Bishop's Column
Posted Thursday, November 01, 2007
An Open Door and Many Adversaries: Thoughts on the Eve of Convention
November 2007
I will visit you after passing through Macedonia – for I intend to pass through Macedonia – and perhaps I will stay with you or even spend the winter, so that you may send me on my way, wherever I go. I do not want to see you now just in passing, for I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits. But I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost, for a wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries. (1 Corinthians 16:5-9)
Before I turn out the light most nights, I read travel literature – Travel and Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, National Geographic Travel, Departures, the New York Times’ “Escape” section, the Wall Street Journal’s “Pursuits” section. It gets me dreaming of exotic places, imaginary journeys, and fantastic adventures, and puts me to sleep.
The Apostle Paul had his own travel interests. But unlike mine, his travel planning included no escapes. He knew that the word apostle means “one sent out”! He also understood the meaning of the word “travel” – a variant of “travail,” from which the French get “travail,” and the Spanish “trabajo,” their words for “work” or “toil” or “difficulty.”
On a flight once from London to Philadelphia I was seated between two students from one of our local high schools who were returning home after travel in England. “What do you think of England?” I asked. “Not nearly as fun as last year’s trip to Cancun!” one replied. “Well, of course,” I said, “Cancun would be more fun, but fun is not why you go to England.” “What do you mean?” asked the other. “You go to Cancun for vacation,” I said, “but you go to England to travel.” “There’s a difference?” queried the first, astonished. “Yes,” I said, “to vacation means to enter a vacant – an empty – place, where you can escape responsibility, while to travel means to enter into travail – hard work.” “Oh,” they responded.
Paul knew the difference. From Ephesus he wrote to the Christians across the Aegean Sea in Corinth; he had previously visited them briefly. Now he was plotting another journey. He would come to them through the rugged, rocky mountain ranges of Macedonia on foot – adding to the many thousand miles it is calculated he walked in his apostolic labors. Once he arrived, he would hope to spend the winter, not least because of the impossible travel conditions during the cold, wet, snowy season, but more especially because he desired genuine quality time with them. Indeed, he had no further plans beyond seeing them. He described his next move dismissively as “wherever.” It is as though he was open to staying with them forever, even until his death.
But he also knew that hunkering down in Corinth for the winter would not provide any real escape. After all, he wrote from Ephesus. Perhaps he had been there, too, for a prolonged winter, for he says he plans to stay until late spring, or Pentecost. But if so, Ephesus was for him no winter vacation on a tropical island. Rather, he planned to stay in order to take advantage of the situation that he faced there, what he calls “a wide door for effective work” that has “opened to him, and many adversaries.”
Whether the city is Ephesus or Corinth or Philadelphia, an apostle like Paul – and an apostolic church (which we Episcopalians confess ourselves to be) – always has “a wide door for effective work opened … and there are many adversaries.”
Here is a lesson worth remembering as this month we gather for the 224th Diocesan Convention: wherever a wide door for effective work is opened to us as a diocese, there, too, are many adversaries. Life in the church is no escape from human life in the world, and human life is inevitably agonistic – marked, that is, by antagonisms, contradictions, conflicts, polarities, party factionalisms, struggles, and paradoxes.
An understanding of human life plays a major role in Paul’s thinking, and, consequently, life’s contradictions, and its adversarial nature, are reflected in almost ever sentence of his letters as he writes of Jews and Gentles, free and slaves, men and women, Greeks and barbarians, the educated and uneducated, the mortal body and immortal soul, angels and demons, heaven and earth.
He recognizes that, just as a river flows only because it is contained between two opposing banks, life, too, goes forward only because of its contradictions.
He was aware of such contradictions especially in his own life. He had gone from being a persecutor of the church to become its major missionary. Though a Jew, he was commissioned to take the gospel to the Gentiles. The Jewish-Christians, who held that Christianity should be a reform sect within Judaism, opposed the goal of his mission, which was to make Christianity a worldwide movement.
It took a church convention in Jerusalem to settle the question of whether Gentile-Christians were to be treated as Jewish proselytes or as members of a church whose foundation was outside Judaism. After a fierce debate, the majority supported the latter position, which was Paul’s (Galatians 2:1-10).
But even after the convention adjourned, the minority opposition party did not give up. Rather, they followed Paul into the mission field and worked against him in whatever way they could. He thus found himself attacked on several sides – from pagan religionists, from non-Christian Jews, and especially (because actually closest to him) from Jewish Christians. He could not escape the antagonisms of life. In them, rather, he experienced Christ’s death and resurrection life.
As we come to our own convention, it is helpful to recall that after laying hands on our heads and invoking the strengthening power of the Holy Spirit within us at our confirmations, the bishop gently struck us on the cheek – to remind us of the inevitability of contradictions and antagonisms in the Christian life, and of Christ’s call to turn the other cheek, and to go the second mile in order to remain in the presence of, and to spend quality time, maybe even this winter, with one another, across our differences.
Our upcoming convention will not be a vacation day. But by God’s grace it may be a travel adventure, with much travail, many adversaries, a wide door open for much effective work, and our dying and rising with Christ.