Poolesville Presbyterian Church
03.17.13; Rev. David Williams
When I was in second grade, I knew exactly where I was going.
I remember thinking about it, one day after school, as I was ambling my way home. It was all very clear. There was an obvious path, a clear goal, and I knew how to get there.
Get good enough grades in second grade, and you’d get into third grade. Then, assuming you could handle long division, you’d be in fourth grade, and eventually you’d be one of the sixth graders, the kings of the school, the towering giants before whom kindergarteners tremble. That was four years away, and four years is an eternity when you’re in grade number two. It was half the span of a life at an age when a summer could last forever and a day was time enough to get anything done.
Beyond that, the hormonal Hades of junior high, and then, further still, there was high school. High schoolers drove cars, and did grown up things. Deeper into the haze of the future, so far I could barely see it, there was college. I was going to go to college. Second grade me just assumed this. But I’d have to get in, and that wasn’t a shoo-in. I’d have to have done things that would appease the gatekeepers. I’d need my coin to put into the boatman’s hand as he took me across the river.
When time passed, and I found myself there, the credentials lined themselves up. Test scores lined up nicely. In an era before you needed community service hours, I had them. I wrote for the school newspaper, and was the editor of the school’s literary magazine, and had placed third in the state in a writing competition. Grades? Well, the less said about them the better.
Through what could only be described as divine intervention, college happened. Problem is, that was as far as my vision for my life went. Because after college came life, and my story of myself ended with “going off to college.” That was it. After that, I didn’t have a clue. Something was going to happen. But what that something was? I had no idea. A job, perhaps? But in second grade, I’d wanted to be a long haul trucker driving a road train across the Australian outback, and I couldn’t quite see how my degree worked into that plan.
What I learned pretty quickly was that life pitches you curves that nothing you’d ever done before could prepare you for. You’ll have experiences and encounters that stretch you beyond your credentials. Some of those are hard. Recessions and long agonizingly fruitless stretches of unemployment. Friends dying young. Couples you love splitting.
The Apostle Paul had experienced exactly that. He’d thought he knew where his life was going. But he didn’t. Life had thrown him a hard curveball, and as he recounts his background in today’s passage, he lets his readers in Philippi in on how he views his own personal history.
The funny thing about Paul sharing his background with the folks at Philippi was that they kind of already knew him, and knew him well. It was a church that he himself had founded, likely in around the year 50 in the Common Era. The short letter he wrote to them reflected their relationship, and that relationship was a good one. This wasn’t a mess like Corinth or Galatia. It also wasn’t a church where Paul wasn’t well known, like the church in Rome.
These were his peeps, and the letter reflects that. It’s an expression of the love he felt for the community there, particularly as they had supported him through times of challenge. This letter was written during one of Paul's many imprisonments, most likely written from jail in Rome in the early 60s.
At 10,000 inhabitants, Philippi was about double the size of Poolesville. It was conveniently located on an East-West thoroughfare in the Roman province of Macedonia, 10 miles from the bustling port of Neapolis. It was not close to Rome, but it was a Roman colony with deep connections to the center of Empire.
This whole letter is basically one big thank you to the Philippians. Paul thanks them for both their material support in Paul’s time of imprisonment, but also thanking them for their prayers and care. What makes this sweet little thank you note so interesting theologically is its focus on expressing the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, and particularly the humility and self-giving nature of Christ. That's the focus of the well known hymn to Christ in Philippians 2:5-11, in which Paul encourages his readers to empty themselves of themselves, and be humble even in the face of their newly found connection to God.
The purpose of today's reading is similar, but with a more pointed focus. Paul knew his own history and his own background, and recounted it to the folks at Philippi as a way of reminding them of his impeccable credentials. In every way, he’d prepared himself for one life. He’d been born into the faith of his parents. He’d studied the sacred law ferociously, training at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the most renowned rabbis of that era. There was very little doubt of Paul’s skill, training, and background. He had prepared himself for a very particular future.
That was not the future that he would end up living. Having had a powerful and transforming experience of Christ, Paul found himself radically changing the arc of his life. The thing he thought would not be became what he was. The life he couldn’t imagine himself living became his.
In this new life was not his upbringing or his flawless credentials that mattered. What mattered was the transformative relationship he had with that odd man from Nazareth. Paul’s faith in the justice, grace, mercy, and love of Christ was what defined his life, and what gave him value. It is that relationship that allowed Paul to endure, and to press on through the considerable trials and difficulties of his existence, certain that there was a purpose to his life.
The other stuff? It helped. Without question. Paul’s knowledge of Torah and his gifts of persuasion did sort of come in handy later on. But what mattered wasn’t what he thought mattered. He found himself forced to adapt to a new reality.
As we move through our own lives, we need to keep this in focus. Generally, when people talk about being unable to move beyond their past, or when they become defined by what they have already encountered, they’re talking about a negative thing. You can be trapped in the resentments of a collapsed relationship. You can be paralyzed by memories of failure. You can be unable to shake the aimless rage that still seethes over an unresolved injustice long ago. Those old patterns of life carve out deep furrows into us, into which pours all of our energies and all of our hopes.
But that’s true of even what we might think of as the more positive ways we’ve shaped and formed our lives. We train, we learn, we develop, and we grow more and more in a particular field or area.
There’s nothing wrong with all that effort we put into advancing ourselves, or in learning more, or in having a strong sense of yourself and your place in the world. It’s good stuff, up until the moment we allow it to be the thing that prevents us from taking a new and God-given direction in our lives. That’s true if you’re a senator who realizes that the ideological stance he’s defended his whole life long is less important than his love for his family. It can also be true for the faithful.
Take, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was a 13th century Dominican priest, and a brilliant, brilliant theologian. His writings on ethics, natural law, and political theory helped shape Western thought. And Lord have mercy, did he think and write. He wrote and wrote and wrote, creating a book called the Summa Theologica. It’s three thousand five hundred pages of carefully and intentionally structured logical argumentation, the sort of thing you might inflict on the other women in your book group if you really, really don’t like them.
He was still writing it when he had a vision of Jesus. That encounter, which he would never fully discuss, ended with him no longer writing. “Everything I’ve done is just straw,” he would say. And that was that.
As those experiences come, we need to be open to them. We need to understand that it is grace and love that are our best guides in that place of unexpected trial or unanticipated gift.
If we have the boldness to claim ourselves as followers of Jesus, what defines us is our willingness to be humble, no matter what we know or who we are. What defines us is our willingness to set aside place and station and training and credential. be open to the radical encounter with grace that allows us to ever deepen in our faithful journey
It’s that heart and mind that lets us set aside our pride, and turns us to serving both one another and those who are most in need.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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