Being the Church in Rome and Corinth

Last week I gave you an invitation – or did I extend to you a challenge?

What expectations do we have as we come to church?

Do we come with expectation?

Next Weekend we are going to have a great harvest celebration – not just one harvest supper with all its fun – but two – a party on Friday night and a Quiz night on Saturday.   All part of our Highbury @ home weekend.

It really is the last moment today to book up – come along if you can.

And if you really cannot – be thinking of us,  be there in spirit if not in person.

But come with expectation.

That’s where my invitation or was it a challenge came in.

We are going to be dreaming dreams and sharing visions for our church here at Highbury.

We cannot just dream any old dreams. We cannot just have any old visions.  If we are to be church here at Highbury we need to be shaped not just by our ideas but by Jesus Christ who is the head of the church who calls us to be his body here on earth.  We need to be true to the God Jesus opens up for us who is ‘our father’.  The great thing is that Jesus has left his Spirit for us so that we can be guided by the very Spirit of God.

This is exciting stuff.  There’s more.  We have a document that is if you like our foundation document that sets out all we need to know not just about Jesus, our Father God and the holy spirit, but life the universe and everything.

That document is of course the Bible.

Hence my invitation … or was it a challenge?

I prepared a set of readings for a couple of weeks – if you haven’t started yet, there’s still time – just read two days at once!

The readings take us to five cities in the Mediterranean world of the Roman emperor where there were churches made up of people who believe it or not were in so many ways just like us!

Those five city churches have one thing in common – they all received a letter from Paul.  As he gives thanks for their strengths, challenges their weaknesses and offers guidance as they shape their future it is possible to read between the lines and sense what kind of church fellowship these churches were.

If you start to do that these real life letters from a real life person to real life people start to leap off the page and live before our eyes.

But that takes a little bit of imagination.

How do we know what these people were like, what made them tick, what kind of people they were, what their society was like?

If only we could be a fly on the wall.  If only they had had a camera or better still mobile phones so that we could see what their lives were really like.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if those people and their lives could have been frozen in time and we could catch a glimpse of what they were like.

What’s remarkable is that actually it is possible to do just that.

Only fifteen to twenty years after Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, on the 24^th August AD 79 something happened that had devastating consequences for people at the time and remarkable results for us today.

Mount Vesuvius erupted – it’s great cloud of ash fell at first slowly and then more rapidly on the city of Pompeii.  People left meals half prepared, some hid under tables – and the ash buried them, leaving only the very tops of the buildings uncovered.

Another city, Heruclaneum was engulfed by the flow of lava as life in virtually an instant was scorched into the ground and buried 80 feet deep.

People who have visited Pompeii or Heruclaneum have told me how wonderful those places are.  And next summer the big exhibition at the British Museum will mean that you don’t just have to travel to Pompeii to wonder at what it was like.

Maev Kennedy writing in the Guardian quotes the curator,

“Despite the display of bodies and the poignant objects the citizens snatched up as they tried to flee a collapsing cloud of ash and gas towering 19 miles into the sky above their heads, curator Paul Roberts, head of Roman collections at the museum, said the emphasis would be on everyday life in the towns not death.”

And that’s what’s interesting for us as we turn to Romans and Corinthians.

To use your imagination to enter into the world of Romans and of Corinthians the best thing to do is to enter into the world of the Roman empire.

The people in Pompeii were just the same kind of people as the people in Rome.

And that’s what Peter Oakes explores in what to me is an exciting new commentary on Romans  “Reading Romans in Pompeii”  Paul’s letter at ground level.

Pompeii was in the words of that article ‘the larger town full of bars and brothels’

If you want a feel for the kind of extravagance, decadence, license of the world of Rome that is the backdrop for the first chapter of Romans some of the sites in Pompeii are a real eye-opener.  You make sense of the words.

If you want a grasp of what the ordinary people who are named in Romans 16 were like then you have their lives captured in a moment and revealed two millennia later in that exhibition

“Faces of the inhabitants will include an imposing bronze bust of a banker and moneylender who was also a freed slave, as up to half the population may have been.  A vivid wall painting portrays a baker, Terenitus Neo and his wif; his wife is nameless but as Neil MacGregor [the inspiration behind so many of the great exhibitions in London in recent years] remarked, she looks much the brighter of the two, standing slightly in front of him and holding a writing tablet – striking evidence of her literacy and status.”

Maybe not quite the surprise to see from Romans 16 the key part in leadership and service played by women like Phoebe and Priscilla.

The word that caught my eye is the word ‘status’ there.

Peter Oakes imagines a church meeting in the home of a craft-worker and asks what it would be like to read Romans 12.

Every home has its shrine and a temple won’t be far away – and makes its sacrifices – you need look no further than Chedworth up into the Cotswolds, Uley under the escacrpment or Lydney – and what Paul asks of People in Romans 12 is a living sacrifice – being prepared to give the whole of their lives –

Don’t go along with the pattern of this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Paul is challenging the people of this church to stand up and be counted, to stand out and be different – what is our relationship with the world around  us go along with the pattern or turn things upside down and inside out.

That’s where that little word ‘status’ comes in in the newspaper article.  Roman society was very conscious of status – and it was all built around a system of honour – Peter Oakes imagines 30 people meeting in a model craftworker’s house.

“The 30 people in the model house church stood in a status order that would be broadly agreed by them and by society as a whole.  There were subtleties and scope for limited differences of opinion, but there was a fairly clear scale running down from the wealthiest free-born male householder (unless someone else in the house church was particularly well born) to the lowest-level slave.  Free-born was above freed, which was above slave.  Male was above female.  Adult above child.  Wealthy was above poor.”

Paul cuts right through all of this in the most life-transforming of ways.

For,, through the gift that I have been given, I say to each one among you that you shouldn’t think more highly of yourself than you ought.  Instead you should assess soberly, as God has distributed to each an amount of faith.

Nothing about the honour system, the status system counts any more.  All that counts is the gift of faith.  That’s what so transforms and is so transforming.

Paul goes on to speak of the members of a body in that image we love so well – but we don’t appreciate how different it was – the different roles are not determined by status or honour, but by function what you do.  And we are to value each one for the gift they have – whatever status or honour they bear.

You can do exactly the same for the church in Corinth.

Indeed another recently published commentary that interestingly is among the chosen few Christian books regularly on the shelves at Waterstone’s – in Paul through Mediterranean Eyes, the Arab and Middle Eastern scholar, Kenneth E Bailey reads 1  Corinthians from the ancient world.  These are works that invite us to imagine ourselves into the world that day.

What do you see in that so-cosmopolitan city on a major trades route very much at the cross roads of the ancient world, Corinth – divisions, people going into groups.

Paul counters that by coming back to the same set of insights.

Church is a place where all sit around the table to eat of the Lord’s Supper – jew and gentile, man and woman, slave and free – all equal, all members of the one body of Christ – the tragedy in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 11 is that people have allowed status, honour, the old divisions to creep in when they are supposed to be sharing in the Lord’s Supper.  Paul warns fiercely against it – no we are all one  body.

Just the same picture – challenged in Christ to hold one another in high regard, each with different gifts.

And then one thing binds them all together … and that one thing is love.

Not just a great reading for a wedding – and, yes, we did use it yesterday – it comes for Paul at a key moment in one of his most powerful letters as it goes to the heart of what being the body of Christ is all about – without love there is nothing.

Faith, hope, love … the greatest of these is love.