I’ve been quite interested in the slogans used by the American presidential candidates. Donald Trump thinks he will “Make America Great Again.” Hillary Clinton has told him that America is already great and her slogan is simply, “Hillary for America.” Ted Cruz wants to “Cruz to Victory,” while Marco Rubio wants “A New American Century.” The slogan that is perhaps most memorable belongs to the Bernie Sanders team, “A Future to Believe In.”
Many are starting to believe in Bernie Sanders’ “Future.” Few thought he had a chance last summer but his common sense approach to most issues has been taking hold and he is giving Hillary Clinton a surprising “run for her money.” Sanders appeals to young people with his idea that public universities should not be putting students into debt that will take decades to pay off. He appeals to lower income people with his talk of a living wage. His “Real Family Values” appeal to people who cannot take even a modest amount of time off work when ill, when they have a child, or when they need a vacation. Sanders straight and hard talk against Wall Street is reaching many except, of course, Wall Street. Agree with him or not, a significant number are viewing Bernie Sanders’ ideas as, indeed, “A Future to Believe In.”
I think that if we read our passage today closely, Paul is pointing the Philippians and all Christians toward “A Future to Believe In” and a future that he himself is truly committed to. It’s something he wants to gain no matter what the cost. Something happened to the young man once named Saul. He had been a Jew of Jews and zealous for the Torah. He was part of a movement to eliminate the sect known as “the Way” before it got off the ground. He had orders from the High Priest. He was en route to Damascus to bring any Christians he found back to Jerusalem for trial. En route he was encountered by a great light. The light, he said was “brighter than the sun” even though it was midday. It drove him and his companions to the ground. Along with it came a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
“Who are you, Lord?” asked Saul.
“I am Jesus whom you are persecuting,” came the reply.
Saul was blinded by the light, blinded for several days, and only regained his vision a few days later in Damascus when a Christian leader, Ananias, laid hands on him.
Whatever the Damascus Road experience involved, that encounter changed Saul’s forever. It transformed his way of life, his way of thinking, and what he thought would be his future. The one he thought to be dead was indeed risen and it led, very improbably, to Saul becoming one of the most passionate and influential proponents of Jesus the world has ever known. The living Jesus gave Saul “A Future to Believe In”.
I said, “very improbably” because if you look at Saul’s life prior to the Damascus Road, he was an unlikely candidate. Saul was a Jew of Jews, circumcised on the eighth day in accordance with the law, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. He was born in the Roman city of Tarsus but brought up in Jerusalem. Sources suggest that the Jewish people were great educators in the first century and Saul would have learned his alphabet as a young child and basic reading and writing skills. Memorization was a significant part of Jewish pedagogy and at a young age the thing that children memorized was Torah. Saul must have taken to the Torah for he went on in his education to something akin to university level. Very few did that but Saul studied at the feet of Rabbi Gamaliel who would have taught him not only to memorize Torah but to interpret it. Saul was probably thinking of a rabbinical career himself.
There were some options for young Saul but he joined the group that was the most stringent about Torah and conduct, the Pharisees. They were the orthodox Jews of the day and he describes himself as zealous for the Law and working with the Jerusalem leaders to imprison, persecute, and even put to death any who opposed the ancestral law. We might think of Saul as a “zealot,” a radical, a fundamentalist. Saul was serious about God and Torah.
People like Saul do not change easily. What happened to him would have been like one of Osama bin Laden’s lieutenants becoming a Jew or a Christian. But something incredible had happened to Saul on the road to Damascus, something so incredible it transformed him. Everything he thought, everything he believed, the way he lived, all had to be re-evaluated. His goals, his aspirations, had to change and before he did anything he went off to Arabia for a few years to figure things out. His Pharisaism was “out the window.” His goal to be a rabbi was gone and by the time he wrote to the Philippians, almost thirty years later, he could say that he was completely changed: “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 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 and be found in him.”
The extent of Paul’s thought and commitment to this new future is incredibly apparent in our passage today. He tells the Philippians that more than anything else now he wants to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, and he says that he is willing to suffer, willing to be like Christ in death, just to attain it. Now, that kind of commitment comes from a deep place. That kind of commitment comes from a certainty about life, what he had experienced, and the direction he has now taken. We saw something like that commitment in the work of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King was born in Atlanta in 1929. He was educated at Morehouse, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University. He was ordained into the Baptist ministry in 1954 and went on to work tirelessly for civil rights, desegregation, voting rights, and for the impoverished. In 1955 after Rosa Parks refused to give her seat up to a white person, King was involved in the Montgomery bus boycott that did away with inequality on buses. In 1963, 200,000 - 300,000 people heard his vision of a just society in the “I had a dream” speech in Washington. In 1964 he saw America’s Civil Rights Act approved and was given the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1965 after Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, King led two non-violent marches in the cause of equality and equal voting rights for all citizens. Shortly after the Voting Rights Act was put forth by President Johnson. In 1968 he was in Memphis to help black sanitary public works employees get a better deal and gave his “Mountaintop” speech at Mason Temple on the night before his death. It’s worth quoting,
And then I got to Memphis. And some began to … talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
It’s almost as if King knew what was coming. But ultimately important for King, was doing the will of God. Above all he had to speak for equality and basic human rights and for the impoverished regardless of the cost. A few years earlier he was speaking about human dignity for all and said, “There are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they're worth dying for. And if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.”
That’s commitment! And it’s that kind of faith and commitment to Christ that we see in the Apostle Paul’s words. I’ve often seen Philippians as a nice, positive letter, an encouraging letter, almost a happy letter, “Rejoice in the Lord always.” But the more I read it, the more I find that the faith lying behind those words is deeply committed. It’s a faith that is willing to go to any length for God. It’s a faith that’s willing to suffer, a faith that’s willing to die even just that he may know “Christ and the power of his resurrection.”
Paul was committed to this specific goal. He told the Philippians that he was “pressing on to make it his own.” Never mind what he had lost, he was “straining forward” to something far better ahead. “I press on toward the goal,” he said, “for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” There’s not only a commitment in Paul’s words here, there is also passion in them. His goal is to know Christ at all costs and there’s a prize, a resurrection lying before him and he is focussed on those things no matter what.
I recently heard a sermon championing what the minister called “a disinterested faith.” What he meant by that was a faith that would carry on without any benefit to it whatsoever. There has been the thought in some circles that true faith worships God because God is God and not because we get something out of it. While I’m a little sympathetic to the idea of following God no matter what, I’ve never truly understood this thought entirely, because constantly in the New Testament, belief in Christ is tied to eternal life and resurrection. There is always the benefit of knowing and following Christ. That is Paul’s “goal,” that is what he calls “the prize.” He is focussed on knowing Christ and attaining the resurrection and if you read Philippians carefully there’s a passion in his words.
If you’ve been on our church website or Facebook account, you may have seen that we are planning a conference here at the end of September, Being Christian 2016: faith in a complex world. It looks like we’re going to have Paul Henderson introduce the conference and tell us something about why he is a Christian. For a certain generation, Paul Henderson is the man who scored the goal. Many of you will remember the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union. Set during the cold-war, it pitted the best hockey nations against each other and it took on even greater connotations politically, there was the idea of communism versus the free world. Eight games were planned. At the end of five, the Soviets were 3-1 up, with one game being tied. The last games were played in Moscow and Canada took the next two encounters. It was tied three games each. In the final game, after two periods, the Soviets were up by two goals. Canada roared back, however, in the final period, it was 5-5. In the closing minutes, the word was that if the score remained as it was, the Soviets were going to claim victory because they had scored more goals in the Series. It became critically important for the Canadians to score again and they stepped it up. Henderson, feeling something in his gut yelled at Peter Mahavolich to get off the ice. Henderson went on, took one shot, round the back of the net, came out and took another, and somehow with 16 seconds to go, the puck went into the back of the net. Canadians on the ice went wild, the Canadians in Moscow went wild, Canadians from coast to coast went wild in their celebrations. The free world had won. The Canadian game, our game had come out ahead. The Soviet goalie, Vladislav Tretiak couldn’t believe it. He said later, “Henderson got that puck from God himself.” Phil Esposito, Bobby Clark and gang talked about how the group had talked before game six and determined that they were going to do whatever it took to win the Series. “It was war,” said Esposito. “We had to win at all costs,” and we gave ourselves to that.
That’s the kind of intensity and passion that lies behind Paul words, “I press on … forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on … that I may know Christ and attain the resurrection. It doesn’t matter what it costs. It doesn’t matter if I suffer. It doesn’t matter if I die, my goal is to know Christ and gain the prize of eternal life.”
Oh, that we could bring that kind of passion to our Christian lives. Father Ronald Rolheiser has written a book called, Secularity and the Gospel. In it he notes that we can come up with all kinds of arguments and excuses about why the Church has faltered over the last half century. He writes, for instance, of “the intoxicating power of secularity.” But what the Church is really lacking, says Rolheiser is its fire, the romance and the aesthetics connected with faith. Pierre Berton talked about “The Comfortable Pew” in 1965, but when the apostle Paul talks about the faith, he speaks with fire, passion, commitment. Can we say about our faith that “whatever gains we had somewhere else in life, we count them all as loss for the surpassing value of knowing Christ and the power of his resurrection?” Now that’s “A future to believe in?” A goal to press on toward or strain forward for.
Thinking of Paul puts several things before us and we should ask ourselves if we truly have Christ and “A future to believe in.” We should ask ourselves during this Lenten season, “Is it something I’m committed to with a commitment like that of Martin Luther King, Jr?” And we should ask ourselves, “Is it something that we’re striving passionately to attain, like Paul Henderson and the boys strove to win in 1972?” Those things were part of the early Christian faith. Are they part of ours?