March 21, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

To Be the Good News

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 126
Isaiah 43:18–21
Philippians 3:4b–14

“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.”

Philippians 3:10–11 (NRSV)

The pushing and shoving of the world is endless.
We are pushed and shoved.
And we do our fair share of pushing and shoving
in our great anxiety. . . .
We seem not able,
so we ask you to create the spaces in our life
where we may ponder his suffering
and your summons for us to suffer with him,
suspecting that suffering is the only way
to come to newness.
So be that way of truth among us
that we should not deceive ourselves.
That we shall see that loss is indeed our gain. Amen.

Walter Brueggemann
Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth

William Brosend, a professor of homiletics, has written an article for the Christian Century on how it is a bad idea for preachers to talk about themselves in their sermons. “I maintain,” he writes, “that self-reference undermines the effectiveness of preaching. . . . The preacher . . . must find a way to move the focus off of himself” (Christian Century, 23 February 2010). With a host of reasons, this professor of homiletics takes a stance against the use of autobiography in sermons. One of the reasons he gives is that there may be people in the pews who, while listening to a sermon, begin thinking to themselves, “Who does she think she is to tell me what to do/feel/believe?” To avoid this, among other things, he advises preachers to minimize the use of the pronoun “I.”

In this morning’s lectionary text, we find an occasion in which Paul has chosen to speak about himself. Like many of his letters, this letter to the Philippians was meant to be read aloud in a worship setting. In his absence, the letter was meant to be a substitute for Paul, who, had he been there in person, would have been speaking to the worshiping assembly. That is why the letter includes liturgical elements, like confessions, doxologies, prayers, benedictions, and hymns.

This particular letter even includes autobiography. Though it is not rare for Paul to speak about himself in his letters, it is also not commonplace. Biblical scholars love those autobiographical snippets that provide information about the apostle. In the passage we heard this morning, Paul portrays himself, and interestingly the point of his self-portrait is precisely to tell the listeners what to do/feel/believe.

To the Philippians, Paul writes that he was circumcised on the eighth day, just as Jewish law required; that he was born a Jew, of the tribe of Benjamin, of thorough Hebrew ancestry; that he had been an expert in Jewish law, a Pharisee in fact, trained to interpret and apply the law; that publicly he had been a zealous persecutor of the church; and that personally, he was a righteous upholder and follower of the law.

Paul describes himself in this way in order to draw out a pattern, a pattern of religious experience for others to follow. See if you can discern the pattern that Paul sets forth. He writes that though as a Jew he had all those reasons to boast, as a follower of Christ he considers those reasons now to be moot. “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ,” he says. “More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Paul goes on to say, “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.”

That there is a pattern in what Paul says about his life becomes more apparent if we compare it to what Paul says about the life of Jesus Christ. Paul develops his autobiography here in chapter 3 in imitation of Christ’s biography in chapter 2. The biography of Christ in chapter 2 is in the form of a hymn about Christ. Whether this hymn, already familiar to the church in Philippi, was composed by Paul or not is unknown. We do know, however, that the hymn succinctly presents Paul’s understanding of who Christ was.

Listen as I read this hymn from chapter 2, verses 6 through 11:

Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

This hymn of Christ is a succinct, condensed biography of Christ. It does not include, as do the gospels, the many things that Jesus said or taught. It does not include stories of what Jesus did during his life. This biography, in the form of a hymn, tells the story of Jesus Christ that Paul thinks matters most: Christ reigned with God. Because of God’s love for humanity, Christ became human, humbling himself and giving up his divine status so that he might live, suffer, and die for humanity. Finally, Christ was raised up from death to be united with God. For Paul, the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the essential story that people need to know.

This succinct biography of Christ sets forth a model pattern, a pattern upon which Paul sketches his own autobiography and that he wants others also to imitate. Just as Christ gave up his claim to equality with God in exchange for obedient service, Paul gave up his advantageous status as a Jew, trusting God, not himself, to work out his salvation. Just as in chapter 2 Paul presents Christ’s biography as an example to be imitated by the Philippians, in chapter 3 he presents his own autobiography also as an example to be imitated.

In a fascinating book entitled Imitating Jesus, New Testament scholar and Greco-Roman classicist Richard Burridge makes the case that the gospels of the New Testament, as well as the Christ hymn in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, were biographical in character. Their primary purpose was to give an account of who Jesus was. Unlike philosophical treatises and dialogues, such as those written by Plato and Aristotle, biographies in the ancient Greco-Roman world did not have as their primary purpose ethical instruction. Nevertheless, it was not uncommon for biographies to be used for the purpose of mimesis, or imitation. This is what we find in both the gospels and the letters of Paul. In his letters, Paul presents sketches of himself and of Christ as models to be imitated. To the Corinthians he even writes, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).

An important thing to note is that Paul doesn’t exhort the Philippians to imitate Christ because he thinks Christ was a great moral teacher whose teachings, if followed, could save them. Paul would have vehemently criticized any view of Jesus merely as a great moral teacher. Paul also would have been suspicious of the view of salvation implicit in the popular question, “What would Jesus do?” as though people could be saved by their actions. Paul wants us to be like Jesus because of what he understands God to be bringing about through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

This is a major turnaround for Paul. It is nothing less than a religious conversion. The conversion that Paul has undergone is not simply a conversion from Judaism to Christianity, as though Christianity were a better religion than Judaism. In a commentary on this passage, biblical scholar Fred Craddock explains that upon careful reading it becomes clear that Paul, in recounting his religious conversion, denigrates neither the Jewish covenant nor the law (Philippians, from the Interpretation series). To the contrary, by comparing his own relationship to Judaism with Christ’s equality with God, Paul maintains their worth. Paul has confidence God will remain faithful to his covenant with the Jewish people. From Paul’s autobiography, we can see that his conversion is a conversion from seeking salvation by one’s own efforts to trusting that salvation comes from God alone.

That is why, for Paul, an emphasis on following Jesus’ teachings or Jesus’ deeds alone would have been just as problematic as his opponents’ false teaching that people have to be circumcised in order to be saved. In his letters, Paul barely mentions Jesus’ specific words and deeds. Instead he focuses on the overall Christ-event—the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ—because it is in this event that Paul comes to understand what God is achieving. In Christ, God is bringing to completion nothing less than the salvation of the world.

So when Paul provides a bit of autobiography to the Philippians, he is in fact telling them what to do/feel/believe. This is not to say that he has in mind a list of concrete teachings and actions. No, given Paul’s conversion, that wouldn’t make sense. Rather, Paul has in mind a picture of a whole person for us to be. Just as Christ, who preached and carried out the good news, came to be proclaimed as the good news, Paul wants the same for Christ’s followers: that they themselves, in the stories of their whole lives unto death, become the good news of God’s saving grace. Amen.