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But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 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. \u2026 I want to know Christ\u2014yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:7-8a,10-11)

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Maybe these words from Paul are easier to see, understand, and appreciate through the lens of a pandemic.\xa0 Or through the lens of so much loss and grief that we\u2019ve suffered as a church this past year.\xa0 It seems that there has been a death in our congregation almost weekly for longer than I care to remember.\xa0 And toady: another funeral.\xa0 Pastor Michael\u2019s father.

It strikes me again how clarifying death can be, even through our grief and grieving.\xa0

So many of the things that we spend our lives pursuing are lost in the face of death: good health, strength, positions, experience, skill, wealth, status, property, security.\xa0 Even our relationships are broken by death, which is why we grieve.\xa0

But one thing is not lost through death: our relationship to Jesus Christ.\xa0

Our connection with Christ endures.\xa0 Because Jesus Christ, and he alone, has passed through death and risen to newness of life.\xa0 That\u2019s why our Christian hope, indeed, our only hope for this life rests in him.\xa0

An older tradition of the church said that the Christian life is really all about preparing for a good death.\xa0 That actually, we are called to live all of our Christian lives in light of death.\xa0 And that\u2019s really what Paul is getting at in this text, too.

Paul had a lot of privilege in his column, a lot of things to count as gain by the standards of the Jewish world he lived in.\xa0 He had ethnic privilege, private religious schooling privilege, professional association (Pharisee) privilege, and he exercised his privilege in power and with impunity too as he persecuted the young church and kept a righteous air about him all the while.

But then he died.\xa0 That is, he died in the death of Christ as he was baptized into Christ\u2019s death.\xa0 And having died?\xa0 Seeing his life through the lens of death: Paul looks back on all his privilege, all the things he spent his life striving to earn, and sees it all, as a loss.\xa0 Because the only thing of worth, the only thing that endures, and so the only thing, finally, worth having at all: is Christ.\xa0

As a church and as Christians, what will get us through this pandemic and all the many journeys of grief we walk, is a stubborn clinging to Christ and to the hope he gives us of resurrection life in him.\xa0 Nothing else will do.\xa0 But in him: we have everything.\xa0 The promise of life restored and a world set right.

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