America produces 239 million tons of trash each year. In the last couple of years, the scope of recycling has declined in our community, apparently due to China beginning to limit the amount of recyclables it accepts. Setting our plastic carts of plain garbage, recyclable cardboard and plastic, and yard waste at the curb, we usually don’t give much thought to it all. It just “goes away.” Likewise for all the human waste which we daily flush away both literally and from our minds.
In one sense it is good for health that trash and waste is removed from the places we live. Accumulation of waste attracts both insect and rodent vermin, as Eugene neighborhoods have found with a rise in keeping chickens and backyard composting. Norway rats have moved in and become ugly pests even around homes without chickens or compost piles. They are attracted to collected rubbish which perhaps does not belong in the confines of a city.
In our Advent epistle lesson for this Sunday, Philippians 3:1-11, Paul is also concerned with proper waste disposal. In the second verse of the text, he warns against “dogs,” which is an ugly image for those who are advocating circumcision for Gentile Christian believers. As the text unfolds, it becomes clear that the Jewish practice of circumcision, itself a good thing of which Paul himself can boast, has become unhealthy refuse in relation to new life in Christ. Those focused on things which ought to be discarded from spiritual life became pesky and dangerous creatures in relation to new Christian believers.
So Paul enters into a discourse on all the spiritual accomplishments which he accumulated prior to encountering Jesus: his circumcision; his Hebrew heritage; his careful keeping of the law as a Pharisee; his zeal even to persecute the church when he thought Christianity was contrary to God’s will. All of it he says he now regards as loss rather than gain, even as “rubbish” in verse 8, a word which probably means dung or excrement and which suggests something which is properly thrown to dogs.
In the place of such spiritual rubbish, Paul holds up “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” In verses 10 and 11, he says, “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.” Paul understands that in order to know Jesus, he needs to discard much of what he thought he knew, what he thought he understood about place and privilege both in the world and before God.
It’s time for you and I also to begin sorting through what we imagine is important and discarding that which is simply refuse, with the aim of truly knowing Jesus. Paul’s inclusion of “and the sharing of his suffering” in what it means to know Christ makes it clear that part of what we may need to discard is a misguided notion that we are somehow as believers to escape loss and sorrow. Instead, it may be that just in such losses we discover what we actually need to know about Jesus. . . and about ourselves.