I've always loved taking foreign language classes. For one thing, as a young teenager, I dreamed about traveling the world from the confines of my small town bedroom. When other friends were hanging posters of the stars of "Dukes of Hazzard," I had a veritable travel agency of posters from Egypt, Germany, France, and Spain adorning my walls - thanks to the selection of Pier One's poster rack. Getting to roll my r's or speak the nasally half-dropped ends of French words was wonderfully strange. Seeing where words came from and how they coincided with my own native tongue has always been and still is fascinating to me.

But at the same time, my friends in Junior High were waiting and hoping, baiting the teacher to tell us how to say all the "bad words" so that we could cuss without getting caught at home. Actually, the plan was pretty cool. Being able to speak in a language that parents can't understand is still thrilling to the thirteen-year-old. I must admit that when my kids reach that age, I'm going to be looking at the online parent dictionaries to make sure I can translate today's text message lingo. So, needless to say, I was not daunted by the requirements of learning biblical Hebrew and Greek quite like some of my counterparts in seminary. I actually found it a kind of treasure hunt to see just what unfolded if you prodded the language, peeled back the layers, and imagined a whole other world of ancient people and their stories. I was also fortunate to have passionate instructors - one who would recite the fluid Hebrew poetry of the Psalms to open a morning class, and one who loved to trick us with the logical puzzles of Greek's high grammatical forms.

But you know, there's one in every class. Eventually, we wanted to know if maybe there were actually some bad words in the Bible of all places. Could there be times when the English translators were too prudish to get the real meaning of the text just right? Through recent years of biblical criticism and the Reformers long commitment to scripture translated from its most original sources into the native tongues of Christians everywhere -- could it be that we've still missed some subtle nuance that might make us realize that the original writers of our most sacred texts were in fact people just like us?

Well, score on that one. Paul, having been known for strong language and insistence on the saving power of Jesus Christ no matter what, uses a word - one time - in today's reading that is really lacking in emphasis if you use a more, dare I say, clean and sanitized approach. At least Eugene Peterson's translation of scripture gets it closer - but not quite complete. Paul tells us that all the things he thought were so important are now in a different place in his life, his status, his credentials, his religiosity; once upon a time those things were important. But now, compared to having Jesus Christ in his life, everything that he once thought was special is now insignificant - like dog dung. Well, the Greek word that Paul uses there is skubala, and let me tell you, Paul knew his skubala from shinola!

The sentence enhancer, the s-bomb that he throws at the Philippian Church is what he really meant. Yes, Paul says that compared to having Jesus in his life - everything else has been sh..

Well, that's a rather lengthy story for me just to be able to tell you about the bad word in the Bible, but telling you about that one bad word is one way to let you know just how far God has come to bail out humankind from the absolute mess they've made when it comes to setting their true priorities. It's not just a tale to make the sermon more interesting, but to make an important point. A significant shift has to occur in one's life in order to say that everything else is skubala.

We read the Ten Commandments this morning. In Moses and Aaron's day, that was God's loving solution to a long problem of grumbling and fussing. The Hebrew people who were once slaves in Egypt needed a sense for what it would take to get their own community up and going, so God blessed them with what today would be called a "Behavior Covenant." Do these things. Hold fast to these rules, and life might go a little more smoothly. But even as Moses was bringing these loving laws down from the mountain, what were the people doing but melting their gold into a God they could see and touch - a blatant violation of rules #1 and #2?

Fast forward a few centuries and a few cycles of corruption and renewal, and we get to the Jesus narrative. Jesus comes to bring a new message from God, a message of love and grace, and forgiveness even when we mess up on the laws - both God's laws and the then numerous human laws. What do the people do then but crucify him? Even Jesus' closest friends have trouble staying by him until the end.

Then in Paul's dramatic conversion story, he gets his own bailout of sorts. Paul was a persecutor of Christians, a keeper of the religious code down to the last dotted 'i' and crossed 't'. He had the status of both religious authority and political influence. He was - as Peterson puts it - "A fiery defender of the purity of his religion." But, you see, compared to the love of God, all of that was no more than skubala. What I hope you will begin to see is that God bails us out over and over again, and it's not like any plan of Congress which eventually will require a pay back of some kind no matter whose plan it is. We get God's bailout absolutely free to us. When we were lost in the wilderness, God gave us laws for loving community. When we were being crushed under the powerful foot of government and the stranglehold of religion, God forgave us for all the times we've gave in to unrighteous authority and its demands. When like Paul, we were blinded to our own evil ways, God gave us Jesus as Lord, as Savior, as the love of all the world.

But there's also a giving up that happens on our part. Here, in the community of the faithful, we lose some things, but those things are really unimportant anyway. Our credentials don't matter, political influence doesn't matter, wealth and knowledge and all those things that count in the outside world amount to naught. Paul reminds us that we give up that inferior stuff for something much better, for knowing Christ so intimately that the power of the resurrection becomes real, more real than the phony attributes of the world's report card. This, my friends, is what we claim to die for - that Jesus matters in our lives. As Paul says, "I didn't want some petty, inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ - God's righteousness." I pray for you the same robust sense of trust in God that allows you to put Christ first.

Now, I confess. I am a person who is inclined in my day to day vocabulary to use the occasional sentence enhancer as Paul did in this case. One comment on the Internet about this text reminded me that Paul only used this word once, so perhaps it is a reminder to me to still be cautious with my words, and yet, Paul used it in just the right way to convey just the right meaning.

Today we still falsely put our trust in things of this world, in money, in power, in a way of life that thrives on consistently breaking the 10th Commandment. In the financial unfolding of the last couple weeks, it seems to me as though our world turns on wanting what all our neighbors have. It makes us wonder if God's bailout plans have all but dried up. We ask, "When will something spiritually spectacular happen in our lives?" But I would ask, "What are we waiting for?" These biblical stories of God's love being the beacon of light in times of darkness are our story too. Jesus Christ is the light of our world; the light no darkness, NO DARKNESS, can overcome. We, like so many before us, lose hope. It takes the startling language of an apostle Paul to shake us up and remind us that Jesus make all the difference. It takes hearing the good news in shocking ways to remind us that God is speaking to us right here, right now. The amazing thing is this. Paul was so focused, so oriented toward Jesus, so excited about sharing this good news with those he knows personally and by extension with us not so personally as to say that anything else, ANYTHING else apart from Jesus Christ is indeed skubala.

Amen.