Credentials

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.13.16; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Philippians 3:4b-11

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

There’s a peculiar thing about having spent the majority of my adult life getting an education as a professional Christian.

I’ve got the undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from Mr. Jefferson’s University, that flagship of the stellar state system across the Potomac, an institution that has become so fiercely competitive that there’s not a chance I could have gotten in now.   I mean, not a chance.

Then there’s seven years of Master’s Degree work, mostly part time, at a little Methodist seminary in Washington, followed by five years of Doctoral study, which is...just barely...most of the time since I turned eighteen.

That’s not to mention the requirements for Continuing Education, training, and recertification that we Presbyterians require of our Teaching Elders.  I’m trained.  I’ve got credentials out the wazoo.  

Which is where the whole professional Christian thing gets a little peculiar.

On the one hand, having some clue what you’re doing a good thing.  It is.  I mean, training and certification is a vital thing.  You don’t want a nurse to have no clue what they’re doing, and you want your surgeon to have actually been trained on something other than a Wii game.  You want the truck drivers on the road to have gotten their CDLs, and we’re generally more comfortable if the folks up in the cockpit of the plane weren’t sitting up there thinking, Oooh, I wonder what this lever does!

Oops.

If you assume that conveying the teachings of Jesus in an accurate way matters, then having some training is kind of important.

But on the other, there’s the painful reality that on another level, it doesn’t really matter.

The Apostle Paul reminds me of this, every time I read him.

Paul’s more than faintly threatening to every professional Christian.  Here, the most influential early follower of Jesus, whose energy and dynamism were absolutely central to the spread of the faith...and he’s the dude who takes no salary as a point of pride.  Oh sure, it’s fine for some, he says.  If people really need it.  But for me?  I’m not going there.

And that’s in the face of a set of credentials that was as impressive as anything the early Christian movement could have expected.

The funny thing about Paul sharing his credentials 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.    

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 training and 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 Torah and the Prophets ferociously, training at the feet of Gamaliel, grandson of Hillel, and one of the most renowned rabbis of that era.  Gamaliel is such a significant rabbi that he shows up in the book of Acts, chapter 5, as the wise and thoughtful counsel who prevents an angry klatch of rabbis from killing the apostles.  

There was very little doubt of Paul’s skill, training, and background.   He had prepared himself in every conceivable way for leading a Jewish community.   That was not the life he ended up living.  Having had a powerful and transforming experience of Christ, Paul found himself radically changing the arc of his life.  

In this new life was not his pedigree or his flawless credentials that mattered.  What mattered was the transformative relationship he had with that odd man from Nazareth.  This isn’t a gentle relationship of wuv, either, not about the warm fuzzies.  It’s the kind of relationship that knocks you to the ground and leaves you as blinded as if Jesus had just tossed a flash grenade into your soul.  

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 for all of his training and all of his experience, Paul completely rejected the idea that those things had any value.  How completely?

So completely that this passage in Philippians is the one place in the New Testament where profanity is used.   Right there in Philippians 3:8, when Paul says:

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.

The word in the Greek is skubala, which has nothing to do with either swimming underwater or Hanna Barbara characters.  The slightly cowardly translators of the New Revised Standard Version render it “rubbish,” which means that Paul ends up sounding a little bit like the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey.  But in the common Greek of the Greco-Roman world, that word had a very specific meaning.  It was, back then, the precise equivalent of a four letter word for excrement.

“All those things don’t count for skubala,” Paul says.  “They’re just a bunch of skubala.”

Paul, remember, may not have realized that he was doing anything other than writing a letter to a community of friends who loved him, and wasn’t feeling the need to be guarded.

The long and short of it:  those things that build up our pridefulness, that allow us to assume that we are of more value or more significant than others?  They can be stumbling blocks on our walk along the Way, if we allow them to become so.

This last year, we had on our prayer list a woman named Phyllis.  I’d put her there, because she was dying.  Which she did, as we mortal creatures inevitably do.

Phyllis Tickle, besides having one of the most delightful names ever bestowed in the history of naming, was also a significant thinker, a writer of Christian books and poetry.  I’d gotten to know her as the silver haired grand-dame of emergent Christianity, back when I was part of that movement.  Her books and lectures were everywhere.  She was the Religion Editor of Publisher’s weekly.  She was, within American Protestantism, a Personage.

And so, as a Hail Mary of sorts, I’d reached out to her to see if she’d be willing to even look at my efforts at writing.   Not only was she willing, but she was also remarkably supportive, generous with time and praise in a way that belied her august status as a Name with Impeccable Credentials.

Her grace...her ability to remain unchanged by all of that?  It was remarkable.  

And whenever we find ourselves viewing our identity in terms of roles and cultural expectations, whenever we allow ourselves to forget our essential humanity because we’ve internalized the false standard of hierarchical power?

That’s when Paul has a word for us, about how much that’s worth in the eyes of our Maker.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.