The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for March 25, 2007

Texts: Isaiah 43:16-21/Philippians 4b-14

Title: “Rearranging the Price Tags”

              I, like many of you, I am sure, would characterize myself as a student of human behavior, not necessarily a particular perceptive one, but I can draw not very original conclusions about the things I see as well as the next person. One laboratory, I, the student of human behavior, value as source material for my not very original conclusions about human behavior is the Elmwood Fitness Center swimming pool where I swim three times a week. 

              I would like to share with you some of my observations.  I confess that these observations might support the larger point I will be attempting to make, or may, on the other hand, fail entirely. With that bit of disclosure behind me, I am ready to proceed.

              There are three basic approaches people use when entering the Elmwood pool. There is the “plunger,” the guy or gal who approaches the lip of the pool, and without hesitation, plunges in.  There is the “ledge sitter,” this is the person who sits on the edge of the pool, lowers his or her feet and legs into the pool and sits there for five or ten minutes, before ever so tentatively lowering his or her body into the water.  The third approach falls in between the two I just identified.  The person I will refer to as the “tweener” doesn’t hesitate but lowers her body over the edge very slowly, balls of the feet supporting the body until she is ready to lunge forward and take the first stroke. 

              That series of observations on the table, I will move on to my larger point. The plunger, a person who is characteristically decisive and quick to a conclusion, is liable to see things as black and white with very little gray. He is inclined to risk, viewing risk as the way to the most generous reward. He is outspoken, and because he is absolutely convinced of what he knows, will not equivocate when opportunity presents itself to share what he knows.  The plunger will not back down in an argument.

              The ledge sitter is a different breed.  Hesitant to act without good information, the ledge sitter likes to mull things over, and examine a question from many different angles. The ledge sitter is the kind of person who in a meeting will typically point out the one inconvenient issue everyone else has overlooked.  The motto of the ledge sitter is “slow will get me there soon enough.”

              OK, the tweener is a hybrid of the two types I just described. Assertive, but not overly so.  Deems information important, but is willing to act on less of it than our ledge sitter.  The tweener will attempt to reign in the plunger when he advocates speed over caution, but he will be impatient when the ledge sitter enters yet another qualification or consideration to delay a decision. 

              The plunger, the ledge sitter, and the tweener all come to the pool for the same reason, yet how each approaches the experience varies greatly. Excuse a gross over simplification, but suppose that the all the people of the world could be placed in one of the three categories I have identified, into which category do you think the apostle Paul might fall? Consider carefully.

              Let’s turn to the evidence our lesson provides us.  As the lesson opens Paul lays out his resume, a resume, incidentally, few Jews could match. “Circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the tribe of Benjamin, he was a Pharisee (a group of Jewish laymen known for their commitment to their faith), a persecutor of the church (a good Jewish credential at that time), and, importantly, righteous under the law.  Paul stood tall among his peers, no doubt about it.

              However, he places an important consideration on the table when he shares his stellar past with his audience in the church at Philippi, and us.  “Yet,” Paul writes, “Whatever gains I had these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ….[continuing] For Christ’s sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as “rubbish,” [a word chosen by the editor’s of my Bible, though the Greek word here entered as “rubbish” is more accurately translated, “dung”]I regard [what I had] as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him…” A life behind him that would please any observant Jew, and then some.  “Yet, [Paul could report] that life is behind me.

              Friends, Paul took the plunge, and it was off the high dive. “I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as ‘rubbish,’ in order that I might gain Christ.”  When Christ entered his life everything changed.  All the gains he had made in his life meant nothing. He was starting over.

              Paul took stock of his life and concluded that every bit of it was disposal so long as he had Christ.  He took the plunge, out of one life and in to another, just like that. There are people in this congregation who might fairly be termed plungers, but there are limits beyond which even the most daring plunger will not go.  Paul recognized no such limits. “I want to know Christ [Paul writes] and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.” 

              For Paul the life he was living was merely the foreword to the life he anticipated living with the resurrected Christ. Would it be fair to say that that is not the foremost orientation of you and me? A life with Christ some day, certainly the hope upon which we, people of faith, base our lives, but I doubt that any of us are as eager for that day to dawn as Paul writing to the Philippians was.

              My experience with the people I have met in church has taught me that there are few plungers in our midst, few folk whose lives have been transformed and set on an entirely new course as Paul’s life had. God’s providence may well have led us to the pool, but we have gone no farther than the edge. 

              Some of us are ledge sitters and some of us are tweeners, poised somewhere between the ledge and the plunge. From month to month, year to year, probably in many cases, day to day, our posture on the ledge may change, for our experience of God is not some static thing.  There are times when God appears in clear focus, other times when the image blurs. Yet, to continue the analogy, we are at the pool, we value a relationship with God.

              At the pool, we value a relationship with God, IN the pool is to be in relationship with God. Paul was inviting his brothers and sisters in Philippi to join him in the pool, and he used his own life experience to encourage them to act. Fact of that matter is, of course, that Paul’s experience was Paul’s, and likely did not translate easily into the experience of the folks in Philippi. A plunger might influence a ledge sitter or a tweener to take the plunge, but there is little likelihood that the two plunges will resemble each other.

              Paul, a good student of human behavior, wisely acknowledged that his experience of Christ could not be reproduced in other Christians, his experience was just that, his experience.  Yet Paul, the dedicated teacher and preacher that he was, continually sought to translate his experience into words and deeds that would convey the grandeur of Christ.

              Keep in mind that Paul didn’t presume to know all the answers, didn’t presume that he was more than a fellow traveler with the Christians with whom he communicated.  While Paul possessed extraordinary confidence in his relationship with the risen Christ, he writes, “I do not consider that I have made it my own [“it” being complete union with Christ]; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

              Paul the plunger readily acknowledged that he had not reached his goal, his prize, but was in the pool and was on the way.  So how can Paul help us who have not made that move?  That is why we give Paul a hearing in the first place, isn’t it?

Paul’s autobiography reveals that he had goals and expectations in his life with Christ.  He was given a vision of what his life might become, and he was dedicated in pursuing it, in his case, relinquishing all other ambitions, he plunged in. Now such a move might not be in us, but that does prevent us, wherever we may happen to be on our faith journey, from setting goals and expectations for ourselves.

               The plunger, the ledge sitter, and tweener, all come to the Elmwood pool with goals and expectations in place.  The goal might be as simple as getting fifteen minutes of exercise or it may fit into some training plan of the serious athlete.  Goals and expectations from a pool workout may vary greatly, but each person who comes to the pool comes with a purpose.

                Life devoid of goals and personal expectations is stagnation.  Such stagnation, I fear, is all too prominent in the church.  The church has no tests, no scales, no stopwatches, or other devices to measure progress, the church can suggest, encourage, and even exhort, but it cannot set goals or expectations for you.  The best it can do is assist you in meeting the goals and expectations you have set for yourselves.

                The church, with Paul, seeks to live into the “prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”  The church attempts to faithfully preach the gospel that the Christ placed in our hands, but the church has no enforcement mechanisms. The church is called to present the message, yours to live it.

                  Paul found a dramatic way to live the message.  Declaring that his former status, his credentials as a Jew righteous under the law, amounted to nothing, rubbish, he “[pressed] on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” Paul took the plunge and embraced a whole new value system.

                 Are you ready to take the plunge?  Are you ready to turn your life upside down?  You may not be. But what if you began rearranging some of the price tags in your life?  Are you willing to revalue activities? Simple things.  That opportunity to stay home Sunday and enjoy a free day all to yourself is an attraction for many of us, and frankly sometimes it is appropriate to yield to the attraction, but for many worship on Sunday is readily bumped in favor of other priorities. But what if worship bore a higher price tag? What if its priority were elevated? Think about it? Once in the door on Sunday, there is no accounting how the Holy Spirit will use the hour or two we have together. That is not to say that the Holy Spirit can’t work at the birthday party, the soccer field, or golf course on Sunday morning, it’s just that the birthday party is a venue for celebrating a birthday, and the sanctuary the venue for worshiping God.

                  The Reverend Peter Gomes, long time Harvard teacher and preacher, was asked to speak at a gathering of some of America’s most celebrated business leaders.  The auditorium was filled with CEOs, board chairmen, and other business elite. As he mingled with those women and men he said his thoughts turned to the price tag those high status positions carried, the huge invest of time and energy required to get to the top wrung.

                 There is a price tag on everything we do, the price tag carrying higher and higher with time and energy invested. There is a price tag on everything we do. What if we risked rearranging some of those price tags? What if we risked re-valuing what we do?

Think for a minute about how you allocate your time and your resources.  I challenge you to spend some time this week identifying the things that carry the high price tags in your life. It isn’t difficult. When you have performed that exercise ask yourself if in light of what is contained in here [Bible] the price tag properly values that activity.  If it doesn’t, set some goals, levy some expectations on yourself, to change things.

                “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.” Wow! Paul took the plunge to rectify things, and did it in an extraordinary way.  You may be sitting on the ledge, you may be struggling between the ledge and the plunge, but whatever your status, Christ is just as available to you as he was to Paul. Change is possible, but it may well require rearranging some price tags. I urge you to find a place to start.  Who knows where any of that might lead? AMEN.   

PRAYER

              Good and gracious God, our hearts true home, may those who have entered this house of worship today feel at home.  A living presence reaching out to us, open or ears that we may hear, our eyes that we may see, the hope upon which our lives as your children is grounded. Take the words spoken here, and the hymns sung here, and so transform them by your Spirit that like the manna you provided for the Israelites so long ago, they may sustain the humble soul seeking assurance. Where concerns outside this sanctuary beg for attention and our minds drift, bring us back to thee who created the mind and each aptitude we call our own.

              O Christ, our brother, our Lenten journey nears its end, the terrain as we near Jerusalem leveling out to expose serious obstacles ahead. We find ourselves in familiar surroundings, identifying familiar obstacles, betrayal, trial, execution just up ahead. The script never changes, the players, Judas, Herod, and Pilate never change.  All so familiar, yet we revisit familiar places and meet those familiar actors, as people who in the space of a year have changed.

We enter familiar space on our way to Jerusalem more experienced in living, a people who have celebrated achievements, disappointments, been wounded, been healed. O Lord, we are more experienced in living.  We pray that experience might offer us clarity about what your last days on this earth achieved for us and the world you gave your life to save.

              With gratitude we acknowledge graces dispensed this last week, O God, a project of ours that earned us tributes, a call from child or grandchild living in another state, a spontaneous act of kindness that reminded us that there we share this world with some very special people.  With gratitude we acknowledge graces dispensed, a good report from the doctor, safe travels in the air or the highway, a win for our favorite sports team, a memory that connected us with a special event in the past.  With gratitude we acknowledge your abounding grace, O God.  

              With regret we acknowledge tears in the fabric of life that need mending. The casualties of war keep mounting, tragedy strikes residents in a Russian nursing home, strikes miners in Siberia.  With regret we lift up the homeless whose numbers continue to grow, the uninsured whose numbers continue to grow, the high school dropouts whose numbers continue to grow, the crime statistics those numbers continue to grow.  With regret we mourn the loss of wetlands, the devastation of the artic shelf and the great rain forests.  We regret the extinction of animal and plant life. O God, so much needs mending, be present to direct and encourage us in doing your will.

              O Lord, abide with our nation as we assert leadership in the world. May those who make and enact public policy do so wisely, not ignoring the repercussions that our actions have on other nations. A nation commanding great gifts and resources, may the good stewardship of those gifts and resources become a national priority as the nations of the world look to us for leadership. A nation of immigrants, help our national leaders to create just and reasonable policy in dealing with those who wish to resettle here.

              Heavenly father, you gave us life, grant us wisdom and faithfulness that we might live wisely, good citizens, befriender of our neighbor, particularly he or she who is struggling.

              Preserve in us, O God, an openness to you in all that we do, cherishing the day that we will be privileged to meet you face to face. 

              We lift these prayers in Jesus’ name, praying the prayer he taught us.