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