More Jesus
A Homily on Philippians 3:4-14
by Griff Martin
For the Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the Twenty Ninth of Covid Worship)
For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
October 4, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
Let’s pray… Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God, for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.
A few weeks ago as virtual church ended Jude said something that caught my attention, for a lot of reasons. One being the simple truth that he was no longer listing all the other videos on YouTube he would prefer to watch instead of my sermon, which is one of his favorite things to do, or his other favorite the game we play most Sundays where he sits next to me and mimics my hand motions all of worship… one gift virtual church has given me is the experience of regularly sitting with a child during worship which is why the sermons have gotten remarkably shorter.
But what he said this particular Sunday caught me by surprise, it was the last time we had taken communion together. That morning Jude had served as the host and had broken the bread and brought us all our juice and bread. We were using a loaf we had gotten from Easy Tiger bakery and as Jude put the plate back on the coffee table, he dunked the rest of the bread in the juice and then ate it all up and said, “I like communion like this because we can have as much of Jesus as we want, not those little bites you give us at church.”
There is probably something to that… As much Jesus as we want.
I hope that in the last few months you have experienced something similar, and if you have not, you will make that your goal right not, don’t waste a perfectly good pandemic, a chance to focus on what really matters and have as much Jesus as you want, as much grace and love as you can handle.
Because this pandemic has done a lot of things to us, but one thing it has done to me, it has me reading Scripture through new eyes: like today it has led us all to understand this passage from Paul in a whole new way, to experience it.
This passage begins with a bit of boasting, some humble brags and for that reason it has turned folks off. Now, some will try to make the case that Paul is using a typical rhetoric feature here, that when you were making a case, part of the case you were making was building your own autobiographical argument, let me persuade you with my resume.
It’s how, if you have a co-worker who went to Yale or Harvard, you know it. Or if they do Crossfit, you know it. Or if they are eating Whole 30 you know it. Or if they belong to an exclusive club, you know it… You get it.
Paul is letting us know that he is a thing, and the truth is he is kind of a big deal. “You know my pedigree -- a legitimate birth, circumcised on the eighth day, an Israelite from the elite tribe of Benjamin, a strict and devout adherent to God’s law, a fiery defender of the purity of my religion, a meticulous observer of everything set down in God’s word.” It’s a good resume.
And if he stopped there, we would not be reading this passage in worship this morning. It would not have made Scripture because when the New Testament was put together they wanted it to be about Christ and not about Paul, which for the record, Paul would have agreed with… it is our recent history where we seem way more concerned with what Paul said and did and how he would have done church than we have been about Christ.
If Paul had done all this boasting, he would just have been another loud male voice in a room full of loud male voices. We have this passage because of what comes next. He lists all his accomplishments and then the next words are critical: “But you know what? None of that matters.”
Paul lists his resume, his autobiography, not to win an argument but to show us how foolish that resume is… it might be as meta as it gets in Scripture here. He is using irony to the fullest. All that I just listed that I thought mattered so much and that you were leaning into, the list meant to impress you, well, don’t let that impress you much.
“But you know what? None of that matters. Because the only thing that matters is Christ. All the things that I once thought were so great and important, don’t matter. All that matters is Christ.”
Reading this story today, it would serve us well to go back and think about Paul and his journey to Christ. The journey certainly starts with ego, and then Jesus literally knocks him off his high horse and he is blind and can’t see, and he lives for a period of time with everything he knew taken away. The Pauline Pandemic, where everything he thought mattered no longer mattered and the life he had was suddenly taken away and everything he thought he knew for sure was suddenly gone. It’s the refrain of my favorite song right now, “Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in.”
It was a time when Paul realized all the essential truths of life: it’s not about you, you control so much less than you think, it’s about following, it’s about letting go, it’s not ego addition it’s ego subtraction.
It’s the lessons that I have learned over and over and over in this pandemic.
And those might all seem like negative lessons, but there is a great truth there…
It’s not about you Griff, the world does not revolve around you… It’s about Jesus and love.
You control way less than you thought, Griff… but you do have a really important verb, follow, which means love.
Griff, it’s time to let go of so much you thought that mattered… so you can hold onto what really does matter, which again, means love.
Griff, it’s not ego addition but subtraction because the more of you you lose, the more of Me you find.
Everything you thought you knew, that you once believed, the world you though you knew… None of that matters. Because the only thing that matters is Christ. All the things that I once thought were so great and important don’t matter. All that matters is Christ.
I used to think of World Communion Sunday as a celebration of the church at large, that we were so much bigger than we ever really realized… and there is certainly an element of that which we celebrate this day.
But today, it’s more simple than that and more important… today is a day where we state what matters most together in a year where everything has been taken from us, where this group of people -- human beings -- come together and say nothing matters but this, this meal, this meal that celebrates the life of a man named Jesus who came to show us what love is, that we were loved and how to love, thus, how to live. That is all that matters to us.
Today is a day where, from a place of isolation, we name what matters most together.
This is what the pandemic feels like to me… We need a pause to remind ourselves what truly matters most to each of us. Erin Melton said to me a few weeks ago, "it’s like being sent to our rooms to think about what we’ve done, what really matters, and to make some changes."
And today we are here and we are stating what matters most to us, to our church, from this moment going forth… Jesus, just Jesus.
And you can have as much Jesus as you want.
We have a modern day Paul in Sara Miles, one of my favorite priests living today. Sara Miles was a leftist, liberal atheist journalist who lived with her partner in San Francisco when she was home from reporting in and on war-torn countries. She loved the adrenaline and the high of that type of reporting. A few years ago, she was home for a brief stint and she found herself one Sunday morning walking by a church. She realized that in her thirty something years of being alive she had never actually attended church, it was not for her -- religion was outdated, there was no need for God, but still she was curious as to why folks did this church thing, so she wandered in and took a seat.
Worship was exactly what one would think until everyone stood to receive communion, until the priest stood and said the simple words, “Jesus invites everyone to his table.” And Sara found herself in line to receive communion. And she took the wafer and she took the cup, and in partaking of the elements, in her words: “something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.”
In her words: “I still can’t explain my first communion. It made no sense. I was in tears and physically unbalanced; I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over…. I couldn’t reconcile the experience with anything I knew or had been told. But neither could I go away: for some inexplicable reason, I wanted the bread again. I wanted it all the next day after my first communion, and the next week and the next. It was a sensation as urgent as physical hunger, pulling me back to the table at St. Gregory’s through my fear and confusion.”
I think her last words get me, through fear and confusion, it sounds like Paul in his Pauline Pandemic and it sounds like us right now in our pandemic, and in fear and confusion we turn to Jesus, only Jesus, more Jesus.
And that first communion led to many more for her, until she decided that she needed to be part of communion, so she started a food pantry at St. Gregory’s and then she became a priest. Communion became her very life; Jesus became her very life.
May the same be true for you and me this day. May the world be born again at this table, just Jesus, as much as we want… Amen and Amen.
*artwork: Santa Cena, by Jose Ignacio Fletes Cruz
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