Sermons
April 21, 2024 (4th Sunday of Easter)
Turning the world upside down?
Acts 17:1-9
Most kids go through various phases as they grow up. Some of these have to do with food: they will only eat, for instance, macaroni and cheese, every meal, every day, for weeks on end. Or maybe they’re about clothing: when my nephew was really little, he wanted to wear a Power Rangers costume every day. Eventually he outgrew the costume, and my sister thought that would be the end of it; but a friend of hers had the same costume in a bigger size.
Carrie went through an odd phase herself when she was a kid. I have no idea what prompted it—it would probably take an expert in child psychology to figure that out, and I’m sure not an expert in child psychology or any other kind of psychology. She would get into our kitchen cabinets and turn everything upside down. She turned the spice bottles on the turntable upside down. She turned all the canned goods upside down. She turned the cereal and cracker boxes upside down.
As a result she, along with many others, discovered something about the packaging of a new snack product that came out around that time. The snack was a mixture of nuts and pretzels and cereal bits and things, sort of like Chex mix (and this was before you could buy Chex mix in bags; back then if you wanted Chex mix you had to make it yourself). It was called “doo dads.”
What Carrie discovered was that, because of the way the name was laid out on the box and the typeface it was printed in, if you turned the box upside down, it said “spap oop.”[1] So for a time she expanded her odd little habit to the grocery store—and I joined in from time to time—and she would go down the snack food aisle and turn the boxes of “doo dads” upside down.
Like most kids do, Carrie eventually outgrew that phase. I know this because these days everything in her kitchen cabinets is right side up. Like I said, a child psychologist might have a field day with that kind of quirk, but I am not a psychologist and don’t play one on TV, so I don’t intend to speculate about it.
What I do know is that “turned upside down” is a pretty common metaphor for changes in life or culture that are frightening or aren’t altogether welcome.
That’s the accusation leveled against Paul and Silas by the Jewish leadership in Thessalonica. “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also,” they told the city authorities.
Ironically, the Jewish leaders were doing a whole lot more to turn Thessalonica upside down at that moment, stirring up a mob and dragging Paul and Silas and their new converts off to the city authorities to be punished for what they seem to describe as treason: defiance of Roman law and imperial edicts, and declaration that there is another king, Jesus. The city authorities, while disturbed, chose not to do anything more than collect bail from them; and the other believers sent them out of town for their own safety.
Acts, along with Paul’s own writing, indicate that Paul received similar receptions wherever he preached the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Philippi, he had been imprisoned, just like here in Thessalonica.[2] In Berea, where he went after leaving Thessalonica, his ministry was cut short when the Jewish leaders from Thessalonica showed up and started stirring up trouble for him there, too.[3] In Athens, his message was mostly ignored.[4] In Corinth, after a year and a half of living and working with Prisca and Aquila, and after a change in political leadership, Paul was attacked again and had to leave town.[5] In Ephesus Paul got crosswise with local businessmen who made a handsome profit supplying goods for pagan religious observances.[6]
Over and over again Paul’s message of salvation through Jesus Christ is met with resistance by the powers that be, either the political leaders, businessmen, or the leaders of his own Jewish faith.[7]
We who have always been believers in Jesus might have a hard time understanding why Paul’s message turned the world upside down. We belong to a faith that is now the dominant one, even though our culture is growing more diverse these days. We tend to believe that being Christians is about being good people and upholding traditional, middle-class, white American morality. And we tend to turn to Paul’s writings to support that understanding of what the Christian faith is about.
Turning the world upside down is what rabble-rousers and radicals do, and we tend to see rabble-rousers and radicals as enemies of the Christian faith, trying to change what we’ve always held dear. Yet that is what Paul was accused of; he was called a rabble-rouser and a radical, and he was rejected by many people and treated harshly almost everywhere he went.
How can this be?
If Paul were here today, surely he’d be standing right beside us as we hold on with gritted teeth, trying to keep the world from being turned upside down, wouldn’t he?
Wouldn’t he…?
There’s a school of thought out there—among both Christians and non-Christians—that sees Paul as having domesticated the teachings of Jesus and combined them with his own teachings to codify a faith that is far more interested in maintaining the status quo than in turning the world upside down. We who are Christians and who live pretty comfortable, moral, socially acceptable lives may well prefer that Paul. The only problem is, that is not the Paul portrayed in Acts, and it’s not the Paul we meet through his letters. We pull a few things out of those letters, like the household codes in Ephesians and Colossians (both of which were quite likely written by someone other than Paul), the consequences of rebellion against God in the first couple chapters of Romans what he says about women’s roles in church in 1 Corinthians 14[8] or the “love chapter” in 1 Corinthians, and force them to represent all of what Paul said, and we get a very distorted picture.
If Paul was such a guardian of the status quo, why was he in trouble everywhere he went, and why did he end up—as Jesus before him had—executed by the Roman Empire?
The answer, of course, is that he wasn’t. He was still turning the world upside down right up to the day he died.
I don’t think this apostle, to whom we turn to find out how to live as Christians, had any intention of creating a socially acceptable institution that functions as the keeper of so-called traditional values, particularly as regards sexual morality and the place of women in church and society. He was not setting up the church of Jesus Christ as a fortress that defends the status quo against change. His message wasn’t that in Christ we will be prosperous, socially acceptable, nice people.
Here’s why I suspect this is the case.
Like almost all of his letters (with the exception of Galatians), Paul begins his first letter to the church in Thessalonica, written long after he had left there, with a thanksgiving. We tend to want to skip over these thanksgivings to get to the body of the letters, which in the case of First Thessalonians begins with chapter 2. But there is usually some interesting information in those thanksgivings, and that’s true of 1 Thessalonians.
In that thanksgiving Paul describes how the Thessalonians have been transformed by accepting the Gospel: “You became imitators of us and of the Lord.”[9] Paul, who was always in trouble for preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and Jesus himself, who was rejected by the leaders of his own people, then tortured and killed, because of their radical (yes, radical[10]) teachings about the Reign of God, had become the model for the lives of the Christians in Thessalonica. As Paul had turned the world upside down, as Jesus had turned the world upside down, is it too much to suggest that the Thessalonian Christians did the same? Paul does indicate in the letter that they are being persecuted for becoming followers of Jesus, so we have to wonder.
I think it’s safe to say that, far from wanting Christians to be preservers of the status quo, Paul would have us continue to turn the world upside down. Are we doing that?
We know the world is not as it should be. There is far too much violence, terrorism, exploitation, poverty, and sickness around us. Frankly I think the world needs to be turned upside down. And if we were actually to become imitators of Jesus Christ, as Paul described the Thessalonian Christians as having become, perhaps we could be the ones to do it.
[1] Autocorrect tried to make this “spa poop,” which is most assuredly not what I meant!
[2] Acts 16:11-40
[3] Acts 17:10-15
[4] Acts 17:16-34
[5] Acts 18:1-21
[6] Acts 19:21-41
[7] We have to be careful not to turn Jewish leaders’ rejection of Paul’s message into a doctrine that “all Jews are guilty of rejecting (or even of killing) Jesus.” Indeed, everywhere Paul went he started by teaching in synagogues, and he gained some Jewish converts in most cities he visited.
[8] vv. 33b-36; at least some scholars say that, based on the Greek words Paul chooses, he never meant to rule out women taking leadership positions in church. He simply wanted women who had never been in a gathering like a church service, and thus didn’t know how to behave there, to stop talking among themselves and listen to what teachers and preachers were saying.
[9] 1 Thessalonians 1:6
[10] Radical doesn’t actually mean what we think it means. It comes from a Latin word that means root, so a true radical, like Jesus, is calling us to return to the root of our faith and our life, which is God’s love, God’s grace, and God’s truth. A true American radical would call us to build a society based on the ideals we have had articulated by the greatest leaders in our history, things like “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”