To Live Is Christ Philippians 1:21-30

Transcription

1 George A. Mason 16 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 24 September 2017 Dallas, Texas To Live Is Christ Philippians 1:21-30 For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. That s the kind of beautiful and pithy phrase that makes it onto needlepoints in your grandmother s house, right alongside aphorisms about thrift and kindness and the like. But it s really a summary of Paul s own take on the meaning of his life his reason for being. I m always taken by the work of public relations people who do branding work for companies and come up with cogent taglines that capture the essence of what the business or ministry does. I pay closest attention the nonprofits, don t you know?! Like the Salvation Army: Doing the Most Good. Or M.D. Anderson hospital in Houston: Making Cancer History. Or Children s Medical Center here in Dallas: Making Life Better for Children. There s usually a lot to unpack in a few words, and there s usually a double entendre. If a PR firm were to rephrase Paul s life mission, it would probably read: Living is Christ, dying is gain. But what does that mean? Paul s words are even better in the Greek. He deliberately juxtaposes the words for Christ and gain, Christos and kerdos, to give it a certain ring. But again, what does that mean? Let s start with the word Christ. Paul understands Christ to be more than the last name of Jesus. We blithely say Jesus Christ as if that s his proper name. But Christ is the word Paul uses for the whole history of God s way with the world from the beginning of creation to the end of things as we know them and then to the eternal new creation. Jesus perfectly embodied this way in his earthly life, and as a result he was given the name above all names in heaven and on earth. So when Paul says that for him to live is Christ, he is saying something about how he has joined Jesus in living a new way of life that is different from the usual way people go about things. He is talking about a life of self-giving love, a life that isn t about himself alone but about his commitment to pouring himself out on behalf of others.

2 This is contrary to the way most of us live. The motto of most of us is more like, For me to live is gain. We think the key to life is to get, not to give, to accumulate and separate, to become free from suffering and independent from others. Like the bumper sticker that reads, The one who dies with the most toys wins. Yeah, not so much, Paul would say. To die is gain, only if to live is Christ. Suzii Paynter is the executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the group of Baptists that Wilshire most closely aligns with. When she was 26 and teaching school, she got an invitation to attend a reception at an art museum. She walked into this gallery, which was filled with beautiful people dressed to the nines. She immediately felt out of place. And then a tall elegant woman approached her with a glass of champagne in hand, looked down at the diminutive teacher over her half-glasses and asked in a voice that sounded trained by finishing school, And what is it you collect? Suzii felt about two inches tall, and she didn t know what to say. She stammered something out and went her way. On her way home, she kept thinking about the woman s question and what she might have said. And then she thought, You know, my life isn t about collecting; it s about giving. That s part of what it means to say that to live is Christ. Even those who have been successful in collecting and accumulating often find this way of life insufficient to bring personal happiness. Case in point: Aggie Gund. Agnes Gund, who goes by Aggie, is a wildly wealthy woman, an art collector, who shocked the art world in June by selling a 1962 Roy Lichtenstein painting, titled Masterpiece, for $100 million one of the fifteen highest prices paid for a work of art. But why she did that and what she is doing with the money is the bigger story. Aggie is a white woman with twelve grandchildren, six of whom are black or brown. She recently watched a documentary by Ava DuVernay called 13 th, which tells the story of the tragedy happening in America s prisons. We ve been warehousing people of color in a systematic massincarceration project that creates generational hopelessness among minorities, deepens our growing racial divisions and undermines our American values by unjust 2

3 sentencing. She became so convicted of the need to attend to this that she enlisted the Ford Foundation to help her form the Art for Justice Fund. She has also put the finger on other rich art collectors to match her $100 million. I thought I should do something about something that to me is so wrong about our system, Gund said. We ve just loaded up our prisons with mostly people of color and given them different penalties. And I thought I should know more about it and then I thought, maybe this is something I could address. 1 When Paul addressed this letter to the church at Philippi, he himself was in prison. Many early Christians were incarcerated for their faith. Instead of making them bitter, they, like Paul, reflected upon the suffering of Christ. The whole story of the gospel is about God being with and for those who were oppressed and afflicted, marginalized and sometimes killed for not conforming to the political or religious establishment of their day. Paul considered it a t-partisan/wp/2017/09/19/why-artcollector-aggie-gund-is-spending-100-million- privilege to suffer for Christ, but most of us consider it a privilege not to suffer. Paul didn t view life as a game of gain. He didn t demand his right to be accepted and blessed by those who opposed him. He saw it as an opportunity to be with and for those who suffered, to share in that suffering as a witness to a different world of justice and peace that God promises to bring. This is so important for us to get straight today. Too many of us and I mean to include myself in this us want to feel comfortable. We want the church to be a comfortable place that gives us refuge and protects us. And there s a certain sense in which I agree with that. We want to be the kind of community where people can be accepted and loved, where they can feel a taste of that coming world where everyone is valued and knows the joy of being a child of God in the presence of their heavenly Father. When we have this kind of church, we bear witness to this coming world. That too is living for Christ. 1 to-combat-massincarceration/?utm_term= a86668&w pisrc=nl_opinions&wpmm=1 3

4 But the church has more than a mission to and for ourselves. We are to love and serve those whom the world casts aside. We are to proclaim liberty to the captives, to recover sight to the blind, to set the prisoner free and to proclaim the Lord s favor. This mission often makes us rightly uncomfortable in its demand on us. When we do it, though, we live for Christ. We do so in so many ways. When we rush to aid victims of hurricanes and earthquakes, living is Christ. When we partner in missions in places like Kenya and Tanzania, living is Christ. When we mentor inmates in the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, living is Christ. When we seek to improve urban public schools that have been so underserved and underresourced, living is Christ. When we stand up for racial, gender and LGBT equality, living is Christ. When we decide that our money is not our own and give generously to support all of these causes through a church that seeks to be a beacon of hope and a voice of life in a world of death, living is Christ. My colleague Gary Simpson is the senior pastor of the predominantly black Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York, not far from where I went to high school. Gary is a friend who is as close as a brother. His birthday was two days after mine this week, and his wife, Emma, posted a tribute to him on Facebook. He tells his associate ministers and preaching students that we all have but one sermon to preach, and we spend our lives preaching it and living it in a multiplicity of ways. I think, his wife said, he s been preaching this one ultimate Resurrection, life-giving, deathdefeating sermon in every way possible for as long as I have known him: God, who desires the intimacy of that friend allowed to wipe our tears away, has swallowed up death for us all. We who have been freed from shrouds will cast no shrouds for others in fact, we will become shroud-defeaters. And, we will live and love in defiant joy because the hand of the Lord will rest on every mountain. That s the good news the church has to tell the world. And, oh, how welcome it is for those who live in darkness and ignorance and blindness. 4

5 Ella Baker was a civil rights pioneer who influenced scores of celebrated figures of the movement, including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and John Lewis. At a time when women could hardly take the lead in anything, and black women in particular, Ella had a phrase she lived by: Give light and people will find the way. She was an inspiration to many, but her father was her inspiration. Ella grew up just outside of Ebony, Virginia, across the river from North Carolina. She remembers the routine of her household, night after night, when she was a little girl. Her daddy would come home from working the fields, and the family of twelve would all sit down for dinner together. Then they would adjourn to the big room, where the kids would do their homework and her father would read the newspaper. After he finished, he would say, Time to go to Ebony. The kids always wondered why he would leave the house night after night, climb onto the buckboard hitched to a horse and make the journey into the town of Ebony. He would just tell them he was going to get a Pepsi. That didn't really figure to the kids, because by that time people could buy a six-pack of Pepsi and wouldn't have to go to town for one. One night when Ella was about seven or so, she asked if she could go with him. She was so excited when he said yes that she jumped out the door and onto that hard seat next to him. As they made their way into the town, she saw a gathering of men start to form behind a building, and she wondered what that was about. Her daddy went into the store and bought Ella a Pepsi and a candy bar, then told her to sit there and not talk to anyone while he ran an errand. She watched him as he made his way toward that group of men. They parted like the Red Sea and once he was inside the group, they closed it in a circle. She could barely make out what was being said, so she got out of the wagon and moved in closer. She could hear her daddy doing all the talking. And she finally figured out what was happening. He was going through the newspaper with those men, telling from memory the stories he had just read about what was happening in the world. She realized that her daddy was one 5

6 of the few literate black men in the area, and these men were hungry to know the news. He took the job upon himself to bring the news to Ebony. Friends, if we want to join Paul in saying that our motto is to live is Christ and to die is gain well, it s time to go to Ebony. 6