Each year, my church hosts a “Student Welcome Sunday” at the beginning of the fall term. I’m picked to preach on that day, for obvious reasons. I’ve pasted below my sermon from this year, rooted in Philippians 3.

I’ve found that my sermons are becoming ever more “churchy.” Maybe that’s not the best adjective. What I mean is, the “application” portion often points toward the body of believers as being the tangible, earthly place to encounter the transforming grace of God. Maybe it’s my latent Catholicism, or something, but I’ve a much higher view of the institutional church these days, compared to my early twenties. I think it’s good though: A high view of the church is a strong way of rebutting the evangelical heresy that says you get to make God up on your own, with out a magisterium or tradition. It’s also a good antidote to the similar secular heresy: that you get to make *yourself* up.

Anyways, here ’tis:

The Race is On
Philippians 3.1-4.1
Student Welcome Sunday – September 12, 2010

“It is we who are the circumcision.”

Not exactly the sort of slogan you’d see on a church sign as you drove past. “The Church in the Woods” is maybe a safer description, insofar as it might cause fewer traffic accidents.

But the language of circumcision meant a great deal to this fledgling Philippian church, and to Paul, who was, as we read, very well-versed in the ways of the Jewish people.

Paul is writing to combat some fashionable teaching that’s been taking place in Philippi. For some people – church historians call them “Judaizers” – the Gospel of grace found in Jesus Christ wasn’t sufficient. Especially not sufficient for the new Gentile members of the congregation. They needed more – a fleshy signifier that they were part of the fold – if they didn’t have Jewish ancestry, they’d at least have to endure the covenant ceremony of circumcision to set them apart and make them members of this community.

In the eyes of many of the Hebrew people of Paul’s day, the Gentiles were dogs. And it might not be hard to blame them for seeing things that way. After all, their holy homeland was occupied by an invading gentile empire, and their history in that land is composed of story after story of invading and marauding outsiders. But Paul flips the insult – he dubs the Judaizers to be dogs. And he does it because in their insistence on an outward sign of membership, they’ve joined ranks with the pagan outsiders who all find their confidence in their ethnicity and ancestry, in ancestral homelands and rituals, in their outward signs of who belongs. They’ve joined the ranks with their pagan neighbours who put all their confidence in the flesh.

And by confidence in the flesh Paul is certainly referring to the fleshy rite of circumcision, but it also to a broader sense of the term. A confidence that righteousness can be found in our own efforts, in our own capacities, and through our own will. Confidence in the flesh is a confidence that is placed in the creature, over against God. For Paul, the Torah of Moses ceased to be a revelation of God’s likeness to be lived out among God’s people, and had became mere human rules to be observed that parsed out who was in and out of the flock.

This is a scandal to Paul, because it is a firm and fast denial of the surpassing grace found in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And it’s that surpassing grace of the Spirit of God which binds the fledgling Philippian church together, not any other standard they can conjure up themselves.

Nowadays we don’t put too much stock in circumcision. But we definitely have our own confidences in the flesh.

In an age where the grand stories of progress and enlightenment the “purpose of life” have crumbled, I think we’ve seen a turn inward – - a locating of confidence in the individual. I think one of the main assumptions in our culture is that we can figure out for ourselves the best way to live.

The story we tell ourselves is that we are each masters of ourselves, and that the morality of our behaviour is a non-issue, unless it hurts someone else. And if we choose what we want to do on our own terms, we’re flexing the muscles of our self-sovereignty. It’s as if the maxim “think for yourself” has been taken to its extreme — “think for yourself,” because it’s assumed that we each of us has all we need to be righteous. We can figure out for ourselves the best way to live.

We see this in the way we live sexually: We say, “it’s no one’s business who we sleep with, as long as it’s consensual.”

We see this in our economic lives: We say “the amount of money I make is no one’s business but my own.” “The amount of money I spend is no one’s business but my own.”

This is what counts as confidence in the flesh, in the year 2010.

And this confidence in the flesh thrives abundantly at universities. Back in 1850, the president of the University of Michigan wrote that the role of the university was to “contribute significantly to enhancing its cultural context by promoting beauty, culture, truth, and even moral leadership.”

How many of you were convinced to attend Laurier or UW because of the promise of beauty, culture, truth and moral leadership? I’m not trying to say that these things can’t be found at universities any more. But this is an age where market forces and lucrative research opportunities and moral relativism hold sway, they can be very difficult to find.

But universities don’t abandon all hope encouraging us to think about the best way to live. I know from talking with engineering students at UW that they’re required to take engineering ethics classes. And I imagine the same is true for business students, or medical students, and perhaps many of the other applied sciences.

But what if ethics classes are a bad idea? What if they’re a bad idea, because they encourage the people in the class to take themselves seriously as moral agents. In other words – they give life to notion that we all are capable of figuring out the best way to live?
That our hearts and wants and desires are already in the right place?
That they’re fit to deliberate on ethical problems, and come up with a righteous and moral solutions. What if ethics classes are a bad idea, because they encourage a false confidence in the flesh that’s so pervasive in our culture? That they tell you that you can make up your mind about something, even if you don’t have a mind worth making up yet?

The trouble with ethics classes is that they bring us back to where we started – that we all can figure out the good life for ourselves. What if a better lesson, for the people in the class, was that they’re not yet properly formed to think well about such things?

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says that moral good is not available to any intelligent person no matter what his or her point of view. Instead, he says that in order to be righteous, to come to know what’s true and good, a person has to be made into a particular kind of person. In other words, transformation is required if one is to be righteous at all. And this means there’s no account of the moral life that doesn’t involve conversion.

No doubt, the Apostle Paul would agree 100%.

That’s why he considers all his confidence in the flesh to be a loss. He has no confidence in the fleshy righteousness he had achieved in days gone by. Because after meeting Christ, Paul has changed. Things are different, and the old way of doing things isn’t intelligible anymore.
Paul knows Jesus now, and this is no mere head knowledge. Knowing Jesus doesn’t mean just nodding your head to the proposition “Jesus is Lord.”
Paul tells us that to know Christ means to experience him – to be transformed by the power of his resurrection, and shaped by sharing in his suffering.
To know Jesus is not to reflect on some luminous moral principles, but to be refashioned, from the inside out.
To know Jesus is to gain insight that subverts the confidence we place in our own flesh.

Paul is quick to proclaim, however, that this isn’t the ticket to righteousness at the snap of a finger. Using himself as an example, he tells us that being transformed by Jesus Christ isn’t instantaneous. It’s the vocation of a lifetime – “a long obedience in the same direction,” as Friedrich Nietzsche would say.
In fact, contrary to the culture that says we all have what we need to be moral, Paul says that the truly mature person realizes that they don’t have what it takes. It’s the truly mature person who presses on toward the goal, and strain toward honing a righteous life.

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas describes the development of the Christian life as similar to being trained in a craft. He was raised among brick layers, and worked as an apprentice himself. He says (in a slight paraphrase):

“To learn to lay brick, it is not sufficient for you to be told how to do it, or figure it out yourself. You’ve gotta learn to mix the mortar, build scaffolds, joint, and so on. It’s not enough to be told how to hold a trowel, how to spread mortar, or how to frog the mortar. In order to lay brick you must hour after hour, day after day, lay brick.”

In fact, when you’re learning to be a bricklayer you are not just learning a craft, but you’re being initiated into a history that’s bigger than yourself. There are techniques and disciplines and practices and an entire language that apprentices inherit. And this takes time. It takes patience. It takes endless effort. It takes becoming not just someone who has an idea about how bricks are laid, but being transformed into someone who lives it out – who understands it intuitively and automatically. Someone who has been shaped and formed to respond wisely to the different tasks and problems that the trade presents.

“But what this indicates most of all is that to lay brick you must be initiated into the craft of bricklaying by a master craftsman.”

This is exactly what Paul tells us in verse 12, where he speaks of pressing on to take hold of the goal. The only guarantee that he’ll ever take hold of what’s ahead is because Jesus Christ has already taken hold of him. It’s Jesus’ firm hand on his shoulder that gives him (and us) the grace to strain on ahead, to run the Christian race with integrity and joy. And when our own confidence in our flesh finally fails us, we find the master craftsman Jesus, pushing ahead next to us, his grace sufficient to carry us through.

The race is on.

And the good news for those of us who’ve no confidence in our own flesh: it’s a race we get to run together.

In fact, that’s the only way to do it. Because Jesus has given each and everyone of us the gift of a load of other people that we call church. A gathering of people who live according to the pattern that God has given them. To be sure, the church is imperfect, cracked, and flawed. But it still bursts at the seams with saints, and master craftsmen and women. People who know the language of faith. Who live out the disciplines and hone their craft according to the grace that has been given them. Folks who know something of what it means to practice resurrection. Folks who are acquainted the sufferings of Jesus.

And it’s in this group of people we call church that we can learn to hone the difficult task of being a Christian. Where we’re made into the kind of people we ought to be. Where we learn:
The tricky craft of confessing our sins to one another.
The art of prayer.
The selfless labour of charity.
The joyful practice of worship.
The formative discipline of loving our enemies.
The grammar of faith, of love, and of life together.

As Paul says: it’s in here we can find folks who know the pattern. May we joyfully take note of that.

And may the master craftsman Jesus Christ transform our hearts so that we find the abundant righteousness that comes from life in the Spirit.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

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