Grace-St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Mercerville, New Jersey

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

'The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone'?
Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls." When the scribes and chief priests realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people.

Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

“William Butler Yeats wrote that there is ‘one myth’ for every person which, if we knew it, would help us understand what that the person did and thought.”¹ By “myth,” Yeats did not mean a fabricated story that hides the truth about a person, but rather a coherent story that reveals who that person is; how they understand themselves; what they think and feel, and therefore, what they do.

The myths and identities that we live by are formed in large part by the contexts that have shaped us – our families, first of all; followed closely by the values imparted by our culture, socio-economic class, education, work experiences, and those particular life-changing events that mark each of our lives. The complexity that shapes our identities can never be captured in words. Still, we often can name much of the mythic truth of a person’s identity quite simply. I suspect we all know people of whom we might say things like: “He’s a hard worker, reliable – you can always count on him; She’s a good mother -- clear, no nonsense, and always there for her children; He marches to the beat of a different drummer; he never quite fits in with the crowd; She’s suffered a lot, I guess -- maybe that’s why she always seems to be a victim.” We say such things and know that when we do, we’re getting near the core of a person’s mythic identity, even if we don’t know all of how it came to be formed over his or her life.

These mythic identities matter to us a lot. We cling to the sense of self our life stories give us – even when that is a pained sense of self – because it is what we know, familiar and therefore safe. It gives life meaning; tells us what’s important and what isn’t; names our place in the world and sets the direction of our lives, and maybe even offers some of that rock-bottom security we all deeply crave.

Our patron Saint Paul had his own myth about himself, a sense of who he was, how he fit into the world, what mattered to him, what his goals in life were and where his security was rooted – and it is all laid in the first two verses of today’s reading from Philippians: If anyone else has reason to be confident… I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.²

What matters most in Paul’s life story are all here: He is a Jew, one of God’s chosen people, born a Hebrew, not a convert, circumcised on the 8th day of life as the Law commands. This could be said of many others, but Paul embraced his identity as faithful Jew with real passion. His zeal led him to persecute the upstart heretics who preached that some crucified carpenter was the Messiah. He himself was a Pharisee, one of that group of pious Jews intent on living God’s Law as faithfully as possible – so much so that he could say that he was blameless in keeping the Law. Paul was a good Jew in every good sense of that phrase. This was Paul’s myth, Paul’s life, Paul’s identity. It shaped how he prayed; what he read; what he thought and felt; who his friends were; what he ate and with whom he ate. Most deeply, it defined his life with God, giving him, he believed, as secure a place with the Lord as is humanly possible.

And then he gave it all up. Why? Why in God’s name would Paul give up the myth, the identity, the life, the self that had shaped him from birth to adulthood. There was huge cost in doing so: he lost the friends and community to which he belonged; he abandoned what gave him standing in his social and religious world, and what promised him security with God. Why give up what he calls all the “gains” he had?

There can be only two reasons: First, he discovered that the life he had been living did not give him all that it seemed to promise -- all his zeal, all his hard work, all his genuine faithfulness didn’t, in fact, give him that peace and security in life and, especially, with God, he so deeply wanted. Indeed, it’s a good bet that he kept working as hard as he did precisely because the secure home with God he so much desired always remained just out of reach. “Maybe,” he thought, “maybe if I just try harder, live more faithfully, I’ll finally get there” – but he never did. All his hard work could not deliver what his heart sought.

Second, and more important, he found -- rather was found by -- something far better: Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.³

What was the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord? Quite simply, it was the security Paul found in being loved. When Paul writes of the “righteousness that comes through faith in Christ; the righteousness from God based on faith” one way to understand what he mean is the security of God’s love. He means that instead of having to create for himself a secure place with God by his own efforts, he has discovered that in Christ, God has given him the secure place in life that he has always wanted, because God simply loves him as he is, no matter what -- loves him so much that Christ died for him. For Paul the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord is to know that he is loved.

Discovering that such love has been freely given to him was a life-changing gift for Paul. In the story of his conversion in the book of Acts, we’re told it knocked him off his horse and struck him blind. Today in Philippians, he tells us that by comparison, everything else he’d known in life till then was loss – “rubbish” even. And in his letter to the Romans, Paul puts into rich words what he has come to know of the secure life-giving love he has come to know in Christ Jesus his Lord.

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? God did not withhold God’s own Son, but gave him up for all of us -- will God not give us everything else along with him? Who will bring any charge against God’s chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through the One who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. It was to embrace and be embraced by that life-giving, all-encompassing, security-bestowing Love that Paul counted as loss the myth, the identity, the life he had lived from birth.

We, too, have our myths and identities, those selves so carefully built up over years to make a secure place for ourselves in the world -- hard worker, responsible parent, faithful friend, independent thinker, long-suffering victim, self-made man, good person – whatever they may be. There is truth in them, and they sometimes serve us well. But finally, they cannot give us the deep security of divine love our souls desire. Indeed, by promising what they cannot deliver, they prevent us from finding it where God wants to give it. To find and be found by that love, we will, like Paul, have to give up what gets in the way. Paul gave up everything he’d ever known and ever been to live in the deep security of the divine gracious love. And what of you? What of your identify, your life, what of all that you’ve been and known – what of all that would you give up, so you could live in that deep security of the gracious love of God that changed Paul’s life forever?

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¹ Sermon, The Grace of Humility, Curtis Almquist, SSJE, November 3, 2002
² Philippians 3:5-6
³ Philippians 3:7-8

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