ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

The Fifth Sunday of Trinity, 12th July 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at Solemn Evensong and Benediction

Readings: Job 4. 1 - 5. 6-end; Romans 15. 14-29

One of the questions that we should ask when we read the bible is: How are the people who first read the text the same as us and how are they different? How were people similar and how different?

On the one hand people are people, now and then. We're the same physically: heads, bodies, and usually two arms and two legs. Yet as we know from archaeology those who lived in ancient times were by and large shorter. We're better fed so we're taller than our ancestors. People are the same yet there are differences.

Then there are feelings and experiences. People loved and hated in the ancient world just as we do now yet there are differences. Family life was structured in a different way. The nuclear family of mum, dad and 1.2 children is a far cry from the households of the Roman Empire which could include several generations of the same family under one roof with all sorts of slaves and retainers. People are the same and people are different.

People have always communicated with each other. In the ancient world as in the modern world people had conversations and wrote things down but the biblical authors knew nothing of blogging and twitter. (Blogging & Twitter: sounds like a firm of solicitors.)

And then there's travel. In the modern world we can fly to the other side of the world in a day. This would have astonished the ancients and they knew nothing of mass tourism. But they didn't just sit at home twiddling their thumbs. People travelled and the bible is in many ways a travel book from Genesis onwards. Once Adam and Eve had left the Garden of Eden people would always be on the move not least of all St Paul.

As Paul draws to the end of his magnum opus (the Letter to the Romans) he refers to his journeying. From Jerusalem and as far round as Illyricum I have fully proclaimed the good news of Christ, he tells us. Illyricum was the Roman province that covered what we call now Albania and until recently we called Yugoslavia.

When Paul wrote to the church in Rome he hadn't been there but he longed to visit: I desire, as I have for many years, to come to you, he says. Now, it seems there is a possibility when he goes to Spain. In the meantime Paul is going to Jerusalem. The Jerusalem church was poor but he'd some fundraising. He'd persuaded the church in Macedonia and Achaia (that is, Greece) to help out and he's going to take the money to Jerusalem in person.

If we take the Acts of the Apostles at face value then it's apparent that Paul made four main journeys. The first two were missionary journeys.

To begin with Paul set off from Seleucia on the Syrian coast, headed south to Cyprus where he visited Salamis and Paphos on the southern coast of the island. Then he went north-west to the mainland of what we now call Turkey, across the Taurus Mountains to Derbe and then back to the coast and returned by sea to Seleucia (Acts 13. 1 - 14. 28). That's a round trip of about 1500km.

The second missionary journey was much longer. Again, setting off from the Syrian coast Paul travelled across the Mediterranean to Southern Greece landing near Corinth and travelling by land up the eastern coast as far north as Philippi. Then he headed east across Turkey and back to Syria (Acts 15. 36 - 18. 22). That's about a 5000km round trip.

The third journey involved Paul visiting churches that were already established. This time he went the other way round setting off from Syria through Turkey, then sailing to Northern Greece, travelling by land down to Athens and finally heading for Jerusalem by land and sea via Western and Southern Turkey (Acts 18. 23 - 27. 16).

The fourth journey took him from Jerusalem where he was captured to Rome where he was martyred (Acts 27. 1 - 28. 16). This, given the complicated sea route was probably over 4000km. In all these journeys Paul faced danger. Writing to the church in Corinth he says that he had been shipwrecked three times (2 Cor 11. 25).

Paul travelled. Perhaps his great journeying was in part caused by the fact that his conversion had happened during a journey, the experience that he had on the Damascus Road. But Paul's journeys weren't just geographical they were also theological as the Letter to the Romans shows. And this theological journey wasn't detached. It was anchored in the real conditions of the people and the churches that he knew.

So what had Paul's travels (in every sense of the word) taught him? What did he know? In what was he confident? Well, the opening verse of the second lesson this evening may come as a bit of a surprise:

I myself feel confident about you, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness (agathos), filled with all knowledge, and able to instruct one another.

For two thousand years the strongest advocates of the Pauline message have been those who have the darkest version of the Christian gospel: St Augustine, Luther and Calvin and some of the Fathers of the Counter Reformation; those who seem to want to convict us of the terror of our sin and pressgang us into repentance.

But Paul does have his sunny side. Indeed, his sunny side may be even sunnier than we could ever have imagined. Back in 2006 excavations at the church of St Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome showed evidence of a very early Christian tomb below the basilica. A few days ago on the Feast of SS Peter and Paul the Pope declared that he thought the bone fragments that have been found in the tomb are possibly those of the apostle. Along with the bone were some items of cloth, some blue fabric covered with gold sequins. Paul wearing gold sequins: now wouldn't that be a thing! Goodness knows where he picked those up from on his travels.

But Paul's travels had taught him something fundamental. He was convinced of the goodness (the agathos) of his brothers and sisters in Rome. Agathos (goodness) was a much discussed virtue by the philosophers and many of them got into highly technical arguments about its origins and out-workings but one thing that bound the ancients together and binds us together with them is that we know that goodness exists.

We see goodness everyday of our lives: in lovers locked in an embrace, in parents gazing in wonder at their children, in countless acts of compassion and mercy. Paul saw. We see. Paul saw essential human goodness so he was able to cope with differences in the church in a way that some find impossible today.

As Fr Alan reminded us last week the controversies in the church were every bit as bitter then as they are now. Arguments about meat and veg and about the keeping of special days lead to accusations of laxity by one side and over-sensitivity by the other. But Paul had learned to ride out storms in the church just as he had ridden out storms at sea because he realised that like the ocean the deeper you go the calmer it gets. However high the waves are on the surface deep down there is a stillness; and that stillness in human beings is our inner core of goodness. Original Sin may be ingrained but Original Goodness that is the foundation.

Soon, Fr Alan is to take some study leave. He's going to take a sabbatical. We're being encouraged to sponsor him on part of his journey. He's going to Spain, walking where Paul would have trod given half a chance. And one of the things that I've experienced when I've taken time off like this is that you end up believing more and more about less and less. The things that consume our energies day in day out become less important. The storms that blow us this way and that subside and we can concentrate on what is important, what is of enduring value, what is eternal. Basic human goodness is one of them. That was true in ancient times and its true now.