I’ve been watching just a little cable news lately; maybe you have, too. I have to confess: the more I watch cable news of late, the dumber I feel. Now I don’t mean my inability to grasp the practical (or moral) implications of a $700 billion-dollar bailout for Wall Street – basically the shoring up of a system that has always made sure profits are privatized (and funneled to the top), by the sudden socialization of losses. Not that. Nor do I mean the surreal fact that every child in this church now owns a share of national debt that equals $175,000 apiece and climbing (not counting the price tag of the bailout bill). These things make me feel confused, maybe even numb, but not so much dumb. I figure we’re all pondering these things.

What really stumps me is the stock market. Watching them ring that bell, all grins and giggles, then scowl and shout all day on that paper-strewn floor – I feel that everybody understands it but me. Stocks for the last three weeks have gone up and down – and down - and I find myself wondering how it is we’ve been at this for a century or so, and never installed an early warning system. Some kind of monitoring device, like the one that tells us when our gas tanks are about to run dry – only this one would tell us who’s busy stuffing their pockets while running billion-dollar financial companies into the ground. Why don’t we have that? Like I said, I’m too dumb to get it.

But if my mind is too limited for all this, the complexities of finance might have made sense to somebody far sharper than I, who in the letter we heard from this morning revealed a totally new way of doing accounting – one that would amaze even the guys who used to work at Lehman Brothers. According to the Apostle Paul, all the things he formerly counted as “gains” can now be written off as losses. You know he’s not talking about sub-prime mortgages. He’s talking about risking the very best things he has ever earned – making the greatest wager of all – and in turn, gaining everything he could have imagined.

Now I recognize not all of us like Paul. (I think this because some of you have taken me aside after Bible study, and whispered, “I don’t like Paul.” ) But I can tell you that you are reacting to the Christian Paul. Truth is that before he met Jesus, Saul (as he was then called) was the sort of guy who’d be pretty respected in Botetourt these days. Born to the bloodline that had produced Israel’s first king, Saul was raised in a deeply religious household. He had a great education and became a successful businessman and a Pharisee. The latter title meant that he was trusted by his own people to hold onto all that made Israel holy before God, like no other nation on earth. Had Saul run for office, most of us would probably have been impressed with him, with his drive, ambition, and commitment to conservative, faith-based values.

But something happened to Saul along the upwardly-mobile way that most of us aspire to in life. We won’t share now the story of his encounter on the road to Damascus – but it’s in Acts 9, if you want to look it up later. For the present, we’ll just note the upshot: the Damascus road was the beginning of a radical transformation of Saul’s priorities, his friendships, his way of experiencing life. Most of all, it led to a transformation of his relationship with God. I like to say that Paul’s conversion is good news because it means that even religious people can be converted – at a time of God’s own choosing. That is, if we’re willing to take a risk.

Paul reflects more on the meaning of his transformation here than perhaps anywhere else in the Bible. We might suppose this is because he is writing to the Philippians from prison, and that perhaps he may be having second thoughts about all he lost along the road that got him behind bars. But that’s not it: in fact, his letter to the Philippians is the most joyful of any preserved in the New Testament. He writes to reassure the Philippians that he is not afraid so they should not be so, that his imprisonment is actually being used for good purposes by God. He is more concerned for them than for himself, because he has heard that some preachers have come among them, saying that God is grading what they do, that their salvation is only guaranteed if they study hard, honor the Law of Moses sufficiently, and please God enough to pass muster.

This is why Paul offers what we might call his faith testimony. We who have already heard faith testimonies about the before-and-after of meeting Jesus, we might suppose that Paul would share what a rotten guy he was before. He might tell us how he broke his mother’s heart and blew his college fund on a Camaro, only to wrap it around a tree in a drug-induced stupor. But that is not Paul’s testimony. To the contrary, he describes how good he was, how decent and devout – and then he writes off all those assets as worthless. He zeroes them out when he reflects on what Jesus Christ has placed on his balance sheet.

Consider this: Paul never says he messed his life up so badly he needed Jesus to come fix it - to bail him out and give him a fresh start. Some testimonies I have heard, perhaps some you have heard, would make it seem that that is what Jesus has to offer. Maybe somewhere along the way, we were given the impression that Jesus went to the cross for us so that we could get back on our feet like Fannie Mae and start living a better life.

But that’s not the Good News - that we have to get started living better. The Good News that Paul is describing for us is that it doesn’t matter how good you are – whether you’re a good mother or father, daughter or son, boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife. It doesn’t matter, because you will never be good enough to atone for your sins. However much you achieve, however hard you work and whoever you impress, these will never be enough. That’s what Paul is saying. And he should know!

What does matter, says Paul, is to know Jesus Christ, and to be acquainted with his death and Resurrection as the core events not just of human history, but of your life. Compared with this, all the things Paul counted as gains before are like shares of Lehman Brothers – plain worthless. Now Paul’s life hinges on knowing God through the fundamental realities of the Cross and the empty tomb. Our salvation involves allowing these two to become the core realities of our lives, the Cross and the Resurrection as our story.

I do not know whether you most need the Cross or the Resurrection this morning. Certainly some who would follow Jesus have not yet taken the road to the Cross, and counted the high cost for following him there. Going to the Cross means for each of us the experience of dying to our old dreams, our old anxieties, dying to the life that we had planned on living. All these are sacrificed before Jesus, as we are reminded every time we come forward to share in his broken Body, his spilled blood, this renewing of the call to “share in his sufferings,” as Paul says. So some today may hear a reminder in Paul’s words that we cannot come to know the living Christ, if we refuse to encounter the Cross in our own life.

But there may be others here who risk getting lost on the road that leads from the Cross to the empty tomb. How could a thing like that happen? By forgetting that the Christian life is not about hard work, sweat and toil for the sake of our redemption. The Christian life is about dying to our old self in order to rise again to the new life that Christ offers. The only reason that Jesus calls us to his cross is to lead us to his resurrection. The Cross is the place where we give up laboring to save ourselves, to secure our own futures in a volatile world, and the place we get started on living as we were made to live – joyfully, in relationship with the God who made us. The empty tomb is an invitation to encounter a new way, not just a rescue plan, not a bailout – but total salvation from the life that without God has been killing us. We were made for better - for the life God has always wanted to give us. Are we ready for that wager? Are you?

Jesus is ready. Thanks be to God.