Sermon — June 26, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” (Gal. 5:1)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The 2013 PBS special Constitution USA opens with a shot of the NPR news quiz host Peter Sagal riding through the Arizona desert on a Harley-Davidson painted with the American flag. “A guy on a motorcycle,” he narrates in the voiceover, “it’s like freedom personified! Five guys on five motorcycles?” (Here the camera pans to show him riding in formation with four members of the Arizona Leathernecks Motorcycle Club.) “Five times more freedom! It’s a freedom fiesta! But freedom to do… what, exactly?”

“Freedom to do what, exactly?” This is the question Sagal sets out to answer, biking around America to talk with citizens and scholars about the meaning of the United States Constitution. And we can add another question: freedom from what? Because, as one of the bikers astutely points out to Sagal in the bar after their ride, the Constitution isn’t there to protect us from one another. It’s there–he says, drawing a pocket copy out of vest and brandishing it—to protect us from our government. And while I imagine I may disagree with some of his politics, he’s right about that. The Constitution says much more about what we are free from than what we are free for. And the same is true of the national holidays in this season of freedom. Juneteenth commemorates Black Americans’ freedom from enslavement; the Fourth of July celebrates a new nation’s freedom from tyrannical monarchy. But—freedom to do what, exactly?

It’s not a new question, and it’s not limited to American politics. In fact, these are exactly the questions St. Paul addresses in his letter to the Galatians, and which Christians have struggled with for generations since. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” Paul writes. But from what and for what?

Paul is writing to the churches in Galatia, in what’s now the heartland of modern Turkey, at an inflection point in their history. They had received the gospel from Paul, the good news that they—these Gentiles, these non-Jews—can be accepted into the family of God, can be counted part of the chosen people of God, can be reckoned as righteous in God’s sight, not by conversion to Paul’s religion, Judaism, not by adopting the practices of circumcision and kosher food laws and Sabbath observance that define Jewish identity, but through faith in Christ, apart from these works of “The Law.”

But Paul’s letter is not just a cheerful reminder of this good news. It’s a rebuttal to what seems to be an alternate set of teachings by another set of early Christians, people who were, like Paul, Jewish members of the new Christian movement. They seem to be teaching that the Galatians do need to follow the law: that if they’re so excited about this good news of Jesus, the Messiah, the next step into entering his kingdom is to join his people, the Jewish people, and to follow the commandments of Jewish law. Paul is having none of it. This is precisely not the point! Paul has a more universal message in mind: it’s not obedience to Jewish law that makes a person righteous is God’s sight, but faith in Christ, and our Christian freedom is, in a sense, freedom from the obligation to fulfill the Law.

Of course, our problems are different from Paul’s, and “the Law” has been reimagined over time so it applies to more contemporary situations. For the Protestant Reformers, “the Law” was the kind of external, legalistic requirements, the “points systems” the Church had created. Paul’s message of Christian freedom led them into rebellion against some of the demands of the medieval church, exemplified by a historical event with one of my favorite names: “The Affair of the Sausages,” a dinner in 1522 in which Swiss reformers exercised their freedom in Christ by committing what was, to the authorities, a grievous sin: eating sausages at dinner on a Friday in Lent.

“For freedom Christ has set us free!” Freedom to do what? To eat hot dogs on a Friday night.

In our day, the Law is different. It’s not a requirement to obey the Jewish law, the law of Moses, in order to become Christian. It’s not a requirement to obey the Church’s arbitrary rules of fasting and penitence in order to earn God’s forgiveness. It’s the little-l law, less-obvious but more devious, the whole set of expectations and requirements and achievements that tell us that we are not enough: that our home isn’t clean enough, or our kids’ school isn’t “good” enough, or we don’t volunteer or call our mother or meditate enough. The law is good—all these things are good—but the law demands that we do and do and do and do, and we do and do and do and find that we can do no more, and however much we’ve done, it is never enough.

But we have been set free from the demands of the law. We do not have to submit to its yoke. Our worth is not determined by any external measurement than God’s love, by anything at all but our faith in Christ.

We’re set free from the law’s power to judge or condemn. But we’re set free also from the flesh. We are subject to two opposing forces“the flesh” and “the spirit.” “The flesh” is Paul’s phrase for the tendency within us that pulls us into ourselves and away from our neighbors, the source of our jealousy, anger, envy, drunkenness, and more. “The spirit” is what draws us out of ourselves, into the world, with “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (5:22-23) “There’s no law,” Paul wryly points out, “against such things.” (5:23) And somehow, mysteriously, Christ’s crucifixion in the flesh has put to death the power of the flesh. God’s sending of the Holy Spirit has strengthened the power of our spirit. The delicate balance between the flesh and the spirit has shifted, so that we can grow and flourish and bear “the fruit of the Spirit.”

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” We are free from the law and free from the flesh. We are free from the external demands and measurements others make of our lives and free from the internal forces that lead us astray. We are free from all those things outside ourselves that distract us from the primary commandment, to love our neighbors as ourselves; and free from all those things within ourselves that prevent us from loving our neighbors as ourselves.

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” But it’s not the freedom of the solo cyclist. It’s the freedom of the motorcycle club. It’s not the freedom to go wherever we want and do whatever we want because God’s going to love us anyway. It’s the freedom to love. It’s the freedom to live together in a community like those Arizona Leathernecks, riding together, watching each other’s backs—in a joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, and loving way, of course. Christ has set us free from the law, from social norms and expectations and even from daily needs, in a way that can sound as shocking to our ears as it did to theirs. (Freedom from burying your father? (Luke 9:60) Freedom from saying farewell to your family? (Luke 9:61) These probably deserve a whole sermon of their own.) And he’s set us free from the worst versions of our own selves, from our jealous and anger and fearful sides, from everything that draws us away from one another and into ourselves.

But human beings aren’t so good at being so radically free. We crave order, structure, leadership. We love to take on the yoke; we need its solid certainty over our shoulders. Paul’s seen it already in the Galatians’ temptation to adopt the customs of the Law for what Paul sees as no benefit at all. And I wonder if this explains the strange paradox in what he writes to the Galatians: “Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” he says; then, just a few verses later, “but through love become slaves to one another.” You need to serve something? Okay. If you’re going to enslave yourself to something, don’t make it the law outside you or the flesh within you; make it the people around you. Serve one another, in love, for this is the essence of the law.

Not many of us have ever felt quite so free to love. Not many of us feel that radical freedom from the expectations and judgments of the world, or from our own weak wills. And our unfreedom comes from many different sources. There are at least as many things keeping us in chains as there are people in this room.

So what is it that’s keeping you from love? What is it that stops you from loving your neighbor as yourself? What is it that distracts you, that leads you to try to measure up? What is it that draws you into yourself? And what would it mean to say that Christ had truly taken away the burden of that thing? What would it mean to say that God’s unconditional love for you had actually set you free? What would it mean to say that you were being guided by the Spirit into ever greater love?

What would that “freedom fiesta” look like for you?

Because I have good news: Christ has set you free.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon — June 12, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Sermon — The Day of Pentecost — June 5, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” (Romans 8:14)

Today is the Day of Pentecost, when we celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit among the disciples gathered long ago. The Spirit makes a splashy appearance: with violent wind, (Acts 1:2) and tongues of fire, (1:3) and such linguistic fluency in such unknown tongues that the disciples seem to some to be “filled with new wine,” although it is only nine o’clock in the morning. (1:13, 15) The Spirit, Peter says, is doing what the prophet Joel said the Spirit would do when God poured it out on them: they will prophesy, and see visions, and dream dreams. (Acts 2:17-18; Joel 2:28) And this is all very dramatic.

But the Spirit works in quieter and subtler ways, as well; you might even say lawyerly ways. It’s not just a spirit of mighty wind and intoxicating fire. It’s an “Advocate,” says John, the one who guides you through a court of law. (John 14:26) And it’s a “spirit of adoption,” writes Paul, a Spirit who “bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” (8:15-16) There’s a lot in that image: God is our adoptive mother and father, the one into whose family we are being incorporated. Jesus is our brother, the one whose siblings we become. And the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness to our adoption, the one whose presence brings us into that family and seals that moment, really making us members of a new family, really making us children of God.

“Children of God” is one of those phrases that often say without really thinking about. So you’ll hear someone say, for example, “well, we’re all God’s children” when what they really mean is something like, “we should treat people well, no matter who they are.” But we don’t often go much deeper than that.

Paul goes deeper, though. (No surprise.) He wants to draw out what this metaphor means. The Holy Spirit, he writes, makes us children of God—“and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:16-17) We are truly children of God, a parent whose love is beyond anything any imperfect human parent has ever shown. God is the infinitely loving, patient, understanding One whose only concern is for our flourishing and growth. And as children, Paul points out, we are heirs of God. Everything that God has, God wants to be ours. Everything that Jesus has, is going to be ours to share. All the glory of heaven is ours by right’ we are joint-heir with Christ. “If, in fact, we suffer with him”—and we will suffer, and we will be with him—we will “also be glorified with him.” (8:17) God loves no matter what, and God promises us a future beyond our most wonderful imaginings.

But note, too, that we are children of God. At our best we are child-like; more often we are childish. Children grow and learn and change and make mistakes. That’s childhood is for. And we are all still children. After all, what are eighty or ninety years of life, set beside the eternal wisdom of the One who created a universe that’s more than 13 billion years old? We are all still children in God’s sight, and what a gift: God knows we are still children, however grown-up we may seem; God knows that we are still learning and changing and growing up into the shape of Christ, and God doesn’t leave us alone to learn: God sends “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit,” to “teach [us] everything and remind [us] of all that [he has] said to [us].” (14:26)

And there’s one more thing. To say that we are “children of God” does not just mean that we are loved by God, or that we’re heirs of God, or that we are still trying to learn and grow. It also means that we’re one another’s siblings. Our religion is not just an individual relationship with God. It’s life in a family of God. And that family is not just this church. It’s The Church. It isn’t just the people in this room. It’s the raucous Pentecost crowd of people “from every nation under heaven,” (Acts 2:5) young and old; sons and daughters; “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs…” townies and toonies and bears, oh my!

You probably don’t need me to tell you that siblings don’t always get along. No family is perfect, right? Some people have decades-long quarrels with their families; others have more recent hurts. Some have left their families behind altogether, and that’s been the healthiest thing. Other lost their families, long ago, and wish they still have them. But the Holy Spirit has adopted us all into this one family of God, a family that breaks through every boundary of language and nation, race and class, and we are obligated to love and serve and try to reconcile with one another within this human family, across any barriers that may divide us.

We may not see tongues of fire. We may not hear a violent wind. But to really listen to one another, when we don’t come from the same place—to really understand one another, when we don’t seem to speak the same language—that is the heart of the Holy Spirit’s work on Pentecost, and that is work in which we can participate every day. For “all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” (Romans 8:14) Amen.

Sermon — May 29, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30)

The English bishop and New Testament scholar Tom Wright tells the story of an older English bishop and scholar, Stephen Neill, who taught him how translate this verse. They’d both grown up with the classic King James Version translation of the verse, which was so iconic that it hasn’t changed in English-language translations for the last five hundred years: “’Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’… ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.’” (Acts 16:30-31) It’s a simple question, and simple answer, and it’s a profoundly important one. This back and forth basically sums up the whole Protestant Reformation. Imagine reading this five hundred years ago, with the whole medieval Catholic penitential system in mind. You would’ve been taught your whole life that you stood under the judgment of a just but exacting God, who kept meticulous accounts of right and wrong, of good and evil deeds, with consequences that could be measured and quantified and compared with one another in units of years in purgatory.

 “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” How many prayers must I say? How many Fridays must I fast? How many offerings must I make to repair the church roof? And if you’d grown up with a legalistic kind of Christianity, as many still do—if this then that, if you are good enough then God will love you—the answer brings incredible relief. “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” The Church’s whole monopolistic economy of salvation is a sham. Don’t be afraid of your priest. Don’t be anxious for salvation. Your salvation is not the result of your good works, of your striving and straining and working to repent. Salvation is the free gift of God, who asks only that you believe in his beloved Son. You should try to be good, to be clear, and you fail again and again, and God will save you still.

All of which is true, by the way. You can understand why the translation was so powerful that it stood the test of time. But it makes the sermon rather short. And there’s an inconvenient truth: This is not really what the jailer’s question means.

He is, we can assume, a moderately pious Roman pagan. Okay, maybe he’s been skimping on his votive offerings, maybe he doesn’t sacrifice a chicken to Jupiter as often as he should, but, hey, life’s busy, the kids have chariot practice, and you know, he’s always good to offer a few sprinkles of incense before the image of the emperor on his way into work. He was a solid Roman guy. And Roman religion had almost no anxiety about things like eternal punishment and eternal reward. There was no notion of a heaven or a hell like ours. The gods were vengeful, yes, but they took their vengeance here, on earth, and you know what? Your boss could be pretty vengeful, too, especially when you were a jailer, and you’d lost everyone in jail. When he asks this famous question, the jailer is not worried about his eternal salvation. He’s worried about how to save his skin, right here and now.

So Stephen Neill offered a rather different translation of the verse. Not “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” but this: “Gentlemen, will you please tell me how I can get out of this mess?”^[1]

The foundations have been shaken. The gates have crumbled. The chains have unraveled. And the jailer looks around, and asks the miracle men calmly sitting in their cells: “How can I get out of this mess?” And then, startlingly, the answer to this very different question is the same: “‘Believe in the Lord Jesus,’ they replied.” (Acts 16:31) And you will be saved.

How can we get out of this mess? Twenty people, mostly children, shot and killed in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Ten Black grocery shoppers murdered in Buffalo. Two thousand Americans dead of Covid this week alone, and countless lives upended and overturned by our ongoing attempts to manage it, and we call that a pretty good week, and statistically, sadly, it is. A politics charged with anger and hate and fear, a culture of exhaustion and despair. And that’s not to mention the world’s largest conventional war in seventy years.

It’s hard to see what “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” could possibly mean to this terrified and exhausted jailer in the middle of the night, let alone to any of us.

And nobody else in this story has it any easier.

The young woman with whom we begin is doubly oppressed, possessed by a fortune-telling spirit that speaks through her lips but without her control and “possessed,” in a very different sense, by the men who enslave her, keeping her under their control so they can profit off her talents. She speaks the truth—these men really are the servants of the Most High God, proclaiming a way of salvation—but she does it so incessantly that in a fit of frustration Paul breaks the spirit’s power over her, rendering her useless to the ones who claim to own her. She is free from the spirit’s power, and now that the magic’s gone there’s no reason to keep her enslaved, so she may well simply be free, soon enough; but to be rendered useless to the ones who enslave you without being protected by the one who’s freed you is a dangerous and precarious situation.

And indeed, we get a taste of her enslavers’, as they seize Paul and Silas and drag them into court. The two men barely escape the mob’s violence, and the magistrates aren’t much better, beating them and throwing them into jail on trumped-up anti-Jewish charges of disturbing the peace and inciting rebellion and lawlessness among the people.

The jailer is a mere functionary. Assigned the impossible task of keeping these miracle men in chains, holding all the responsibility and none of the power, he fails. And he’s so overcome with fear and shame that he’s at the very end of his rope, until a brief moment of hope when it turns out that the men he’d imprisoned had not in fact escaped, but are there, right there, sitting in their cells. Ironically, it’s not the miracle that allows Paul and Silas to escape. It’s the relationship they build with the jailer by forgiving and embracing him, by saving his life.

“Gentlemen,” the jailer asks, “How can I get out of this mess?” the jailer asks. And you could put the same question on the lips of anyone else and it would make just as much sense. “Gentlemen,” the young woman might ask. “You got me into this mess; how am I supposed to get it out of it?” “God,” Paul and Silas might ask, “You got us into this mess; how are we supposed to get out of it?”

And their answer is not quite, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and everything will be just fine.” We know that’s not how the world works. Paul knows, or at least he’ll know soon enough. His escape from jail isn’t the end of the story. From now on, everywhere he goes will be a kind of trial. He’ll travel from city to city, and in nearly every one he’ll be arrested, or mobbed, or escape by the skin of his teeth, until he begins his final journey to Rome, where he’ll die. Faith doesn’t ensure an easy life. It never has.

This is not exactly the joyful kind of hope we’re used to hearing in Easter.

But there is hope in those last verses of the reading from Acts. It’s not an Easter hope, per se. It’s a “Sunday after the Ascension” kind of hope. Jesus has gone away and left us in charge. He’ll send the Holy Spirit, to be sure, but he is gone. And yet through us he continues to do remarkable things. He’s chosen to work through us; not by miracles, but through our quotidian humanity, through our relationships with one another.

The jailer asks them how to get out of his mess, and the easy answer is not such an easy answer. But they tell him to believe, and he does, and he enters into a community of believers. He and his whole family are baptized, without delay! And he brings the men he’d locked up in jail into his own home and feeds them. And together, they rejoice.

It’s not really an answer to his question, or to any of their questions. The enslaved young woman still has to deal with her angry enslavers. The jailer still has to deal with his angry boss. Paul and Silas will still be persecuted and run out of town after town. We know this is the way of the world. You don’t need me to tell you things are hard. But built on top of that, there are those moments—these moments—when we bear witness to another way, an Easter way, a way of peace, and hope, and joy. And we bear witness to that joy, we cherishing and tend the light of Christ, in the midst of everything that is sad and strange and broken in this world.

^[1] N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone Part 2 Chapters 13–28, vol. 8 of Accordance electronic ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 67.

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