Philippians has been called Paul’s love letter to the church. Not every love letter has warnings but Paul never missed a chance to remind the believers of the dangers not only surrounding them but also among them.  I’ve been reading Walt Whitman recently and he writes the greatest threat to the country was not from the outside but from the inside. We were at war with ourselves. It was John Adams who said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide..Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.”

That is the fear Paul has for the young church. It is not persecution that will kill it. In fact, more often than not persecution from the outside only strengthens believers and movements. It is the dogs on the inside who steal the hearts of the movement by confusing people with rules and regulations and strict definitions of who is in and who is out. It is not just the church at Philipp that is in danger of becoming bound and enslaved by falling back on confidence in the flesh. It is every new movement that has to wrestle with how it must balance freedom and structure – grace and works – the Spirit and the law.

Here the dangerous dogs – the Judaizers – are trying to convince new believers to join a new version of the past – to become exclusive and not open to growing. They were trying to revitalize the old system instead of moving on. They wanted to make Judaism great again. They wanted the Holy Spirit to reform the old – to add something instead of making the radical change that Paul had preached.

They were the institution protectors with norms, standards, rules, policies, the close defining of things to have structure. They wanted a religion that was built to last forever in the form they preferred. We have talked about this before. Why did the early church in Jerusalem fade away and the churches planted by Paul thrive? Because Paul’s gospel adapted and the churches taken over by the Judaizers could not adapt. The Judaizers always appeal to our desire for certainty and identity. Those rituals that once were simply marks of belonging have now become obstacles to faith. For them it was circumcision but we have our own rituals that have become marks of our exclusivity and being exceptional.

I’m old enough to remember closed fellowship by which a non-Baptist could not take communion or the demand that one be fully immersed instead of sprinkled. Even now, I always hesitate in saying the Lord’s Prayer when we get to choosing “forgive us our debts or forgive us our trespasses.” Liberals always said “trespasses” while the truly saved said “debts”. It’s better now in some ways because all of our code words and triggers have become political. It is more important to know how someone voted than what they believe about religion.

Paul was not just a breath of fresh air to Judaism. Paul was pure oxygen. In the air that sustains us there is 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen. Oxygen is food for fire. Nitrogen is food for structure.  Too much nitrogen in a system decreases the ability to carry oxygen. Too much nitrogen creates weight gain, slowness and depression. As well, it affects our vision. We know that pure oxygen is fatal so it needs nitrogen’s stability. But nitrogen needs oxygen’s ability to ignite. Paul was spirit and the Judaizers were constantly battling for more structure. Paul was sometimes ambiguous and preached a hard to define love and the Judaizers wanted detailed ethics and boundaries. They wanted hedges around the law and Paul wanted the leading of the Holy Spirit.

An institution cannot live on pure oxygen but too much structure suffocates it. Instead of being built to last it is built to become obsolete.

The Judaizers could not go beyond being good or even self-improvement to being absolutely new. They could not resolve the conflict Christ created – except to make the new fit the old. They were good with reformation and even renewal but not with the completely new. They could not, like Paul, consider their heritage and identity as peculiar and special people as loss or even rubbish. They could not let go of what made them righteous.

What about Paul?

The Swiss psychologist, Erik Erikson, studied men and women who start movements and this is what he wrote.

“Virtually every leader of a movement for change has a San Andreas fault line down the middle of their personality – and those who follow them live near it. Greatness always harbors massive conflict.”

Paul experienced the equivalent of a 9.0 quake where the plates of grace and law had been pushing against each other for years. Sudden conversions more often than not have long histories.

It’s what geologists call diastrophic distortion or continents pushing against each other for years or decades and finally snapping. Paul’s resolution of the conflict was not to reform the old like the Judaizers but to set it aside and “to experience the power that brought Christ back from the dead.” He wanted to live with the risk and uncertainty of never being good enough versus the certainty of the law. “I am risking everything I have come to know about God and what pleases Him. This goes against everything I have been taught to believe and everyone who has believed in me.”  He intentionally chose to live without the comfort of customs and traditions that he had loved all his life. What would it be like to throw away the very things that defined you?

Not the inconveniences and things you would like to be free from anyway but the things you love the most? Not forgetting just the failures but the successes as well. The experience with Christ unfitted him for the world. Having seen what is to come he is never again at home in this one. Who can live like this? Who can live on 50% oxygen? He chose to live with hardship and misunderstanding from both Jews and Greeks. He chose to share Christ’s suffering – not just physical – but the emptying of himself.  This is not the kind of self-help religion we teach and long for today. We look for problem solving religion but not problem creating religion. So much religion is about a false resolution of the conflicts we all face. But instead of resolve we only manage to make ourselves numb to the life to which Christ has called us.

I want this world to be home. I want to find my place here. I want respect from people that matter because I’ve not seen my real home the way Paul had. This is what happens when our faith settles in and stops pointing to our real homeland. We become good citizens of this world instead of sojourner and what looks like practical Christianity makes us – long term – miserable people, even more miserable than those with no faith for we once saw more and saw beyond. You probably remember the scene from the movie “Pan” with Robin Williams when Peter and the lost boys realized that Peter had forgotten how to fly. What had happened to him? What had growing up done to him?

William Wordsworth wrote in “The World is Too Much With Us.”

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away,”

And in “Intimations of Immortality” he wrote,?

“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”

That’s the question we all face not only as we age but as we fall into the routines that make life comfortable and controlled. How do we come to terms with life but not lose ourselves? How do we live in the here and now and yet see beyond this? How do we escape the religion of self-improvement and happiness? How do we experience Paul’s sense of trust and letting go of all that the world considers essential?

This numbness or compromise is not the peace with God that Paul found. It is a false peace the unravels or fades away in the hard times. What does Paul say? “I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” Why has Christ taken hold of you and me? What is it we press on to take hold of? Paul did not live for a great cause. He lived to know Christ. Too often we have turned that all consuming desire to know Christ into a cause, a movement, an institution.

There are change points in history that are often like the arc of a trapeze.  At great moments of change there is often a person like Abraham, Moses, Luther, Wesley, Augustine, and Paul so vested in the customs and traditions of the old system that it takes an earthquake to dislodge them. What we call incremental change happens from the outside in. Circumstances change and institutions gradually adapt. But discontinuous change happens when an insider – like Paul, Luther or Moses – experience a revelation and then lead others out. At the right moment they are taken hold of and they let go of the trapeze – and make the change irrevocable. They burn their bridges and leap out into the void taking others with them.

More often than not they do not prepare intentionally for it. It is thrust upon them but they have been prepared by God for that moment. Look at Acts 9:15. “But the Lord said to Ananias, “Go! This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”

At the top of the arc when one system has reached the heights of its swing, the moment between old and new, someone has to let go and carry people across the empty space, the wilderness, to the next handhold.

Again, Erik Erikson writes” “Born leaders seem to fear only more consciously what, in some form everybody fears in the depth of their inner life – and they convincingly claim to have an answer.”

Someone has to step into that place, like Abraham, where God is silent – even cruel – where everything is taken away and all that is left is trust and hope.

After that comes the life that experiences the power that resurrects and not the mild imitation that only reforms or tries to resolve the inescapable conflict in our own hearts when grace and goodness push against each other 15 miles below the surface.

Which is your life? Have you let go of what holds you and swung out into the space between what I know for sure and the one who knows me?

Is there a fault line deep in the crust of your life that has begun to move? Remember, it never happens suddenly. It builds for years and then snaps.

“But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain the resurrection from the dead.”

Let me close with this:

A PURIFICATION by Wendell Berry

At start of spring I open a trench

in the ground. I put into it

the winter’s accumulation of paper,

pages I do not want to read

again, useless words, fragments,

errors. And I put into it

the contents of the outhouse:

light of the sun, growth of the ground,

finished with one of their journeys.

To the sky, to the wind, then,

and to the faithful trees, I confess

my sins: that I have not been happy

enough, considering my good luck;

have listened to too much noise;

have been inattentive to wonders;

have lusted after praise.

And then upon the gathered refuse

of mind and body, I close the trench,

folding shut again the dark,

the deathless earth. Beneath that seal

the old escapes into the new.

Putting everything behind and pressing on toward that which Christ has taken hold of you. Forgetting it. Covering it up and burying it. Letting it become new.

I think it is unrealistic for us to mimic Paul. We need a different mix of oxygen and nitrogen – fire and certainty. But we can live near him without being him. We can be in the presence of one who lived not for causes or certainty but for taking hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of him.

That’s what I leave you with this morning.  Not a pep talk or even a challenge but a question.  “For what did Christ Jesus take hold of you?”