Sermon on October 4, 2020: 18th Sunday after Pentecost

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. 

I have never been very good at writing a resume. I feel kind of lucky that it’s been years since I’ve had to do so. The whole aim, it seems, is to condense one’s entire life experience onto a single piece of paper. Education, work history, extra skills, GPA, professional associations, Latin honors, MS Office, coding abilities, nicknames, favorite colors, you name it, it goes on there; and it had better be crisp and clear and without typos, and for the love of God do not use Comic Sans font—never use Comic Sans font. Or Papyrus, for that matter. You need to state an objective at the top of the page, and apparently the objective cannot simply be “convince you to hire me,” even though that is, in fact, your objective. Under your list of skills, be sure to emphasize your “attention to detail,” otherwise how else will they know just how attentive you really are? Above all, you need to brag about yourself as much as humanly possible—but without sounding braggadocious. Braggadociocity will get you nowhere in the job search. Rather, you must convince your resume reader that you are bright, and consummately qualified, while also being humble, and not fully aware of just how bright and consummately qualified you are. It’s like that song by One Direction from about ten years ago, the song with the lines “You don’t know you’re beautiful; that’s what makes you beautiful”—do you know that song? No? Well that’s exactly what you have to do on a resume. You have to be beautiful without knowing it, and that’s what makes you beautiful.

So that’s what I know about resume-building. Probably not very good advice, I admit—you should probably seek someone else’s advice when you are crafting yours. It sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? So much merit to be crammed onto a single 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. So much elucidating of all the ways we are deserving to be welcomed through the threshold of the places we want to be.

You could say that St. Paul had a knack for writing a resume. On the one hand, he loved to boast all about his status, his birthright, and his accomplishments; he knew how to prove his qualifications; but then he would turn around and say that all of it was entirely meaningless. That’s the way that St. Paul crafts his resume in today’s reading from letter to the Philippians. Throughout this passage, Paul shows us just how deserving he is by outlining his religious resume: a circumcised, certified member of Israel, in the preferred tribe of Benjamin; a member of the preferred Jewish sect; zealous in his faith, and a blameless keeper of the law. Paul lists it all out in bullet points, showing us that when it comes to being qualified, he wins. He wins, because no one else can top his list. “If anyone else has reason to be confident,” says Paul, “well I have more.”

Paul makes a long list of his pedigree and accomplishments, in order to make a crucial point, which is that God is not especially concerned with pedigree and accomplishments. In fact, they will often act as a barrier to walking in the way of Christ, who offers us a life free from the tyranny of status, merit, and accomplishment.

Life in Christ has nothing to do with earning honors and awards, with educational and professional achievement, or with an ample set of extra-curricular activities. Paul wants us to know that God is not like a cosmic college admissions officer, who grants entrance only to the high-achieving, well-rounded “cream of the crop.” No, God is nothing like that at all, because at the end of the day our identity as children of God has nothing to do with us, and it has everything to do with Jesus Christ.

Paul’s experience of God in his encounter with Jesus Christ was so powerful that nothing could ever be the same again. For the old Paul, the resume-builder, Jesus was nothing more than a false messiah, to be rejected like a builder would reject a misshapen piece of stone; but for the new Paul, writing to the church at Philippi, Christ is the key who changes everything—the cornerstone from which all the other stones are set. Without a cornerstone, the other stones of a building cannot hold together; by themselves, they don’t mean anything. Paul writes that, “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” What Paul is saying is that it is our belonging to Christ that really matters; it is being made one with Christ, so that he may dwell in us, and we in him.

The church is meant to be the place where people come to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. And in order to do that, we are going to have to resist the temptation of spiritual resume writing, of building our list of qualifications to be admitted into the kingdom of God. Instead of crafting a resume, we are being called to do the work. We are being called to a deep knowledge of Christ, and the power of his resurrection. When we know Christ, we will know the extraordinary power of forgiveness, and that God stands ready to forgive even those things of which our conscience is afraid. When we know Christ, we are given the eyes to see Christ in all persons—in the eyes of the poor, in the eyes of immigrants and refugees, in the eyes of prisoners, in the eyes of enemies. When we know Christ, we will be a people who are capable of justice rather than bloodshed, to use the words of the prophet Isaiah. When we know Christ, we will be able to hear the hard truths we are normally not willing to hear, especially the truth that we are not as qualified as we think.

To know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, is not a private knowledge, in the possession of individuals. Such knowledge is too wonderful to be turned into private property. Christ can only be known in community, in the company of others, in the body that we call the Church. The true Body, comprised of people of every race, and language, and nation, and orientation. The Body where the only supremacy is the supremacy of Christ, our dark-skinned Jewish Lord. We can only become a Body through his Body. We will only know the power of his resurrection when we give up on writing our resumes, and stop trying to prove that we are better than we really are. Only the dead can experience the power of resurrection. And only the resurrected will know Christ.

For Paul the Apostle, to be made one with Christ was both the journey and destination of his life. His story was caught up inside the greater story of God’s love for the world in Christ. And we, like Paul, are caught up in Christ’s story and invited to walk in his way—and yet, like Paul, we haven’t yet fully arrived, we haven’t yet reached the goal. But we press on and make it our own, because Christ Jesus has made us his own. The Christian faith is a journey that always calls us forward, always calls us to press on, and to keep walking. This is a journey that we walk together. Let us press on toward the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. To him be the glory, forever and ever. Amen.