Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 12/27/09
Taking Chances
Philippians 3:4b-11
There is something in us that does not like change. We find comfort in the old, familiar patterns. They have worked for us. They are predictable. They’re safe. Change disrupts all that. It pulls us towards the unknown, pulls us towards risk, and as a result it significantly cranks up our levels of stress and of anxiety. Small wonder that our default mode is a preference for the status quo, or what systems analysts call “homeostasis”.
So when God says he is going to do a new thing there in our first lesson, that isn’t necessarily something we are going to receive with enthusiasm. A new thing isn’t always welcome.
I was thinking about that the other day; thinking about how much has changed in our family’s celebration of Christmas. For the first time all three kids weren’t able to make it home. Our oldest, Christopher, had to work. At the same time my brother Brewster and his family didn’t drive up to Boston this year to join my other brothers and their families. Brewster is struggling with cancer. My mom didn’t make the flight either. She spent Christmas Eve and most of Christmas Day alone. I don’t like these changes; I don’t like the idea of my family not being together.
But change happens. It is part of life. Yet change isn’t always bad. There are times when it comes as good news, times when it helps bring life itself. For the people of Israel, living in exile, the announcement that God was doing do a new thing – that God was preparing the way for their return – was filled with hope and joy. Sometimes the status quo just isn’t good enough. Sometimes we need to change if we are going to not just survive but actually thrive.
In 1886, thirty three year old Andre Michelin abandoned his career as a successful engineer in Paris to take over his grandfather’s failing business in Clermont-Ferrand. By the time Andre took it over, it was close to insolvency. He recruited his younger brother Edouard who had been a fine-arts student and on the edge of a very promising career to become managing director.
Three years later inspiration came in the form of a cyclist with a punctured tire. He had a new kind of tire that was filled with air instead of being solid rubber. The problem was that this new kind of tire had to be glued to the rim. That meant repairs or replacement was a very difficult process.
The two brothers came up with the idea of developing a pneumatic tire that could be easily detached from the rim. Within two years their tires were on the winning bike in the Paris-Brest-Paris race. Within six years they had transferred what they had learned to a pneumatic tire for cars. The rest is history as Michelin has grown to become one of the dominant tire manufacturers in the world.
So what would have happened if these two brothers had chosen the safe and the familiar; had stayed in Paris, for example, with their promising careers, or stayed with the farm equipment and agricultural goods that their grandfather’s company had specialized in?
Sometimes you have to be willing to change in order to move ahead. And that’s the message that comes to us as we turn to our second lesson this morning.
Phil. 3:4b-11
Within his culture, Paul stood among the elite. “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.”
Today, Paul’s standing in his community might be compared to being born a Mellon or a Frick, a Roosevelt or a Vanderbilt; and at the same time graduating from Harvard and Harvard Law; and becoming a CEO or a member of the Supreme Court. Think here of the most elite not only by birth but by accomplishment as well.
And Paul chooses to leave all that behind, v. 7, “yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss,” later (v.8), “as rubbish.” Why? Because he had found something that was so much more important to him; something that offered infinitely greater rewards. He found Jesus Christ. “I regard them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.”
His encounter with the living Christ on the road to Damascus changed everything for him. All the things that he had once thought so important were now seen in a very different light: he has traded them for the joy of knowing Christ – the sheer joy of walking with the risen Lord.
Back when I was in Princeton Seminary, I wandered over the University Chapel one Sunday morning to hear the Chaplain, Ernest Gordon. I didn’t know anything about him at the time, but what I heard that morning has stayed with me ever since.
Gordon was a Captain with the Scottish Argyles, serving with the British Army in Malaysia during the Second World War. He was wounded, but rather than surrender to the Japanese after the fall of Singapore he joined some friends in trying to escape on a junk. They sailed about two thousand miles only to be captured and sent to a prison camp on the River Kwai.
The conditions were unbelievable; their captors extraordinarily cruel. Death was everywhere, and the prisoners themselves descended into a kind of subhuman existence. The only thing that mattered to them was survival, was getting by one more day. In his own words, “as starvation, exhaustion and disease took an ever-growing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived was increasingly poisoned by selfishness, hatred and fear… the weak were trampled underfoot, the sick ignored or resented, the dead forgotten.”
But then a few men began to take a stand. Two of them, one a Methodist named Dusty Miller and the second a devout Catholic nicknamed Dinty Moore made the choice to nurse Gordon himself back to health when he was placed in the “death ward.” Suffering from Malaria, Diphtheria, Typhoid, Beri Beri and Jungle Ulcer, the 6’ 3” Gordon had come to weigh less than 100 pounds. He was given no hope of survival. But these two men chose to care for him twenty four hours a day, and slowly they nursed him back to health once more.
Another man named Angus McGillivray had a friend who was too ill to work. With food so scarce, the dying were refused their rations. So every meal-time, Angus would draw his own rations and then take them back to his friend and force him to eat them – never touching them himself. His friend’s blanket was stolen. Angus gave him his own. Sneaking out at night, Angus would risk his life to trade with the natives outside the camp for the necessities his friend required. Finally, his friend got better, and as he did, Angus himself finally collapsed. Doctors diagnosed his death as due to starvation complicated by exhaustion.
What these men did, their courage, their sacrifice had an impact on the entire camp. Their story fired the imagination of those who heard it, it offered an example of what life even there in the horrors of that camp, could be. It offered a light that shone out in the midst of all the darkness. The whole camp was ultimately transformed as a result.
Dusty, Dinty and Angus never made it back home. They each died a prisoner of war; Dusty just two weeks before the end of the war when a guard -- furious because of his imperturbable calm – chose to kill him.
Change is never easy. Yet it was in risking change for the sake of the family business that the Michelin brothers found the path to unimaginable success. It was in risking the shift from their own survival to the survival of those around them that those prisoners moved from the sub-human to the divine.
Where is God calling you to step forward in faith? Where have you been holding back, resisting this call to embrace the new?
We stand on the edge of a new year, a new decade. This year I would invite you to risk putting Jesus Christ first. Risk making him your first and highest priority. Put him to the test! See if your life isn’t so much infinitely better! The Apostle Paul made that choice, and he never regretted it. What he discovered is that knowing Christ is the greatest prize of all. The promise here is that we can know that prize as well, if only we are willing to step forward in faith.