Further, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you. ² Watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh. ³ For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh— ⁴ though I myself have reasons for such confidence.

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: ⁵ 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; ⁶ as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

⁷ But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. ⁸ 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 ⁹ 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—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. ¹⁰ I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. (Phil. 3:1-11)

The Birthday Debacle

“Pastor, could you wish Mary Lamega happy birthday at announcements? She’s 90 years old.” One of our deacons, Miriam, asked me just before service on Sunday morning. I had heard of Mary before: She was one of the matriarchs of the church and a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada. She survived the holocaust, and then her family and she had to flee communists who tried to imprison them in their country; they escaped the Iron Curtain to come to Canada.

Of course, I was new to the church, so I was eager to build a good rapport with the congregation. Prove to them they made a good choice in hiring me. Prove I was relatable.

“Oh wow, that’s special. Certainly,” I said, “Umm…by the way, which one is Mary?” I had never been formally introduced, or I probably had, but it takes a while to learn names and faces.

Miriam pointed.

“Okay, got it.”

Service began, which meant after the call to worship, the first song, and the First Baptist tradition of passing the peace that devolved into a several-minute hug fest, an introvert’s worst nightmare. Ya, it was beautiful to see the folks regard each other as family, but as one regular attendee, Dale would mutter every Sunday as everyone went around shaking hands, “Well, that is how we all get sick.” Dale was ahead of his time.

Well, announcements came, and so I, the pastor, got up and announced, “Well, everyone, today is a special Sunday. It is a certain, special person’s birthday today.” I proceeded to give a short impromptu speech about how valuable this person was to the church. I came and sat down next to the lady. “Well, how old are you on this special day?” The lady responded sheepishly, “Oh, it’s not my birthday today.” I responded, “Now, now, you can’t get out of it that easy, Mary; I know it’s your birthday today.” She responded, “I’m not Mary.”

Now, my immediate thought was, “Wow, this Mary character really loves to play games.” But then she said, “I’m not Mary; I’m Gwen.” The lady next to her, Marguerite, confirmed with an embarrassed nod. “That’s Mary Lamega over there,” she pointed. I turned my head to find a lady sitting there with the most horrified, bewildered look on her face. And she awkwardly waved.

To add insult to injury, our worship leader, Bill, witnessing the whole thing, said under his breath, and yet standing too close to his mic, we all heard him say, “Wow, that’s embarrassing.”

What do you do when that happens? I felt like calling it a day and going home. Nope, couldn’t do that.

I awkwardly walked over to Mary and told her some sad, condensed, half-hearted, soul-sucking version of the same shpiel about her being special and valued that everyone there knew to be an exercise in attempting to close the proverbial barn door after all the animals run out. I think we may have sung Happy Birthday, or we didn’t out of the painful awkwardness of it all. I don’t remember. I may have blanked out. I remember preaching a sermon. I remember forgoing the usual pastoral chit-chat after church, hiding out in my office to “get something.” And then, I went home, and I just said to my wife, “I just need to be alone for a little bit.”

I can tell you that I wanted to curl up in a corner and die.

I am not going to tell you how many episodes of Seinfeld it took for me to watch before I started feeling better and ready to rejoin humanity—Seinfeld is my therapy sitcom (it’s a thing; you’ll learn about that in pastoral care and counseling I am pretty sure).

I have learned one thing: Miriam was way off. So, I also learned the vital life lesson that Miriam points out with the accuracy of a stormtrooper. If she gives you directions, get a second opinion. Follow me for more life-changing advice.

(Also, I need to go on record saying that Miriam and her husband Carl are actually great people).

I learned one thing: Making the Christian life and ministry about looking good and getting status and approval never goes well…especially if you are nerdy and awkward like me and, apparently, can’t follow basic directions.  

Paul’s Problem: People and God’s Approval

Paul, when he writes to the Philippians, is talking to a church that has lost sight of the important things, about how the Christian life is about grace above all else, following Jesus, no matter how messy it looks.

They have put their own egos, their own quests for status and looking good, you might say, ahead of simple faith. You can see what this means through this beautiful letter: it looks like those who are preaching the gospel for the wrong reasons in the first chapter. It looks like the petty grumbling and arguing described in the second chapter, and particularly here in the third chapter, it goes a bit deeper. There are Judaizers whom Paul calls the “mutilators of the flesh,” those who argue that the marks of circumcision are true signs of status, of whether one truly deserves to be in God’s family.   

Well, Paul has some words to say about that. I used to think that Paul was just humble bragging, but I think our boy Paul here is doing something cheeky and brilliant (this is where I cite that I am not a New Testament scholar, and I give a hat tip to Danny and Grace for safety’s sake). He says, “Hey if you people want to make faith about ways to flex your muscles, if you want to make ministry about one-up-man ship, allow me to take you down a notch.”

“My Jewish heritage is purer than yours. My rabbinical credentials are more prestigious than yours. My ability to follow the law you think makes God love you, that you think gives you the status to say you belong here and those Gentiles don’t….Well, guess what, I was better at that than you, but—and here’s the problem—I was so obsessed with it that it led me to literally persecute and kill people—God’s people— before I realized how misguided I was.”

That’s a reality check.

Paul realized that this whole way of thinking about faith is worthless; it’s a distraction, and it’s worse than that: garbage.

When you turn your faith into a way of having status before God and others, other people become your competition or worse, threats to be eliminated (as Paul or Saul, the zealous young Pharisee, saw Christians), and if you keep going on that path, you can have something really humiliating happen. You might have a Jesus moment like Paul did on the road to Damascus, where you realize all the stuff you tried to fill your life with is worthless garbage.

Pastoring: Are We Doing It to Seek Approval?

The Great May Lamaga birthday debacle was twelve years ago (wow, that makes you feel old when you casually reminisce about what happened a decade ago). I had just started as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Sudbury, a small struggling church four hours north of my stomping ground in Southern Ontario.

Moving up there was not something I foresaw myself doing. I had aspirations of planting a thriving, sheik church plant in the GTA area.

However, my contract ended as a church planter in my denomination at the time. My aspirations were abruptly ended when the leader of the association found out I was supportive of women in ministry (which this particular denomination was fiercely against), and he proceeded to give me several ultimatums: if you value your job, your funding, you won’t rock the boat, you will toe the party line. I refused: my wife says I have the spiritual gift of not knowing how to shut up about things.

After a few months of unemployment, dozens of applications sent out, and a handful of interviews with no call backs—the whole process felt so humiliating—Big churches said things like, “We are a large church, so we need a pastor with a lot of experience to guide us.” Little churches would say, “We are a little church, so we need a pastor with lots of experience to guide us.” Finally, this little church in the great white north took a chance on me.

My first couple of years were tumultuous. I had convinced myself I can grow this little church: All I needed to do was work harder, organize more programs, and put more time into sermon prep.

I can’t fail at this. My wife gave up her job to relocate here to pursue my vocation. My family relies on this job.

But it was more than that: When I moved, one former classmate of mine who, shall we still ardently held to all the things I no longer did, took it upon himself to invite me out for coffee. When I thought it would be a time of reminiscence with a college mate, it ended up being an hour of this person telling me I don’t have what it takes to be a Baptist pastor because I am too academic, too radical in my views. “Your church is going to be ill-served with you in it,” he kept saying. He also said that I would probably just end up teaching at some liberal theology school one day (I will leave that comment to your apt judgment).

This was just one of many hurtful conversations I had when I left the denomination I used to pastor in (the denomination my Grandfather helped found), and while I believed I was authentically following truth and justice, God’s will in scripture, in doing the things I did, I have also learned that our actions in life can be deep, entangled knots, forming layers of complicated motivations.

Actions like pastoring a church, preaching a good sermon, and organizing an event can all be, in some sense, good things that God calls us to, but they can be fronts for pride, fears, deep resentments, and hurts.

You can say to yourself as I did: “I hope so deeply that my church grows, that it sees hearts changed, disciples made,” and that is true. But that can also be intermixed with an undercurrent of spite deep in one’s heart, “I hope it grows so that it proves to that church that didn’t hire me, they were wrong. I hope it grows so that those classmates of mine know they underestimated me.”

Preaching a good sermon can be both the delight in knowing a biblical truth as impacted people, but it can also be intertwined with pride, “I hope people see how smart I am, how capable I am, how pious I am.” (How is this sermon going, by the way?)

Your character can be the result of God’s grace at work in you; indeed, praise God. However, it can also very quickly become a source of judgment against another: “Oh, you do that. Well, I am thankful I didn’t make those choices.”

Ministry can be the best job in the world. I deeply believe that. A job where you get to encourage and serve people, help them know God loves them, study and teach God’s word, where you get to be at the center of a community of good, saintly folk.

Ministry can also be one of the toughest jobs in the world. The time demands, the emotional weight of caring for people, the worries of particularly smaller, less financially stable churches, and also the feelings of being put on a pedestal that happens in larger churches.

And if you let it, ministry can be about appeasing your insecurities—your need to feel liked, all the ways you desire an ego boast and seek recognition, or just surround yourself with the safe and familiar—and what can make pastoring particular hazardous is that there can be nothing more satisfying then rubber stamping success and status with God’s will. See, this is why God is pleased with me.

When we do that, when we equate ministry with our worth, our need for secure status and recognition, there will always be pressure then to hide our faults or, worse believe we have none. We will feel like we are living behind a mask. We will refuse to ask difficult, costly questions. We will bend the truth to make it more palatable and convenient. We will neglect the needy and broken of this world since they serve us no purpose. We will treat people as a means to an end.

Some of us will be wise enough to see these hazards early on and self-correct. Some of us will just move on to the work that needs to be done. Others, some of you, might be looking at me like, “Wow, Spencer is really hard on himself and really overthinks things.” That’s true, I’ve learned. (As I have regularly said in interviews, my greatest flaw is that I just care too much).

Also, we are all human.

Learning to Count Garbage…Literally

And in the daily grind of ministry, I felt like I lost sight of things. I did not have a vision of Jesus where I fell off my horse and went blind as Paul did, but you might say I did have a come to Jesus moment. Two years into pastoring, the honeymoon phase ended. The church had not really grown. In fact, a number of people either died or retired and moved away, meaning the loss of several key leaders.

I soon realized that an ongoing challenge of the church was relating well to the daycare it founded years ago but had since taken on a life of its own, and many church people felt that in terms of space usage and other resources, the daycare was the tail wagging the proverbial dog.

I tried my best to do programs that might appeal to the daycare families and build good relationships with the staff of the daycare.

Well, it felt like it all came crashing down one day. A bear got into the garbage. By the way, Sudbury had a lot of black bears. On my back deck, every evening in the summer, I would watch about a half dozen black bears scurry along the edge of the forest to begin scavenging for food, usually from the dumpsters of the different apartment buildings in the town.

However, this time, it was our building’s garbage. Here is a fun fact: bears love diapers. That is actually a disgusting fact. Bears tore open the dumpster lid—they are that strong—got into the garbage, and so torn up, half-eaten diapers were all over the church’s lawn.

Well, I got a call from one member of the church, “The daycare needs to clean that up; it looks terrible; it’s their diapers.” Then I got an email from the daycare operator, “The church needs to clean that up; after all, we pay rent.” One church leader responds, “We don’t have money for that. The daycare can pay. And while we are at it, we need to charge more rent!” And it went back and forth like that. It got ugly.

Well, guess who has two thumbs and ended up cleaning all those diapers up? This guy. I’ll tell you one thing: I did not feel like “the Reverend” anything that day.

It was so gross. I think I threw up in my mouth a couple of times. I remember thinking, “How can it get any worse.”

Then it started raining. That’s just great. And you know what is more disgusting than regular diapers? Wet, water-logged diapers. That’s what.

I remember wanting to quit. I wanted to fire up what Chris Killacky has come to know as his “Rez-um-may.” (By the way, that counted as a Chris Killacky reference, so you can check that off of your ADC Chapel bingo cards).

There I was, literally doing, as Paul called it, counting garbage. (See what I did there: How’s that for a thematic unity?)

I remember thinking to myself words similar to Marta from Arrested Development (my other therapeutic sitcom): “I’ve made a huge mistake.”

 This is not what I thought my ministry would look like. Any aspiration of looking like that cool, successful pastor looked literally like hot, steamy garbage at that moment.  

What made that moment feel so degrading was the fact that I had made ministry into this desperate obsession with growth performance: more programs, more events, working more hours—all the ways I needed to do more in order to show people I was more.

I realized I lost sight of the stuff that mattered.

You are Enough

At that moment, I remembered the words of one of my mentors, Pastor Tim Walker. I was his intern back at Bradford Baptist, and we have been able to meet every year and just talk for hours. When I told him that I was moving up north to pastor this small church, he gave me the best advice I have ever been given in ministry. It’s advice that is so easy to lose sight of amongst all the work and all the worries of life and ministry.

“Spencer, you know it’s not your job to make the church grow. It’s your job, first and foremost, to simply be faithful.”

Ya, church growth is important, but if you make ministry about the numbers, if you make success strictly about that, it’s worth nothing but garbage, and you will probably feel like garbage by the end, too. You may have to say this as Paul had to…

I count it all garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own…

Compared to all the other things that Paul and his community considered successful, worthy, and righteous, the only thing that mattered was having Jesus.  

And so, in case you just have not heard it enough:

To Jesus, you are enough. With Jesus, you are enough. In Jesus, you are enough.

Can I just tell you how incredibly freeing it is to pastor a church and say, you know what? I don’t know what this church’s future will be. I can’t say that I will be successful at everything I do in ministry. But if I am seeking to know Jesus. If I’m trying to sincerely follow Jesus, it’s worth it. That’s all it ever has to be. Once you have that in sight, everything else is in its proper place.

I know I am not the most eloquent preacher, the best event planner, the learned bible scholar, and if I am honest, some days in my faith, I don’t even feel all that pious either: I feel like Paul when he calls himself the chief of sinners.

If you are still looking to Jesus, then nothing else matters.

Paul says this in this congregation in Philippi, where people used their religious and ethnic status as a way of securing God’s approval and excluding others. I saw it in my own ministry every time I made ministry about performance and achievement.

Same Goes for Education

(No, this is not the point in the sermon where I tell you that Jesus wants you to do your homework…but also, ya, you should be doing your homework). There is a reason why we call ourselves disciples, students of Jesus’ way.

I have realized that how we treat our education is really a practice run for how we will end up treating ministry. How we approach our convictions in assignments trains us for how we will work on our convictions in life. If you make seminary about achieving, ticking the performative box, getting the quick answer, and looking smart, you’re going to get yourself into some more garbage.

I remember doing a course for the history professor of my Bible College, Dr. Paul Wilson, who was known to be one of the toughest profs at the college. (Why is it always the history professors, right?)

I took his History of Western Civilization part one course by distance education in my first year, and I thought I got this. I was one of the top students in my high school; I can do this. I wrote a paper on reasons for how the early church grew. I don’t want to toot my own horn here, but I started the paper in advance, not on the night before. That’s right. I actually looked up sources, like the ones that are on paper. I even looked over my paper for typos before submitting it. Can you believe that?

Dr. Wilson scheduled a time to debrief the course at the beginning of the new semester. I strolled into his office and sat down. Here it comes. He is going to tell me how much he loved the paper: “Well done, good and faithful student.”

“Spencer, I have to tell you,” he began, “Your paper, I’ll be honest, just wasn’t good.”

I think I heard that record player, “burrrt,” noise go off in my head.

And like a dagger in my heart: “Spencer, I don’t think you really understand how history works.” I feel you judging me, Melody: “Spencer still doesn’t understand how history works.” Church history is not just older theology written by dead people, ya, ya; I get it.

“Spencer, where did you do your research?”

Sheepishly, I answered, “A library…?”

“Which University?”

“Umm…it was my church’s library?”

Exactly. He made that same wince noise. Then he proceeded to pull book after book off of his shelf and stake it right on my lap. “Spencer, you should have read this book on Roman culture, and this book on Greek household churches, and this book on…”

I remember saying to myself, “Hold it together, Spencer, don’t let him see you cry.” I said, “Thank you for your feedback; I have to go now,” and I got up and left.

And you know what? I felt like garbage (I’m nailing these thematic tie-ins, aren’t I?). I left feeling so, so dejected. I scurried back to my room and said to myself, “I need to watch some Seinfeld.”

And yet, when I look at my education, the courses that I did the worst in were also the ones that I actually learned the most in. If there was one course that taught me the most about how to think critically, write, and research well, it was Dr. Wilson’s History of Western Civilization course…part two.

I can even say that I got an A+ in his Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman history course. The second time I took it.

I say I had to take it a second time because, during one semester in college, I failed several courses.

My Dark Summer

It feels weird to admit this to some of you who are students here looking to me as the professor, but I have probably failed more courses in my seminary education than anyone else in this room (if you have failed more, feel free to share!).

As some of you know, in my third year of college, my dad died of cancer. Meanwhile, my mother was also facing cancer and died two years later. My best friend at the time tried to commit suicide, and my pastor friend and mentor had a meltdown, snapped one day, and walked away from his family, his faith, his whole life, and ran off with someone else.

To make matters worse, the only job I could find was working the night shift four nights a week at Tim Hortons. My job every night was, you guessed it, taking out the garbage (Ya, I know, now I am just shoe-horning the garbage theme in—oh well).

The result was many nights left to my own thoughts, and I didn’t know how to process all the grief mixed with anger and frustration mixed with doubts and despair.  

I remember sitting there one night, feeling like everything that mattered in my life, in my faith, had come crashing down. My dad died a terrible death. Good friends that I looked up to had lost faith, and as someone who prided myself in my studies and, moreover, in my faith, always finding the right answer, the notion that for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to believe anymore, was the scariest thing I have ever experienced.

For some of us our way of knowing we have God’s approval in our lives is whether we have the right answers, and that all gets stripped away the second you don’t know something.

And yet, at that moment, in that moment of sitting in my basement apartment, sitting there thinking, “Is anything true anymore? Is life just a veneer over an abyss of meaninglessness?” I remember having a profound, even mystical moment. It occurred to me that even if all my truths (small t) are wrong if Jesus is who he is, if Jesus is Truth (capital T), I can fail; my beliefs can fail, but God’s grace won’t.

Humility is What Saves Us

I have learned that God sometimes reveals Godself most beautifully, not when we are at our best, but when we are at our worst, and if we are afraid of failing, we will never fully see God redeeming.

If we cannot humble ourselves, we cannot know fully that it is God’s humble love that saves us. That kind of vulnerability is scary, but we can trust it. Because, as Paul said earlier in Philippians, Jesus…

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing…

That Jesus is the God who became nothing for us, humbled himself even to the point of death on the cross for us…If that is who God is, as Julian of Norwich would say, then all shall be well; all shall be well, and in every manner of thing, it shall be well.   

I can tell you that from that moment on, my studies took on a new drive, a delight and curiosity for asking the tough questions, all the ones I was afraid to ask before, and this led me to want to pursue a doctorate in theology. I can also tell you that after that reality check, picking up diapers on the church lawn, things, for one reason or another, turned around.

But, of course, that is not the point though. And if we ever make it the point, we need to remind ourselves again with Paul’s words:

Not that I have already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3:12-14)

Let’s pray:

Gracious God. You love us despite our sins and failures. You love us even when we think it is because of our achievements and successes. We thank you that you love us simply because you are who you are, revealed in your son Jesus Christ, his cross, and resurrection.

God, teach us how to count garbage. Remind us how nothing else matters compared to knowing and walking with you, how everything matters properly when we see all things through you.

God, there are some today that might be here, and the only thoughts on their minds are words of thanksgiving. There are others here where the only thoughts they feel are ones of worry, doubt, and discouragement. God, comfort us and remind us that you are always with us. You never leave us or forsake us. Thank you that you love us as we are and that you are leading us always to know further the power of your resurrection.

For these and so many other reasons, we praise you, God. This we pray in your name, amen.