Turning the world upside down

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church  

21 April 2024

Acts 17.1-9
1Thessalonians 1.1-10
 
For our sermon today, I have chosen the title, "turning the world upside down,"
            a concept that, as we will discover, has roots in the early days of Christianity
            but which remains as relevant as ever in our modern times.
 
As we navigate a world that often feels tumultuous
            and fraught with uncertainty,
we can find inspiration in the bold and courageous acts
            of those who have dared to challenge the status quo
            and bring about meaningful change.
 
When we think of individuals who turned the world upside down,
            names like Martin Luther King Jr., Malala Yousafzai,
            and Greta Thunberg may come to mind.
 
But in our everyday lives, we are faced with moments
            where we must choose between complacency and action.
 
We are called to draw on our faith and the teachings of Christ
            to shape our responses to these challenges.
 
As we explore this idea of "turning the world upside down,"
            let us consider how we can embrace our calling
            to be agents of transformation in our communities and beyond.
 
Over the next few minutes, we will delve into scripture,
            reflect on the wisdom of spiritual leaders,
            and look to the world around us for guidance.
 
My hope is that by the end of this sermon,
            we will all leave here feeling inspired and empowered
            to turn our own corners of the world upside down
            with love, compassion, and a deep commitment to justice.
 
But let’s be realistic, turning the world upside down
            is neither comfortable nor easy;
rather, it is threatening, and capable of triggering disproportionate responses,
            both individually and societally.
 
Just as Paul, Jason, and the others in Thessalonica
            discovered for themselves in the middle of the first century.
 
The Narrative Lectionary takes us this week
            into the world of the early Christian
            church-planting and missionary movement,
and we encounter these early pioneers proclaiming the gospel of Christ
            and discovering to their cost
                        that even the simple statement that ‘Jesus is Lord’,
                        is actually a world-shaking utterance.
 
To understand this we need a bit of context.
 
Thessalonica was a major port city
            in what is now northern mainland Greece,
and in the first century
            it was the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia.
 
Everything about the city, its religious, political, and social life
            was built around the mythology and ideology of the Roman empire.
 
Its citizens worshipped the Emperor alongside the other Roman gods;
            they benefitted from the pax Romana, the ‘peace of Rome’,
            with the Roman army permanently garrisoned in the town;
and its economic and social life
            revolved around the trade from its prosperous port
            trading with the far flung territories of the empire.
 
If you were fortunate enough to a citizen of Thessalonica,
            you were part of a carefully constructed synthesis
            of religion, politics, and economics.
 
And as Paul, Silas and Jason were about to discover,
            you mess with that at your peril!
 
As with other ancient cities from that time,
            there was a small local Jewish population,
            with a synagogue for Sabbath worship.
 
The Romans typically allowed Jews in such situations
            some measure of freedom of religion,
and Paul often started with the synagogue
            when he arrived in a new city to plant a church there.
 
But what is unusual about Thessalonica
            is that there also appears to be a large number of non-Jews
            who were nonetheless attracted to the Jewish faith.
 
Acts calls them ‘devout Greeks’ in v.4 of our reading.
 
What happens next in the story
            is that whilst Paul has limited success
                        in converting the Jews in the synagogue to believing in Jesus,
            a large number of these devout Greeks joined him.
 
It makes a kind of sense
            - these are people who want to follow the Jewish God,
            but can’t fully do so because they are not ethnically Jewish.
 
So when this Greek-speaking Jewish preacher called Paul comes along
            saying that the God of Israel
                        has reached out beyond the ethnic Jews
            to also include Gentiles
                        through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
            you can see why they would be attracted to his teaching.
 
However, from the perspective of Romans,
            this is a potentially dangerous situation.
 
The Jews were granted toleration in part because
            they were a non-proselytising people:
            they didn’t seek to make converts of the Gentiles.
 
But here we have a dangerous breakaway sect from Judaism
            which is aggressively conversionist in its ideology;
                        seeking converts not just from within Judaism
                        but from the Gentile world too.
 
And the problem is that converting to the worship of Jesus as Lord
            is not just a religious commitment;
            it has other far reaching ramifications too.
 
We’ve already heard how religion, politics, and economics
            were inextricably interwoven in the society of Thessalonica,
and how to change just one aspect of that
            was to risk unravelling the whole thing.
 
The risk here, posed by Paul and Silas’s preaching,
            is that if people started worshipping Jesus as Lord,
            they might stop worshipping the Emperor as Lord,
and then the Roman armies would have to step in,
            and the trade that hinged on the Empire would the threatened,
and before you knew it the whole of society was unravelling.
 
It’s no wonder that the disgruntled Jews from the synagogue
            joined with gentiles from the city
            to hunt down Paul’s associates to try and silence them:
 
They were turning the world upside down,
            politically, socially, economically, and religiously.
 
And so we have this show-trial of Jason and his friends,
            who have to pay bail to get their freedom back;
a trial intended as a stark warning of what will happen
            to those who similarly threaten the status quo of the empire.
 
But the thing is, Paul and his friends wouldn’t be silenced.
 
Even after leaving Thessalonica, Paul wrote back to them
            to encourage those Christians still in the city
            in the face of their ongoing experience of conflict.
 
Because from Paul’s perspective,
            silence wasn’t an option.
 
He looked around him at the Roman Empire,
            and saw not a sweet system of mutual benefit,
but a world dominated by an evil systemic power,
            with humanity and creation together subjected
            to the forces of violence and death.
 
For Paul, the proclamation of Jesus as Lord
            was not simply a personal message of individual salvation,
it was rather a message of good news for all people,
            for society, for the whole world…
and that was a message he couldn’t allow to be silenced.
 
And here’s the thing.
 
We are the heirs of that gospel of good news for all people,
            and we too are called to share a message
            that still has the capacity to turn the world upside down.
 
And like Paul, and Jason, and the others in Thessalonica,
            we too will discover that when we proclaim that message
            we will also face opposition.
 
Taking a stand against the idols of our age is not an easy thing to do,
            and you don’t turn the world upside down
            without rattling a few cages.
 
Bloomsbury has faced opposition over the years
            for certain stands we’ve taken and continue to take,
            and this is to be expected.
 
However, I wonder if we can hear Paul speaking to us
            through these ancient texts,
encouraging us, like he encouraged the Thessalonians,
            to persevere, to keep the faith,
            to continue in acts of radical courageous welcome,
                        and in caring for others and looking out for them.
 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and Nazi resistor,
            who was murdered by the Nazis on 9 April, 1945
            for his stand against Hitler and The Third Reich,
lamented how easily the church
            can become complicit with power and nationalism.
 
He said:
 
“Christianity has adjusted itself much too easily to the worship of power.
            It should give more offence, more shock to the world, than it is doing.
Christianity should . . . take a much more definite stand for the weak
            than to consider the potential moral right of the strong.”
                                                                                    London, 402-3[1]
 
Whether we are challenging the narratives of nationalism
            that lend legitimacy to state-sanctioned violence,
or the cultures of religious exclusion
            that lead some to think themselves unworthy of God’s love and acceptance,
or the unspoken collusions of class
            that declare some lives less worthy than others,
the proclamation of Jesus as Lord
            remains as politically, economically, and socially disruptive
            as it ever was in the first century.
 
So we will continue to declare the Kingdom of God
            over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
 
Not because we are a Christian country,
            but because Christ cares for all those who live in this country,
            and because we believe that Jesus is Lord.
 
We will continue to declare that God is love and that in God is no violence at all,
            which means that all violence is evil,
            whatever justification people may try to marshal for it.
 
We will continue to declare that all are welcome in God’s house,
            because Christ died for all, regardless of their ethnicity, social status,
            gender, sexuality, or any other marker of our common humanity.
 
And we will continue to hold the powers that be in our world to account
            whenever they place the values of the market
            over the value of human life;
we will continue to resist the myths of nationalism and British exceptionalism
            when they whisper to our self-interest,
                        suggesting that the sacrifice of the vulnerable
                        is a price worth paying for long term financial gain.
 
We are called to be the community we have been shaped to be,
            a community who love each other, look out for each other,
                        who proclaim together that Jesus is Lord of the whole earth;
            so challenging those narratives of violence, scapegoating, and fear
                        that keep people silent and subservient to the forces of domination.
 
At the end of the day, for our faith to have meaning for us,
            it has to take shape in the world,
            and that shape will be world-transforming.
 
We have a call to participate in the remaking of society,
            through partnerships such as London Citizens,
as we echo in our lives the call of Jesus to love our neighbours.
 
From the Magnificat of Jesus’ mother Mary,
            singing that through her son the world would be transformed,
the theme of reversal runs through the Christian gospel.
 
And we have a message of good news for those who have no hope,
            a message of life for those who live in fear of death,
            a message of love for those who hate either themselves or others.
 
And such a message is always a challenge to those powers
            that would keep things as they are.
 
We, like Paul, and Jason, and Silas, and Silvanus, and Timothy,
            and all the unnamed women who stood with them,
are called to seize the courage of our convictions
            and play our part in turning the world upside down.

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[1] https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/30/truth-must-rise-church-silence-over-covid-19/