L.D. 22, Philippians 3:12-4:1 "Between Heaven and Earth" Scott Hoezee

Within the past week we witnessed the conclusion of both the Olympic Games and this season's last political convention. Just in case we had forgotten it for a moment or two, both events reminded us that in this world, two of the greatest forces are sports and politics. Both fields traffic in huge sums of money. Both fields deal with large amounts of power and influence. Both fields can lead to great fame for those who rise to the top. And so, not surprisingly, both athletics and political campaigns have the ability to exercise a tremendous pull on our hearts and minds. Whether it is Mia Hamm scoring the winning goal of a soccer game or President Bush delivering a strong line in a speech, we know full well that these things can bring crowds to their feet in full-throated cries of exuberant affirmation. We get caught up in sports and politics in ways that may not happen in the rest of life.

As you could no doubt detect in Philippians 3, the apostle Paul invokes both sports and politics and yet he applies them to not just the things of this earth but to the things of that more spiritual realm known as heaven. Along the way, Paul touches on that most fundamental of all tensions in the Christian life: the tension between heaven and earth, between the reality we can see with our eyes and the reality we affirm by our faith. This morning let's explore the final two articles in the Apostles' Creed to ponder what our belief in "the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting" does to the shape of our lives.

Paul begins with the sports image of a runner stretching himself forward to be the first across the finish line. Again, at the Olympics in recent weeks, how many times didn't we see this kind of forward stretch? So many of the swimming and track races were won by the merest fraction of a second, with the slow-motion replay showing us that it was that last little stretch of his finger that made Michael Phelps touch the wall first or it was the sprinter's final thrusting forward of his chest that caused his body to cross the finish line that all-important thousandth of a second before anyone else. These are images of tremendous effort and strength. It may indeed have been only Michael Phelps's index finger that touched that wall first, but you know that behind that tiny touch of a fingertip was the straining forward of every last muscle in that man's body.

That's what Paul is saying, too. His life is a constant straining forward, a constant lunge to touch the finish line, and it takes everything he's got to make the effort. But in this case just what is the finish line? It is getting to know Jesus Christ as completely and perfectly as possible so that this intimate knowledge can then make us into an exact image of Jesus. Jesus is the ultimate role model, the very perfection of everything humanity was ever meant to be. So Paul isn't straining forward here to grab some thousandth of a second in order to get a laurel wreath on his head. He is aiming at nothing less than the full stature of what it means to be a human being, recast perfectly in the mold of Christ.

But Paul is keenly aware he's not over that finish line just yet. In fact, there is every indication that he knows he will never cross that line this side of death. And yet, reading this letter to the Christians in Philippi, it is also clear that there were some folks in the early days of the church who claimed they actually had attained spiritual perfection. There were apparently some triumphalist believers who viewed the Christian life not as a one very long push for the finish line but as an enjoyable basking in glory up on the medal stand.

And maybe we can understand why. After all, every athlete who traveled to Athens last month did so with a goal. Each athlete went there with the hope of finding him- or herself atop the medal platform, a laurel wreath upon his head, a gold medal hanging around her neck. As the close-ups of those winners demonstrated, being in the spotlight had been their goal. For those skilled enough to have achieved this, it was demonstrably the best few minutes of their lives. And so you just knew by looking at these winners that the point of every contest all along had not been to have the race go on and on but to have the race end in glory. No one went to Athens to enter a race that would never end.

So it is not surprising that all through history there have been Christians who view also spirituality as something you achieve at some point. No one wants a race that won't end. Shouldn't we Christians be able to rest "on our laurels" as the old saying goes? Shouldn't we have a sense at some point that we've gotten to where we were going? That's what some in Philippi were saying: they now knew and understood Jesus as well as anyone ever could. They had the knowledge of Jesus all sewn up. Ask them any question, and they'd give the answer they knew Jesus would give, too. They knew exactly how to think on any moral question you could pose. They knew exactly how to make political choices, what form of worship was best, what was the most Christian way to run a household--you name it, they knew the answer. And if you disagreed with them, that only proved who was on the gold medal part of the winner's platform and who was down a bit lower.

But Paul goes another way. He claims that the Christian life is about constant striving and struggling, the asking of hard questions and the admission that sometimes, for now at least, we don't have all the answers because we are not yet completely like Jesus. Then in verse 15 he says that everyone who is "mature" will have this same point-of-view. And if there are those who disagree with Paul, God may well show them that in due course.

In verse 15 Paul is being quite clever. Because the word translated in the NIV as "mature" is the Greek word teleios, which is a form of the word for "perfection." Paul is doing a rhetorical end-run on those Christians in Philippi who were claiming they were already perfect. But Paul says that if we really are mature, if we really have begun to receive the perfection of Jesus, then the first thing that knowledge tells us is that, as a matter of fact, we will never be finished with the striving for more. In a way, this is a version of the old saw that says true wisdom begins with the knowledge of how much you don't know!

True spiritual maturity, the beginning of perfection in the Christian life, does not lead to the arrogant view that you now know the truth about any issue you may face. Because, as it turns out, one of the first things Christ-likeness leads to is humility, and one of the first things we need to be humble about is the fact that we don't know the full heart of God just yet and this is what motivates us to press on to learn more all the time.

Yes, as Paul goes on to say in verse 16, we must live up to what we have already been given by grace. Because there are many things we do know. We have a message to proclaim and to stick with. Being humble enough to admit that you don't know everything must never mean that you give in when someone tries to make you say that maybe Jesus isn't the only Savior or some other thing that waters down the gospel. No, where faith has clarity and where the church confesses the truths of the Scriptures, then we are bold proclaimers. But believing that we know many things is still different from believing that we know everything. And just that is Paul's point.

And that is because the finish line toward which we lunge isn't even on this earth. It is, as Paul says in verse 14, an upward call, something that makes us lift our gaze higher than the horizons of this life on this earth. This, then, leads to the political part of Paul's imagery in this passage where he reminds the Philippians that their citizenship is in the kingdom of God. Historically there is evidence that the Philippians knew what it meant to have citizenship in a place different from where they lived. The city of Philippi was likely on the far eastern side of Macedonia near modern-day Bulgaria. They were a long way from Rome and yet were given the full privileges of being Roman citizens. Their identity derived from a place a long ways from the locales they called home.

Knowing this, Paul says that this is a good metaphor for the whole of the Christian life: we live on this earth and are forced to deal with its realities in our work-a-day living. We read the local papers, we deal with the flesh-and-blood folks who live next-door, we engage the life we've got. Just as the Philippians didn't have to pull up stakes and literally move to Italy in order to be Roman citizens, so we Christians do not need mentally to move off this earth by pretending we have no interest in the news of the day or the realities around us. Instead we can be citizens of heaven even while we live on this earth. But the point is that this heavenly citizenship shapes and determines how we live here on this earth.

And if earlier in this passage Paul was dealing with super-Christians who thought they knew everything, in verses 18-20 he swings over to the other side of the spectrum to deal with those who were getting so thoughtlessly caught up with the pleasures of this life that they were not thinking spiritual thoughts nearly often enough.

So on the one hand Paul says we don't know everything and should not act like we do--the Christian life is a constant striving for Christ-likeness. But on the other hand Paul says that we do already know many things and so part of our striving is applying what we know to the choices we face at work, at home, and in our leisure times. In verse 19 when Paul addresses those whose focus is on "earthly things," he is not saying we shouldn't pay attention to earthly things at all. But he is saying that these must not be the only things we focus on. We must never forget that our identity derives from a place very different from where we live for now. Being a citizen of heaven will not cause our interest in earthly things to dry up, but it will give us a very different view of such matters.

That is the main point: we have both the realities of a heavenly kingdom and a concrete, physical life on this earth where we need to apply that kingdom. We have both the sense that we are always struggling to become more like Jesus and the need to demonstrate that we already have a measure of Christ-likeness and this shows up in how we talk, in how we treat food, drink, sexuality, ethics in the workplace, the shape of our homelife.

Then, to re-enforce this clamping together of both heaven and earth, Paul ends by reminding the Philippians that contrary to Greek visions of the afterlife, our final vision is not a hyper-spiritual existence in which we will forever be like ghosts flitting through wispy dimensions of cloud and vapor and pure thought. Our vision of heaven ends up being very physical as we receive from God a new body. We believe in the resurrection of the body. Our hope for "life everlasting" is finally an embodied hope.

The Catechism is quite clever in Q&A 58. The phrase "life everlasting" with which we conclude the Apostles' Creed could, on its own, sound very wispy and insubstantial. So instead the Catechism says that this "life everlasting" is something that "no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human heart has ever imagined." But that is a clever way to put it because this reminds us that when we get to heaven, we will still have eyes that can see, ears that can hear, and hearts that can feel and imagine! We will still have bodies that will be undeniably substantial and real. "Life everlasting" turns out to be not less life-like than what we experience now but more life-like in bodies that are more real, more physical, more deeply wonderful than even what we have now.

So all of that is a whirlwind summary tour of Philippians 3 and of Lord's Day 22. But how does all of this apply to our daily lives? How can such "heavenly" matters nevertheless enable us to keep both feet firmly planted on the ground of this earth yet without letting that same earth distract us from our higher, upward calling in Christ? When we opened this sermon, I mentioned that sports and politics have a way of whipping up our enthusiasms. Billions of dollars get poured into both fields. Huge amounts of energy get expended in both kinds of endeavor. If you could somehow tote up the number of words spoken on television and written in newspapers every day about just sports and politics alone, you might well find that between the two, talk about such things makes up the majority of human speech in a given day. Take away sports-talk and political analysis and this world would be a much quieter place!

Maybe it was the same even 2,000 years ago, and maybe that's why Paul tapped into these two powerful cultural forces to direct us to have a similar passion for our Lord Jesus Christ. If we find it possible to become enthusiastic about something as temporary as a baseball game, shouldn't we be able to devote ourselves to things that last eternally as we see them reflected in Christ Jesus? If we can generate feelings of national pride as citizens of earthly nations that cannot last, shouldn't we be able to let the shape of God's coming kingdom mold our actions and speech within this world already now?

Paul's answer is an enthusiastic yes. But it is not a simple yes. Paul of all people knows that carrying this out involves abiding struggles, the encountering of hard questions, and the knowledge that despite everything we know, there is so much more we don't yet know. Theologically, it is difficult to combine spiritual visions of heaven with the idea that even that life will be physical. Christians are often a "both/and" kind of people. But it is easier to be "either/or" folks. Being "both/and" creates tension, and we'd all just as soon live without tension.

When I get feedback on sermons, I hear that sometimes people want me to be more practical by telling folks what to do. At times we do need a sermon's application to be a 1-2-3 series of steps that are straightforward to follow and, of course, sometimes applications are like that, too. But sometimes they aren't. Sometimes sermons leave us the task of puzzling something out within the specifics of our individual lives. That creates tension. And none of us likes the hard work that living with tension can require of us.

Yet Paul embraces the tensions. Better to live with the nagging sense that we have so much more to learn than to be content. There were two fairly content groups back in old Philippi, and Paul rattled them both. Some were content because they believed they knew it all. Others were content because they didn't think there was much to know.

Paul called both back to the cross. The extent of Jesus' hellish sacrifice tells us that if the cross is the measuring stick for determining what it means to be like Jesus, then we all fail to measure up, we all have a long way to go in having within us the mind of Christ. But then, the cross is also our most vivid reminder that our physical lives matter to God. To save us, the Son of God became a real person with a real body. He did that so that when he was raised again from the dead with a new body, we would know that the glory of the new creation will not replace the glory of the old creation but will redeem it, renew it.

So in the meanwhile, we dare not act as though what we do with our bodies or with this earth are of no interest to our great God in Christ. The cross tells us that living in this world the way Jesus lived is not easy. But that same cross tells us that living like Jesus is possible, and so this is the goal at which we aim our lives. We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. But we also believe that this everlasting life starts now. And so, my friends, let us press forward toward the finish line with everything we've got. This life may be only the beginning of glory, but the glory has begun! Thanks be to God! Amen.