Reading: from Phil. 3
Paul is in prison. He has lost his freedom. He is in danger of losing touch with his friends and with the churches he helped found. He may soon be losing his life.
Losing things – things important to him – is not a new experience, and he has learned from experience that loss and the passing of what you have known is not the end of the world, and not even always a bad thing.
In conclusion, my friends, be joyful in your union with the Lord. Remember, [it’s not the externals of our life that save us and are important, but the Spirit with which they help us to live in each moment. We do not put our trust in the external things, even when they are good and right and given by God. I, of all people know this, because I have had every reason to trust in externals, in light of how fortunate and godly my upbringing was.]
I was circumcised when I was a week old. I am an Israelite by birth, of the tribe of Benjamin, a pure-blooded Hebrew. As far as keeping the Jewish Law is concerned, I was a Pharisee – so zealous that I persecuted the church. As far as a person can be righteous by obeying the commands of the Law, I was without fault.
But all those things and others that I counted on I now reckon as loss for Christ's sake, and I don’t regret the losses because of how I’ve been led to even deeper union with God in Jesus the Christ. For his sake I have thrown everything away; I consider it all as mere garbage, so that I may gain Christ and be completely united with him beyond what was possible with what I had.
I am coming to know Christ and to experience the power of his resurrection. As I let things go – let them die and let myself die to them, I come to know the power of new and deeper life out of that dying.
And it’s not once for all and already completed. It’s ongoing, as I keep striving to win the prize for which Christ Jesus has already won me to himself. Forgetting what is behind me and doing my best to reach out to what is ahead, I keep running towards the prize, which is God's call through Christ Jesus to the life of heaven.
Meditation
A number of years ago I came to know a man who had lost a lot.
I didn’t know Bob’s former life, but from what I heard from others and from the echoes of his past that I think I heard and saw in him, I imagine he was a man of considerable vitality, with a restless creativity about him, a lively mind, freedom of thought, just-as-free activity and travel, and appreciation for the intellectual and artistic creativity of others. I imagine him to have been one of those spirits who for both good and ill, probably, could not and would not easily be penned in or kept down by convention and by the limitations that others might have thought important and might have tried to impose.
By the time I got to know him, he had lost a lot. He was confined to his home, and at home to a wheel-chair in the front room that he manoeuvred only with difficulty. He suffered Parkinson’s disease, and had already lost a lot of control over his actions and gestures. He was unable to care for himself, let alone anyone else. As time went on, he lost more and more – moving out of his house to care home, and then to another, becoming more bed-ridden and less in control, less able to do anything he might want to, including sometimes even to speak and be understood.
All the way through, though, from my first visit with him to the last, if he knew I was coming – and sometimes even when he didn’t – he would have something ready to offer me. “Your moment of inspiration,” he would call it – some musical video clip all cued up ready for he and I to watch together at the touch of a button on the DVD remote.
Often it was a Bill Gaither Homecoming gospel song. But it might just as easily be Eva Cassidy singing “Fields of Gold,” or Deacon John singing some old blues song about his own hard life and the grace of God hidden within it, Billie Holliday, the Count Basie All Stars, or a clip of Aretha Franklin bringing a crowd to deep silence as she sings “The Lord’s Prayer” in the middle of a recorded concert in some concert hall. The way that particular clip was introduced to me, was “let’s watch Aretha turn a concert hall into a church, and a concert into worship.”
As we went on to watch the clip together, the nursing home room we were in also became a chapel, and our time together a time of prayer and deep faith shared with a great company of others far beyond that room and that moment.
And that was the spirit with which Bob shared what he could with me. One time he loaned me a book about the life of Duke Ellington, because of the way Duke would gather and work with his band. He would seek out gifted musicians, gather them, give them time to get to know one another, give them a musical idea, and then more or less just stand back and let them have fun with it to see what delightful and holy thing would come of it and of the free sharing of all their gifts. Bob thought maybe I could learn something from The Duke about being a minister, leading a church, and making room for the presence and the spirit of Christ to emerge almost anywhere and in anything no matter what.
“I have suffered the loss of many things, and I let them go without regret,
because of the union with Christ and his goodness that I grow into,
as I leave the past behind and keep faithful
to the promise of heavenly life through him and in union with him.”
I think remembering Bob helps me imagine a little more clearly Paul in his prison cell writing this letter to his friends and fellow believers in Philippi.
Things have not gone well lately for Paul, and the end may be in sight – not at all an end he would have chosen. Years earlier, committed to God and to the kingdom of God within the world, he had been a model Jew among Jews. Then for years after that, after encountering God in a deep and intimate way in Jesus, he was a leading disciple of Christ among other disciples. Each stage of his journey had had its own goodness and holiness. How could he have asked for anything more to make his life worthwhile and meaningful?
So, it would be easy and understandable if now Paul were to lapse into depression over the sudden change in his fortune. Into misgiving maybe about some of his choices. Certainly, into regret – maybe even doubt and anger, about things he has lost and had taken from him.
But he doesn’t. Rather, he looks at where he is now and sees it as just one more opportunity to keep growing in his union with the Christ and with the God-in-Jesus who is in all things. To keep seeing how heavenly life and the kingdom of God really are at hand in any circumstance and situation, no matter what.
So in the same way as Aretha Franklin turns a concert hall into a church, and The Duke gives permission to his band to come together in spirit and make heavenly music, and Bob was able to make a nursing home room into a theology lab or ministry classroom, Paul sees his prison cell as a temple or as a synagogue of God, both his fellow prisoners and his guards as children of one God needing to know they are loved, and their days together in jail as a graciously given time to let the walls and barriers between them to come down, and to create together a little outpost of the kingdom of God – a little bit of heaven right where they are.
Sometime it’s said of some people that they’re too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good. I wonder if that depends on what they – or we – mean by “heaven.”
If heaven is somewhere up in the sky separate from earthly life, and some place we go to only after death and the end of our life on earth, then probably it is possible to be too heavenly-minded to be of earthly good.
But if heaven is the kingdom of God that’s possible to be lived out in any present moment, and the present moment – any present moment – is just one more opportunity no matter what to live out God’s love for all in a new way, and grow further into union with God as we know God in Jesus, then maybe what life on Earth is most in need of is more heavenly-minded people.
Thinking of Paul and of Bob and of how they lived into each stage of their life as it unfolded and even unravelled, I wonder about what we do with the losses we all suffer and feel deeply today – about things we can’t do as a church that we used to enjoy doing, and about things taken away from us at home and in the community – because of COVID, and because of a hundred and one other things that affect our life.
Do we regret what we’ve lost and lapse into depression, doubt or anger because of what’s been taken from us?
Or together do we keep seeking to see Christ at work for good in all things, keep sharing God’s love for all no matter what – maybe even more freely – because of what’s been taken from us, and keep turning the life of the world around us into a more and more open, more and more inclusive kingdom of God?
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