Love Abounding
A Sermon At America's 250th
I was honored to preach this weekend at Watermark Tampa, where Tommy Preson Phillips is teaching through Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Here are a few thoughts from the text, Philippians 1:3-11, set against the backdrop of Christian witness in the face of Christian nationalisms.
The Gospel Goes West
The church in Philippi marked Paul’s first venture into Europe, into the West.1 It’s not a stretch to call Philippi the “first church in the west.”
This matters. All around us talk of “saving Western civilization” tends to enlist a form of imperial “western” Christianity in its service—as it has from the earliest centuries through colonization to today. But there are always exceptions.
Reexamining how the gospel first came to Philippi highlights this contrast between the church in the west and the—more formal— “Church of the West.” In our American context, and this week’s 250th anniversary of American independence, we stand to ask: will Christians be a church in America, or the “Church of America”? The differences in tasks between these two prepositions (“in” and “of”) make all the difference. One keeps the prophetic edge (“in”), while the “Church of America” makes itself chaplain to American empire.
If the “Church of America” plays the role of chaplain to empire by sacralizing “Western Civilization” or the “nation-state” as “holy”—the church in America or the west enacts an entirely different way of things as a witness to the rule of God in Jesus.
We see this in first century Philippi in ways that command Christian attention today, now. The text gives witness in a way that forces us to grapple with the political outcomes of the gospel in our here and now. This is crucial when (for so many) political apathy is more common than political zealotry.
(Aside: we don’t talk about this enough: what I call “soft Christian nationalisms”—passive forms of Christian political engagement and piety in service of the status quo—more on that another time maybe! But it certainly stands to reason that hard forms of power are more concentrated, while soft forms of power tend to be more dispersed across broad segments of society—food for thought)
In Philippi, we find the first European convert in Philippi was Lydia, a wealthy businesswoman who founded the church in her home. Next, entering the market, Paul and Silas command silence from a lucrative demonic spirit possessing a young girl, whose body was claimed by certain businessmen. It was here, after threatening the local economy, where Paul and Silas are unjustly jailed. But even here, the power of Rome found its limits by the power of Jesus—the jail that housed them collapsed. Once the city’s rulers learned Paul was a Roman citizen, with it the horrible realization that they had wrongly detained him, they quietly asked him to leave.
This was how the gospel and the church entered what some call “the west.” It was not to occupy thrones, or to seize levers of power—the gospel in Philippi enacted a radical alteration of the status quo, both its systems and its scripts.
Today, we find ourselves faced with competing Christian nationalisms. In so many ways, Christian witness stands against forms of imperial Christianity, just as it gives a witness to the faith of Jesus Christ. This difference—between Empire and the Kingdom of Heaven—is captured by our recollection of the gospel’s entrance into Philippi.
When Paul writes them from prison years later: “I am confident that the one who began a good work in you all will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ…” he was invoking their shared memory of God’s startling, subversive interruption of their settled securities—of Lydia’s baptism in a river outside of town, in the demolition of the local economy that followed demonic dispossession, in the refusal to go along with political secrecy by demanding unjust treatment of citizens gain a public hearing—all of this filled up the content contained in “the good work.” Paul wrote with Christian hope in a final, full, and fruitful completion of that work.
Are we prepared to hope for the same sort of subversive dispossession among the churches in America?
Today, we stand in that hope. Even as democracy falters, the church’s task is always and ever to make the same confession—as if for the first time—made by the Philippian jailer who asked: “What must I do to be saved?” And heard: “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved—you and your household.”
Christian resistance to national idolatry and tyranny begins with Christian confession.
The full sermon is available below for those who prefer to stream or watch.
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Now, its likely sporadic witnesses to the Christian message made their way west after Pentecost. But in Acts, Luke marks the moment Paul turns west by including the “Macedonian Call” — a Spirit-directed alteration of Paul’s plans to bring the gospel into Europe. The point isn’t to determine who was first. The theological point, in Luke’s narrative, is the significance of Christian witness moving out from Jerusalem.