Did you ever wonder exactly why early Christians got in trouble so much?
Most Jews were made very angry by Christians. They barred them from synagogue worship, they sometimes whipped them and even murdered them as blasphemers, and they also did what they could to get Christians in trouble with the Romans. What do you suppose made the Jews so angry?
And what was it about the Christians that made the Romans so nervous? They were more or less constantly hounding them, arresting them, torturing them and even killing them.
In the early years of Christianity, the religion was officially pacifist. Soldiers, if they wanted to be Christian, had to resign from soldiering. You couldn't even hold office in the Roman government because the government engaged in warfare and a violent system of punishment for crime. The point here is that Christians were utterly unarmed and were strictly constrained from doing violence for any reason. What therefore was threatening about them?
We know that many Christians came together to live in community. We know all of them that were wealthy voluntarily liquidated much of their property and contributed it to the community to be redistributed. We know that the church sought out and supported widows and orphans, people too old or too young to work and who were not being cared for by their families.
We know these communities had rich worship and prayer lives and that from the very beginning they celebrated baptism and the Lord's Supper. We know they didn't have buildings, but met in people's homes. We know they were egalitarian, mixing many ethnic groups and classes together, and empowering leadership regardless of ethnicity or gender or class, at least until late in Paul's life, perhaps even later, when women's equality was again brought into question.
We know that evangelists, deacons and apostles travelled far and wide and that they performed miracles not unlike the ones Jesus had done before the resurrection. They healed the sick, raised the dead, fed multitudes, travelled supernaturally, stilled storms, and cast out spirits and demons that possessed people.
What is it in any of this that might have caused the Romans or the Jews so much anxiety?
It appears in Acts that the Jewish authorities were really angry that the Christians kept saying that Jesus wasn't dead, even though everyone had seen him get crucified on Good Friday. The Jewish authorities kept telling the Christians to stop saying that, but the Christians wouldn't listen. The reason the Christians gave for bucking the Jewish authorities? They had to obey God rather than people. God apparently had commanded them to announce that Jesus was alive, and to keep announcing it.
Why was this so upsetting?
In Acts, it appears that there were economic consequences to this message. Paul healed the slave girl with the demon and deprived her owners of the rich income she brought. Paul got everyone to denounce idols and the city's lucrative idol factories died for want of customers.
But this wasn't all. In this same letter of Paul to the Thessalonians we heard this morning, Paul goes to some length speaking about the "man of lawlessness," which modern Christians maybe think of as the devil. But many of us believe it much more likely that Paul was talking about the emperor of Rome.
A very small percentage of the people living under the Roman Empire lived well. That being said, there were a lot of people living under the Roman Empire. So that small percentage of wealthy people made up a pretty big number. Merchants, politicians, officers in the military, tax collectors, local royalty, priests of various religious sects, these were the people who had the resources to live what must have been pretty delightful lives. But the vast majority of peoples living under the Romans lived miserable, short and desperate lives, because the fruits of their labor and toil mostly went to the delightful lives of the relatively few.
The promise of Isaiah, that laborers would not have to give up the fruits of their labors to oppressors, came to pass, but in a strange and miraculous way.
The Christian communities, at least at the beginning, really seemed to bring about justice. The few who were well-to-do used their resources to re-endow those who had been robbed of theirs. We have evidence also in Paul's letters that resources also flowed from well-to-do congregations to those suffering want.
Now it's important here to recognize that there is no evidence that the Christians had any agenda to get the Romans to adopt the Christian way of life. They certainly were not a political party. But it was obvious to many of the poor just whose side the Christians were on. And I suspect it was obvious to the Romans as well.
It's also obvious that then as now, some folks sought to take advantage of the Christians. They probably were pretending to be teachers like Paul and demanding that they be taken care of. We think this because Paul calls them "busybodies," presumably because they were sticking their noses in everyone's business instead of actually preaching and teaching the gospel. Jesus warns about them in his sermon today, saying that many will come claiming to be him, but not to believe them. Paul doesn't deny that apostles and teachers should be cared for by the congregation, but he has the number of those idlers who were using the churches as a means to an easy life.
The Romans and their local minions were constantly pouring out propaganda to the poor about how Roman exploitation of the poor was actually good for everyone, and every once in a while the Romans would stage big impressive entertainments and pass out free bread to convince the poor they actually were taking care of them. It was very important for the Romans and the Jews who were getting rich and powerful under Roman rule that the poor never wake up to their majority, and never recognize what was really being done to them.
The Christians were gaining supporters for themselves from among the poor, who were very very many, and these poor people, because of the concrete generosity of the church, began to believe in Jesus and not in Herod or Caesar or the rest of the ruling class, who were rather few, comparatively speaking.
And so it was that Christians were turning the world upside down. Making a new earth is a tumultuous and rowdy business. When God raised Jesus from the dead, God threw down a glove. God announced in Jesus that God's kingdom was henceforth impossible to keep out, impossible to knock down, impossible to reject, no matter how powerful the human kingdom that tries to knock it down, keep it out, or reject it.
Philippi is a warm and lovable bunch of people. Almost all of them are involved in the community, doing all kinds of loving service. Indeed, many of our members are greatly admired and loved by their neighbors.
What, I wonder, might we do to get in trouble?
Amen.
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