Freedom of Little

Text: Philippians 3:4b–14

There is a view of the world that elevates the spirit and despises the body. In this view, the spirit or soul or psyche is perfect and pure. The body is imperfect and corrupted. The spirit is good in essence, and the body is bad in essence. There is nothing good about physical creation. In this view, salvation is a process of leaving the dirty body behind and letting the clean soul ascend. The world is rubbish and salvation is an escape from it.

This idea comes from gnosticism, a philosophy common at the time of Jesus. Though gnosticism was condemned by the early church as a heresy, the notion continued and continues to run strong in people’s view of the moral universe. This view is not, however, something that Jesus subscribed to or taught. Jesus was a healer of bodies, and a lover of good food and wine and interesting company. Jesus was a person who did people sorts of things and, it seems, liked the things that people ordinarily did.

And it was not the view of Martin Luther, who also liked to eat and schmooze. Luther was an earthy person, passionate and a little vulgar.

The world was created good, it says in Genesis. And God loved the world, it says in the Gospel of John. Our bodies are created by God. God feeds and clothes us and the rest of God’s creatures. God is generous to creation, and God promises an abundant life in this world. The world is full of good stuff.

You might think, on hearing today’s readings from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, that Paul would disagree. He talks about rubbish and leaving all this behind. And elsewhere he seems to condemn what he calls the “flesh.” Paul does have an issue in this passage, but it is certainly not about how the world is sour and the soul sweet.

We cannot deny that things of this world—stuff—can be a problem. And by stuff, I mean both material stuff and intangible stuff. Stuff that we carry around with us. Stuff we store away. Stuff we fret about. All the things to which we are so attached. Some of that stuff is material. Material goods. And some not. On Paul’s list are things of success and birth. Status, class, ethnic origin, positions of authority and responsibility, titles, reputation. It’s things and things associated with things.

Stuff can burden us. We spend thought and energy getting it, worrying about it, maintaining it, cultivating it, storing it, and eventually discarding it. It can define us. Paul is the Pharisee, the Benjaminite, the zealous persecutor. We are known by the things we have and the accomplishments we’ve achieved. And it can lie about us, making it appear that what we have—or equally what we do not—is who we are. We are not what we have or do not have or what we have succeeded or failed at. Things steal us, they steal who we are.

I don’t want to be crabby about this, because Paul is not crabby about it. He is not talking about virtue. He is talking about freedom. The problem is not stuff itself. Some of which, after all, is essential. And much of which is good, giving us pleasure and graceful appreciation. Paul’s complaint is not with stuff itself, not with the things of the flesh themselves, but with their hold on us. Which comes from our hold on them, and on our inability and unwillingness to let them go, unable and unwilling to consider them as peripheral, rather than foundational to our lives.

When Paul speaks about regarding all he had as rubbish, he says more literally that he reckons all those things as being dreck. He is talking about how he accounts for this stuff, as an accountant might record assets in a book. It goes in the “this is not critical to me” column. What he has lost, as he says, is how important these things were to him. They used to be in the “totally important to me” column. But though they still may be good and sweet and fine and beautiful, they no longer determine how he sees himself or his life or his work. The are accounted as having very little to do with him.

This passage in Philippians is a story. A story of about Paul himself. It is a salvation story. Paul comes from a culture—a Pharisee, tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew it says—that itself is defined by a salvation story. The story is the story of the Exodus, of a people freed from slavery. A people transformed from being slaves in Egypt to being partners with God and a light to the world. A people whose expectations were radically altered by God.

The story of Paul in this passage in Philippians, like the story of the Exodus, is the story of amazing grace. I once was lost but now I’m found. It is not that he repudiates the value—positive or negative—of what he had done before, or the pleasure he took in it, or even the sorrow he had over it. It is that he is now in a new story. Forgetting what lies behind, he says, and straining for what lies ahead. His motives are different, the way he sees the world is different, the climax of the story as he can imagine it is different.

The story is not over when Paul writes to the church at Philippi. He is in the middle of it, as he says. Transformations almost never come all at once. Even for Paul, who was struck blind on the road to Damascus and heard Christ’s voice—even that event was just the beginning of something new. He was changed by the help and guidance of others and by his own experiences after that sudden event. What is calling Paul forward now is different. No longer a closet full of tangible and intangible property, but the call of Jesus.

Paul does not demand the Philippians make the same change as he did. But he does invite them to. We don’t have to live our same old stories. They do not have to control us. It is possible to live in a new way, it is possible for the story to have a different ending than we thought.

Paul’s experience—the way he talks about it—is the experience of one who was held captive but now is released. By telling this story, he invites us to have the same experience. To change what we reckon is good, important, and compelling in our lives. To experience the freedom of a Christian. To be free.