Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus
Christ. Amen
“And not only that,” Paul writes, “but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing
that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and
character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love
has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to
us.”
In Philippians
3 Paul writes:
“7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I
have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8 More than that, I regard
everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my
Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as
rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 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. 10 I want to know
Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by
becoming like him in his death, 11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection
from the dead.”
But this wisdom of Paul didn’t come
easy.
Paul had
reason to boast.
If anyone
else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised
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; 6as to zeal, a
persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
In Acts we
hear
"I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in
Cilicia, but brought up in this city (Jerusalem) at the feet of Gamaliel,
educated strictly according to our ancestral law, being zealous for God, just
as all of you are today.”
The life
Paul lived, was an impressive one. He
spent much time and great effort in achieving all that he had achieved.
He was a
man of great passion.
He was well
known to the religious leaders in Jerusalem.
He was an
up and rising star.
And then,
as he pursued his passion, he was knocked off his feet by a blinding light from
heaven and heard the words “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” When he gathered himself together and got up
off the ground, he was blind.
Everything
he was,
Everything
he strived so hard to be,
His very
self image,
All of
that, died in a moment.
It became
rubbish, trash, worthless.
It wasn’t
just the physical blindness he suffered, it was also the loss of an entire
world view. He could no longer see the
world the way he once did.
Paul had
reason to boast in the great accomplishments of his former life, and yet it was
not these that changed him, but suffering.
And then in
his blindness, he began to see.
His former
life now gone, he was to be resurrected, and would live now – in Christ, and
Christ in Him.
Richard
Rohr calls this experience
“Falling Upward”.
Apart from
some sort of necessary suffering,
Apart from
a shaking of the foundation
Apart from
a significant uncontrollable loss
Apart from
hitting some sort of ‘rock bottom’ in our lives,
It is difficult, almost impossible
for us to let go of the self that WE have fabricated, in order that we might
become what God has created us to be.
To put it
differently,
We cannot
live in Christ, nor can Christ live in us, if we are so full of ourselves that
there is no room.
Like Paul,
we spend a lot of time and incredible amounts of effort fabricating our lives.
We have a
self image rooted in our families of origins. At each stage of our development
and growth we add both victories and failures that shape our identity.
We get our
degrees.
We learn
our skills.
We are
passionate about some things, indifferent about others.
We surround
ourselves with friends & foes,
Colleagues and clientele,
Family, and if we’re fortunate, that
one special person that more than any else, shapes our identity.
Into this
castle we are building, we load it with things, especially in a materialistic
society such as we live in.
My house,
The car I
drive,
The boat,
the furniture, the tools and the toys-
It’s all stuff
that says something about who I am.
We fill our
lives with activities.
And whether
it is the opera, or the rodeo, or the soccer field,
Each choice we make is a statement
of our very being.
We are
creating a “Self”, an “Ego”,
A person of our own making.
If we do it
well, it is quite impressive.
Not only do
we impress others, we impress ourselves.
The problem
is that it is all a façade.
It’s like a
sandcastle on the beach. No matter how
beautiful, how awesome, no matter how much energy we put into creating it, in a
moment it crumbles.
The
foundations shake.
Suffering
becomes a reality.
We find
ourselves loosing the very things that shaped our identity.
Things that
seemed like forever are gone in the blink of an eye.
Knocked
down, blinded and unable to see, we are left wonder who we actually are. . .
Who are we meant to be?
And there
in that moment, when everything seems lost, when our very life is in shambles,
There is the voice of God speaking.
One of the
most difficult things to accept is that often the very events that threaten to
destroy us, are in fact the hand of God nudging us beyond our own little world,
into the life for which we have been created, the life “in Christ”.
Our old
self must die,
In order
that Christ may live in us.
The death
of the “old self” is linked to resurrection and new life. You can’t have one without the other.
“I want to know Christ and the power of his
resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his
death, 11if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”
Here I need
to say two things:
First, it
is not that God produces suffering in our lives in order that we might learn
and grow from it, for to do so would be nothing less than cruel. Suffering is not a tool God uses to produce
spiritual maturity.
But, having
said that, apart from suffering we will remain spiritually immature, or perhaps
it would be better to say, spiritually inexperienced.
Hope, for
one who has not suffered, is mere optimism.
Hope that
is borne out of suffering, is a confidence that in all things Christ will be victorious,
even over death itself.
I don’t
know about you,
But I’d
much prefer to know Christ and the power of his resurrection,
Without,
and I really mean WITHOUT
The sharing of his sufferings by
becoming like him in his death.
I liked the
“ME” that I had created.
I liked the
life that I have been living.
I didn’t
want the “self” that I worked so hard on achieving, to crumble like a
sandcastle.
Not all of
us are knocked to the ground by a heavenly light and encounter with Jesus as
Paul was.
For most of
us the turning point in our lives may be much more mundane.
It can be
the loss of a job that was so much a part of our identity.
Likewise,
with the loss of a spouse, or the children moving away, or other significant
changes to the relationships that had defined us.
All of us
grow old, and part of the aging process is coming to terms with limitations
that once were not there, but now begin to define who we are and who we are
not.
For the
alcoholic, they know this critical point as the “rock bottom”, when the life
they had created around alcohol comes apart at the seams, and they find
themselves powerless and life is now unmanageable.
And at one
point, each of us must confront the reality of our own mortality.
It is in
these moments of pain that God speaks words of hope.
The first
word, is that death does not win.
Death, not
the death of our “false selves”, not the death of our “Egos”, not the death of
our carefully crafted and created self image, nor for that matter, our physical
deaths,
Death,
however you define it, is not the last word.
We are
joined with Christ in a death like his, that we might also be joined with him
in a resurrection like his.
And living
our lives, now in Christ, our identities are no longer rooted in the things of
this world, but in Christ.
The words
God spoke to Christ at his baptism,
The words
spoken to us in the water and the word are the only words that finally matter.
You are my
Son,
You are my Daughter,
The one I
love,
And with you I am well pleased.
It would be
nice if we didn’t need get knocked on our butts to hear these words and to
embrace them as our only true identity.
But, we usually aren’t willing to
let go of our old selves without a fight.
But God
will win that fight.
And we will
one day, sooner or later, come to know the beauty of being a beloved Child of
God with whom God is well pleased.
That is who
we are.
Nothing
less.
Nothing
more.
Amen
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