“What Really Matters:  the Fifth Sunday of Lent”                           March 21, 2010
Isaiah 43:  16–21; Philippians 3:  4b–14                                       Rev. Dr. Mary L. Swierenga

In the opening verses of today’s passage, Paul is dealing with an issue that was threatening to divide and destroy most of the earliest Christian churches. That issue is what I call “Jesus plus.” Having faith in Jesus alone was not enough. “By grace you have been saved through faith” was not sufficient. The people spreading this heresy were Jewish Christians known as Judaizers. They were teaching that Gentile Christians needed to do more if they were going to be “real” Christians. Believe, yes, but also be circumcised. Believe, yes, but follow Jewish dietary practices. Believe in Jesus but also observe the Jewish rules about purity and ritual cleanness.

According to the Judaizers, outward qualifiers were as important—maybe more important—than a person’s faith relationship with Jesus. And Paul stood foursquare against them. Not because he couldn’t fathom what they were talking about. But because they were contradicting the gospel he was preaching. Furthermore, he opposed them because he understood their mindset all too well.

Paul knew all about what it took to be “good enough”. He tells us in Philippians 3:4-6 that he’d spent a lifetime acquiring all the pluses, the proper credentials. He’d been “circumcised on the eighth day” — he carried the proof of that in his body. It was a sign that he was “a member of the people of Israel.” Not only that, he came from one of the crème de la crème tribes of the nation, “the tribe of Benjamin.” And, as if that weren’t status enough, he was “a Hebrew born of Hebrews” — a Jew who’d grown up outside of Palestine but one who’d mastered the intricacies of the Jewish religious language. To top it all off, he was “a Pharisee,” a passionate adherent of the strictest religious tradition of all. His “zeal” for the Jewish faith drove him to try to exterminate Christianity. He considered it a deviant branch growing from the tree of Judaism. We’re told in Acts 8 that “Paul was ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.” It was an activity he was took pride in because he was helping to keep Judaism pure.

Paul saved his most significant credential for last — last but certainly not least: “As to righteousness under the law [he tells us], I was blameless.” It’s as if he was saying, “If anyone is ever going to impress God, it’s going to be me. I’ve done everything right.” He’d spent his life packing his bag full of impressive Jewish Ivy League stuff, and its effect was intended to knock the socks off the likes of lesser folks.

You’re maybe asking what any of this has to do with Lent, 2010. Well, Paul’s description of his obsessively perfectionist, self-protecting persona couldn’t be more contemporary. The heresy of the Judaizers is still alive and well. Who of us doesn’t try hard — and then try harder — to look good, to present ourselves as intelligent, well read, witty and well spoken, well employed, well dressed, and well heeled. We want others — and God — to think well of us and so we arm ourselves with whatever credentials we think we need to reach the level of “enoughness.” But it’s a constantly shifting target. And the effort it takes has the potential to destroy us, for there is never “enough.” The external mask of looking good far too often covers up an insecure, untrusting spirituality. Lent is the time to explore our inner selves, to examine which credentials we depend on. It’s an opportunity to ask what really matters to us. A time to quit trying so hard to save ourselves.

Have you ever wondered what would have happened to the Apostle Paul had he not had his experience on the road to Damascus? My guess is that he would have gotten more self-righteous, more violent, more dangerous, more split off from his real self — a self which was genuinely zealous for the things of God. Until the light and the voice stopped him on that road, he was well down the path to spiritual destruction. But stopped he was, stopped dead in his tracks when he got thrown to the ground off his horse.

Something like that happened to an old Dutch woman named Corrie Ten Boom. Now I have to tell her story by prefacing it with another story. In my church last Sunday, the pastor, Russ, was illustrating how Lent gives us with chances to get rid of spiritual faults that bog us down. He disappeared behind the pulpit a moment and emerged with three big suitcases, and asked Nathan — a sizable, healthy young man — to come forward. One by one Russ tossed the suitcases to Nathan, who walked them out of the sanctuary into the hall one at a time. “Here, Nathan, let’s get rid of resentment. Let’s not carry around terminal selfishness any more, either. Oh, and we don’t need to haul around the heavy baggage of anger for one more minute. Take that one out of here, too.” Not a bad sermon illustration, I thought.

It put me in mind of Corrie Ten Boom, a woman of faith and courage. Never married, she and her sister Betsy had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II for hiding Jewish refugees in the basement of their father’s watch shop in the Netherlands. Corrie and Betsy were well into middle age, and the deprivations of prison life were brutally hard on them. Betsy eventually succumbed to the rigors of the camp, but Corrie was able to hang on until the liberation came.

At the urging of her many friends, Corrie began a speaking tour to share her experiences as a Christian during her incarceration. To illustrate how she had been able to let go of many negative experiences and memories, Corrie would bring along to each lecture a suitcase full of rocks. She would take them out one by one, encouraging her listeners to let go of the things that were wounding them and defeating their Christian life.

One night, having seen this illustration many times, one of the tour handlers confronted her. “I see you take out those life-defeating rocks every night, but, you know, every night after the program is over and everyone is gone, you put those rocks back in and carry that suitcase back to your vehicle.” It stopped Corrie in her tracks. It made her realize how defeated her life continued to be as she battled those spiritual demons, those memories of horror and cruelty; night after night giving them to God, and night after night taking them back again. God had confronted her, and she was not the same person after that.

Sometimes God wants to jostle us good, wants to move us off our habitual, comfortable center. Not that we will always enjoy the experience. But we need revelations of the living God that speak words of truth and grace and hope into our hearts. Our lives cry out for visions like the ones the prophet Ezekiel received; a hopeful vision of spiritually dry bones reknitting and dancing back to life. We’re hungry for the spoken words of Jesus in the Gospels which healed and restored people like Mary Magdalene and Matthew the tax collector. We need to meet up with words of Jesus, words like the ones which challenged and forgave Simon Peter and the woman at the well. We yearn for deeper insights into how much God loves us, so we can relax and quit frantically playing our culture’s game of pulling ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps. If we but avail ourselves of them, Lent offers us times for reflection and opportunities for experiencing the holy and gracious reality of God. It takes a willingness to unpack our spiritual suitcases and travel without the things that used to sustain us.

A close encounter of the third kind — well, sort of like that — that’s what happened to proud, self-righteous Paul. He was met face to face by Jesus the living Word, visited with presence of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus confronted him about his behavior, “Why are you persecuting me?” And the glory of the light that was Jesus shone round about him and made him sore afraid, and left him blind.

Paul’s revelation began with his asking the one essential question, the same one people kept asking in the Gospels, the question all seekers ask: “Who are you, Lord?” The light answered, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” From that moment on, Paul’s only allegiance was to Jesus, for Jesus had received him. He didn’t berate and condemn him. Paul’s blindness lasted three days; the same number of days Jesus was in the tomb. Enough time to erase everything he used to see so clearly.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing,” Isaiah had prophesied centuries earlier. “Do you not perceive it?” Indeed, Paul did perceive it. Something like scales fell from his eyes and he was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then he got up and was baptized. A few days later, he began to immediately preach about Jesus, saying, “He is the Son of God.”

By grace, not by any activity of his own, Paul had become a new creation! All the stuff that used to matter to him no longer did. He had gained Jesus. He could now say of his painstakingly acquired credentials, of his pride and joy, “I have come to regard them as loss.” He unpacked his old credentials suitcase and set off to travel light on an entirely new spiritual journey. It was a journey that began in Lent, so to speak, and opened up into that resurrection revelation on the Damascus road, the revelation that stood everything previous in Paul’s life on its head. What mattered to him from that day forward was Jesus.

What happened to Paul is offered to us. Maybe, just maybe, Lent is a time for us to declare “enough” to be enough. It’s an opportunity for a resurrection encounter that enables us to exchange our credentials for Jesus’. How does this happen? Do you want it to?

It seems God speaks into our lives when we are least expecting it. Paul was just jogging along on his horse. Corrie Ten Boom was just standing on a platform giving her usual message. Maybe we’re not looking for or even wanting a revelation from God. I believe it comes when we need it, when we’re able to receive it. For years, I have had a sign on my desk that reads “God is never late.” Or, as one of my friends always used to say, “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come.”

One of my teachers has been a Quaker named Parker Palmer. He wrote a book entitled Let Your Life Speak. In it, he asked the question, “Is the life you’re living the life that wants to live in you?” I received Palmer’s book at a time when things were not going well at all in my life. Maybe you’ve had times like that, too. Times when your coping mechanisms no longer serve you. When the things that used to give you comfort don’t any longer. When your relationships are floundering. When you’re not making good decisions. Maybe your life has crashed or is crashing and you feel like Humpty Dumpty.

Maybe — probably — God’s revelation to you won’t be dramatic as Paul’s was. Maybe it will be a still small voice asking, What’s going on here? What are you really searching for? Maybe it will come with the realization that you don’t have to live the old way any more.

Paul didn’t know when he set off for Damascus that another life wanted to live in him. But when he was given new life in Christ, he gladly exchanged it for the old. Listen for the loving fervor in his voice; it still comes through after two millennia: “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, not having a righteousness of my own . . . but one that comes through faith in Christ. . . . I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.” Paul met Jesus, received grace, and was a changed person.

I wonder if Paul spent a lot of time regretting his past way of life. We certainly spend a lot of our time there. But we just don’t know how Paul dealt with his past. What we do know is that he spent many years living into his new life. In Galatians 1 and 2, he tells us that following his conversion, after a difficult visit to Jerusalem, he went to Arabia for a while, then back to Damascus, and into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. After three years there, he went to Jerusalem again, and only returned to Jerusalem fourteen years after that. There were years of study and prayer. It took a long time to integrate his faith and life into new patterns.

But isn’t that always true? Thank God, it’s never too late to begin establishing new patterns. The process begins with God stirring things up in us, spiritually speaking—creating in us a longing, a divine dissatisfaction with the way things are. Whether that divine movement happens when our lives are going well or falling apart, it is God’s loving revelation of a whole new thing—a godly power—that wants to live in us. “Who are you, Lord?” we ask in effect. “I am Jesus. . . . Get up and you will be told what you are to do.”

That’s how the revelation comes. Jesus comes alive in us, and our lives are transformed immediately and over time. This is the on-going, ever new good news of the Lenten Gospel! Thanks be to God! Amen.