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S. MW Easter 4.25 Acts 20:17-35

‘But I do not count my life of any value nor as precious to myself, so as to finish my racecourse and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to bear witness (“martyr-for”) the gospel of the grace of God.’

Paul always portrays his life as a Xn apostle more as a competition than an exhibition. English translations tone this down, but a δρομος in Greek is literally a racecourse, a track. And Paul is in it to win it, but, for him, winning means losing everything for Christ’s sake, a magnificent defeat or as Rilke put it so well in his poem “The Man Watching”:

“Victories are not inviting to him/ his gain is to be profoundly vanquished/ by ever greater things.”

In his memoir of his early life “Surprised By Joy”, C.S. Lewis notes the presence of something in his juvenile love of the Norse gods (whose story he discovered through Wagner’s Ring Cycle) that was utterly missing in his rapidly fading Christian faith: “something very like adoration, some kind of quite disinterested self-abandonment to an object that securely claimed this by simply being the object it was. We are taught in the Prayer Book to ‘give thanks to God for his great glory,’ as if we owed Him more thanks for being what He necessarily is than for any particular benefit He confers upon us… But I had been far from any such experience; I came far nearer to feeling this about the Norse gods whom I disbelieved in than I had ever done about the true God while I believed.”

As you can see in in the mini-pastoral epistle that is our reading, that was not a problem for St. Paul! He boasts not of his bravery or accomplishments, but of his humility and tears and trials that happened through the plots of the Jewish church bureaucrats of the day against him, of his single-minded extolling of the gospel of God and the word of his grace.

And even though that adoration of Christ was leading him, according to the Holy Spirit, to imprisonment and afflictions, Paul doesn’t care about any of that…(!)

“I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself…” There it is! That’s the quite disinterested self-abandonment of adoration! It isn’t ever missing in St. Paul, even when Saul was misdirected away from the New Testament revelation of Jesus Christ. Lewis blames himself for the way it was missing from his adolescent Christianity.

But I’m not so sure.

I think I’d put the blame on Christendom, as Soren Kierkegaard did for his own often blasé faith. SK was like “it’s not me, it’s you…” in his breakup with the Danish State Church 😉 I think deep down, Lewis knew that was also true in his case. It was just his great modesty that kept him from putting the blame squarely where it belongs. But his later works on sorting the fly shtuff from the pepper like “Mere Christianity” and “The Great Divorce” demonstrate that he was really quite clear where the problem actually lay.

Be that as it may, I think it’s easier to repent, change our minds when it’s not so much our fault that we’re like this. Even if that’s not quite the case, whatever leads to Christian mind-change, to repentant and faith, I’m for it!

To count our lives as valueless, not precious to ourselves, to be ready to fling them away for Christ’s sake, to be resigned even to damnation if that should be the Lord’s judgment—this is a disturbing attitude to most in the church today, even the quite devout.

I find it’s easy to identify with most of what St. Paul says in this mini-pastoral epistle, about zeal for the Lord, fighting the good fight, finishing the race, admonishing the faint-hearted and commending all to God and to the λογος of his grace, that it’s more blessed to give than to receive—though I would note Paul isn’t saying that to all Xns but only to pastors. It’s more blessed for pastors to be giving than receiving, but for everyone else, receiving is the way! I worry about my liking only the parts that let me run the verbs…

I notice that few people can say honestly that we “count our lives as valueless and not precious to ourselves”! I mean if Jesus values our lives so much as to lay down his life for us, shouldn’t we have the same attitude?

Uhm, well; Paul doesn’t seem to think so. He seems to think only Jesus can rightly judge the value of anything or anyone and leaves all judgment to the Lord at the Last.

I had a little debate with the vicar whether it was right for my friend Barry to say to a parishioner who caught him smoking at his desk late one Saturday night and chided: “Pastor! You shouldn’t smoke! It will cut ten years off your life!” And Barry. taking a deep drag and exhaling, replied: “I hear the last ten years are pretty crappy, anyway”.

To me that sounded like St. Paul’s “ I do not count my life as valuable or precious…” The vicar wasn’t so sure. Anyway, I wrote this sermon partly to try to persuade him…

My closing argument is that after saying his life is valueless to him, the next clause’s linked by the Greek ως, a purpose clause “thus” or “so as to finish my racecourse and the ministry that I received from the Lord.

Paul seems to think it’s only by counting his life valueless that can he finish the race, the martyrdom set before him by Christ. It’s almost like he says elsewhere “if I were a people-pleaser I couldn’t be an Apostle of Christ”.

Similarly, it seems as long as there’s a little bit of self-interest, a little bit of “what do I get out of it?” that we can’t be as single-minded as Christ would have us be…

I’d say: it’s only forgetting ourselves, having eyes only for Jesus, that we’re on the way to that Peace surpassing all understanding, guarding our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.