Morning prayers during Holy Week 2020

Morning prayers during Holy Week 2020

Dr. Thomas Robinson delivers our Palm Sunday Message

Morning prayers during Holy Week 2020

Kyle Swann preaches a message from the Gospel of John.

What does it mean to be confined as a Christian? This week Tom draws a parallel from Paul's time under house arrest and the current social distancing that we are all experiencing.

A special message from Tom Robinson and the Manhattan Church of Christ regarding Covid-19.

Reading from a Distance – to Understand and Follow

Paul writes to Timothy in c. 67 after 2 yrs house-arrest in Rome, travel to Spain and back to Aegean area. After Rome’s fire in 64, Nero’s slaughter of Christians in Rome, made it illegal to be a Christian in the Roman empire. Paul urges them to stay engaged by Faith-Gospel but to pray for emperor and for quiet life with honor. Christians vulnerable to accusation and execution.

We read from our modern post-Christendom, individualism, freedom, more ignored than physically endangered. Our tradition often reads this text as a check-list of laws for church elders.

Challenges in crossing centuries: Givens of Greco-Roman society (1) Patriarchy in law (2) Honor- shame culture based in evaluation of others, (3) Patronage, (4) Polytheism. Christian faith was threatened on all these fronts. People breathed this given reality as they organized life.

Why to Timothy and Titus, who’ve work with Paul 15+ yrs in difficult situations. Don’t they know? Why should overseers be married? Paul earlier (1 Cor 7) urged staying unmarried, like himself. Why so much about accusation, conflict, honor and so little about spiritual gifts as earlier. Why must pagans speak well of the overseer? Who is the “accuser” (diabolos, devil, human)?

To understand the language, it helps to understand what’s at stake, what Paul is trying to do. Paul knows Timothy and Titus know the spiritual gifts needed for leadership (Rm 12, 1Cor 12...). He focuses on particular needs for leadership in the troubled churches in Ephesus and Crete.

They face the new vulnerability to accusation, prison, execution. They face groups who want the assembly to withdraw into a private group of religious speculation and myth. They need leaders of faith who appear to an outside world as honorable members of society: husbands, family honor, not vulnerable to accusation or vice, praised by pagans, able to protect the community.

What about women? Women had spiritual gifts as men did. But women were always by law under a man’s authority: father, husband. The society considered it shameful for a woman to lead or even speak. But a widow was no longer under a man’s authority. Thus we watch the adoption under pressure of the role of “elder” widows (60+) with lists of qualification for that time.

The pattern of 1 Timothy and Titus did not survive long in early Christianity. Through the 2nd century the Patriarchal structure of Roman society pushed out women, enforced one overseer.

Embodying the Gospel in Day by Day Community Life

How do we follow Paul and follow the scripture. We look at the variety and diversity of structures of community life in the NT. We watch Paul’s stress on Spiritual gifts. We watch how he takes very seriously the context and possibilities of the community in their society and guides them to meet the challenges, threats, opportunities open to them. We do in our time as they did.

If we simply enforce in our day their outcomes in the Roman empire (patriarchy, honor/shame) we undermine the very work that Paul is doing in making sure the Gospel is heard by outsiders.

Praying for a Quiet, Active Life Under a Threatening Empire.

Reading scripture challenges our imagination and empathy. Or does it? Is Paul writing to his co-worker Timothy and instructing him by stating the ideal arrangements of the church?

Nero began persecution of Christians in Rome after fire. No systematic official persecution. But being a Christian was illegal and anyone could bring accusation. Permission to kill. Hard vulnerability. What does a community do? Still pray for the emperor? Withdraw from public life? How can we fulfill our principal mission? How can we live by the Gospel in a world of honor and shame.

There was also the vivid danger of a Heresy that focused on myths and speculation instead of Faith. Semi-Gnostic withdrawal: We are those who know our Divine inner reality. The physical is corrupt. Avoid marriage and giving birth to more flesh. Women, young widows were especially attracted.

Men, fairly simple. Pray for emperor and quiet life. But stay quiet: Don’t show anger, dispute.

Texts Written for One Context, Read in a Changed Situation

What about women? Our translation traditions from KJV on reflect a context in which women did not participate in leadership or public worship. Church became fully in concert with patriarchal structure of culture. But that patriarchal structure was not from Jesus but from Greece and Rome. Women were always by law under the control and command of a man. Any break was dangerous as a slave rebellion and was considered shameful.

Paul is not describing the ideal Christian community but giving important guidance so that the church can survive and fulfill its mission under a new, generalized, mortal threat. And challenged by growing theology that sacrificed the mission for safety of withdrawal. He urges the church to fit in with the society in every visible way that doesn’t destroy their faith and mission. Don’t try to get yourself killed. Pray for the tranquility to live “under the radar” of the threatening empire.

Women Participating in a World that Believes that They’re Shameful.

Christians like Paul had to rank what was most important. Proclaim the Gospel – public. Use of Gifts of the Spirit. Now Rome gave permission to have Christians killed.

Paul assumes that women will pray. But choose noble deeds as adornment, not display that calls attention to itself – be like a respectable Roman! Women don’t stay uneducated, but must learn. Do it without display, quietly. In public assemblies, Paul urges following Roman sensibilities, to avoid accusation of disgrace. But Paul’s guidance takes a strange turn: Adam and Eve. Saved by bearing children? What’s going on. Heresy? Paul is not advocating sin without deception, but reflecting those most attracted to “Speculations” in the community. “Childbearing” seems a code-word for rejecting the heresy that forbids marriage and denigrates the physical.

Paul has evaluated the context in which the church lives and gives his guidance. Following Paul’s teaching today is not by enforcing what the community had to do under hard persecution by Rome, but rather to evaluate the possibilities of our own society and fulfill our mission and the gifts of the Holy Spirit to the fullest extent possible.

Being True to the Gospel under Powerful Threats.

Reading scripture challenges our imagination and empathy, to put ourselves back in the situation of the writer and readers and hear the words as they heard them. Scripture is more than that, but it begins there. This text can seem bland or obsequious when read from a comfortable setting in modern times. But it is a text that affirms God’s heart expressed in worship in a time of vast uncertainty and threat, both from powers and divergent teaching.

Put yourself in Ephesus, Roman provincial capital, about 3 years after Nero killed Christians in Rome after a great fire. [Tacitus] Things had been hard, but now the empire has given permission to denounce Christians and execute them. Some want to turn inward to become a group that doesn’t engage the world but focuses on special knowledge, speculation, and myth.

Paul challenges Timothy to guide the community in prayer precisely for their fiercest enemies.

What does it mean to Pray for All People and for the Emperor?

Rome’s empire and politics were highly stratified. Christian communities had no ordinary power. They were too different to be incorporated into Rome’s “tolerant” paganism. But they could have railed against it. Instead, Paul draws on Jesus’ teaching to urge God’s inclusive vision.

The emperor is not God but simply one of “all people” who are the focus of God’s love. Praying for the emperor is not approving of him, but saying that he’s responsible under God.

The prayer is for an unthreatened life that allows the community to bring God’s desire for all people to greater fulfillment. Paul knows how much damage persecution can do. He wants no withdrawn, isolated community, but simply to work below the radar of threatening powers. It’s there that the non-elite, inclusive community can embody God’s purpose with dignity.

From Knowing God to Living under the Empire

Though the community knows that they are vulnerable and outside the structures of power, they also know the One God who relativizes even the most obvious claims to human rule. The one God loves all humans –the emperor is just one – and is transforming people by his wholly counter-intuitive, counter-cultural intervention. God is Simple, One and Profound.

Only God can also be mediator between God’s realm and that of creatures. He has done that in Jesus who gave himself as Human and God to deliver humans from their enslavement. Both withdrawal into isolation and trembling before power fall away. A realization of God’s truth at the center is “Faith” – wholehearted commitment to that God and the world he loves.