I Count it all as Loss - A Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27) - Year A, 2020

Homily for Pentecost 18 (Proper 27) Year A, 2020
Sunday, October 4, 2020
Trinity Anglican Church, Aurora
St. Stephen’s Maple
The Rev. Daniel F. Graves
Text: Philippians 3:4b-14. 

Perhaps I am not the only one who watched this week’s presidential debate. It was not a hopeful event.  Indeed, it seems to me that it was emblematic not only of the intense suffering faced by our neighbours to the south, but also of the suffering being felt around the world in these tumultuous times.  We keep saying, “it can’t get worse”, and then it does.  It is not only our political discourse that is suffering, but also the health and wellbeing of the people of this world, and the health and well-being of the planet, itself.  How did we get here? 

Last week I suggested that perhaps, pride was at the root of much our suffering.  Pride destroys any constructive political discourse. Pride disrupts public health efforts and the curbing of pandemics. Pride allows us to destroy creation without any sense of consequence.  Pride is the most dangerous of all the sins.  In some ways it is the most invisible, we can be surrounded by it, subjected to it, and even be controlled by it personally, and never know what is happening until it is too late. In the mytho-poetic landscape of the book of Genesis, in the primordial garden, at the birth of human consciousness, Adam and Eve are duped by pride, and before they could realize the consequences, they were driven out of paradise.

Pride is something we live with and struggle with daily.  It is something each and every one of us is subject to. St. Paul had a very personal experience of the consequences of pride.  His own pride had made him into a righteous zealot. He admits freely that he considered himself the best of the best at what he did.  He was righteous for the Law and persecuted with zeal.  But then in being struck blind, his inner eyes were opened.  In suffering, in crisis, in trauma, he discovered that all of that counted for nothing, no matter what earthly accolades were bestowed upon him.  It’s all rubbish, he states. It’s all loss to me now, because in suffering, my eyes have been opened, my heart transformed, and my mind changed.

In the immediately preceding passage, which we read last week, Paul was exhorting the Philippians, who were experiencing suffering and discord in their own community to make his joy complete by being of the same mind as Christ.  And what was the mind of Christ? It was to empty himself of all glory and take the form of a slave, even unto death on the cross.  Christ experienced the deepest depths of human suffering, and God raised him up and glorified him.

The example of Christ is not only an example, but an efficacious event.  It is God present amongst us feeling our pain, journeying with us in our sadness, disappointment, fear and disillusionment. As he takes up our human condition, so he sweeps us, through our suffering joined to his, and invites into the divine condition, into true holiness and humility.   Paul states, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection of the dead.”

We try to avoid suffering at all cost.  I think this is very natural. We are wired to try to survive. We cannot escape suffering, though. Suffering is part of our fallen and imperfect world. It is what each of us, every generation, every individual has to reckon with at some time or another.  The sin of pride attempts to persuade us that we can beat it.  We may be able to for a time, but eventually circumstances overtake us, and sooner or later, we find ourselves lost in a sea of suffering.

Some of you will know that in late 2018, I suffered a nervous breakdown and had to take some time away from ministry.  I thought I was immune to suffering.  I believed I was strong.  I was ambitious, I was successful, I believed I was loved and respected by everyone. In short, I was filled with pride.  I was proud about how busy I was. I was proud about how I could multi-task. I was proud about how I could handle every problem that was thrown at me. I was proud about where I might go and who I might become.  And then I was thrown down from my high horse.  I found I could not function. I was a wreck, good for nothing, a grave disappointment to those I had been called to serve, and a great disappointment to myself.  It was a year of suffering unlike any other in my life.

I suppose I had always wanted to strive not to be ambitious, not to be proud, but it was beyond my reach. My pride nearly destroyed me.  And then I took a big time-out.  Over the course of my year-long healing journey, the things that used to matter to me seemed to stop mattering.  The things that I longed and craved after no longer held any appeal to me.  It matters less to me now if people like me or if I can please them.  I don’t really have any special ambition for the future.  These are things I could not change of my own volition. These things I had to learn through the hard road of suffering. 

For St. Paul, suffering is the road to joy.  It is a difficult place to be, but it is ultimately a hopeful road.  I think the healing actually begins when we are knocked down from that high horse.  That’s when God really gets a chance to journey with us and work in us.  When we find ourselves on that road of suffering, we have this fear that we will be on it alone. But perhaps our new vulnerability gives us a special insight, like St. Paul, a new vision, and if we lift our heads, we will see others, many others, indeed all of humanity, journeying on that road.  We are not alone.  And who shall we find leading us, having taken up his cross? It is Christ.  Perhaps in all our earthly wealth, success, fame and fortune we have been searching for him and unable to find him, and yet, here, on the road of suffering we find him.

Paul begs that he may have the same mind as Christ, and he implores the people of Philippi to let themselves be of the same mind as Christ Jesus.  It is in humbling ourselves, or more poignantly, in being humbled that we meet him.  Paul says something similar in Romans 5: “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

As we find ourselves journeying through this troubling time – political turmoil, a public health crisis, environmental collapse – we need to remind ourselves that this is precisely the moment and the place that Christ comes to meet us. Let us not lose hope but remember that in suffering comes a certain maturity. We must not cling to the gains we thought we had made, but let them go, consider them loss, and be open to a new call for a new day. Let us heed the words of the Apostle, “Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind,” and “press on toward the goal of the prize of the heavenly call of God in Jesus Christ.”