Winning The Prize

"Winning The Prize"

Philippians 3:4-14
October 5, 2008

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the
eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of
Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to
righteousness under the law, blameless. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come
to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss
because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have
suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain
Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the
law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on
faith. 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
from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal;
but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved,
I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies
behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize
of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Starting tomorrow, the Nobel Committee will begin announcing its winners for its various
prizes in chemistry, physics, medicine, economics, literature, and the work of peace,
and the announcements will be paced out over the next week. It’s a monumental prize,
of course—the cash is good, but the real value of the prize is the prestige it delivers to
those who win it in those various fields. And yet, over the years, there has been a lot of
people that have questioned the true nature of the choices, and whether or not obvious
biases came through in the judging processes of the Nobel Committee. In 1976, the
Nobel Committee opened up its archives in order to give more light to what had been
otherwise secretive set of deliberations. And what researchers found was that
objectivity was sometimes given short shrift, even amongst some of the most well-
known of Nobel Prize recipients.

“The Nobel Committee’s treatment of Albert Einstein reveals how deep the bias of its
members sometimes reached. Einstein put out his first paper on his now-famous
theory in 1905 and further developed it in 1915. The general public didn’t hear much
about it until 1919, however, when a British astronomer ran a test of the theory during a
total solar eclipse. When that astronomer published the results of his test, Einstein
became a household name, practically overnight. Thus, when the Nobel Committee
was reviewing candidates for the 1920 Nobel Prize in physics, they received many
recommendations to consider Einstein. There were some members of the committee,
however, who were opposed to Einstein because he was a pacifist. Some opposed him
because he was Jewish and others because did he work in theoretical rather than
experiment physics. Some members harbored all three of those shortsighted
objections. One committee member dismissed Einstein’s work as “world-bluffing Jewish
physics.” So they picked somebody else in 1920.The next year, the committee again
received many nominations for Einstein, but the senior member of the committee was
opposed. To his shame, he said, “Einstein must never receive a Nobel Prize, even if the
whole world demands it.” As a result, the committee awarded no one the prize in 1921.
Thus, two prizes were available in 1922, and by that point, Einstein’s popularity was so
great that members of the Nobel Committee began to fear for their own reputations if
they didn’t recognize him in some way. So finally, a kind of compromise was suggested
by one nominator. The committee awarded the 1922 prize to the physicist Niels Bohr
for a new quantum theory of the atom, and the delayed 1921 prize to Einstein, not for
his theory of general relativity, but for another theory he had proposed, the law of
photoelectric effect, which dovetailed with some work Bohr had done. Einstein, of all
people no dummy, knew a snub when he saw it. He accepted the award — he actually
needed the money — but did not attend the ceremony to receive the medal. And later,
when asked to name the most important honors he had received, he was able to reel
off an impressive list, but he did not mention the Nobel.” —Summarized from Virginia
Hughes, “Einstein vs. the Nobel Prize,” Discover, September 28, 2006, http:
//discovermagazine.com/2006/sep/einstein-nobel-prize/.

I think Einstein’s experience is a reminder that all prizes are not equal, especially when
one knows the context of how that person actually won the prize—or was denied it, as
was in Einstein’s case. It’s a reminder that you can work and work and be finally
awarded some honor and then find it be fairly hollow in its meaning, at least for you
personally, despite the additional prestige that people might now accord you. I was
thinking about Michael Phelps recently, our American Olympian who won 8 Gold medals
in the Games in China…I wonder how long the feeling of pride will last—maybe a
lifetime, maybe 6 months, I don’t know. When you’ve reached the top, where do you go
from there? If the point is to be the best, and you are the best, what is there to shoot
for anymore? What do you win next, when you’ve won everything at 25 or so? He’s got
a lot of life to live, and each of those medals, if they don’t lead to something better than
even being the best swimmer in the world, then I can’t imagine that they won’t
eventually feel like a noose around his neck.

But what it would mean to go beyond the Nobel Prize, or winning a gold medal? I think
our passage has some answers to that, at least from the point of view of our Christian
tradition. In this text today, the apostle Paul is in the midst of defending himself against
some in the church of Philippi who have questioned his ideas, his teachings, and who
are now teaching a faith that seems to return to some of the traditions Paul had left
behind. Some seemed to be teaching that to be a winner, to win the prize, one needed
to be circumcised or one had to eat the right foods, or follow some of the ritual
commandments of the Jewish faith, in order to be good with God. Of course, for Paul,
who had once been a faithful and observant Jew—in fact, in many ways, he had been a
fanatic of his faith, persecuting other Jews who had converted to this new religion called
Christianity—for Paul, this return to those familiar ways of doing things didn’t work
anymore and he told this church that personal truth. What had changed him was that
Damascus Road experience, when the light blinded him, and he heard a voice, and the
One whom he had been persecuted spoke to him, and asked him “why the fanaticism,
why the persecution?” After that, life changed, and his viewpoint changed, and he
found himself on the other side of the fence, so to speak, siding with those he once
persecuted. What he wanted was to make sure that people didn’t think that the gift
Christ brought was just a rerun of what had already been, as good as that was.

But don’t get me wrong here because so often we in the Christian tradition dismiss the
Jewish traditions and practices that Jesus himself practiced and lived into that we often
end up bashing Jesus’ very faith—remember he was practicing Jew, not a Christian—
they’re were no Christians until after Jesus, of course—and often that Christian self-
righteousness has led to anti-Semitism. We don’t need to go to that awful and sinful
place to acknowledge that Paul here is sharing a different understanding of his faith—
that he is proud of his heritage, of his tradition, of his long connection to his historic
faith, passed from the Moses to the prophets and then to the rabbis he had learned
under. In our text, he actually reminds his readers that if there was anyone who had a
right to revel in the roots of that good faith, it would be him—he had the spiritual
pedigree that many of his enemies in this church did not. What had changed for him
was the prize he was shooting for, the goal he was trying to achieve, and that had put
him on other side of the fence, had changed, and so now he was standing with those
who felt no need to first become Jewish in order to become Christian—you can go from
A to C without being B, without being Jewish.

And the goal, the goal that he has set for himself, the prize he had set for himself, had
changed the way he had structured his life, including his religious practices, because
the goal was no longer to be a faithful follower of a tradition, of even Jesus’ own
tradition, but to know the One, the Christ, who had extrapolated and expanded on that
tradition, as all good Jewish rabbis of that era did and continue to do in the Jewish
faith. But the difference is that for Paul, this particular rabbi, this Jesus is alive, still
alive, because he has been resurrected, has moved from the shadow of death, to the
power of resurrection. 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 from the dead.   Now, don’t misread that—that isn’t a death wish for some
sort of martyrdom; no, it’s a desire to know what it means to be as faithful as Christ was,
to live and die as fully and faithfully as Christ did. Paul wants to know, to breath in, to
immerse himself in the life of this One from Nazareth, so fully as to embrace the kind of
faithful life he lived right until the end, a willingness to suffer for doing the right thing, in
order to “win” the gift of new life, resurrection—again, eternal life in the Christian
tradition begins now, not just when we pass onto the other side—eternity begins here
and now, not later. What Paul seems to want to win is nothing short of being as faithful
to God as Christ was, even in the midst of deep suffering that may come, surely as it
came to Christ as he lived out his faithfulness to the God who is Love—Paul wants to
jumpstart eternity, right now, right here.

Of course, Paul knows he’s not there yet in this faithfulness—do any of us ever get
there, but he keeps moving forward, keeps being faithful, laying aside what he believes
are the unimportant things, perhaps even some things Jesus himself did as a faithful
Jew, some traditions in order to move forward, to press on towards that goal of knowing
this Christ, and his life more fully. It’s an odd thing, but Paul is an odd duck, and
sometimes the odd ducks have lot to teach us about just getting in the water and just
paddling. What I love about what Paul says here is that no matter where we are in the
water, where we are in the race, or how we’ve taken in water at different points, or
stumbled, in the race, we just need to look forward, and not look back. We can’t
change the past, we can’t change who we were back then—the past is the past, and it
remains forever unchanged, but the future, well, the future we can do something with,
and that is what Paul looks toward, because the future is something still ripe with
opportunity.

But, really, what does it really mean for us to press towards that prize that Paul speaks
of here? Well, whatever you believe about who Jesus is, and that is one of the
wonderful thing about this place, we don’t all agree on who he was and is, but whatever
you believe about him, there is something to the idea of patterning one’s life after his
goodness, his faithfulness, his openness, his gentleness, and his teachings. Whether
you see him as the Savior of the world, God incarnate, or simply a great spiritual
master, there is something to the idea that we need some goal, some perfection,
something ideal to shoot for, to press onwards, some prize to achieve that isn’t going to
just fade with time, or get tarnished by the real back story of how one actually won the
prize, as in Einstein’s case. I don’t think there is a better goal in this life than to try to
be as kind and good and faithful as this Jesus of Nazareth, not just because of what he
said and taught, but, actually, because of what he did and how he lived his life. Paul
rarely refers to Christ’s actual words in his letters—he almost always points to Jesus’
life, the way he lived his life, his faithfulness to God, to the very end, and beyond, as
his own role model, and a role model for us to follow.

Is it possible to live that well, that lovingly, that wholly, that perfectly, in this world? Well,
traditionally, the Methodists say yes, but those of us in the Reformed tradition, and in
the UCC, we are generally more skeptical about fully being perfect, of doing the
following perfectly. Maybe we’ll get there one day, but if you’re like me, you’re always
having to look forward in life, because on a daily basis, there is a lot I keep needing to
leave behind, too many stumbles to count, so to speak. But just because it seems
impossible to do, to be as good and kind as the Christ, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to
do it, especially knowing that there is no winner’s circle, no gold, silver or bronze
medals being handed out at the end of the race. And you never know, the impossible
or inconceivable may be possible, may one day yet be achievable.

I mean, think about it: even something like running the mile in four minutes seemed
impossible to do—they said it couldn’t be done no less than 60 or 70 years ago.
“Sports commentators claimed that it simply couldn’t be done. Physiologists believed
that the human body and mind would rise up and rebel against the strain of such a
race. The four-minute mile came to be seen as a barrier that no human being would
ever be able to break. Then, in the spring of 1954, exactly 54 years ago, Roger
Bannister stepped onto the track. He was a British medical student and runner for the
Amateur Athletic Association, a young man absolutely determined to break the barrier.
Bannister knew that many outstanding milers had attempted to achieve the goal,
including one who had missed by a mere 1.5 seconds. But Bannister would not allow
the four-minute threshold to intimidate him. On a cold and windy spring day, he took
his place at the starting line of a track in Oxford, England. There were about 3,000
spectators in the stands. The race was carefully planned, and Bannister was aided by
two other runners who acted as pacemakers, Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway. As
they began the race, Brasher took the lead and Bannister fell in behind, with Chataway
running in third place. When Brasher began to wear out, Bannister called for Chataway
to take over. Then, just about 200 yards from the finish, Bannister exploded into first
place with a final burst of energy. He sprinted to the finish line and collapsed into the
arms of a minister friend, Nicholas Stacey. “It was only then that real pain overtook me,”
reported Bannister. “I felt like an exploded flashlight with no will to live.” A hush came
over the crowd as the announcer read Bannister’s time. “Three minutes, 59 seconds
….” In an instant, absolute pandemonium broke out as the crowd realized that they had
just witnessed the greatest feat in the history of the mile. In three minutes and 59
seconds, Roger Bannister had broken an unbreakable record and ran what came to be
known as the “Miracle Mile.” (Homiletics Online)

You know that story, if you’ve ever seen the movie Chariots of Fire. Folks, maybe we
can do it, or maybe we can’t be as good as the Christ, but the point is to get up and
get going, not necessarily be the best, to be a Michael Phelps, or an Albert Einstein—
the point is to make every day a day in which we become more like the Christ we
admire or worship or believe in or seek simply to be like—if we can do that, if we can do
that, there’s no doubt we’ll get over the finish line, whether in first place or last place,
but, hey, I think most of us will just settle for just finishing the race.   Amen.