Many of you might not be aware of all the things that the Government of Canada actually does for us, but there was one that astounded me when it was brought to my attention a couple of weeks ago. On the Government of Canada website there is actually a section labelled, How to Start Your Own Business. Now, I must admit that wouldn’t be the first place I would go to seek advice on how to start a business. But it was helpful and it was fascinating, and it was interesting in outlining some suggestions that I think we should ponder this morning.
First of all, always think about an everyday problem and how to solve it. That should be the first thing in a business. Then start with your own idea. Put together a business plan. Determine if you need financing. Put together an initial marketing plan. Build you infrastructure early. Use the Web as a resource. Make paying for your item convenient. I think that is a really smart one! And, purchase machines that help process the finances. Of course, all of these are fleshed out, and there is great advice that goes with them one-by-one.
As I read this, I thought, “You know, in many ways these things apply not only to starting a business, but to running your life.” I think there are things that were in there that maybe are very helpful for the Christian community to ponder. None of us are going, I think, to start up a church from nothing. We are here in a church. We have our building. We have our denomination. We have our ministerial team. We have over a hundred years of history and reputation. We have churches all over the city. It is not as if we are all starting out again to rebuild the church from nothing.
Just suppose we were actually starting again. It is not a bad question. In fact, it is something that maybe we should ponder from time-to-time. Not that we are going to start a new church necessarily, but it might help us realize what a church really is: that it might reshape and reform and renew a sense of our calling under God, that we go back to first things, and that those first things remind us of what is really important.
I thought, “How will we do this? Where would be our resource? We are not going to the Government of Canada website “How to Start a Church!” So, where do we go? We go back to the beginning and we reclaim and re-examine maybe a story or two of how the Church was formed in the first place and how the early congregations were created. What was it about those early Christian communities that were so engaging that the Gospel was moved from the confines of Jerusalem to what was known in those days as the uttermost parts of the earth in a matter of less than a century? How is it that the Church grew and developed the way it did?
To answer that I want to go back to one moment, to one congregation that was formed. At least, I think as we look at this congregation we really get a sense of maybe what a church should be and renew ourselves and our passion for what we believe in. Our passage this morning from the Book of Acts about the creation of a church, which was in the eyes of the Apostle Paul, one of the beautiful, most sincere, most caring congregations in early Christian-hood: the Church in Philippi. It became a strategically important church in the world. It became a place from where others went to help and to support and to nourish the wider Christian community. Philippi was in Paul’s heart.
What I want to look at is how did all of this develop? How did Philippi grow? What were its roots? What were the things that made it great right from the beginning? Well, I want to do this by asking a series of questions, the first of which is the how of Philippi. How did Philippi become the church it became? It is very obvious, and we are given a clue in the passage, that it was created by God himself. It wasn’t as if a group of people got together in Philippi and said, “Well, let’s just create a church.” On the contrary, there was a sense in which the Holy Spirit was already at work preparing the path for the church in Philippi.
It begins actually with Paul having a dream. In the dream, a man from Macedonia appears. The man says, “Come to Macedonia, come and share the Gospel in Macedonia.” Paul, always open to his dreams, which of course we should be, says, “This is what we should do.” So, along with Luke, who wrote the Book of Acts, they go to Philippi, because Philippi was the major city, the major centre in Macedonia.
Paul goes there and he expects to find the man that had been in the dream. But when he gets to Philippi, he is there a few days and he is astonished. There doesn’t appear to be a synagogue, and Paul always went to a synagogue whenever he visited a new town. There was no synagogue. Philippi was a pagan city and it is unknown to us and unclear from the text, but he goes to a riverside, and by a river he meets somebody. It is not a man, as his dream had suggested. It is a woman, a woman whose heart was going to be moved by Paul’s words.
She was already a believer, and Paul meets this woman, and the woman is actually not from Philippi but from Thyatira. Her name is Lydia. Paul sits down with Lydia, and he talks to her about Christ. All of sudden in a sense this church is created. This community comes into being. Her heart is moved. Paul had been taken there by the power of the Spirit in a dream and now something amazing was going to happen. All of this is what is known in theology as “prevenient grace” a term that was coined by Augustine and later dwelled upon by Wesley, which literally means “a grace that anticipates.”.
The grace of Christ was creating this church out of nothing. When Paul got there, there was no building, no men, no infrastructure, no money, no status, no existing religious community: there was nothing. In fact, there was some hostility towards religion in Philippi. Philippi and Philippians generally did not appreciate religious people. But God wanted a church in Philippi and that is how it came to be.
Where they gathered is critical. They gathered, we are told, on the riverside. There were no synagogues in Philippi, as I have said. Yet, a synagogue literally means “a gathering place” or “a gathering of people.” It does not in fact denote initially an actual building, but simply a place where people gathered. Both Philo and Josephus, two of the great ancient writers, suggested that synagogues in fact can appear in different places and at different times when people gather together for the worship of Yahweh, for the worship of God.
Paul through the power of the Spirit creates a synagogue on a riverbank. As he sits down with Lydia and her friends, and as a teacher sitting and talking to them about Jesus Christ and about his death and Resurrection, about the Good News, they are touched and they are moved by the very Spirit who called them there in the first place. In other words, the church is not a place; the church is the gathering of the fellowship of the kingdom. The church is not initiated by us as if it is our creation to do with as we please; it is the creation of the Holy Spirit and the power of that Spirit is the church’s power. When they sat down by the banks of the river, the Lord came to Paul and Lydia.
I have often thought about that, because I have always been a believer that while churches and buildings and institutions have their own importance and their own gifted grace, at times one of the things that we haven’t told people well enough is that no matter where they are, they can seek out fellowship and they can seek to find the presence of the Lord. I was thinking back to one of the most sensitive times of the year I suppose as we are approaching Mother’s Day in a couple of weeks, and because I am returning to Bermuda next weekend, I was thinking that the last time I left Bermuda, I left actually, physically, with my mother.
Then, I was thinking about the day before I performed my mother’s funeral, about twelve years ago, and I thought how difficult it was to do something like that. Now, I may have shared this with some of you individually, but one of the things that I decided to do the day before was to actually go through the service and the sermon. I went to the beach on the Northumberland Strait in Nova Scotia, and I stood there and I preached my mother’s eulogy and sermon. No one was there except for a couple of fish that were swimming in a pool that had come in after the high tide: that is all.
There was just the ocean, but God was there. The Holy Spirit was there. And after having preached to the sea, preaching in the church twenty-four hours later seemed easy, and there was peace. The Lord calls his Church to be wherever He is. There is no place that is not the Lord’s! There is no constraint upon the power of the Holy Spirit to move. I think that riverside encounter between Paul and Lydia is an example of that dynamic, powerful faith that is not just built around buildings or institutions or creeds or denominations, but is built upon a loving engagement and relationship with the Lord.
It was Macedonia that became the beneficiary of that encounter, which brings us to “the Who?” Who was there when the church in Philippi was created? Well, Paul as we know, but Lydia, who we know little about. Lydia must have been a remarkable woman. Clearly she owned a business. She was an anomaly in her time. She owned a business that sold purple material. Purple material was the material of royalty and the aristocracy. It denotes power and prestige. Lydia must have had that.
Lydia would have met with princes and kings and she would have met with the leaders of society in Philippi if she sold purple garments. Lydia had her own home. We know that, because that became the church after the riverbank, when she invited Paul back to her home and there they had fellowship. It was Lydia, who unlike Dorcas, who we looked at last week and was poor and oppressed. Lydia clearly must have had some standing in society but she was moved by the power of the Spirit as Paul talked with her about Jesus. Lydia became one of the founders of the church in Philippi. How the arguments that women should not be in positions of leadership within the Church! How utterly erroneous! Look at Philippi! There was Lydia, at the very beginning, even surprising Paul with her grace!
The “What” of this is important too. The church in Philippi was created to be more than just a single gathering of a few people by a riverside. It became the launching pad for the whole mission to Asia Minor and to Europe. Philippi became a crossroads, a place that people came to and from. Known for its promise, known for its ideas, Philippi became a centre.
It became the launching pad for the extension of the Gospel, and one of the reasons why Luke goes to such depths to explain the importance of Philippi is because he knew that in fact from Jerusalem to Rome the Gospel must go – but it went through Philippi. Philippi became the place where the people from Jerusalem in need of money received it. When Paul had a mission he needed support and it was Philippi that gave it. When he needed comfort from knowing that a congregation was working well, he talked in beloved terms about Philippi. From that moment on a riverbank with Lydia, the Church continued to grow and expand.
It seems to me that every gathering of a congregation, every group of people that adhere, never does it just for themselves; they gather for the world. They gather for generations to come. They gather for the expansion of the Gospel, not just the edification of themselves. Philippi became that centre. But, why is it important? It is because, more than any other of the churches that we know of, it was founded on prayer and contemplation. On that riverbank, the prayers of Paul to have the Gospel expanded were listened to. And Lydia, whatever may have drawn her there, had her prayers answered when she heard what Paul said about the Gospel.
The Church is always a place of prayer. It is first and foremost a body of prayer. It is that very power of prayer that creates and forms that congregation, without that prayer there is no power, there is no fellowship. Prayer and contemplation go hand-in-hand with action and with compassion. We are told that Lydia was someone who was generous, someone who was kind. Her contemplation and her compassion went hand-in-hand. In Philippi, the church became an extension of the passion that the Spirit had put within her.
Churches, synagogues, places of worship will take on the character of the people who attend them. If the people who are part of them are people of prayer, then the congregation and the gathering will be a place that takes on that characteristic, and if it is not, it will reflect that. And so, as a reminder to all of us, be people of contemplation and prayer but be people of action and compassion as a result of that prayer.
There is also another lesson in this: we live in a very mobile world. I am always astounded every time some new technology comes out that requires my knowledge and, sometimes it seems, even my devotion. You should be doing this. You should have this account. You should Tweet on NAV and Blog on the other, and you should be on Facebook and LinkedIn, and I don’t know what the next thing is, but I have got to be on it. It is that mobile world we are in where people are connecting in many different ways. You can fight it all you want, but the fact of the matter is, it’s the way the world is going.
I think one of the things that I would say to that Blogosphere world, to the world that is constantly mobile, is that no matter where you are and no matter what you are doing, you need to take time for God. You need to have a time for contemplation and prayer and you need to focus on that. Have you noticed in this great story of the Philippian church, Paul just didn’t go to the riverbank and say, “Here’s the Church!” Rather, he had an encounter with Lydia and others in Philippi and in that encounter, in that relationship, the Holy Spirit was at work.
I say to those who are mobile, those who access us by the Web, those who listen on the radio, those who go to their podcasts, those who call on their cell phones or their IPads, I say you need also the fellowship and the bond and the relationship with others in the faith. You don’t live a solitary Christian life, you live a life in relationship in a synagogue, a gathering, and that is why churches like this are important. It is not because they are an end in themselves; they are means of bringing the saints together to support and nurture and love and care for one another. And in the midst of that interchange and all those prayers, the Holy Spirit is at work.
I think we have much to learn from Philippi. I think that encounter between Paul and a Macedonian woman was meant to happen. And, because of that, God even speaks to us from the two of them who, in contemplation and prayer, sat by a riverside and were moved by the Lord Jesus Christ. May we be so moved! Amen.