Scripture: Philippians 3:4b-14; Matthew 21:33-46

"Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own…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 upward call of God in Christ Jesus."

-- Philippians 3:12-14

William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead; it is not even past.” I trust you know who Faulkner was: 1949 Nobel Laureate in literature from Mississippi, where he located most of his fiction. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County was a place where Gothic members of dilapidated families (chiefly the Snopes family) gnawed each other to spiritual death, inflicting emotional agony because they could not forget or forgive. Only in a place where the past is not past can such spiritual and emotional damage be done, and such communities or families have usually suffered great losses with which they refuse to come to terms. In the Mississippi of the 1920’s the great unresolved communal trauma was the “sacred lost cause,” the defeat of the rebel states in the Civil war, and the liberation of their slaves. The slaves may have been liberated but in Faulkner’s world the erstwhile slaveholders remain indentured to the past, captive souls in crumbling mansions. 

Perhaps his best known novel is “The Sound and the Fury” (1929) a tale told by an idiot named Benjy Compson, concerning the doomed and decaying Compson family. Those of you who know Shakespeare will recognize the title as a fragment from Macbeth’s final soliloquy. “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more; it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” (Shakespeare was not an optimist). Faulkner’s message is clear: unless you can leave the past behind your life will be nasty, brutish and insignificant.

Our text for today makes clear that Paul understood the terrible punishment of the undead past, and at a level of profundity that Faulkner could never reach. In effect Paul says,  “Move on or your life will turn out to be a trivial tale! But this is not just a worldly move, it is the one and only true move to make, the move to God.” Listen: In only four lines of the RSV translation of our text above Paul four times uses the terms that drive us into the future; “I press on to make it my own,” “I forget what lies behind,” “I strain forward to what lies ahead,” “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

The biographical context of these exhortations is, as so often the case with Paul, and with any pastor of the average stubborn flock, polemical. Christian Jews were troubling the congregation by arguing that Paul’s break with the old religion falsified the Gospel, and that the truth is not as Paul communicates it by his words and deeds but as they do. They are, after all, “Israelites, Hebrews, zealots for the Law of Moses” guardians of the old ways. Paul confronts them by pointing out that he outstrips them in the field of Jewish accomplishments, and would win any contest of “boasting in the flesh.” So his refusal to appeal to such marks of authority is not because he lacks credentials. He is even named for the first king of Israel, Saul, who was the hero of Paul’s Jewish tribe , the small and exclusive tribe of Benjamin. So if it is a matter of external credentials, what Paul calls “boasting in the flesh,” he beats them all; but what’s the point? Paul is not meek and mild; he calls all that sort of thing, as the RSV coyly translates, “refuse” (literally “a heap of excrement”) and reminds us that he actually and in fact gave up all status and privilege for the sake of Christ. It is all worthless trash by comparison. He forgets what he once was in order to be what he now is, his real self,  the slave of Christ.

So, from this personal example we learn the importance of being who we are, and how to become what we are. Let us unpack this paradoxical idea. Surely we are already what we are, how can we still be in process of becoming? That’s what Paul once thought. We ask, “What is it that makes us who we are? What do we use to give substance to our self when we try to describe to our self who we are?” The answer is surely, “ the regard of others and our memories of our lives.” We are who we remember ourselves to be and who others regard us to be.  Let us deal with these in reverse order.

We are who others regard us to be. People who mattered held Paul in high regard. He occupied a status of honor in the minds of men. If he had been unwilling or unable to dispense with this regard he would never have known the privilege of being an apostle of Christ or, as he puts it, “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” If he had preferred the regard of men to the call of God he would have lost his eternal salvation. Paul’s situation and ours is not simply an illustration of the conventional truth that the good opinion of the world is fickle, and that fame is “the last infirmity of noble mind” (Milton), rather it is the claim that the issue at stake is the choice between life and death, worldly honors that perish and the eternal life of Christ. “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, …that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead“(3:7-11). What we value in this world, the “boasting in the flesh” and the love of the praise of men might become eternal death for us. “Forget it! Put all that nonsense behind you!” says Paul, and look forward, not back, because eternal life is in the future not the past!” Thus, by forgetting a distinguished past he begins to become a new person, no longer the eminent religious lawyer and pontifical diplomat, but the persecuted apostle of a crucified felon to the despised gentiles.

Let us conclude with some thoughts about remembering and forgetting as such, and some thoughts about laying hold of him who has already laid hold of us. If we are who we remember ourselves to be, then to forget what is past and to press on to the future is to change who we are. We are no longer constituted as a person by our memories of achievement or the praise of men who remember us for good, but rather by God’s call and God’s promise of eternal life. Our memories are eclipsed by expectation in the dynamic of self-definition. We can let go of all that self-justifying reminiscence – the sort of thing that occurs on CV’s and lists of publications. To be able to forget in this radical way is a gift of God’s grace. It is the deep freedom from self-justification, the acquittal from the crimes of memory. I no longer have to justify myself before the bar of my own or others’ memories of me. All that is just garbage and I am now to be found at last, “clothed and in my right mind,” - as the gospeller says of the Gadarene demoniac after his meeting with the Lord Jesus, - only in the heart of God, who remembers not who I became but who He initially made me to be, and now at last is making  me once again to be.

This gift of forgetting is very profound and very necessary and cannot be summoned at will. It can only be a gift of divine grace. Thomas Merton in “The Seven Storied Mountain” reminds us of a category in traditional spiritual teaching called the “humility of hell.” It designates the spiritual experience of remembering one’s past sins with shame and embarrassment. Have you had the experience even at the trivial level of regretting in retrospect something stupid or hurtful that you said? Sometimes at a deeper level, in prayer for example, former sins come to remembrance and cause deep shame. This is surely a good thing? Well, not entirely, because it is mostly an expression of pride. It says not, that I regret affronting the Divine Majesty, or hurting another human being, but that I regret exhibiting my real, cruel and heedless self. “I am better than that,” it says. It is mostly an exercise in narcissism, a demonstration of the humility of hell. Merton says that the saints, on the other hand, when they remember their past sins, feel not regret or chagrin but gratitude because they see not their sins but God’s grace that has already covered and erased their sins. The humility of hell wallows in chagrin, the humility of heaven exults in grace. Only by the miracle of the divine grace can we really forget the past, and that is why Paul says “…that I might gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (3:9). Real forgetting is a miracle of the divine grace given to us as we believe more and more that Jesus is the Christ by whom God has healed and saved us.

The final point I want us to believe and act on today is another of the great Pauline paradoxes. Paradox, a type of thought that seems to be contradictory but is in fact profoundly consistent, is one mark of God’s presence in human thought. It forces us either to go away bewildered or to go beneath the surface. That going beneath the surface is one of the forms that faith takes. To exercise faith is to listen to the voice that speaks beneath the surface of the text. The apparently weak is really strong, the apparent defeat is the triumph of God, and so the radical move into the future is really the return to the past, to the time when God first laid us down in the womb, in his own image and likeness, and then laid hold of us again by that image in Jesus Christ. So the urgent pressing on into the future, all the forgetting and leaving behind, is really a return to our true selves, a becoming at last of what we have always been in God, but temporarily ceased to be because of sin and worldliness, because of what Paul calls, “boasting in the flesh.”

T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” are perhaps the most profound meditation on this paradox of time, of the way forward being also the way back, in 20th century English. In the conclusion to the fourth poem, “Little Gidding,” he writes: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time.” This homecoming will be, “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything) / And all shall be well and / All manner of things shall be well / When the tongues of flame are infolded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.” My knowledge of Eliot is shaky; but I think that the fire symbolizes the Holy Spirit and the Rose stands for the Virgin Mary, and so when the fire and the rose are one my humanity is transformed like Mary’s. The miracle of the recreation of the world through the incarnation of God occurs in you and me, when at last we reach the condition of complete simplicity, which, remember, costs not less than everything.

Christ has grasped you and me firmly, like mother cat grasps her kitten by the scruff of the neck. Now it is for us to empty our arms of all the things of this world so we can return that hugely loving divine hug. When we do we shall be at last in a state of “…complete simplicity, costing not less than everything,” just like St Paul, who counted all the honors of his religious world as so much refuse compared to this pure love of God and His eternal life, St Paul who strained every sinew to reach the goal of God and grab in a great embrace the Christ who had hugged him, hostile and arrogant, on the road to Damascus. So leave all the garbage and forget all the nonsense and reach out for the living God, that is, become your real self! The Apostle has shown us the way.

Amen.