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 epistle lesson for this Sunday, Philippians 3:4-14, Paul is also concerned with proper waste disposal. In the two verses prior, Paul warns against “dogs,” which is an ugly image for those who advocated circumcision for Gentile Christian believers. While the Jewish practice of circumcision was a good thing of which Paul himself can boast, it has become a disposable extra in relation to new life in Christ.
In verse 4, Paul identifies concern with an unneeded accumulation of spiritual identity markers like circumcision as part of the “flesh.” While he clearly means the term to evoke the actual physical flesh involved in the rite, the larger meaning is, as I said last Sunday, a realm of human thought and endeavor which is contrary to God’s work in Jesus Christ.
So Paul enters into a discourse on all the spiritual accomplishments which he accumulated “in the flesh,” 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. Simply note that not all of these have to do with physicality, confirming that more abstract pejorative meaning of “flesh” in Paul’s theology.
In any case, all those fleshly accomplishments he now says he 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 sufferings” 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.