“A Colony of Heaven”

a sermon by

Dr. William P. Wood

First Presbyterian Church Charlotte, North Carolina

November 9, 2008

Text: “But our citizenship is in heaven, it is form there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 3:20)

A recent article in the New Yorker Magazine featured an article entitled “The Uses of Adversity” which related the story of Sidney Weinberg, who from 1930 to 1969 was the driving force at the investment firm Goldman Sachs. Weinberg was born one of eleven children of Pincus Weinberg, a struggling liquor wholesaler and bootlegger in Brooklyn. Sidney Weinberg started out as an assistant to the janitor at Goldman Sachs and ended up as one of the most powerful men on Wall Street.

As the author of this article points out, Weinberg was like many successful people of his generation. He was raised in poverty, he understood the value of work, and he was in many ways an “outsider.” He did not have the education, background, or social connections that many others had. But he had something else. He had a spirit and the capacity to seize an opportunity. He had the capacity to use his adversity to his advantage.

I.

When the Apostle Paul spoke of the church of his day, he used a remarkable metaphor. He called it “a colony of heaven.” The citizens of Philippi would understand that figure, for the city of Philippi was a Roman colony. When Rome wanted to Romanize a new province, it took Roman people and planted them as a colony in the midst of it. There, as a powerful minority, they stood for Roman law, Roman justice, Roman faith, and Roman customs, leaven in the lump of the province, until the whole province was leavened. Rome understood the art of government. Therefore, when Paul said to that small group of Philippian Christians, “We are a colony of heaven,” they understood. They were a minority thrown out, as pioneers, in the midst of an unchristian world to represent the ideals, faith, and way of living of a nobler realm until the earth should be the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. I am not sure we appreciate today what those early Christians actually accomplished. Paul understood this. As he wrote to the church at Corinth, “Not many were wise by the world’s standards, not many were powerful by noble birth.” But Paul goes on to say that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is foolish to shame the world.”

So look what this small group of Christians accomplished. They put an end to the ancient practices of infanticide. They brought to a halt the bloody shambles of the gladiatorial shows in the arena. They laid hold of an old polytheism that had been glorified in literature, extolled in art, established in custom, supported by government, and ended it in the name of one God revealed in Christ.

Christianity was very powerful in those days. It was a minority movement with nothing to lose and with everything to gain; joining which a person pledged his very life as a forfeit. At last, this movement became so powerful that it captured the Roman Empire itself. When the Roman Emperor Constantine became converted to Christianity in 312 A.D., Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The tragedy of this was at the very moment the church gained the world; it began to lose its soul. It entrenched itself in wealth and world prestige, it stopped challenging the world, began compromising with the world, went on to defend the status quo of the world and eventually became so corrupt that during the “dark ages” the church became almost universally corrupt.

II.

Today, we face a different type of challenge. The so-called mainline protestant denominations are on the verge of extinction. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has lost over half its members in the last forty years.

Moreover, we have become a church that is focused not on the “Great Commission,” but on a series of issues. For thirty years we have debated the issues of Abortion and Homosexuality, as if somehow these issues defined the nature of the church.

Now, let’s don’t deceive ourselves. Sometimes the church is called to take a stand, as it did in the 1960’s on the issue of racial injustice. It was a “status confessionis.” But today, the General Assembly of our denomination has made so many statements on so many issues that it has trivialized the witness of the church.

So how do we recover the notion of the church as a “colony of heaven?”

III.

For one thing, the church, if it is to be a colony of heaven, must take its stand for the “common good.” When the framers of the Constitution of the United States sought to define the liberties of this nation, they always balanced the rights of individuals against the rights of the common good. They conceived a nation where individuals had the right to pursue their own interests but this was always tempered with what they called “civic virtue” or the common good. If the current economic meltdown has taught us anything, it is demonstrated that unregulated,

First Presbyterian Church Page 2 November 9, 2008, #1339 unfettered markets don’t always serve the common good. Markets can generate abundance, but they can also breed excessive insecurity and risk.

Dean Rusk, who was Secretary of State under President John Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson, once told of growing up in a small rural community in Cherokee County Georgia. The community had a somewhat primitive system of communication and each farm had a telephone. One long ring and two short rings meant the phone call was for you. Two long rings and two short rings meant the call was for someone else, but as Rusk pointed out, you could always listen in. But if there were three long rings and three short rings, that meant there was an emergency and everyone was instructed to come to the telephone. Rusk said that in that small farming community, there were three things that constituted an emergency. One was if there was a fire, and then everyone had to come to the rescue of the house that was on fire. The second was if there was a mad dog in the neighborhood. The third thing that constituted an emergency in Cherokee County, Georgia was if a government agent was spotted in the neighborhood. “We didn’t want them,” said Rusk, “we didn’t think it was Washington’s role to bail us out.” Today, many of the people who have been arguing for deregulation of financial markets are the same people who are demanding the government intercede to bail them out.

But where are the statesmen? Where are the bankers, the lawyers, the businesspeople, the ministers who understand that unless the whole succeeds the parts cannot succeed?

The Apostle Paul understood this. He understood that the church was the “body of Christ.” Like the human body, the church consists of many parts. But the parts can only succeed, if the body itself succeeds.

IV.

Then, too, if we are to be the “colony of heaven” God intends us to be, the church is going to have to insist on its right to operate out of its own theology and polity and stand over against the culture in which we find ourselves today.

We are living today in a consumer culture that believes people can have whatever they want. That has been transferred to the churches where entertainment and customer service become the basis of church membership.

But the church has a different set of priorities. As the Barmen Declaration so eloquently points out “The Christian Church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in Word and Sacrament through the Holy Spirit.”

This means that the church has to be the church. It has to be prepared in his worship and in its witness to point people to Jesus Christ as Lord of the world and head of the church.

Throughout its history the church has had to say “No” to certain things in order to say “Yes” to others. The basic and most fundamental creed of the church is found in the New Testament. During the time of the New Testament, the Roman Empire required all its citizens to say that “Caesar is Lord.” But the church had a different confession. For the church, the basic

First Presbyterian Church Page 3 November 9, 2008, #1339 confession was that “Jesus is Lord.” These early Christians found that they could not serve two masters. Either Jesus was Lord or Caesar was Lord.

The same was true during World War II when the Confessing Church in Germany had to say “No” to Adolph Hitler and National Socialism in order to say “Yes” to Jesus Christ.

Today the church is being called to say “No” to a culture that insists that every member of the church can believe whatever he or she wants to without any regard for the teaching of the church. The church has to insist that its worship be conformed to its faith and that even weddings and funerals held in a church are not the property of individuals, but belong to the church.

V.

Then, finally, if we are to be a “colony of heaven,” we are going to have to recover a sense of sacrifice for the integrity of the church. Someone recently observed that the churches that are successful today are those who make it clear to their membership what is expected of them.

In the Presbyterian Church we have done a very poor job of this. For most people membership is a very optional thing. Most of us attend church if we are in town and rested on the same weekend. Many of our members have a very casual attitude to giving to the church. Dr. Charles Kraemer, a former minister of this church, once told me that when he was minister here, he sought to institute an “every member canvass” approach to supporting the church. But the session opposed that idea. One long time member objected that it “would not be fair to make these new people pay for our church.” Today, with a budget in excess of $3 million, I suspect there are not too many individuals who would be willing to take on that responsibility to keep the burden of the expense of the church off the backs of new people.

The New Testament paints a very different picture of discipleship. Jesus cut no corners. To follow him meant “denying oneself, taking up a cross and following him.” In fact, Jesus was extraordinarily harsh in this manner. To a man who protested that he must first bury his father Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” To those who in any way hesitated, Jesus replied by saying that once a person has put his hand to the plow, he cannot turn back.

Let us never underestimate the power of a small group of determined people. The Old Testament speaks of a “remnant,” that small group of people who remained faithful in their hope that one day the Messiah would come.

In the same manner the Apostle Paul saw in the city of Philippi a “colony of heaven” that would make a great difference in the life of city and Empire.

Today, God is calling us as a church to be the light of the world for Christ in this place that people may see that light and give glory to our father in heaven.

Amen!

First Presbyterian Church Page 4 November 9, 2008, #1339