April 6, 2025
I made a mistake this week. Perhaps you caught it. In my column in our newsletter, the Bellwether, I told you of an idea for our food pantry. One of the grocery items that nearly all of our neighbors need when they visit Ida’s Cupboard is eggs. My proposal was that, if you’re able to, you pick up an extra dozen eggs when you do your grocery shopping, then leave it downstairs in the big refrigerator in the kitchen. And, because I’m nothing if not helpful, I specified which side: The side reserved for the food pantry, the left side.
I was gently informed that the food pantry side isn’t the left, but the right side. I knew this, of course. The problem is that I genuinely don’t know my right from my left. When I wrote that article, I even sat there, trying to figure out which was left and which was right. Now usually, when I have time to think about, I get it right. But not always. Which is why, when I don’t have time to think about it, I’m usually wrong. So don’t take directions from me, and don’t expect me to get it right when you give directions to me.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I know which hand to pick up an inkpen with. I know which side of the car to climb into. And I always know which side of the road to drive on. But otherwise, it’s true: I don’t know my right from my left.
I think most pastors are better at this than I am, but there are certain areas that, as a profession, we’re infamously bad at. One of those areas is finance—math in general, really. I don’t know why I’m so bad with math. My mother’s checkbook was always balanced down to the penny. And, after he retired, my father had his own tax preparation business. But I didn’t inherit the numbers gene from either of my parents. And from what I can tell, most of my colleagues are equally bad at math.
There’s a story about a rather famous Anglican priest named John Keble. As a young man at Oxford University, he was treasurer of his college, and he was so bad at bookkeeping that, at one point, he was nearly £2000 pounds off with his totals. That’s a huge amount today, but it was an astronomical mistake back in the early 1800’s when he made it. After examination, it was discovered that he’d written the date at the top of the page, and he’d included the year—1820—to the debit total, placing him seriously in the red.* So much for pastor math.
And this idea of balancing figures is really what Paul’s talking about in this morning’s reading from Philippians 3. He’s saying that we can add up all the wonderful things in our lives—the things that the world values, the things that we’re most proud of—and find they are really worthless when we compare them to this other thing that we’ve discovered.
Paul even goes so far as to say that in the life that he was accustomed to, he only had things on the credit side of his ledger—he had no debits. He obeyed his religion perfectly—so perfectly, in fact, that he persecuted people who followed other faiths… or at least another faith, namely Christianity.
This was all to Paul’s credit. Or at least that’s what he’d been counting on his whole life. But when he discovered something else, he found something—or someone—infinitely more valuable than everything else he had ever treasured. “Everything else is worthless,” Paul wrote to the Philippians, “when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him.”
Knowing Christ resets the balance books. It’s no longer just adding and subtracting. Profit and loss no longer matters. Jesus has become everything. This isn’t because of anything Paul literally possesses or anything he’s done. It’s because of where he finds himself. He is in Christ, and Christ has taken care of everything else—all other requirements, all other obligations, all other debts.
My first question here is this: Did Paul believe in Christ, and then let go of all his assets, all his credits? Did he accept Christ, then reject everything else he thought was valuable? Or did he first have to let go of everything he had in order to make room on the page for Messiah? Maybe he first had everything else taken from him, leaving him room to discover the cross of Christ, standing in its place.
He doesn’t say, really, and perhaps it doesn’t matter—perhaps each person’s experience here is unique. What really matters is that believers are different from the people who surround us. In an age of greed and emphasis on profit, Christians count as loss all that the world seems to hold so dear. In order to take hold of Christ, we have let go of the priorities of the time and place we live in.
When we gather round the table today, let’s think about this. The morsel of bread and the sip of grape juice that we share with one another are tokens of this new world and these new priorities. We don’t need everything. Just remembering the body of Christ, just a drop of his blood was enough to change the world for everyone, enough for the promise of new life to become a reality. Don’t come forward and receive it from the hand of the clergy, but share it out, give it to one another, receive it from the hand of a brother or sister in Christ.
Because we are all in Christ, we are all part of his body—members of one another and ministers of the gospel. When we rise from the table today, we will have Christ. Let us follow him through the cross to the resurrection, where we will find that everything we have given up is nothing in comparison to the new life he offers.
—©2025 Sam Greening
*Gleaned from Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters (London: SPCK, 2002), p. 117.
