Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. We are in our series on Philippians.

It's called Everything is A Letter About Hope. That title is, let's be honest, a bit of a stretch. How do you move from abject awfulness to abiding hope? But then that's kind of the point of Philippians. As a meme I saw on Twitter once said, there are two types of Pauline letters in the Bible.

One, we are heirs through unfathomable grace to unimaginable glory. And two, I am, as a personal favor, begging you sick little freaks to act normal for just five minutes. That's kind of it. It's either you foolish Galatians or it's you Philippians rock. That's about all you need to know of Pauline theology right there.

Of course, that's not all we need to know or this series could have been a lot shorter. But the joke does betray this deep emotional friendship, the care and the concern, the gratitude that underpins Paul's relationships here in Philippi. I think that's kind of beautiful. Today, however, we are rounding the corner into the second half of the letter and we start with chapter three today. But I do want to look back quickly at chapter two.

There, we found Paul launching into the chapter with a hymn, what a lot of us think is a pre existing song or poem that Paul quotes to the Philippians as part of a larger argument about pouring ourselves into each other. First he talks about caring for one another. But then ultimately it's about allowing that trajectory to lead us to love the other, everyone even those not near to us. And for Paul, this is really the heart of the Christian story that God becomes one of us to express God's love for us. First to the Jewish people, then to the Gentile, then to the outsider, and finally to all of creation.

As we read from the tradition of the Apostle Paul in first Timothy four ten, God is the savior of all people, especially those who believe. And this process of God crossing the boundary into the human story of Jesus then emptying himself into humanity, of followers of the way learning to love one another and then the other. This is how the world is transformed. In the self giving love that pushes back the boundaries of our world. But then last week we saw Paul play this out in a bit of an example.

He pulls from the language of the Hebrew scriptures to reference an old, old story. It's a story from the time when the Israelites left Egypt but then wandered in the desert and began to grumble and complain. Were frustrated they couldn't see where their story was going in that moment. The text says that they became a warped and crooked generation. Paul uses that story to say that the past is not determinative.

You don't have to grumble and complain even if that has been your predisposition in the past. You don't have to become warped and bent by your circumstance even perhaps when everything is awful around you. You can choose a new way forward, one that challenges and improves and contributes to the healing of the world and the Jewish imagination, the world to come where you and I will shine like stars in the sky. The point is you can grumble and complain or you can, like Christ, empty yourself into an imagination of a better world. Ultimately, I think that's where Paul thinks we find our hope.

Now today we're going to move into chapter three and there's going to be a little bit of a shift in tone here. I joked earlier about Paul's two types of letters, you foolish Galatians or you fantastic Philippians. Well now he's going to challenge Philippians a bit. In fact, so much that some scholars have suggested that this letter may have been written in two parts. Chapters one and two flowing together and then perhaps chapters three and four coming sometime later, perhaps when Paul had had a short nap and then tried to get back to writing.

You know, those naps where it's not quite long enough and now you're just more tired and more grumpy and your back hurts from falling asleep on the couch. No. Maybe that's just me. Regardless, that actually does seem pretty plausible. One of the things that I find is that the mood that I'm in when I write affects what I write.

Right? But it does mean that if I'm working on a larger project, I have to give some thought to the tone of the voice that I'm using and whether that fits with what I've already written down. A sermon that's written over two days can feel pretty disjointed if I don't work at that. So let's keep that in mind as we turn the corner here with Paul and give him a bit of slack as he moves into chapter three. First though, let's pray.

Gracious God who invites us together toward you in all the ways that we learn to follow your self giving example. As you pour yourself into humanity, as Jesus pours himself into us, as we pour ourselves into one another and eventually into the other. Pushing back the boundaries that help us decide who's our neighbor and who's not to realize that everyone we encounter, everyone in this world who bears your divine image in the world is our brother, our sister, our sibling to love. God, as we embrace that story, as it takes root somewhere deep inside of us, as it becomes the story from which we live, may we slowly, steadily, step by step be transformed into the likeness of your son. And in that may we get to participate in your healing of the world.

The strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay. Today we've got reminders, warnings, alliteration and wide, wide welcome. But let's start by reading our text.

And today we're gonna read from chapter three verse one to verse 11, but we'll make some comments along the way as we get there. Paul writes, Further, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord. And here he starts in a pretty good mood, I might say. I mean, I warned you that he was a little cranky today, but that's a pretty cool way to start a new chapter. Rejoice with an exclamation mark even in the NIV.

So off to a good start here. But next he says, it is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again. It is a safe guard for you. And this is interesting because what he's about to say is not something new. It's something he's been over before with the Philippians, and yet he is going to move into some new territory for this letter.

So once again, we have an image of this deep abiding history and relationship that Paul has with this particular community. I mean, we know that Paul spent time in Philippi. So it's possible that what he wants to say next is something he's talked to them about in person. It's also possible that he had written them another letter at some point previously when we just don't have today. And that's kind of interesting.

In in the Bible, have first and second Corinthians. But in first Corinthians, Paul mentions his earlier letter which we have never seen. That means that first Corinthians is actually second Corinthians and second Corinthians is actually third Corinthians. And in fact, most scholars even think that second Corinthians is really two letters combined together, which means that second Corinthians is really third and fourth Corinthians. Now all of that to say, the idea that Paul wrote multiple letters to Philippi is not at all a stretch.

In fact, it's probably more unlikely that he only ever wrote one letter to such close friends. So think about that. There is an entire history of Pauline writing and relationship relationship that we simply know nothing about. Either way, Paul says, let's go over some stuff again. And that makes me feel good about doing those recaps at the start of our messages every week.

Sometimes it's good to hear things again. Sometimes things don't sink in the first time around. Sometimes I need to think through and re language ideas for myself for them to really land for me. But then also sometimes I think it does land and we still need to be reminded. Understand.

Paul says, look, let's talk about this again, but then he says, because it can be a safeguard for you. And what I take that to mean is that Paul is not about to address a problem in the Philippian church. There's nothing here that Paul is looking at and saying, well, this is broken. We need to fix that. This is just Paul saying, let's remind ourselves about where we're going and why.

And I like that. When I tell my kids I love them every day over and over it's not because I think they forgot. It's because sometimes some things need to be heard on repeat. And I think that's a good reminder for all of us. It's okay to remind yourself about things you know are true even when you already know it.

All of us we have narratives that run-in our heads and particularly when we're trying to change those narratives towards something more healthy, reminding ourselves about what is true, this can be a really, really important exercise. And so Paul basically says, Hey, listen. I know this isn't your issue. I know you've heard this one before, but I want to remind you anyway so that you can keep moving in a good direction in a healthy way. And look, if I get a little bit hot, just know that's me, not you.

And I just I just kinda like this moment because I think it shows that Paul has some self awareness about his writing. He knows those things that get him fired up and upset and he wants to make sure that his friends don't take that personally. There's something strangely kind in that, knowing ourselves and communicating our idiosyncrasies well. But here's what gets him a little testy. He writes in verse two: watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh.

And there's a lot of loaded language here. Dogs, evildoers, mutilators. All of these are words that have major cultural and religious implications that we're gonna need to unpack here before we can really see what Paul is doing. Dogs is the Greek word kunas, and I love dogs. I have a dog, a beautiful and kind dog, a golden retriever named Cedar that likes to sleep on my bed and take up more room than is reasonable.

But he is a very good dog and he is extremely patient with my one year old daughter who likes to crawl over him and grab his ears. This is not the dog that Paul has in mind when he writes. In most of the world through most of human history, the majority of dogs have not been the house trained, lovable family members we think of today. What we're talking about here were scavenger dogs that lived in and around the cities of the ancient world. At one time, when it was Africa, I saw a pack of wild dogs.

They were very small and and skittish on their own, relatively unimposing, but in a pack still pretty intimidating. And this was much certainly closer to what Paul is describing here. Dogs were scavengers. They ate the table scraps from homes not because people fed it to them generously, but because they would scavenge through the garbage to find what they could. In fact, the word that was used for what dogs ate was the Greek word skubalon and it meant scrapings or garbage.

And that word is going to come up later in this passage. So hang on to it because Paul is building his imagery here. However, perhaps the real reason that Paul uses this word dogs is because this was used as an insult for Gentiles or non Jewish people at the time. It had sort of two layers to it. First, a reference to the difference in dietary customs.

Jewish people had very strict dietary rules and guidelines about what they ate. Gentiles, on the other hand, at least in comparison, well, they would eat anything just like the dogs that would eat the scuba lawn. But also, the Jewish people were the chosen people of God, and that meant there was an order of progression to things. First to the Jew, then to the Gentile. And you can see this in a somewhat uncomfortable exchange between Jesus and a Syrophoenician woman in Mark seven.

This foreign woman comes and begs Jesus to heal her daughter and he responds, First, let the children eat all they want, for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs herself. Eek. But then she replies, Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs. And Jesus responds, for such a reply, you may go. Your daughter is well.

Now, it's a very complex story that deserves its own sermon. But quickly here, you have to understand that in Mark, in the verses immediately preceding this story, Jesus has just told a story to clarify the meaning of all of these purity laws that segmented populations for each other. To which his disciples immediately say, well, don't get it. And so Jesus explains. He says, nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them.

Food goes into your stomach, not into your heart. It's what comes out of a person that really defiles them. Theft and murder and adultery, greed, malice, deceit, all of these for example. The purity code is a symbol of your commitment to what's happening inside of you. And then in the very next verse, this foreign woman asked for help and Jesus says, hey, aren't we supposed to have rules about who gets what first?

And the woman says, no, God loves everyone. And Jesus says, exactly. See? She gets it. She's been paying attention.

Why aren't you? It's a moment that's there for the disciples. It's there to illustrate the wisdom of this woman, but it all depends on the same use of this word dogs as a pejorative the way Paul uses it here. So hold on to all of that and let's talk about evildoers for a second. This one is not all that hard to understand.

I mean, it's an insult. Right? I mean, no one wants to be called an evildoer. However, it was also a title that specifically had roots in the Jewish tradition. But there's this really neat thing that Paul is doing here.

Dogs is the word kunas. Mutilators is the word katatomen. And traditionally the insult that Paul is referencing here comes from the Psalms. It's workers of iniquity. But here he changes it to evildoers because in Greek evildoers is the word kakus.

And that gives him kunas, kakus, katatomen which really sort of gives you the impression that he's on a roll here. I mean, this is preacher Paul in full style. But that does bring us to our last category, katatomen or mutilators of the flesh. Flesh. This or one is a reference to Gentile or pagan religious practices.

The specific command comes directly from Leviticus nineteen twenty eight Do not cut your bodies for the dead. But that's a reference to pagan cultures that had practices of cutting themselves and scarring themselves to get the attention of their gods. There's a pretty famous story in First Kings where the Hebrew prophet Elijah has a showdown with the prophets of the god Baal. They have this confrontation about who can call them fire from heaven, but when the prophets of Baal call out and their god doesn't respond, they scream and they cry and when Baal still doesn't respond, they begin to cut themselves and mutilate their bodies. It's the same language that's used here.

So mutilators of the flesh is both an insult and it's a way to say your God is impotent. Now, I want to pause here for one second to talk about cutting. You may know someone. May have used cutting as a way to release anxiety and pain and emotional trauma in your life. My son often feels his emotions in very large ways and I recognize from my own childhood that tendency to want to feel emotions physically.

If that's you, I understand. I get it. There's support. We can help you find the right resources to process these emotions in other ways. But understand this is not what Paul is condemning here.

Paul is referencing specific religious practices predicated on the idea that God wants you to hurt or that the gods demand your suffering to gain their affection and that is not true. God hurts with you. God is never wishing hurt upon you. So please know that you are loved right now with no change and God requires nothing of you but you. However, the bottom line is that Paul has loaded up this phrase with all kinds of imagery that plays into Jewish perceptions and criticisms of Gentile and Pagan practices.

Kunas, kakus, katatomen watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh. And you can imagine now the Philippian community in the shadow of the Roman Empire in a city that venerated Augustus as God. Hearing someone read this letter out loud with all of its alliteration and onomatopoeia, all of those quick aggressive sounds, they're all fired out. They're like, yeah, that's right. You tell them Paul, let them know who's boss.

All of them that tried to keep us worshiping the Emperor, let them have it. Remember, just last week we heard Paul say that the past is not your future. That this little group here in Philippi can shine like the stars in the sky, part of the new creation, the world to come, this Jewish imagination of the world repaired. And now Paul says, watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh for it is we who are the circumcision. And this is where you get that full stop record scratch sorry, you what?

I mean, I thought we were talking about them, the Gentiles and the Pagans, the Romans, the bad guys. You mean to say that all along you were talking about us? Now understand that the Philippians were a pretty diverse group. I mean, those first converts we met in week one of the series, none of them were Jewish, in fact. Although it does appear that the community did welcome a sizable, if not majority Jewish population as a group, Paul makes significant references to the Jewish scriptures assuming that the community will be able to parse those.

But even those Gentile participants, they had identified themselves with a Jewish Messiah by now even though it's unlikely they'd been circumcised themselves. That was never really part of Paul's teaching. They had certainly identified themselves with the larger story that Paul is now critiquing. And I think this is one of the really brilliant things that Paul is able to do in his writing. He has this way of taking all of our critiques of the other, what those people are doing wrong and why they are not worthy of us, and he turns it around to say perhaps we have work of our own to pay attention to first.

And we'll talk about the specifics of his critique here in a moment, but this is just really a neat model of the teaching of Jesus for us. Before we ever worry about the speck in the eye of another we have logs and logs at home to deal with first. And Paul has this way of pulling this out so brilliantly because often we have this deep seated instinctual need to project our insecurities onto our enemies. But by using our own weaponized language in unexpected way Paul does two things. First, he makes us rethink our assumptions about ourselves.

But also I think at another level he invites us to rethink our assumptions about those we may have dismissed in the past. And every single one of us needs that kind of reflective challenge from time to time. But let's look at this whole section here. Watch out for those dogs, those evil doers, those mutilators of the flesh. For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.

Though I myself have reasons for such confidence, if someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, in regard to the law, a Pharisee. As for zeal, persecuting the church. As for righteousness based on the law, faultless. But whatever were gains to me, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.

For what is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ. Now all of this is part of a larger debate within the early Jesus movement about the question of circumcision. One that comes to a head in Paul's letter to the Galatians but one that is addressed in the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15. And again here Paul is quite clear that the issue has not reached Philippi in a remarkable way.

He's not chastising them the way that he does the Galatians. He is, however, concerned about the way our natural tendency to in and out group each other can put the inclusiveness of the Gospel at risk. So in practical terms, the question comes down to this. We follow a Jewish Messiah. Do we need to become Jewish in order to do that?

And Paul's answer, and the one the Christian community lands on is no. The story of God comes through the Jewish people, but the story was always intended to reach to all people. And this itself is the narrative trajectory of the Bible. The blessing of God comes to the person Abraham, to his family and tribe, to the nation that grows from that to the fatherless, the foreigner and the widow, to the Gentile, to all nations, to all people everywhere. Amen.

The movement is not that the world becomes Jewish, the movement is that the Jewish story slowly heals the world. So one, not only do you and I not need to practice Jewish custom to follow Jesus, but two, we really have no place appropriating Jewish traditions because they're not ours to begin with. Those were always symbols of God's goodness to Israel. They were never entry into God's grace to begin with. So they don't belong to us and sometimes it's worth remembering that not everything does.

Ours is inclusion in the story that expands and expands to include all things. In the words of Paul, whether things on earth or things in heaven, all things now reconciled to God in Christ. And whenever we try to take that large story and make it smaller again by limiting God's welcome to the table or by demanding some kind of display of worth. Whenever we think that we get to decide who's in, who's out, Paul says we miss the Gospel of Jesus. In fact, Paul says I've been there, I've done that, and I've done it better than you.

But expertly missing the point is still missing the point. And so now I consider it all garbage he says. The word he uses there is Scoobalon. In all my attempts to keep the dogs out, all I did was feast on the dog food. But when we learn to open wide the doors and welcome all to our tables, and grace and peace may begin to abound in and through us until one day our resolve to be set apart from our neighbors dissolves completely in Christ's love.

It's our tendency to segregate that we need to be aware of. It's our welcome to allow the inclusiveness of Christ to be poured into us and out to each other that we are invited to participate in. Let's pray. God, for all those ways that all of our tendencies rise up back inside of us again, to cut ourselves off, to push others away, to build walls that keep people out. May we remember the path of your son, the self giving sacrificial love that tears down barriers, It welcomes new people to the table that transforms both us and those we encounter through grace and love.

May your peace find root inside of us. And when we find ourselves, that bile rising up inside of us again to say, They're not us. May we be reminded again and again and again by Paul to push back from that tendency and to lean into Your love. In the strong name of the Risen Christ, we pray. Amen.