Sermon — May 22, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Massachusetts has one of the world’s most boring flags: the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on a white field. The seal itself is kind of interesting. It consists of three elements—and by the way, I’ve printed the seal out on a bulletin insert so you can see what I’m talking about. In the center, a Native American holds a bow and an arrow pointed down, symbolizing peace. Above him, an unfortunately-placed arm holds a sword, looking like it’s about to swing down and cut off his head, just like the famous scene in one of the great movies about indigenous people and their relationships with the colonial state: Frozen II. And below him, there’s a scroll with the Latin state motto, Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem: “We seek by the sword a quiet peace under liberty.” It’s an unfortunate combination, implying as it does that violence against the indigenous people of Massachusetts is what ensured our quiet peace under liberty.
Now, the seal is pretty problematic—the model for the supposed Massachusett Indian, for example, is in fact an 1890s Chippewa chief from Montana—but the Frozen thing with the sword over his head is mostly accidental. The seal actually combines elements of two earlier and unrelated seals. (See the other side of the paper!) The revolutionary seal of 1775 features a colonial Minute Man with a sword in his right hand and the Magna Carta in his left, with the motto, “We seek by the sword a quiet peace under liberty.” Hence the disembodied sword-in-hand, and the motto; the violence is against the king. The original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, first used to seal the colony’s charter in 1629, is different. It features a rather stereotyped drawing of an American Indian with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, which have been adopted into the modern seal. But the banner coming out of his mouth holds a very different motto from the Minute Man’s statement of revolutionary zeal, one much more relevant to our reading from Acts today: the simple English phrase, “Come over and help us.”
This is, of course, an ever-so-slightly adapted version of the message Paul receives in a dream from a Macedonian man: “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” (Acts 16:9) It’s a divinely-delivered request: cross the sea from Asia into Europe and bring us the gospel. And indeed, the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw themselves as repeating that apostolic process: they came across the sea, and landed, and settled here, right here, in Mishawum, where they established their first settlement, soon renaming it after the man who’d granted their charter by stamping it with that original seal: King Charles I. Hence, the first settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: “Charlestown.”
Now, placed into the mouth of an indigenous resident of Massachusetts by his soon-to-be colonizers, “Come over and help us” is somewhere between a naïve disaster and grotesque bad faith. Diseases spread by Europeans had already devastated the Massachusett and Naumkeag people of this area, and war with the newcomers would soon nearly annihilate them. Some of the more godly colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony surely thought they were walking in the footsteps of Saint Paul and spreading the gospel here. Others were, without a doubt, cynically exploiting the seeming parallel between the Bible and their lives, using royal authority and Western technology to grab the land for themselves, with no real concern for the actual well-being of the locals. But even the best-meaning colonial Puritan missionaries were doing the very opposite of what Paul had done in the Book of Acts. They were swimming with the stream of a growing empire. Paul was fighting against one.
For three centuries before Paul’s journey to Macedonia, the history of the Jewish people and the whole region had been marked by armies moving from the west to the east, subjugating the local people to Greek and then Roman rule. Macedonia was where it all began, with the rise of a young man named Alexander, known to us as Alexander the Great. His father, King Philip II of Macedon, had founded a powerful kingdom and united many of the independent cities of ancient Greece. Alexander had bigger dreams, and in a brilliant but short career he went on to overthrow the great Persian Empire. After his death, his generals began to squabble over the remains, and rival kings set themselves up in Syria and Egypt, battling over and over again for the areas in between, including Judea. These kings surrounded themselves with a Greek aristocracy and sometimes sought to impose Greek customs on the locals, leading to occasional resistance, including the Maccabean revolt still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. By Jesus’ day, Roman rule had replaced Greek rule, but it was more of the same imperial domination.
In the first century BC, Rome was wracked by civil war as well, and while the history is too confusing to be helpful, there’s one event worth noting. In the year 44 BC, after three Roman generals defeated Julius Caesar’s assassins outside the city of Philippi, they discharged some of their veterans soldiers as a reward for their service and gave them land in and around the city. When one of them, Octavian, finally triumphed in the Roman Republic’s final civil war, claiming the title Augustus and becoming the first emperor, he sent more of his veterans there to strengthen and reorganize the colony, transforming Philippi into a “miniature Rome,” giving his soldiers all the rights of citizens of Rome itself.
All of which is to say: when Paul receives a vision inviting him to cross the sea, to “come over and help us,” he is not coming as the colonizer, the powerful one, here to spread the gospel with a sword hanging over your head. He is the one whose land has been conquered. He is the one whose people have been oppressed. And in next week’s reading, Paul and Silas will be arrested by a mob, who say, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” (Acts 16:20-21)
Now Paul was himself a Roman citizen. He would use that, at times, to his advantage, to escape from a local mob or a small-town jail by telling them he was a citizen of Rome, and therefore under Roman protection. But it was a dangerous game to play, because it turned Paul’s proclamation of Jesus Christ—his claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, God’s anointed King, and that he was inviting Gentiles as well as Jews into his kingdom—from mere rabble-rousing by some foreign traveler to an act of treason by a Roman citizen.
Paul walks, nevertheless, into the mouth of the imperial lion. He crosses over into Macedonia, the homeland of the great conqueror Alexander. He walks into Philippi, a city named after Alexander’s father Philip, a colony of Roman army veterans. He shows up eager to “proclaim the good news” of another, very different, kind of King. (16:10)
You’d almost have to be insane to try it. But after cooling his heels for “some days,” (16:12) Paul does what Paul generally does: he goes to the synagogue to be with his fellow Jews.
Or rather, he goes to the “place of prayer,” down by the river. (16:13) It’s a little unclear, but it seems the Jewish community in Philippi is perhaps too small for a synagogue within the city walls; perhaps too small even to muster a minyan of ten men, as Luke tells us simply of the “women who had gathered there.” (16:13) But these are powerful women, the great saint Lydia among them. Lydia listens eagerly to Paul’s message, accepts his words, decides that she and her whole household will be baptized—and then invites him to stay at her home, which becomes Paul’s base in Philippi. (16:14-15) Lydia’s the first person Paul meets in the city, and she’ll be the last one he says goodbye to before he leaves after his miraculous escape from jail in next week’s reading. (16:40) Within a few years, the Christian church at Philippi will have become a strong and thriving one. In fact, Paul’s letter to the Philippians is one of his most upbeat: there’s much to rejoice about and little to criticize. And I think we have Lydia’s leadership to thank for that.
Paul’s ministry in Philippi gives us a better model to think about the Church’s mission in the world than that Puritan “come over and help us.” It’s one founded on resistance to imperial power and might, not backed up by it. And it’s built on the assumption that you come and work in order to hand leadership over to someone else.
I think sometimes about the relationship that churches like St. John’s and many others have had over the years with organizations like the B-SAFE summer camp program. Over time, there have been changes to those partner relationships, and some of them have been hard for partner churches to swallow. Over time, B-SAFE has made many changes that come from listening to the kids and young adults who are part of the program. This year, B-SAFE has decided to hire parents from their community to cook meals for the kids, instead of churches bringing in food for lunch. And for many people who’d enjoyed cooking those meals for years, this felt like a loss. And it is. But it also reflects a kind of growth and maturity in that program, in a very good way.
God does not want us to “go over there and help them” in the Puritan sense. No, God is working through us more like God works through Paul. God is inviting us to recognize that we are citizens of an empire founded by the sword, and to spread instead the subversive message of the Prince of Peace. God is inviting us to go to the people on the margins of society, to the people gathered at the riverside outside the city gates, not to “help them,” per se, but to accept their hospitality and to support their leadership, to build a self-sustaining community of love, and to trust them to run it. And for what it’s worth, this is as true when it comes parenting or management or friendship as it is about community service or the mission of the Church. The end goal is not a permanent program for “us” to help “them,” year after year after year, but a community built on equality and love. So I pray that when God calls us to go and help people near or far, we answer that call, and that we bear witness to the good news of Jesus’ reign of peace and justice, in word and in deed, in our homes, and in our community. I pray that we have the wisdom of Paul to recognize the strength of leadership that’s already there among the people we come to know. And I pray that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God might build us up into a community that is founded not on the sword, but on the promise of the peace left to us by Jesus Christ, in whom all our prayers are known to God. Amen