Philippians 3:4-14 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
The Fifth Sunday in Lent Sunday, April 3, 2022 “Prize True Treasure, Not the Trash”
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. That’s an old adage, dating back at least to the 1860s. It means that some people may not want or be interested in a particular item, but others may still value that same thing. One person might not like a particular painting, for example, and someone else might love it and want to have it. We were maybe even hoping for a little bit of that over the last few weeks as the church tried to give away things that had accumulated and were not being used. Perhaps in the pile of stuff that we would prefer to have gone from our property there would be something that a member or a guest would find useful. Some things are like that. Some things are a matter of opinion like “Which paintings do you like?” Some things are not valuable to the person who just doesn’t have a use for them, but are very useful to the person who knows what to do with those items or who has a particular need. Are those things valuable? It depends. For some people they may be, while for others they are not. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure; one man’s treasure is another man’s trash. This morning in the verses of our Second Reading, Paul is talking to us about treasure and trash. And it seems like people are approaching the question of determining value in two very different ways. But this debate is not a matter of opinion. This isn’t a situation where things just depend on the person. Paul is trying to explain to the Philippians and to us that some things are far more valuable than others. He’s trying to have us prize those things that are truly treasure. And if we are going to do that, we first need to be able to recognize true treasure. In order to show what true treasure really is, Paul first dismisses what others have considered valuable. He talks about the people who were putting their confidence in fleshly and outward matters. The Christians in the city of Philippi were troubled by a group of people we call the Judaizers. They were insisting that Christian men ought to be circumcised among other things that they expected of Christians. And just to make sure that everyone got the point, Paul laid out his own case for how well he could do by their standards. He listed his own fleshly and outward qualifications. Be circumcised? Paul was on the eighth day like all boys born in the Jewish faith would be, and perhaps not like some of the Judaizers who may have been later converts. Trace your lineage to the Israelite people? Paul could, and specifically to the tribe of Benjamin, a tribe that had not been scattered like so many of the others. Paul was a Pharisee. He was the best of the best. Paul had shown just how zealous he was by going and attacking the Christians whom he thought were perverting his Jewish religion. Paul explains that he could compare favorably to anyone if you were talking about keeping the rules and laws. And then, Paul said that all of these things were useless. At one time he would have considered them to be valuable, but now he did not. Now he knew that they were actually a loss instead of a gain. They were a loss because if he focused his attention or his confidence on those things, he would be focusing his attention in the wrong way. True treasure was to be found only in one place, in Jesus Christ. And so everything else, all of those other things and anything else that could be considered, needed to be thrown out. They weren’t worth anything, not in the long run. This is the treasure: that Jesus Christ had given Paul righteousness through faith. He didn’t need to do anything or be anything. He didn’t need to earn or deserve it. It came from Jesus, not from him. That’s the treasure we prize as well. But still our sinful natures try to hold on to something else. Still we hear the voices that claim our worth is found in outward success or beauty or riches, or anything else. And to treasure these things can be a particularly sharp temptation for people who have a lot of them. Go ahead. Make your list like Paul does. What could you claim to your credit? “I go to church every week. I serve in the kitchen. I sing in the choir. I am the director. People tell me all the time what a sweet and caring and helpful person I am.” Should we keep going? “I have had success at work or school. I have saved up money and live in a nice house. I have gone to Christian schools for years.” And some of these things, many of them in fact, are amazing blessings. They are things that we can be thankful for. But if we put them into the category of how we know we have a good relationship with God, if we start to