothing, held nothing back, never compromised, never wavered, and had pursued this way of human effort without ever turning to the side. “Indeed, if others have reason for confidence in their own efforts, I have even more!” But where did all that get him?
Worthless, worthless garbage (vs. 7-11):
“7 I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. 8 Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ 9 and become one with him. I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ. For God’s way of making us right with himself depends on faith. 10 I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, 11 so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead!”
All that external effort, all that religion, all those qualifications which Paul had spent his entire life pursuing, and now what? “Worthless, worthless, garbage.” That is how Paul now sees all his human effort. In fact, it is worse than our translators demonstrate: hear what our commentators have to say: “The word garbage denotes ‘excrement, manure, garbage, kitchen scraps.’ In some Greek texts this term refers ‘specifically to human excrement’… ‘The choice of the vulgar term stresses the force and totality of this renunciation.’” (Hansen, G. The Letter to the Philippians, Pillar New Testament Commentary, p. 236). Down in a little footnote at the bottom of the page Hansen suggests the English slang “crap”. There is another English slang that takes it even further which I suspect would be Paul’s first choice were he an English speaker today. Paul looks at all his religious qualification, all his considerable effort, and describes it as a pile of (you know what).
Why? Because Paul has found something so much better than trying to earn salvation, he now knows “the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” This is transformational. This is radical. This is true Christianity – not some external attempts to adhere to some religious activities, but the deep, inner, power of knowing Jesus – of seeing Him on the cross and knowing He did that for us, of knowing His resurrection and the power over death not just in our minds as an intellectual fact, not just in our feelings as an affirmation of our worth, and not even just in our spirits as they experience newness and life, but also in our everyday lives as we are able to react with revulsion to every attempt to earn this kind of grace and love. It becomes as repulsive to us as the idea of us making a huge sacrifice to give someone we love a precious gift and them pulling out their wallet and starting to give us cash, and deciding it isn’t enough so they take a second job so they can earn more money to give us, and every time we see them they keep trying to pay us for this gift we had given out of love and a desire to bless them. We find that idea offensive, repulsive, and insulting. And yet that is exactly what we do when our actions towards God come from externals rather than from a transformed, generous heart of love.
Instead, Paul says he looks at all this human effort to try and earn God’s love and says he considers it a pile of dung “so that I could gain Christ 9 and become one with him. I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ. For God’s way of making us right with himself depends on faith.” The alternative to our subtle attempt to earn our salvation through religious good works we think we have to do to be accepted is this thing called “faith”. And again, this faith is not limited to an intellectual agreement, it is the total acceptance, complete buy-in, absolute surrender of every part of ourselves to – to what? an intellectual set of propositions? an outward way of forcing ourselves to live? an emotional crutch to fall back on when we can’t handle life on our own?? No! It is the absolute surrender of every part of our lives to a person – to Jesus! It is about entering a relationship of love based on trust, forgiveness, acceptance, delight, purpose, and being transformed by that relationship.
That is what the last two verses describe: “I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, 11 so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead!”
Conclusion:
As I wrap up this morning, I have to confess that I really struggled to prepare this sermon today. Not with the theology, not with some complicated textual issue, not with some remote context that is difficult for us to understand today, and not with trying to figure out what God wanted to say to us through this passage of Scripture. All those were pretty clear. What I struggle with is how to really get us to understand what it is actually like to be transformed by God, so that all the things around us that we have pursued so intently, that we believed would make our lives great, that we thought were expected of us, really would – in comparison to Jesus – become nothing more than a pile of dung. I wish I had more eloquent words, more captivating stories, more spiritual power, so that message might really sink in. My biggest fear is that we will leave here this morning thinking “oh ya, I know, being saved is not about me earning it but about faith in Jesus, ok…”, and then continuing to live drab, passionless, sleepy lives only vaguely aware of this kind of love, and missing out on the kind of transforming love Paul describes when he writes, “I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead.”
But I know I can’t manufacture that, I can only create space for you and I, and God, to “know” and to “experience”. Do you want to “know Christ”? Do you want to “experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead”? Let’s create that space now in our time of communion.
