In this series of Sunday blogs, we are looking at the Letter to the Philippians and taking note of a consistent theme tying in with humility and selflessness. 

The Apostle Paul subordinated his own feelings in chapter one when he looked upon some people preaching Christ out of desperately poor motives but because the Gospel meant more to Paul than his personal distaste for certain people, he said “What does it matter?” Jesus comes first. Then in chapter 2 through that great kenotic hymn about Christ’s self-emptying humility, we saw Paul once again call himself and everyone else to assume that downwardly mobile pattern of our Lord. Jesus comes first.

Philippians 3 is the chapter that depicts what Frederick Buechner once called Paul’s “celebrated blue period” as a zealous Pharisee. No one was as sure of the ways to please God and save oneself in the process as Saul of Tarsus (as Paul was known back in those days). And few if any amassed the good works that Saul had deposited into his spiritual bank account. Saul had such zeal for all the things he knew were absolutely true that when Saul turned his fervor in the direction of persecuting those Jesus lunatics, that was a very bad day for the infant church.

Saul was by his own claim a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He was the best-est of them all. “Go ahead,” Saul could have said at that time, “just try to find a law or rule of God that I have not kept flawlessly. Go ahead. Try! You won’t succeed!”  Had Saul encountered that Rich Young Man who once claimed to Jesus that he had kept all the law, Saul would have no doubt dismissed him as a weak back-bencher.  

But we all know what happened one day while en route to Damascus to wreck more mayhem on Jesus’s followers. The flash of divine effulgence Saul encountered that day blinded his physical eyes for a time. But although Saul could not see physically, spiritually he was able at long last to see his life with a startling clarity and what he saw was that spiritually, he had been blind all along. Well before the scales fell from Saul’s eyes his inner world fell to the ground too. 

With the recent 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks many of us no doubt saw for the umpteenth time those two moments when first one and then the other of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center imploded, pancaking downward and hitting the ground with such weight and force that it registered on East Coast seismographs as a small earthquake.

That was what it must have felt like to Saul. His world collapsed in on itself. But then by grace alone, a new world was birthed in him and it did not take long before the joy of his salvation by Jesus consumed him. As we noted two weeks ago in the context of Philippians 1, Paul evinced a head-over-heels love for Jesus and for his Gospel that may have been even more intense than his previous zealotry as a Pharisee.

Of course, perhaps the best-known line of Philippians 3 comes in verse 8 when Paul decided that yes, he just said a couple times that his former gains were now viewed by him actually as losses. But this gain and loss language could only take him so far so he reached for a far stronger, more graphic metaphor: skubula.  Paul looked at all his past good works and all the things he was 150% sure made him a superstar in God’s eyes and said that now he knows that all of that was a big pile of crap. It was manure. Not just worthless, but it stunk to high heaven too.

A little later in the chapter in verse 17 Paul will urge the Philippians to follow his example.  But notice that Paul is not saying to follow his example in terms of leading some peerless life of good behavior but follow his example in regarding our good works as horse manure.  Or at least that is what they amount to if shorn from devotion to Christ Jesus the Lord.  And anyway Paul had just said that if we want to outdo one another, if we want to engage in any form of quasi spiritual competition, then let’s try to outdo one another in coming to know Jesus, Jesus, Jesus and the power of his resurrection.  Jesus comes first

Probably most readers of this blog have been nodding their heads in agreement with everything I have written here. Yes, we know our works do not save us. We know it’s all grace alone through faith alone. And yet . . . at the end of the day we can be pretty good at looking down our noses at those we deem to lead shabby moral lives.  We all succumb now and again to the niggling thought in the back of our minds that the difference between me and my unbelieving neighbor is not that grace alone scooped me up into the divine embrace but that I live more morally. God is attracted to my goodness.

That is why, as William Willimon noted long ago, people love sermons that give them long To-Do lists at the end. People love what a friend of mine calls “shouldy” sermons. It’s comforting to know that if I do these five things to grow my prayer life this coming week or adhere to the pastor’s four ways of becoming more compassionate that this will keep me in good with God.  And although moral living is of course an expression of our gratitude to God for the gift of Jesus, it’s not always so clear we are keeping our good works in that gratitude category. Sometimes they slip over into the salvation category.

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,” we meet Mrs. Ruby Turpin, a woman who spent her life looking down her nose at black people and poor white trash people and the freaks and lunatics in life. None of them held a moral candle to Mrs. Turpin. 

Famously at the end of the story, Mrs. Turpin has a vision of a staircase to heaven except that the people leading the heavenly processional were all those poor white trash losers and others of that ilk while Mrs. Turpin and her lot were taking up the rear of the parade. O’Connor placed Mrs. Turpin standing next to the hog parlor in their barn when she had this revelatory vision. So one wonders if when she saw how backwards she’d had things all along if at that same moment the fine stench of pig manure wafted into her nostrils.