So, what’s with all the names, Paul? You wrote in 2 Tim 3:16 that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” OK, so maybe you weren’t totally aware that you were writing scripture (although you hint at it in places) but God knew he was going to use these letters for at least the next few thousand years. Don’t you think we could have done without all the friendly “hellos” to a long list of people we don’t know and we’ll never meet this side of heaven?
I think if we’re honest we’ve all thought things like that about the lists in scripture. Whether it’s the genealogies in Genesis, or the long census lists in the book of Numbers, or the “begats” at the beginning of Matthew. We wonder what in the world this is here for.
That’s a good question, and one that we need to ask. If we believe that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” then we need to take this piece of scripture as seriously as we would any other. It’s God’s word.
This is the eighth, and final, message in the series, “Who are we and what are we doing here?” We started out at the beginning of the Bible in Genesis, thinking about what it means to be created as God’s children in God’s world, children who have rebelled, but still have been chosen to be a blessing to others. Then we talked about what the community of believers should look like, as people who are thankful, holy and who care about the world. And last week we had a very theological sermon about being the church of God.
The New Testament is unique as a religious book because it’s mostly letters. Twenty of them! Some longer. Some shorter. They address all kinds of issues, but not just in theory. They address issues in the context of the lives of real people.
[Marilyn and I fell in love while we were on an outreach team in Athens during the Spring of 1980. We went on our first date to Corinth, where Paul wrote this letter, along with a couple of hundred other YWAMers. That summer we both went back to our home countries, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and we wrote to each other. We didn’t write to argue about some theological issues. We didn’t write to prove a point or develop a philosophy. We wrote because we knew there was a real, live, flesh and blood person at the other end that we cared about.]
That’s something we have to remember about the New Testament letters. They’re real letters to real people in real churches.
None of the texts of other major religions are rooted in history in the way that the New Testament letters are. (I’m not being disrespectful here. Hindus and Buddhists don’t believe that history really exists anyway. Along with everything else in this world it’s all Maya, an illusion.) But this letter reflects a particular time in the life of a particular person, Paul.
It’s some time on 56 or 57 AD. Paul is on his way back to Jerusalem with money he has collected for relief of the famine in Judea. Corinth is his last stop before he heads East by ship. (As it turned out he didn’t take a ship because there was a plot to kill him.) While he’s in Corinth he hears that Phoebe is leaving soon for Rome, probably on business. He plans to visit Rome as soon as he’s done in Jerusalem and so he writes a letter to the church there, outlining what his theology is and suggesting that they might want to partner with him in ministry as he heads on to Spain to preach there.
Romans is a missionary support letter!!
Unlike many other faiths, Christianity must be rooted in the here and now, expressed through the lives of believers. It isn’t a philosophy that we can ascribe to and theorise about. It isn’t even a personal path to salvation. It’s a living faith that we need to be live out in a community of believers if we are going to be true to our roots.
Last week we talked about “The Church of God”, a very conceptual way of looking at the church. That needs to be balanced by the realisation that the church is always a concrete reality of people in relationship.
Let’s take a short look at some of those people from the first century. As we do, we can get a little snapshot of life in the early church, and that’s important because who we are as the church today has to grow out of our understanding of the New Testament church. If it doesn’t, then we aren’t really being the church.
The first two people Paul mentions in his list of people are women! Now there’s a surprise! Paul often accused of being a misogynist, but here he is doing something very much against the culture of his day, greeting women, first!
He doesn’t actually greet Phoebe. He commends her.
Phoebe is described as a diakonos of the church at Cenchrae. The word basically means “servant”, and that’s how the NIV translates it in most cases, except for two where it is clearly talking about the qualifications for the office of deacon. In those cases it translates it as “deacon”. The King James Version goes the other way. It almost always translates it as “minister”, except when it is clearly talking about people who serve at table and here, where it refers to a woman. The New Revised Standard comes right out and calls her “a deacon of the church at Cenchrae”.
I can’t see any reason not to translate it that way unless you come to the text with a prejudice against women in leadership. In this case at least, it would seem that it isn’t Paul who has a problem with women in leadership, as much as his translators.
[Delivering letters in Afghanistan and Pakistan
No mail service
If you’re going that way… Kabul, Delhi, Shiraz
Not just delivering but explaining and expanding]
Phoebe is apparently the courier who carried the letter. She may have been travelling on business, like Lydia in Philippi, and the word used to refer to her implies that she may have been quite wealthy. When she arrived in Rome she would have read the letter to the assembled church and answered questions to clarify anything that was unclear.
The second person mentioned is Priscilla.
Priscilla, along with her husband Aquilla, were close friends of Paul. They were in the same business, tent-making and leather goods, they were fellow Jews, and they worked together in church planting and development. They were originally from Rome but had been forced to leave along with other Jews. Like Paul they travelled a lot and in the New Testament they turn up in Corinth, Ephesus and Rome.
Paul says they risked their lives for him. He’s probably referring to the events in Acts 18, in Ephesus, where they took Paul into their home and worked with him even though the Jews in the city were trying to kill him. They were Jews themselves but they stood against their own people to defend the gospel. As a result they won the love and respect of the gentile churches.
What is unusual is that Priscilla is usually named first in the letters of the New Testament. Once again, this is not the norm for that time and culture. Some suggest that she was a Roman woman of higher rank than her husband, or that she was the more public minister of the two, in the same way that people today may know the names of Elizabeth Eliot, Joy Dawson or Kay Arthur but not of their husbands. We don’t know, and it isn’t really worth our while to guess, but these two women at the head of this list give us insight into the place of women in real churches in the first century. Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchrea, and Priscilla, a fellow worker with Paul in ministry.
There are other women in the list too, some are mentioned as workers in the Lord, others just as friends. Again, this is not a normal way to act in that time and culture. Women were basically invisible. But Paul acts on his belief that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. This list includes greetings to people who fit into all of those categories; Jewish and Greek women, Greek slaves, Greek and Jewish men. In the church there is no room for distinctions based on race, class or gender. We are all equal in Christ.
Paul says to “Greet also the church that meets at their house.”
Wherever Priscilla and Aquilla were, they seem to have had a church in their house. Paul wrote the first letter to the Corinthians while he was in Ephesus. He sends the church in Corinth greetings from Priscilla and Aquilla and from the church that meets in their home. Likewise when he’s writing from Corinth to Rome, he sends greetings himself to Prsicilla and Aquila and to the church meeting in their house there in Rome.
It’s really important that we recognise that Paul and the other Christians in the New Testament had no idea of Christians living apart from fellowship in a church. There were no lone ranger believers. Likewise, although he talks about the “church of God” it’s never as some sort of theoretical concept. He talks, for instance, about the church of God at Corinth, or Ephesus. Even more precisely he talks about the church that meets at Priscilla and Aquila’s house. The church may be the mystical body of Christ, but it always has a very physical address. Like 120 Wentworth North, at Cannon.
It was the same in Corinth. In verse 23 Paul writes, “Gaius, whose hospitality I and the whole church here enjoy, sends you his greetings.” Gaius probably had a church meeting in his home. And it’s the same in many parts of the world today, especially where the church is expanding. Home cell groups are the engines of church growth.
[Marilyn and I have been married 23 years, and for much of that time we’ve had Bible studies in our home. In Pakistan, we had full-blown Persian church services in our home, complete with baptisms in the bathtub.]
If any of you ever want to start a home study group, please come and see me. Some pastors are afraid that home cell groups will get out of hand. I'm not a control freak. I'd love to see some home cell groups get out of hand, and grow and multiply. That’s how some of the biggest churches in the world have grown, from First Assembly of God in Seoul, Korea to Saddleback and Willowcreek in the States.
I won’t go through all the people in Paul’s list. It’s possible that these are all the people he knows in Rome. He had never been there. When he wrote to other churches, which he had founded, he only mentioned a few people, usually the leaders, because he knew so many. The only people he knew in Rome were people he had met somewhere else.
[I’ve never been to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, or Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, but I know a number of people in both cities. I either met them when we were working together in Pakistan, or I’ve met them at conferences. If I were to write a letter, I could easily greet every single person I know in those cities.]
That’s probably what Paul is doing here, and it links well into the last verse I want to focus on. In verse 7 Paul writes, “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.”
Here we have another married couple who have been in ministry with Paul, and in prison with him. When the NIV says they are his relatives, it means that they are fellow Jews, not immediate family.
Paul says they’re outstanding among the apostles. Perhaps you think that’s strange. Aren’t the apostles Peter, James, John, Matthew, and those other guys whose names we can never remember, along with Paul? If you thought that, then you’re not unusual. We’ve tended to limit the term “apostle” to the founding members of the church, and we’re a bit wary of anybody that claims to be an apostle today.
That’s not the way Paul saw it. Andronicus and Junia were apostles because, like Paul, they had been sent out to do the Lord’s work. The New Testament isn’t really bothered with titles, only with functions. Is someone serving the church in a leadership role? Then recognise them as a deacon. Their gender isn’t an issue. Has someone been recognised as having gifts in starting new churches or helping them to grow? Then they’re an apostle. It’s the same word as missionary. It just means someone who is sent.
When I started working on this sermon I had planned it to be a practical counterbalance to the theological one last week. I didn’t expect to spend so much time on controversial issues like women in leadership, but that’s where the text took us.
In conclusion I want us to reflect on the picture we get of the church and to ask ourselves if we match up to it. Are we a church that makes room for everybody to exercise their gifts, regardless of gender, race or social status? Are we a church that is comfortable with spreading ministry out into the homes of the community, or do we require the community to come to us in our building? Are we a church that is producing people who are called to take the gospel to places where no-one has heard it?
These people in this list were real people, in real communities, living out a life of faith. The New Testament knows of no other way to be a Christian but as part of one of God’s communities called churches. This is who we are and what we are doing here. God’s people, living out all the things we’ve talked about on other Sundays in this series; holiness, grace, care, blessing, here and now in this place, at the corner of Wentworth and Cannon.