All Together Now Episode 2026 - Episode 1

Hello Cannon family! Welcome back to this summer's joining of all our church-wide Sunday Schools. Togehter well explore what it means to follow Jesus in our "post-Christian" world by celebrating the lives of those who followed Jesus in an ancient pagan world. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:11

I'm glad that I was sitting in the front, and you all could not see by watching my lips how many of the words I knew and how many of them I did not know. I love the chorus though. Well, thank you for coming on a holiday weekend. This looks like a holiday gathering, right? I am kind of curious with the fourth behind us as a way of gathering on Independence Day weekend. If any of you have a favorite founding father, and if so, why? You may not have a favorite founding father, but if you do, one of the founding fathers that especially that has just has been especially meaningful to you and why. Mike Hamilton. Hamilton, any particular reason why?

SPEAKER_04 0:53

No, he you know he got us all of financial trouble.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

Okay. Got us out of financial trouble. Alright. Somebody else. Marshall. George Washington. George Washington. For all of the reasons. Alright.

unknown 1:10

I'm going to see that movie, Young Washington.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Oh, you're going to go see Young Washington. All right, correct. It's not Button Gwinnette. It's not Button Gwinnett. Okay. Was he featured in the AJC with some others the other day? Yeah, I saw the article, but I didn't read it. Forgive me.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

He was He doesn't deserve any fame. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

Except for accounting. That's fame enough, I guess, for Button Gwynette. All right. Anybody else? Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin. We were in Philadelphia last weekend for a lacrosse tournament, and once the tournament was done, we went downtown and ended up walking to the Liberty Bell and then kept going. And we saw where Franklin had an office, and we got an impromptu um like discourse from a park ranger who was supposed to be done, but they caught us kind of in the wandering around the parkway. It was really kind of fascinating to hear more of his story than I than I knew. Is there anything in particular about him that is a man of everything? Just a man of everything, yeah. Yeah. Anyone else?

SPEAKER_00 2:12

George Washington again. I've got three three copies of the book of the passion between him and Martha. How they fell in love and uh lived their life.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

Okay. Anyone else? Charles.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

I'll also Ben Franklin because he warned us to be sure and to try to keep the keep the republic that had been established.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

I listened to a podcast the other day called The True Independence Day, which was about the events of July 2nd, and I will make reference to those in the service this morning. But the two names that are part of the story of July 2nd that jumped out at me from that podcast are Richard Henry Lee, some of you may know of him, and Edward Rutledge. Lee wrote the resolution for independence, which was actually adopted on July 2nd. And without that resolution of independence, there would be no declaration of independence. But he first proposed it. He had a three-part resolution, which he introduced to the Second Continental Congress on June 7th. And already on June 7th was calling for independence from the English Crown, alliances with European powers, and then the formation of a confederation between the colonies as one confederated state. And the majority of the delegates already on June 7th were ready to vote in favor of that, but not everyone was, and one of those who stood against it was the youngest delegate to the Second Continental Congress, Edward Rutledge from South Carolina. And he just said, this is too momentous, this is too huge to rush into it. We need time to go back to our home states and seek counsel from those who sent us here to make sure that they would be in favor of taking that kind of a step. And so he proposed a three-week stay. Let's push pause, right? Go home, talk to our delegations, talk to people back home, and then regather, which is what they did. And in the meantime, Lee had a follow-up resolution he proposed, which is in the meantime, let's get ready in case we do take that step and we'll form three committees. One to draft a declaration of independence, one to pursue alliances with European powers, and then the third to sort of start making plans for some sort of a confederation between the states. And what struck me about that is that you can see in that the necessity for both conservatives and liberals, for those eager for change and those who want to take our time with change. You see what I'm what I'm getting at? Because it's both true that he who hesitates and law is lost, and you need to look before you leap. Right? Isn't wisdom is not found in one or the other. Wisdom is found in both, and knowing when knowing which applies when. They took initial steps, they they they they paused, right? They reconnected with people back home, then they came back ready to take their next steps. And you can see how you need both conservatives and liberals, those who want to push, you know, push gas, and those who want to want to push the brakes a little bit. Um in any event, it struck me as a as a kind of maybe those two names are important for us at this particular time. Um well, we're not here for uh for all of that, although that's part of the in the air as we're gathering. We're here to begin a series for this summer called The Once and Future Church, which uh is a title I ch I stole from this book by Lauren Mead, The Once and Future Church, which I bought and partially read when I was a baby pastor. Um and so the issues that we're confronting now have been in the air and in the world around us uh since the late 90s, early aughts, when I first got this book. Um and so uh that book, that title has always kind of stayed with me, and um, and I wanted to spend some time this summer talking about um Canon's future running through the church's past, that there are lessons for us to learn from the church of the first few centuries in an ancient pagan world for the church in this century and the centuries to come in what really is a post-Christian or post-Christendom world. Um and so I want to begin actually with the day the world changed, according to two professors of mine at Duke. Um, Will Willemond is a name some of you may know. Um he is now a uh he's he is now a bishop, uh retired bishop. He was the dean of Duke Chapel when I was at Duke Divinity School. He was also professor at the Divinity School. And uh he and one of our professors, Stanley Howeross, wrote a book called Resident Aliens back in the late 80s, early 90s. And um they described their own experience of a kind of a significant change in the world, you know, uh, from the world, really between the world in which they were born and then the world in which they were growing up. And I just wanted to share this story. Um parents had never worried about whether we would grow up Christian. The church was the only show in town. On Sundays, the town closed down. One could not even buy a gallon of gas. There was a traffic jam on Sunday mornings at 9.45 when all went to their respective Sunday schools. By overlooking much that was wrong in the world, it was a racially segregated world, remember. People saw a world that looked good and right. Church, home, and state formed a national consortium that worked together to instill Christian values. People grew up Christians simply by being lucky enough to be born in places like Greenville, South Carolina, which is where Will grew up, or Pleasant Grove, Texas, which is where Stanley Howeross grew up. When and how did we change? Although it may sound trivial, one of us is tempted to date the shift sometime on a Sunday evening in 1963. Then, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state's time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us, regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church, made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox. That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom, South Carolina style. On that night, in Greenville, South Carolina, the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world, served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church. The Fox Theater went head-to-head with the church over who would provide the worldview for the young. That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish. So I begin with that story because it's something concrete. It's something specific, right? It's something personal that represents a larger dynamic that has been happening in our culture for quite some time, not just in the last quarter century, but really the last, golly, three-quarters of a century. So I'm kind of curious if any of you have any memories like that that are very specific, personal, concrete, that kind of represent these larger changes from the world in which to into which some of you were born, and then, you know, in contrast to that, grew up and raised others of us, perhaps grew up into the world that had already been changed where the malls were already open on Sunday and the theaters were already showing movies. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_08 10:06

I grew up in a very small town. Everything shut down, as you said, everybody went to church. And in 1965 or six, they put an interstate in, interstate I-35, and we had an exit at our town. One of the kids I went to the hospital with her dad was a congressman in our in Missouri, so he lobbied for that when we got it. Well, people would get up and there wasn't anything there. So a family came in and opened um a restaurant, and um it was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and um I got a job at some rate when I was 16. Okay. I thought my dad was going to have apoplexy because I couldn't always go to church. Right. And um that was and it was I wasn't the only young waitress, okay. But um that was the first thing that ever was open on Sunday in that town.

unknown 11:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 11:12

It was it was very shocking. Right, and controversial and yeah. Rosemary. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you had your hand up. Somebody else.

SPEAKER_06 11:23

Somewhat related to that, I remember as a child, um, my brother and I would always go to Sunday school, every Sunday. And um, I remember when I was, I think I must have been in first grade, which would have been 1977, um, the nuns in my Catholic church and Catholic school were Sunday school teachers. And for whatever reason, of course, I don't recall what the reason was at that time, but uh after first grade, uh the nuns were no longer our Sunday school teachers anymore. And I remember being very, very disappointed because I was very attached to this lady thinking, you know, that she was you know one of God's workers, that um she was just very close to God and very reverent, and I was very um respectful of her and really missed her. So after after that, no more nuns were Sunday school teachers. Okay. And I grew up in a small town too.

SPEAKER_02 12:26

Okay. Something changed there. Jan.

SPEAKER_07 12:31

So it wasn't just Sundays, but in many small friends, it was Wednesday afternoons too.

unknown 12:36

So the church on Sundays and Wednesday nights. Okay.

SPEAKER_07 12:39

You were at church morning and night, and on Wednesday nights, and that was just all there was to it, period. The other thing I remember is going to camp in the Smoky Mountains one year and not being somehow I had not gotten the reboration on Saturday that everybody was going to get gas. So I had I had missed that and needed gas on the way home. And I was the only one that stopped, had to stop to fill up my tank because everybody else didn't want to make it like work on Sunday.

SPEAKER_02 13:09

Okay. Yeah. So that was I was alive when everything was closed.

SPEAKER_03 13:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Everything was closed.

SPEAKER_03 13:24

Um, but I do remember for the end, I had some time in South Georgia and South Alabama, um, that everything in the food court was open on Sundays.

unknown 13:33

Except for Chick fly. Right. Everybody was like, I don't know if that man's making up there in Atlanta, but he was never gonna make it.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

And here we are.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

Yeah. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. He stuck to it. Yeah, we have to and they have.

SPEAKER_04 13:51

And my I grew up in the Northeast, and um I and so this is sort of negative evidence, I guess. Uh I I don't know that the repeal of the blue laws and similar things really well, I I don't know that it created any sort of a backlash or conflict, or you know, I think people were there just figured if people wanted to go to church on Sunday they would, and if they didn't, they wouldn't. And and that really doesn't change if the drugstore happens to be open or not. Um so yeah, I I don't know. There never seemed to be uh a big you know to-do about the about the change. It just sort of happened and people looked at it and said, Oh, okay, so now we can buy stuff on Sunday and before we couldn't, and it wasn't it was not recognized as any sort of a battleground, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 14:48

Yeah. Yeah, I think um from growing up in the north, I I never knew Wednesdays of the day where things were not scheduled because there wasn't really Wednesday programming at churches. It was everything had really shifted to Sunday already. There was less activity, but the malls were open, and and so it was more about the choice that your family made. I do remember the first time I asked my parents if I could go see a movie with a friend on a Sunday afternoon. And my my mom really, my mother in particular really struggled with that. The fact that she struggled with it makes me think my dad was just kind of waiting to see what she what she said. He may not have felt like he had a dog in that in that fight. Um and I I did go, I don't remember what I saw, but I remember I remember the conversation before they decided it was okay. Uh I think because I'd be back in time to go to youth group that night. So it wasn't in competition, it was just the whole idea of going to see a movie on a Sunday afternoon. Um, so and I'm sure there's some other stories, but obviously so what I'm evoking, even for for those of us who grew up in the north where there was less in like written into local ordinances, right, it still does kind of evoke the world of Christendom. One of the stories I've told from my parents' um high school experience, some of you have heard me tell this before. So I grew up, I mean, I think about I was thinking about this this morning. I went to junior high in the building where my parents went to high school. So by the time I was I grew up in the same town, but it so it was the same, but it had also changed. Uh it had gotten bigger. Um but it was always a very diverse place because of the Pullman Standard Railroad and because of the steel, and because of Armco steel. Big employers, right, drew like you could see the waves of immigration in our town. Like everybody had their section. Um and um so and I'm losing my own train of thought. So, oh yeah, so my parents um remember high school football games on Friday night, which has always been a big deal, was still a big deal when I was growing up, but whereas we played games up on the hill outside the new high school, they played them downtown at Pullman Park, um, a few blocks from the high school, and so then after the game, there'd be this parade through the streets downtown, and a lot of them would end up at Cummings Candy, which was still in operation when I was growing up, and I think it's still there today. And my mom has told me that she remembers being at Cummings very late on a Friday night, looking at friends who were Catholic sitting in a booth with a hamburger on the table in front of them and their eyes on the clock, waiting for midnight, so they would be free to eat beef because it was Saturday. Um, like that just man, like that's that's a whole other world that I know nothing, I know nothing about. Like I knew nothing about. I did grow up with a lot of like butler's very I mean mill towns, right? They drew everybody. So we had a lot of large Catholic population, large Protestant population. We still weren't sure if each other was Christian. I do remember having Catholic friends ask me in high school if we believed in Jesus. Um the whole Methodist thing was kind of baffling to them. Um in any event, so uh go ahead. Butler, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 18:04

They're open at 200, they open at 2 p.m. today.

SPEAKER_02 18:07

There you go. All right, thank you, Rick. Um so uh alright, so there's this world, and actually, and the reason I was thinking about this book, because he does a great job. Loramine talks about the the world of Christendom or the Christendom age in which most of us have lived our entire lives. But then he also contrasts it with the apostolic age which preheated it, and then kind of leads us toward the sort of post-Christendom world, the emerging world that we're kind of half in and half out right now. The reality is that for those of us who grew up in a different time, that different time is still in us and still forms us. Like it still shapes us. We still have a foot in that world. And we also got a foot in this other world, this new world that has come and is coming. So, turn back the clock, if you think about it, to the early church. They were a minority faith in a vast pagan empire. They were a minor a very small, for a long time, a very small minority faith in a vast pagan empire. Over the first three centuries, however, they became a larger and larger and more and more influential minority faith, while at the same time being a more and more aggressively persecuted minority faith. But for them, the mission frontier, the line between the church and the world was their front door. If you think about it, right? The mission frontier, the line between the church and the world was boom, it was right there. As soon as they got up and walked out the door, they were in, they were, in a sense, they were on foreign territory. They were a minority faith in a vast pagan world that believed in different gods and lived by different values. That was the reality for them. Um and they were directly and indirectly, officially and unofficially, harassed and harried and sometimes persecuted even to death for their faith in Jesus. Because they were viewed as a threat to the Roman peace. Not because they launched actual armed insurrection, but because they didn't worship Rome's gods and they didn't live by Rome's values. And they were perceived to be profoundly disruptive, and their loyalty was questioned, and they were seen as such a dramatic threat to the public order that they were directly, indirectly, violently, you know, they were socially ostracized. There was a big price to pay for worshiping Jesus and following Jesus. So that was the kind of ancient context, right? And they were often a persecuted church. So then sort of the unexpected and uh you know unforeseen, unimaginable happens. Caesar uh declares his faith in Jesus, right? Constantine professes his faith. And so he ends the persecution and then puts Rome on the road toward adopting the Christian faith as the official religion of the Roman Empire. And that didn't happen immediately. I used to think at one point, as soon as Constantine came to faith in Christ, boom, everything changed. It started changing. There were some subsequent rounds of persecution. It was kind of a it wasn't it wasn't the end of the road. But it put them on a road toward Christianity becoming the official religion, right? And then so then that totally transformed the relationship between the church and the world. Um, because it changed the relationship between the church and the state. Right? So Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Um and so then okay, so then the mission frontier is no longer my front door, it's the boundary empire. The line between the church and the world is now identified with. The boundaries between Rome and the world outside of the Roman Empire. And so the missionaries are people who go somewhere else, right? You all grew up with that. Missionaries were who? They were people who went to other countries. Right? We never thought of ourselves as missionaries, right? Right. I want to say yes to Jesus, but I'm afraid that they'll send me to Africa or somewhere else, right? I don't want to be a missionary. Missionaries are other people who go to other countries. Like, just think about the assumptions that are baked into that. The line between the church and the world is not on my front door. It's on the boundary. It's identified with the boundaries of empire. That totally changes the relationship. And then increasingly you kind of begin to assume that your neighbors are Christian unless you know they're not. Christian becomes the default religious setting. Increasingly. The Roman Empire did not make it mandatory to be Christian, but they certainly did encourage it. At least encourage a profession of faith. Because more doors were opened if you became Christian. Whether or not you actually became Christian. That's the thing, right? That's the down, like there's a lot of good side that came with Rome coming to faith in Jesus. It stopped the persecution, stopped the violent persecution of Christians, right? Stopped the suppression of the faith. It did actually, the church did bring more compassion ministries, more mercy ministries into the Roman Empire, which had largely ignored the poor. I mean, there's there's kind of, I think some of you have heard me tell this before, there was a Roman Empire who's alarmed at the growing influence of the Christians, and he's determined to bring back the traditional religions of Rome and stamp out this pestilence. And what he says to other elite Romans is, I guess we have to start caring for the poor because that's how they're beating us. Like they're winning the hearts and the minds of the masses because they actually care about people. So I guess we better do something to make it seem like we care about people, because otherwise they'll just we'll just keep losing. I mean, it really is. It was not like compassion for the poor, right? Mercy. That was not of Roman value. It just wasn't. I mean, when there was a plague, people left the sick behind, and the Christians very often stayed to care for those who were sick, at risk of their own life. That's the kind of stuff that really won the Roman Empire. It wasn't Constantine from the top down, it was Christian compassion from the bottom up. That's what won the hearts and the minds of the people. So, anyway, so Constantine comes to faith, there's a kind of a journey toward eventual establishment, and then you have Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, East and West. History unfolds, and then you have a splintering, right? You have a splintering between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. One is Greek speaking, the other is Latin speaking. You have Orthodoxy in the East, you have Catholicism in the West, which wasn't called Catholicism, it was just Christianity, right? It was just the Church until the Reformation in the 1500s. And so you have that's a huge rupture, right? Some of you grew up Roman Catholic, most of you grew up Protestant. That's a huge rupture with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. But for most, for the most part, Protestants didn't really question or even begin to think any differently about the church's relationship to the state, the broader culture. The mission, the bound, the the um mission frontier was still defined by national boundaries. Right? Luther, Lutheranism basically became the German church, right? And so the mission frontier is out there. We may be arguing over what kind of Christian we are, but we're gonna assume that we're all pretty much Christian. Um unless you're Jewish. And the Christians often persecuted the Jews for multiple reasons. But in the world of Christendom, very often Christians persecuted the Jews, persecuted their Jewish neighbors. So they, you know, and John Calvin is recruited to help run, create a Christian Commonwealth in Geneva, Switzerland, right? He's they're still thinking in the same kind of categories that there has to be a close relationship between the church and the state. We may argue over which church and which version of the Christian faith, but we're still seeking a close relationship. And it is still the case, by and large, that church, you know, and state are kind of working together to form believers, maybe or maybe not disciples. It's not always clear if we're making disciples of Jesus or if we're just making good citizens of the empire, the kingdom, the country. You do you see what I'm getting at? If you go back to when the faith became popular and encouraged in the Roman Empire, there are catechetical lectures from one of the early church fathers. So these are lectures given to new believers. I can't remember who wrote them, I'll have to look it up. But he's very well aware as he's giving delivering these public, you know, these lectures to new people who are getting ready for baptism. He's very well aware that a lot of the people in the room receiving these lectures are coming there because it's for their political and economic benefit that they profess their faith in Christ, not because they actually have come to faith in Christ. Like their motives are mixed at best. Right? It's politically, economically in my favor if I profess faith in Christ, if I'm baptized, if I'll become a member of the church. That just opens more doors for me if I profess the faith that Caesar professes. So you can see like it's a complicated world, right? Right? That's that's the world of Christendom. There is good, but it's complicated. And again, some of you have heard me tell the story before. I think about my grandmother talking about Butler, Pennsylvania, right? Family wasn't going to be home, the milk mock, the milkman was due to come through, and so she left a note on the front door and her wallet on the dining room table. And he would walk in and leave, you know, leave in the icebox what she asked for, take the money that he was due and go on about his day, and she never had to worry about it, and their doors were never locked. Right? It's also a segregated world. And the last mass lynching in this country was in 1948 in Monroe, Georgia. Not that long ago. So it's complicated, right? It it I always kind of feel like you can't say that we have not been Christian at all, because that's clearly not true. But you also can't say that we have been simply Christian, just Christian, and faithfully Christian across the board. It's complicated. And there's good and there's bad that comes with Caesar coming to faith in Christ. But so that's that's the Christendom world, right? There's this close relationship, and everybody's kind of working together. There's a there's a shared view of the world, at least a shared view of the world, somewhat shared view of the world. There's a belief in one God who revealed himself to Israel and most fully and completely through the person of Jesus. We have different beliefs as Protestants and Catholics about how God saves us through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, but everybody believes that salvation has come for us and for all through Jesus, right? There's a lot that is shared, even though there's some differences. Some of us believe, right, that if you want to be in relationship with Jesus, you have to be in relationship with the Bishop of Rome, aka the Pope, the Vicar of Christ, and others believe that that is the absolute worst possible thing for you to do that if you are in a relationship with the Bishop of Rome, you are that's a straight road to hell. That's the divides that have been there. And yet, at the same time, even while we were questioning each other's faith and each other's salvation, there's so much that was shared. Not identical Bibles, but very similar Bibles. All believe that God is triune, all believe that Jesus is fully human and fully divine, all believe that through the risen Christ, God has poured out the Holy Spirit on the church back then and the church today. Like, do you see all the stuff that is shared? Like, that's wonderful. There's a rich moral vocabulary. Um, everybody grows up knowing the Ten Commandments. Isn't that true? More or less? Maybe not.

unknown 30:47

It is in Texas.

SPEAKER_02 30:48

It is in Texas. Right? Right? But there is. There's a shared moral vocabulary. There are shared assumptions about the way the world is. Um and so that's the world that has splintered, Michelle.

SPEAKER_06 31:01

Before you get too far away from what you were just saying about um people converting because of economic reasons, um, very similarly in um Muslim regions, or um you know, similar things would happen where there was persecution of Christians who were living in Muslim regions, and uh there was kind of this pressure for people to convert to Islam for economic reasons as well. So it just kind of stuck.

SPEAKER_02 31:31

Yeah, it's I think it's it's common when there is a state faith for there to be first and second class citizens, or there's a tearing that happens. Most often the Jewish people have been on the outs, right? They there's a there's room, but they can only rise so high. They can they're welcomed in but only so far, and it's everything's always tenuous. Um yeah, so it's not it's not unique to Christian faith. It is not. Um, so uh, but I want to turn back the clock again to the Apostolic Age. All right, so now you have, right, you have like Paul writing letters to churches in communities, um, and those are small gatherings of believers in Greek, you know, Greek speaking or Latin speaking. For him, it was all Greek speaking, right? But they are they're they are they might be healthy, vibrant. He's you know, he sometimes tells them, like, man, you're doing great. You know, like you're such a faithful church, and the fruit of authentic faith is just, man, it's everywhere in you. Like if you read 1 Thessalonians, he thinks there's a great, they're a great church. Read Philippians, and I'm gonna quote from Philippians, they're a great church. Uh I feel like Paul wrote two basic types of letters. First is more and more. He will tell them, like, you're doing this, you're doing a great job. He's cheering them on, just do it more and more. Like, keep going, keep going, keep going. Right? And then to others, he writes turnaround letters. Like he's basically repent, turn around while there's still time. You are you're losing your way, you're going in the wrong direction. You need like you need to get your stuff together because this is not going well. Right? He writes those. Galatians is a huge turnaround letter. Um, 1 Thessalonians is a turnaround letter. So he writes those, but we always have to imagine these are basically house churches, they're small gatherings of believers in what are frequently large cities. He didn't plant megachurches, he planted small churches in big cities. With the vision, right, that when that church grew, it would send out missionaries to surrounding towns and villages, and they would, you know, God would God would plant new communities of faith in those surrounding regions, and it would just keep spending. That was his strategy. It was very smart, right? He's gonna, he's gonna he's gonna preach the gospel in hub cities and see God plant churches there, and then they would send people out into surrounding areas. It's a really smart strategy. Anyway, so uh so the surrounding culture is overtly and sort of directly and indirectly hostile. The mission frontier is right at their front door, um, but they were anything but passive, right? They did not, they did, they did not advocate for violent resistance or violent revolution. They weren't trying to overthrow Rome at all. You can see in the book of Acts that Rome can't figure out what to make of this sect. Because they're proclaiming faith in a new Lord, which is politically charged language. Jesus is Lord, when Rome is busy saying Caesar is Lord. You start preaching another Lord, you're gonna get in trouble. Like it's politically charged language, and so you know, like they get into trouble and they're accused of being disturbers of the peace in part because they're pulling people away from the worship of the pagan gods, the traditional gods, the sponsors of Roman prosperity, right? You know, this is cat this is catastrophic if we don't stamp this out. And and so they sound like revolutionaries, right? They sound like insurrectionists, but they're not taking up arms. What do we do with this? Like Rome knows how to fight an army in the field. They don't know what to do with people who like refuse to bend the knee to Caesar. They will pray for Caesar, but they won't worship Caesar. That's the difference. They will pray, they say, we will pray for Caesar all day long, we just won't worship it. And Rome basically said, not good enough. Right? But they won't take arms against Caesar. And Rome struggles with what to do with that. But that witness eventually wins out. And there we have all these witnesses from the early church where basically the Christians say, look, all people are created in the image of God. Where did we get that? All people were created in the image of God. Yeah, we got that. They got that from Genesis, right? The Jewish people had always known that. And then through Jesus, all these Gentiles learned that for the first time that all people are created in the image of God. And so how we treat people is how we treat God. And so we're gonna love everybody, even our enemies. And so they just refused to act with malice toward those who were acting with malice toward them. They just wouldn't do it. They would pray for their enemies, right? They would care for the sick in the empire that was persecuting them. They just bore nonviolent, right, radical, forgiving, loving witness to Jesus in this hostile environment. Uh and so you can see in Philip in Philippians, right, this is this church is beginning to get, there's it's starting to cost them. It's starting to hurt them to follow Jesus. And Paul wants to equip them for that. Um I love the um the way in which he works with metaphors that would have been familiar to them, images that would have been familiar to them. He kind of states the thesis of Philippians in Philippians chapter 1, verses 20 through through 30, where he pictures this small body of believing Philippi as like a cohort of Roman soldiers surrounded by enemies. That's the imagery that's kind of behind the language. When he says, only live your life, and the Greek is a little more subtle. It says, conduct your life in public, in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, right? The good news about Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am about to hear or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit. Here's the military kind of metaphors, right? You're standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel. You have to remember that Philippi was basically refounded by military veterans. And it was a Roman colony. So even though it was in the Greek-speaking East, everything was conducted in Latin. All of its inscriptions, public inscriptions, were in Latin, and a lot of their citizens were very proud of their Roman service. So you're standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel, and are in no way intimidated by your opponents. Like there he's depicting the church as an army under siege. For them, this is evidence of their destruction, but of your salvation, and this is God's doing, for he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well. Since you're having the same struggle that you saw I have, and now here that I still have. So that's that's chapter 1, verses 27 through 30. And then if you flip to chapter 4, the beginning of the chapter, he sums, it's this basically the whole myth, the whole bulk of the letter begins at 127 and then wraps up in chapter 4, verse 1. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. Okay, in what way? Well, it's the way he has spent chapters two and three describing. And in chapter 2, he says, Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. Actually, let me back up. In chapter 2 he says, If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing of the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete. Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interest, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. So, in other words, have the same mind in us that was in Christ, and be conformed to the image of his self-giving love. I mean, that's how we stand firm, right? We stand firm for Christ in the way of Christ, which is the way of the cross. That's how the church, when it was surrounded, lived out its faith. That's how the church, when it was surrounded, lived out its faith. I think part of the real challenge for us in the time in which we're living is the world of Christendom, the world in which there was a close relationship between the church and the state. You know, that is not what it was. And the understandable desire on the part of many of us who have only known that world is to try and bring that world back, bring that world back or hold on to it for as long as we can. Because we don't, we really, if you're honest, I don't know how to live in a post-Christendom world. I was not born into it. I got one foot planted in it, but I wasn't born into it. You weren't born into it. It's bewildering to live in a world where that relationship either doesn't exist or is not at all what it was, and we're not really sure how to make disciples when the state and the broader culture aren't helping us with that. I mean, that's that's the reality, right? The state and the broader culture aren't helping us with that. The irony for me is that Rome tried to do what many Christians are now doing or trying to do, right? There were ancient Romans who proclaimed that the Christian faith was making the Roman Empire weak, that they were inviting the curse of the gods because the gods had made Rome great.

unknown 42:21

Right?

SPEAKER_02 42:22

The gods blessed Rome because Rome blessed the gods. And as they turned from the gods, the gods, we are just inviting the curse of the gods. You're this is inviting ruin. And actually, when Rome started losing, they blamed the Christians. Because the Christians had turned them away from their gods. You see the arguments that to me there are strong parallels between the way many conservative Christians are now kind of understanding where we are and framing things and the way ancient pagans framed them, right? Because change is always bewildering. It is. But my point is, we've actually been not here, but somewhere very similar before. That the world into which we are passing has a lot more in common with the world of the first few centuries than it does with the world of the middle 1500 years. Like it does. We live in a culture now that is kind of on a spectrum from indifferent to hostile toward the Christian faith. It's indifferent to hostile. Like your neighbors who don't share your faith aren't hostile to your to you just and your faith just because they don't share your faith. Some might be hostile, but others aren't. It's indifferent. There's a spectrum of indifference to hostility. That's the reality. Many of our neighbors aren't like lapsed Christians, they are never Christians. They might be Buddhist or Hindu or Sikh or Jewish or Muslim. They might be agnostics. They believe there's something, but they're not sure what it is, and they don't think anyone really knows, so let's not claim. That we do. They might be atheists. It's just kind of a big, vast, complicated world out there. So I don't think the best course of action for us is to try and turn back the clock. But to go forward toward the kingdom. And we just are gonna, it's gonna be complicated and challenging. But the way of the cross is always the right way for us to walk. I mean, that to me is central, is the way of the cross is always the right way for us to walk. We can't actually do by coercion what really only happens by conversion of the heart. We just can't. Um we can post the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, but that doesn't make it mean that we're gonna make more disciples of Jesus Christ. You know? Especially if the church doesn't even know the Ten Commandments anymore. Um so I'm gonna do a series on the Ten Commandments in the fall, just so you know, because I need to spend more time with them. But uh there's a podcast, some of you know about the Bible Project. I'm gonna stop and see what questions there are or comments, but anyway. So the Bible Project is a great online resource, free resource, lots of Bible study tools. They just wrapped up a whole series on the Ten Commandments. And like, so this is a crowdfunded like team. It's a it's a great group, great organization. So all they do is make Bible study resources. And when they started working on their series on Ten Commandments, they went around their offices asking the members of their staff, the staff of the Bible project, how many of them could name the Ten Commandments. Like most people got three or four. They finally found a guy who knew all ten. And he actually knew him in order. That was the other thing, right? He didn't, it wasn't like he got seven and then he's trying to rack his brain. Like he actually got all ten in order. Most people, they were like, oh, my mother would kill me. That's number five. There you go. There you go. Right? So um, so uh uh anyway, so yeah, so I mean I didn't really want to turn this into just politics. I think that it's a real challenge for us. It's a it's a huge challenge for us because most of our models for how to do church are really rooted in a world that no longer exists, or at least that is not the only world existing. Because among people, some people, that world does still exist, right? There are people who grew up. Um, you know, like I one of my surprises with social media has been discovering how many of my classmates from high school have a clearly active, vibrant faith, and I knew nothing about it when I was in high school. And I'm not criticizing them, I'm just saying, like, we didn't really talk about it. I honestly felt like as a high schooler, being active in my church, which I was, singing in my youth choir, which I did, going to youth group, which I did. I thought all that made me odd and kind of odd man out and strange because nobody else seemed to be into that, kind of, or very few people were into that. I had my church friends and I had my school friends were two completely different groups of people. And now I see friends of mine, like my school friends, who like they're very open about their faith. And I'm on, like, I don't know, like, was it real and just wasn't because you know, we're all adolescents, we're trying to figure it out, and we're making some stupid choices, so it wasn't obvious when we were in high school. Or did they come to faith kind of later in life? I don't know, but if you when I see the post, like, okay, like this is a deep, mature faith. Like, I get where they're coming from, like this is real. Um, and this is very important to them, it's central to who they are. So, like, I feel like the world that we most of us grew up in is still there, but there's this whole other world in which our faith is like not relevant. I'm gonna stop and oh, let me wrap up, then I'll stop. Okay, so most of you, some of you would have been in church, it's been a while now, where I showed a clip, it's been a couple years, from the Band of Brothers. Um, so the airborne Easy Company, airborne infantry unit in Second World War, and they were in the Battle of the Bulge, they were behind the lines, they were sort of like at a rest, they were they were they were resting. When the Battle of the Bulge, the last Nazi you know offensive of the war on the Western Front got started, they were rushed to the front, they did not have winter clothes, they did not have sufficient ammunition, they ended up being placed around Bastogne, this key kind of road, this transportation hub. They needed to defend Bastogne, because if the Nazis could take Bastogne then they could send armored columns in every direction. So the the they're trying to get ammunition to them, supplies to them, before the Germans complete the encirclement and get them cut off. Anyway, so there's this great inner exchange between um Lieutenant Richard Winters, who's the the commander of Easy Company, and um uh this guy on a Jeep comes up, played by Jimmy Fallon. That's kind of one of the fun things about the miniseries, anyway, and he drops off some ammo. He said he'd try to come back, but he didn't know if he'd be able to get through, and he says to Winners, It looks like you're gonna be surrounded. And Winners' response is, We're paratroopers, sergeant, we're supposed to be surrounded. We're paratroopers. Our job is to jump out of a plane behind enemy lines, like we're paratroopers, we're supposed to be surrounded. That has stuck with me because I kind of feel like we're the church, we're supposed to be surrounded. Like this should this should be it's unfamiliar, but to be honest, it kind of comes with the faith. Like when we put our faith in Jesus, when we start walking with him on the way of the cross, we're gonna inevitably feel like we're surrounded. And so it shouldn't freak us out, and we shouldn't get bitter about it. Like, well, what did we expect? This is in a very real sense what we signed up for, but the way we live in that awkwardness is the way of the cross. All right, let me stop and see what comments or questions there may be.

SPEAKER_09 50:10

Um previously when I was in high school, I didn't wear my Christianity tool on my sleeve. I went to use group Sunday school and church or whatever. And I got away from it when I went to college until I met somebody. Um I want to go back to the comments you made about you didn't know that your friends were Christians or whatever. They know you were Christian.

SPEAKER_02 50:35

Yeah.

unknown 50:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 50:37

Yeah. Um yeah, no, no, no. Some of some of them did. Some of them did. Um I feel like that was more obvious when I went to college and joined a fraternity.

SPEAKER_05 50:48

Right.

SPEAKER_02 50:51

I mean, I I kind of had made some decisions by then about what I was gonna do and not do, and that just kind of like that became kind of that became kind of obvious. Um that was still kind of external stuff. I don't know that I was manifesting the fruit of the spirit, but it meant I wasn't getting drunk on the weekends. And then I was not. No, it meant it meant I wasn't. Like, and I've kind of wondered about that because I felt um I felt conspicuous or odd for my faith in high school, but I don't really know. Like I realize it now, because it has made me think. I probably was presuming some things that were not true. Um the reality is I didn't know any, I didn't know that. There's just whole sides of people that I didn't really know. I mean, you know, and it wasn't like they were acting in unchristian ways, it just wasn't part of our conversation when we were in high school and they didn't go to my church, so I didn't know.

SPEAKER_03 51:51

But don't we typically hang out with people that we are alike? Like some a lot of maybe just me, but even in high school, it's not that I ask. You know, it's always what church do you go to where but it I didn't I've never really hung out with people that didn't go to church. Yeah, you know, but I know I you know a lot of kids do that, yeah, that they feel more comfortable doing that, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 52:18

There are there are just multiple ways we make connections with people. Yeah. Right? Um, like, you know, thinking about um well I mean, I talk about my kids a lot, but like Luke right now in high school, right? He's got cross friends, he's got running friends, and he's got class friends. Because those are by and large not the same group of people. The people he has class with are usually not the people he's running with, and they're not the people he's playing the cross with. But he's got friends in all those different groups. So yeah, you have, but those are different interests and different things, right?

SPEAKER_03 52:56

But it's I don't know. It's like I didn't have friends whose parents were divorced. Do you know? There were I know later I found out, oh, my parents were divorced, so they got divorced later. Well, I I it I just always feel like a lot of times, at least in my case, I gravitated to people that live more like that.

SPEAKER_02 53:17

Yeah, I think that sure I think that happens. Yeah. Yeah. And I and I and just to go back for a second, I I think I suspect that some of what happened for some of my classmates, right, is something similar to that pattern where there was there was an experience with church and with the faith as a young person, and then you know, that's pretty common to go off to college and you're trying different things on and off, and you're figuring out, you know, you're figuring out who you are, right? And then you well, yeah. So um, yeah,