Sermon: “Righteousness Based on Faith”

Text: Philippians 3:4b-14

5^th Sunday in Lent (C)

March 21, 2010

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is from the apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, a city in northern Greece.  Located near the battlefield where, after the assassination of Julius Caesar, Octavian and Mark Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius, the city became a place where retiring Roman soldiers were given land to farm.  As such, it was a Roman colony and was more Roman than Greek in character.  Once, when Paul was on a missionary journey in what we would now call Turkey, he had a vision in which a man from northern Greece beckoned him to come and help them.  Paul obeyed the vision and established the church in Philippi as one of his first in that region.

Paul’s relationship with this congregation was especially close.  Thus, when he heard that other Christian missionaries were preaching to the Philippians a gospel with a different slant from his, Paul was deeply concerned.  In his letter he sought to encourage his old friends and to warn them away from the teachings of these other missionaries, who taught, among other things, that in order to be righteous a Gentile who became a Christian should begin to observe Jewish law—at least in some of its most basic requirements, such as circumcision.  Using very strong language, Paul condemned such teachings.  He argued that if anyone should be sympathetic to Jewish law, it should be he, whose credentials as a faithful Jew were second to none and better than most.  That is where we pick up his argument with our reading this morning.  Listen carefully to Paul’s comparison between what he had before he met Christ on the road to Damascus and what he had gained through his personal relationship with Christ. 

Sermon.  Marty Soards, one of my New Testament professors, once noted in class that this passage of Philippians is not easy to translate and is often mistranslated.  That was a comfort to me, because I had just finished trying to translate it myself and had found it to be a real head-scratcher.  One thing that Marty said, however, has stuck with me.  He said that the key to the passage is Paul’s phrase, in verse 9, “that I may be found in him [that is, in Christ].”  As we think about the passage, I will do my best to keep us focused on what it means to be “found in Christ.”

You see, Paul had started out at a completely different place in his thinking.  He was a Jew and had been raised to consider that as his primary identity in life.  In the ancient Mediterranean world the boundaries among the various cultures were porous.  In the matter of religion, especially, there seems to have been a lot of borrowing among the major faiths.  Roman gods and goddesses were the same as their Greek counterparts, just with different names.  Both Greeks and Romans found analogues for their gods in the Egyptian pantheon, and all three often borrowed from the Mesopotamian religions.  This was thought to be no big deal; one often worshipped whatever the gods were in the place where one was.  The Jews were the exception.  They were stiff-necked and unbending when it came to mixing it up with the other religions.  “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” warned the Ten Commandments; and the Jews took this seriously.  When combined with their other customs—like circumcision, dietary restrictions, and Sabbath observance—this strong belief in one God set the Jews apart from everyone else.  As much as other cultures resented it, the Jews understood these practices to signify their special status as God’s chosen people.  It would be hard to overstate how much all of this was central to the identity of every faithful Jew.

Moreover, as Paul told the Philippians, he was not just any Jew.  He probably spoke and wrote Hebrew, which would not have been common for a Jew who, like Paul, was raised outside of Jerusalem.  There is some evidence that he may have been sent by his family in Tarsus to Jerusalem to study with the most prominent Jewish teachers.  He was a member of the party of the Pharisees, who despite the bad rap that they often receive in the New Testament, were highly respected members of the Jewish community.  He observed all the important rituals of the Jewish religion, and he was pure Jewish, descended directly from one of the original sons of Jacob.  We may wince when he claimed that he was “as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”  After all, this was the same Paul who wrote to the Romans that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”[1] which, presumably, would have included Paul, too.  Closer to Paul’s Greek, we might translate, “as to righteousness under the law, becoming blameless.”[2]  That is, he realized he was not perfect, but he was working very hard to become perfect under the law.

Yet all of this, Paul wrote, he now “regarded as loss because of Christ.”  The words “loss” and “gain” echo in this passage, almost like an accountant’s ledger.  “All of my religious background, which I used to think of as a credit, I now consider a debit.”  In fact, Paul did not stop at his Jewish background.  He wrote that “everything”—everything he had earlier trusted in, counted on, and identified with—was now a debit.  Paul was a Roman citizen, a status that gave him special rights in the Roman world.  Perhaps he had other privileges or assets in the secular world that would have been thought valuable.  But compared with the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ, they were—our translation says—“rubbish,” although the Greek is much stronger, meaning human waste or rotten food.

Have I mentioned that Paul wrote this letter from a jail somewhere?[3]  He really had suffered the loss of all of what might have made him special.  The Jews hated him, and the Romans considered  him a troublemaker.  He was constantly being beaten and imprisoned.[4]  Why did he put himself in this position?  In verse 8 and 9 he tells us—“in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.  There’s our key phrase, “be found in him.”  There’s a lot of mystery in that phrase, I think.  Paul had experienced the crucified and risen Christ when Paul was on the road to Damascus—on his way to persecute the Christians there.[5]  From that moment on, Paul felt as if he knew Christ although as far as we know he had never met Jesus during his earthly ministry.  Whatever Paul had experienced on that Damascus Road, he wanted more of it.  He wanted to draw closer to Christ—so close that one might consider him actually to be in Christ—in union with him.  And he must have believed that it was possible for others to have that same experience of being “in Christ,” for that seems to be the purpose of this passage from Philippians—urging them to seek that same kind of unity with Christ.

In the next few verses Paul describes what it is like when we are united with Christ, when we are “found to be in Christ.”  When we are in Christ, we do not have a righteousness that comes out of the law, out of our own behavior, out of what we might claim to have done.  When we are united with Christ, our righteousness—our justification before God—comes through faith that is related to Christ.[6]  Paul’s Greek here can mean either “faith in Christ” or the “faith of Christ.”[7]  Evangelical theology emphasizes the first of these alternatives—that we are made righteous by our faith “in Christ.”  But let’s not lose sight of the other thing that Paul is saying here: when we are close to Christ; when we associate ourselves with him; when we seek to be like him and to imitate his love for God and for other people; when we depend upon him for our identity and security and not on our background, station, or possessions; then we are justified by the “faith of Christ.”  We don’t have to depend on the strength of our own faith.  We depend upon the strength of Christ’s faith—and none could possibly be stronger.

There is a real danger in placing too much emphasis on our own faith.  Often I have spoken with persons who are anxious about their relationship with God.  They are worried about whether they have enough faith to avoid God’s righteous judgment.  For those persons, I always try to re-introduce them to something they already know—the God who is the loving father we read about last week,[8] who runs to embrace us even before we can confess and who rejoices when we return.  In fact this God already has come running to us—in the person of Jesus Christ—eager to forgive.  I try to tell them that when they feel that their own faith is weak, they can rely upon the faith of Christ, which can never fail.

During the season of Lent we tend to focus on issues of behavior, as we seek to improve ourselves as disciples of Christ.  If we take to heart Paul’s letter to the Philippians, we might think of Lent a different way—seeking to grow closer to Christ.  There are many ways we can do this.  When we as Christians perform the sacraments that Jesus gave us, we enact this union with Christ.  When we baptize, we say that we are being buried with Christ and are being raised with him to new life.  When we share the Lord’s Supper, spiritually we are taking him into ourselves so that he becomes a part of us and we become a part of him.  We can grow closer to Christ through prayer, as we ask not so much that God would grant what we request, but rather that God would teach us how to desire for ourselves and for the world what Christ desires.  We grow closer to Christ when we act like Jesus.  Paul speaks of wanting to share Christ’s sufferings, even to the point of his self-sacrificing death.  We may not be as strong as Paul, but there are many ways we can give up a little bit of ourselves for the benefit of others.  I see you doing it every week—taking time to be present with those who are going through troubles, offering encouragement to those whose energy is low, reaching out beyond our own walls by supporting Christian mission and local benevolences. 

As Paul wrote,[9] in this life we never will obtain or reach this goal of full union with Christ.  But we keep working at it, forgetting all the negative things that have held us back in the past and “straining forward to what lies ahead, [pressing] on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”  In the end, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we will be fully united with Christ in the “power of his resurrection.”  There is an Easter at the end of every Lent and a victory at the end of every Christian life.