Sermon - Christian Identity: New Priorities

 Philippians 3:4b-14
Christian Identity: New Priorities
James Sledge                                                                                                 April 3, 2022

Ruins at Philippi

 A little over 20 years ago, Nicholas Cage was in a somewhat corny, somewhat trite movie called The Family Man. For those who never saw it, Cage stars as a young man who has become a highly successful businessman and financier. He is an incredible deal maker who has a salary to prove it. He lives in a luxury high rise apartment, drives a Ferrari, wears the finest of clothes, and has beautiful women at his beck and call. As far as he is concerned, he is living the ideal life. But then everything changes.

He wakes up one morning to find himself a New Jersey suburban husband and father, living in a little three-bedroom house, and working as the assistant manager in a tire store. At first, he thinks it’s some sort of terrible dream, a nightmare. But as time wears on and the reality of his new existence sinks in, he begins to feel as if he’s died and gone to hell. He finds a bottle of scotch in his desk at the tire store and says to whomever’s life it is that he now finds himself living, “You must have really needed this.” He is sure that no one would choose such a life for himself, and he sets out to work his way back to being a player in the financial life of New York City.

The movie is nothing but predictable so you can probably guess what happens as the movie unfolds. He gradually begins to fall in love with his wife, a woman whom he had once given up in order to be a Wall Street player. And he comes to love his children, to love playing with them and caring for them. He even comes to love his middle-class existence, including hanging out with neighborhood buddies and bowling in the local bowling league. It’s a far cry from the life he had lived.

But just as he has begun truly to appreciate this new life, he wakes up back in his luxury apartment in the city, a gorgeous woman knocking on the door. He has all his fine clothes and his fancy Italian sports car again. All those things that he valued so much, all those things he had worked so hard to achieve were his again, but all he could think about was that mundane, middle-class life he had briefly experienced.

He makes a desperate attempt to get back his suburban New Jersey life. He locates that woman he had not married. He jeopardizes a huge deal his company is working on when he rushes to the airport to intercept her before she leaves for an extended overseas stay. He makes a fool of himself trying to get her to delay her departure, and the movie ends with him talking to her in the airport bar, trying to find something he’d once been sure he didn’t want.

This old movie came to mind as I thought about Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi. Paul speaks of having lived two different lives himself, and like the Nicholas Cage character, he was certain that the first life was the one he wanted. He had all the things that he thought mattered. He was from the right ethnic group, from the right family, and had been to the right schools. He belonged to the right political party and had attended the right church. He had been certain that all of this was the right way to go, and so he was zealous about how he lived his life. He pursued it with a single-minded devotion born of the certainty that his life was just as it should be. He could not imagine any other sort of life.

Then everything had changed. Paul was so certain of his life that it required a Hollywood like event, something nearly as dramatic as happened to Nicholas Cage in The Family Man to make him think differently. It happened when Paul was traveling along the road to Damascus looking for Christians to arrest. A heavenly light flashed around him, and he fell to the ground, completely blinded. A voice spoke to him saying, “Why do you persecute me.”  The voice turned out to be Jesus, and a blind and bewildered Paul was then led into the city of Damascus, where he regained his sight only after one of the Christians he had been persecuting prayed for him.

No doubt Paul must have felt as confused as Nicholas Cage’s character did when he woke up and found himself a suburban father. But Paul soon realized that something wonderful had happened to him. Discovering God’s great love for him in Jesus made all of life look different. All those things he’d once thought were so important, all those things that had made him feel superior and self-righteous, they all seemed trivial now. He had once devoted himself to the pursuit of that life. Now it all seemed so worthless. Paul tells the Philippians that he now regards all those things as “rubbish.” Actually, Bible translators tend to be a bit prudish, and what Paul really says is that he now regards all those things as “dung, manure.”

All the zeal he once applied to the old life, a zeal that included pursuing Christians to arrest them, he now applies to pursuing the Christian life, to pursuing resurrection life in Christ. Most English translations obscure the parallels here. In the translation we heard Paul speaks of being a “persecutor of the church” in his former life, but now he “presses on toward the goal.” Literally Paul says that he was once “one who pursued the church,” but now he “pursues the goal.” His whole life has been reoriented, and so all his energy now goes into that new life.  His pursuits have new priorities.  

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It seems to me that a main purpose of Christian proclamation is to help people make a move like Paul’s, to exchange an old life with one set of priorities for a new life whose priorities grow out of knowing God’s love in Christ. No doubt much of Paul’s own work was about just this, trying to show people something infinitely better than the life they were living, a life that made all the things they once thought important seem trivial, even manure.

Yet I think a problem often arises as we attempt to make this Christian proclamation. Far too often preachers attempt to move people from old life to new by convincing them of the fallacy of their current priorities. Preachers, myself included, rail against attachment to the values of the culture, against anxious lives that seek reassurance in possessions and power and control and consumerism. We try to convince people that they need to change.

More often than not, however, this attempt is doomed to fail, and both Paul and Nicholas Cage are instructive here. Cage’s Wall Street character in The Family Man and Paul when he zealously pursued Christians were both adamantly convinced that they were living the best way, the right way, the way that made life full and meaningful. No amount of convincing or arguing or haranguing would have changed their minds. Only the experience of something new and better caused them to reevaluate their priorities, to change their pursuits. Only from new perspectives could they look back and proclaim their old lives rubbish—manure.

Unfortunately, religious experiences like Paul’s are extremely rare. God is typically much more subtle. God is much more likely to nudge than to smack you upside the head. That nudge might be a sense that something is missing, even when you’ve acquired many of the things our culture says you need to be happy. It might be a restlessness or hunger that you can’t quite explain. It might be a suspicion that the promises of a consumer culture aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. It might be something else altogether.

If you have an experience like Paul’s, good for you. But if, like most people, that doesn’t happen to you, pay attention to those nudges. God may be trying to tell you something. God may be sending you a gentle invitation, encouraging you to take what is often called a leap of faith. Perhaps God is inviting you to discover if this strange way of Jesus might actually be a better way

But be forewarned. If you take up the way of Jesus, it could turn your life upside down, because the way of Jesus may completely reorient your priorities and make you wonder why you once found your former ones so compelling.