Sermon Audio
April 10, 2016 Second Sunday After Easter
Up From Bondage
Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 23, 1 St. Peter 2:18-25, St. John 10:11-16
Callistus was a slave in the Roman emperor’s household. Put in charge of a fund collected to benefit widows and orphans, he lost the money. He fled and was caught. After serving a prison term of unknown duration, he was released to make an effort to recover and restore the money.
He seems to have approached this work with an excess of zeal; he was arrested for brawling in a Jewish synagogue while trying to secure a donation. This time he was condemned to work in the mines of Sardinia . . . but he still had friends at court. The emperor's mistress intervened on his behalf and won his release.
After gaining his freedom, Callistus became superintendent of the public Christian burial ground in Rome, which is called the cemetery of St. Callistus to this day and was probably the first land owned by the church. The pope ordained him a deacon and made him his friend and adviser.
A few days after Christmas in the year 217, Callistus was elected the 16th pope of the Roman Catholic Church on a majority vote of the clergy and laity of Rome. He served only five or six years before dying in a public uprising, becoming the first pope, with the exception of the original one, Peter, to be martyred.
His term may have been brief but it was hardly uneventful. The losing candidate in the election, Hippolytus, attacked Callistus with a vengeance. Hippolytus – regarded today as the most important theologian of the third century -- couldn’t topple Callistus, but he allowed himself be set up as the first antipope in the history of the church. The schism lasted about 18 years.
Hippolytus attacked Callistus on doctrinal grounds, but more interesting for our purpose are his complaints regarding discipline. By Hippolytus’ reckoning, Callistus was far too lenient.
First, he admitted to Holy Communion those who had already done public penance for murder, adultery and fornication. Second, he held marriages between free women and slaves to be valid —contrary to Roman law. Third, he authorized the ordination of men who had been married two or three times. Fourth, he held that mortal sin was not a sufficient reason to depose a bishop. And finally, he held to a policy of grace toward those who had temporarily denied their faith during persecution.
In the end, the stern Hippolytus was banished to Sardinia, as his archrival Callistus had been, during the persecution of 235. He was later reconciled to the Church but died in short order from his sufferings in Sardinia. Like Callistus, he is listed as a martyr and venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.
Looking back, we ask, who’s a servile slave and who’s a splendid satrap? Who’s a sinning saint and who’s a saintly sinner? Who’s a proper pope and who’s a poor parody? It gets downright confusin.’
St. Peter, that first pope as the Catholics reckon popedom, gives us our epistle lesson for today: “Servants, be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the harsh. For this is commendable, if because of conscience toward God one endures grief, suffering wrongfully.”
This scene involving Callistus and Hippolytus a couple of centuries later allows us a look into an ancient culture at a far remove from our own. We take upward mobility as much for granted as granola bars but in their day one remained in the station into which he was born.
He might, of course, experience downward mobility if he were a soldier captured in war or a debtor unable to pay up. But by the first century most slaves – and there were tens of millions of them in the empire – were born to parents who were slaves.
Not all of them endured the sub-human state of slaves in the pre-Civil War American South. As a matter of fact, many enjoyed a rather soft life as musicians, teachers and physicians. Rome had become so wealthy, so comfortable, that citizens considered work or any sort other than government and the military beneath their station.
A condition of flabbiness that is the precursor of decay had set in; it wouldn’t be long before ravenous Germanic tribes from the north were tearing off chunks of the empire and even sacking Rome herself.
That astute French observer of 19th-century America Alexis de Tocqueville noted a similar syndrome in the plantation culture of the South. As horrible as slavery was for the blacks in bondage, it was not without cost to their white masters. As they became increasingly indolent and self-absorbed they abandoned all mental and emotional discipline, wallowing in their wealth like pigs in slop.
They uttered a word and the cotton crop was harvested, snapped their fingers and a mint julep appeared. Slavery can turn on the masters and consume them. They had made themselves slaves to their excesses.
In our passage, “slaves” is a better translation than “servants.” Peter does not use the common word “doulos.” Remember that Greek yogurt in the dairy case called “Oikos,” which is the word for “house.” Peter’s word is “oiketai,” which refers to household slaves. This was Callistus’ place in the emperor’s house in his pre-papal days.
We insist on the word “slaves” because, regardless of their skills and even in some cases a position that amounted in many ways to that of a family member, these were people who were property under Roman law and as such had no rights.
Peter is beginning to set out here one of those household codes that were so widely circulated in the ancient world for instructing family members and others who live in the house on how to relate to one another. He will go on to tell wives to submit to their husbands and husbands to honor their wives.
To our ears, his counsel for slaves sounds as harsh as Drano. They must take whatever their masters choose to dish out – and not only the nice ones. They would earn credit with God by their suffering under the hand of the vile and abusive if they did so to set a righteous example.
Drawing on the Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah 53, the apostle cites Christ as the model. If there was ever a truly innocent One it was the Lord and He had suffered in silence for the sake of the gospel. Now, go and do likewise.
Is there inherent nobility in suffering? Of course not. Throughout history, some tormented souls have abused
themselves in an effort to purge their sins. In the early centuries of the church ascetics went away into the desert to subsist on the margin of existence in order to train all of their focus on God. Martin Luther flayed himself in an attempt to expunge all sin from his body.
Peter does not advocate inviting abuse but accepting it when necessary to preserve one’s Christian witness. His instruction was intensely practical. Jesus Christ had introduced something radically new into His creation.
Rome imposed a strict hierarchy on her vast colonies with citizens on one plane and subject peoples, captured soldiers and slaves on lower ones. Christ spoke into this world a message of gentleness, meekness, charity, hope and love.
As St. Paul put it, when God considered the essential value of His creatures there was neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. All whom God had created in His image enjoyed His love and approval, if not equal rank.
For God has a hierarchy of His own, never to be confused with that of the world. In His system, the most humble rises to the highest place of honor, the meek inherit the earth.
In this brave new world, a slave might be the pastor of a church and his master one of the rank and file in the congregation. Temptations abounded to carry one’s new-found status back into the household and assert authority there. Peter wants the social order preserved for the good of the church.
"Therefore, slaves, be submissive to your masters with all fear . . ."
For 2,000 years, critics of the church have gnashed their teeth over passages such as this one. Why did Christ never condemn the ghastly institution of slavery? Why do the New Testament writers not once take slave owners to task? Why do they instead tell slaves to shut up and take the torment? Don’t Christians want to see justice done?
Whose justice? We have already touched on one reason for Peter’s stern admonition, the explicitly stated one: Follow your Lord in accepting suffering to demonstrate that you serve the God of peace and love. You have a mission to the nations and you will win over new believers by your faith, humility and endurance.
Commentators point out as well that slave uprisings had already come and that the civil authorities had ruthlessly crushed each of them. The New Testament authors wanted to protect the fragile, infant church against a pogrom that would have resulted from any movement that even appeared to threaten the established order.
We have in this text, beloved, a lesson in the balance – sometimes a delicate balance indeed – the Christian life requires. Based on his experience as a slave, Pope Callistus must have brought a keen empathy to his labors. However he came by it, he certainly had grace aplenty to slather on those fallen and wretched souls who came to him seeking forgiveness and compassion.
Perhaps he went too far. Hippolytus, that champion of church discipline, certainly thought so. Here was a man so brittle it must have seemed a puff of wind would snap him in two. When we survey the church scene in our place and time, though, we’re likely to conclude that many have gorged on grace and abandoned rigor entirely.
None can deny that our Lord’s church must exercise discipline and dispense grace; a point between the two poles those two leaders occupied might have been the most pleasing to our Lord.
Along the way, I’d like to offer a salute to Callistus. If we are to err, as we are bound to do, surely it should be on the side of grace. For my part, I am forever grateful to the Reformed Episcopal Church for the service it allows me.
I have the blot of a divorce from my misspent youth on my record. Even now, after more than 3 ½ decades of marriage, some denominations would disqualify me from the ordained ministry on that basis.
On the matter of condemning slavery, likewise, Peter and Paul were walking a tightrope. They might have come out against it with guns blazing and struck a blow for social justice. But I’m convinced they had good reason to do otherwise, a reason we have not discussed as yet.
That reason is the New Testament principle that it is those who suffer with Christ who will be glorified with Him. This is the inevitable outcome of seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, of making the things of that eternal kingdom more important than those of this temporal one.
So doing, we put ourselves at odds with this world and with the legions who insist that what it offers is all that matters. Go back and read the Sermon on the Mount one more time and meditate on our Lord’s words that command us to do just that.
We’ve had it easy, you and I. It appears unlikely our descendants will have it so good.
In our country, Christians led the crusade against slavery and for civil rights and Christians now see our liberty in peril. Slavery arrived in Great Britain’s American colonies in 1619. The first formal protest against it arose in 1688 and it came from Pennsylvania Quakers, who held fast to a belief in the inner light of conscience.
In the 19th century, Christians argued simply and eloquently that every person was created in God’s image and as such was entitled to equal protection under the law. They made abolition their goal.
From the early days of the struggle down to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, Christians marched in the vanguard of the cause of reform. But in the ‘60s, something changed. The agents of the sexual revolution co-opted both the methods and the uncompromising goals of the Civil Rights movement . . . and they added a twist. Fay Voshell explains:
“The radical fringe of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s coincided and was parallel with the Civil Rights movement, gradually poisoning and then determining to kill outright the Christian religious conscience that was and still is the backbone of reform in America. The radicals behind the sexual revolution substituted in the place of Christian conscience answerable to God a militant view of self-determination that held to no god but the inner god of human will and power.
“In an astonishing perversion of the Quaker idea of the inner voice of conscience answerable to God, the inner voice of the individual human being was determined to be infallible in matters of sex and practice – ‘If it feels good; do it.’ What any individual believed to be his or her inner voice granted unqualified authority to remold the world according to the latest revolutionary fatwa concerning sexual freedom.”
From clamor for equal treatment this movement has ratcheted up the pressure to demands for same-sex marriage and now unrestricted access to public bathrooms for persons who have decided to cast off the gender of their birth and adopt the opposite one in answer to the inner god.
And that is not their end-game. With legal assaults on the rights of conscience of Christian wedding planners and photographers and bakers and on pastors’ determination of whom they will marry based on the standards of the Bible and their denomination, they are maneuvering to enslave followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Callistus transitioned from slave to pope . . . but the train runs in both directions. Fay Voshell sees a parallel between the aims of 21st-century American sexual revolutionaries and those of socialist and communist regimes in the Soviet Union and elsewhere that made it their mission to stamp out Christianity.
In Callistus’ day and in our own, a nation that will not honor God will enslave His people, and worse. With Christ as our example we must stand against the tide in humility, hope and love . . . but we must stand, or we will surely fall. Amen.
Up From Bondage
Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 23, 1 St. Peter 2:18-25, St. John 10:11-16
Callistus was a slave in the Roman emperor’s household. Put in charge of a fund collected to benefit widows and orphans, he lost the money. He fled and was caught. After serving a prison term of unknown duration, he was released to make an effort to recover and restore the money.
He seems to have approached this work with an excess of zeal; he was arrested for brawling in a Jewish synagogue while trying to secure a donation. This time he was condemned to work in the mines of Sardinia . . . but he still had friends at court. The emperor's mistress intervened on his behalf and won his release.
After gaining his freedom, Callistus became superintendent of the public Christian burial ground in Rome, which is called the cemetery of St. Callistus to this day and was probably the first land owned by the church. The pope ordained him a deacon and made him his friend and adviser.
A few days after Christmas in the year 217, Callistus was elected the 16th pope of the Roman Catholic Church on a majority vote of the clergy and laity of Rome. He served only five or six years before dying in a public uprising, becoming the first pope, with the exception of the original one, Peter, to be martyred.
His term may have been brief but it was hardly uneventful. The losing candidate in the election, Hippolytus, attacked Callistus with a vengeance. Hippolytus – regarded today as the most important theologian of the third century -- couldn’t topple Callistus, but he allowed himself be set up as the first antipope in the history of the church. The schism lasted about 18 years.
Hippolytus attacked Callistus on doctrinal grounds, but more interesting for our purpose are his complaints regarding discipline. By Hippolytus’ reckoning, Callistus was far too lenient.
First, he admitted to Holy Communion those who had already done public penance for murder, adultery and fornication. Second, he held marriages between free women and slaves to be valid —contrary to Roman law. Third, he authorized the ordination of men who had been married two or three times. Fourth, he held that mortal sin was not a sufficient reason to depose a bishop. And finally, he held to a policy of grace toward those who had temporarily denied their faith during persecution.
In the end, the stern Hippolytus was banished to Sardinia, as his archrival Callistus had been, during the persecution of 235. He was later reconciled to the Church but died in short order from his sufferings in Sardinia. Like Callistus, he is listed as a martyr and venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.
Looking back, we ask, who’s a servile slave and who’s a splendid satrap? Who’s a sinning saint and who’s a saintly sinner? Who’s a proper pope and who’s a poor parody? It gets downright confusin.’
St. Peter, that first pope as the Catholics reckon popedom, gives us our epistle lesson for today: “Servants, be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the harsh. For this is commendable, if because of conscience toward God one endures grief, suffering wrongfully.”
This scene involving Callistus and Hippolytus a couple of centuries later allows us a look into an ancient culture at a far remove from our own. We take upward mobility as much for granted as granola bars but in their day one remained in the station into which he was born.
He might, of course, experience downward mobility if he were a soldier captured in war or a debtor unable to pay up. But by the first century most slaves – and there were tens of millions of them in the empire – were born to parents who were slaves.
Not all of them endured the sub-human state of slaves in the pre-Civil War American South. As a matter of fact, many enjoyed a rather soft life as musicians, teachers and physicians. Rome had become so wealthy, so comfortable, that citizens considered work or any sort other than government and the military beneath their station.
A condition of flabbiness that is the precursor of decay had set in; it wouldn’t be long before ravenous Germanic tribes from the north were tearing off chunks of the empire and even sacking Rome herself.
That astute French observer of 19th-century America Alexis de Tocqueville noted a similar syndrome in the plantation culture of the South. As horrible as slavery was for the blacks in bondage, it was not without cost to their white masters. As they became increasingly indolent and self-absorbed they abandoned all mental and emotional discipline, wallowing in their wealth like pigs in slop.
They uttered a word and the cotton crop was harvested, snapped their fingers and a mint julep appeared. Slavery can turn on the masters and consume them. They had made themselves slaves to their excesses.
In our passage, “slaves” is a better translation than “servants.” Peter does not use the common word “doulos.” Remember that Greek yogurt in the dairy case called “Oikos,” which is the word for “house.” Peter’s word is “oiketai,” which refers to household slaves. This was Callistus’ place in the emperor’s house in his pre-papal days.
We insist on the word “slaves” because, regardless of their skills and even in some cases a position that amounted in many ways to that of a family member, these were people who were property under Roman law and as such had no rights.
Peter is beginning to set out here one of those household codes that were so widely circulated in the ancient world for instructing family members and others who live in the house on how to relate to one another. He will go on to tell wives to submit to their husbands and husbands to honor their wives.
To our ears, his counsel for slaves sounds as harsh as Drano. They must take whatever their masters choose to dish out – and not only the nice ones. They would earn credit with God by their suffering under the hand of the vile and abusive if they did so to set a righteous example.
Drawing on the Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah 53, the apostle cites Christ as the model. If there was ever a truly innocent One it was the Lord and He had suffered in silence for the sake of the gospel. Now, go and do likewise.
Is there inherent nobility in suffering? Of course not. Throughout history, some tormented souls have abused
themselves in an effort to purge their sins. In the early centuries of the church ascetics went away into the desert to subsist on the margin of existence in order to train all of their focus on God. Martin Luther flayed himself in an attempt to expunge all sin from his body.
Peter does not advocate inviting abuse but accepting it when necessary to preserve one’s Christian witness. His instruction was intensely practical. Jesus Christ had introduced something radically new into His creation.
Rome imposed a strict hierarchy on her vast colonies with citizens on one plane and subject peoples, captured soldiers and slaves on lower ones. Christ spoke into this world a message of gentleness, meekness, charity, hope and love.
As St. Paul put it, when God considered the essential value of His creatures there was neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. All whom God had created in His image enjoyed His love and approval, if not equal rank.
For God has a hierarchy of His own, never to be confused with that of the world. In His system, the most humble rises to the highest place of honor, the meek inherit the earth.
In this brave new world, a slave might be the pastor of a church and his master one of the rank and file in the congregation. Temptations abounded to carry one’s new-found status back into the household and assert authority there. Peter wants the social order preserved for the good of the church.
"Therefore, slaves, be submissive to your masters with all fear . . ."
For 2,000 years, critics of the church have gnashed their teeth over passages such as this one. Why did Christ never condemn the ghastly institution of slavery? Why do the New Testament writers not once take slave owners to task? Why do they instead tell slaves to shut up and take the torment? Don’t Christians want to see justice done?
Whose justice? We have already touched on one reason for Peter’s stern admonition, the explicitly stated one: Follow your Lord in accepting suffering to demonstrate that you serve the God of peace and love. You have a mission to the nations and you will win over new believers by your faith, humility and endurance.
Commentators point out as well that slave uprisings had already come and that the civil authorities had ruthlessly crushed each of them. The New Testament authors wanted to protect the fragile, infant church against a pogrom that would have resulted from any movement that even appeared to threaten the established order.
We have in this text, beloved, a lesson in the balance – sometimes a delicate balance indeed – the Christian life requires. Based on his experience as a slave, Pope Callistus must have brought a keen empathy to his labors. However he came by it, he certainly had grace aplenty to slather on those fallen and wretched souls who came to him seeking forgiveness and compassion.
Perhaps he went too far. Hippolytus, that champion of church discipline, certainly thought so. Here was a man so brittle it must have seemed a puff of wind would snap him in two. When we survey the church scene in our place and time, though, we’re likely to conclude that many have gorged on grace and abandoned rigor entirely.
None can deny that our Lord’s church must exercise discipline and dispense grace; a point between the two poles those two leaders occupied might have been the most pleasing to our Lord.
Along the way, I’d like to offer a salute to Callistus. If we are to err, as we are bound to do, surely it should be on the side of grace. For my part, I am forever grateful to the Reformed Episcopal Church for the service it allows me.
I have the blot of a divorce from my misspent youth on my record. Even now, after more than 3 ½ decades of marriage, some denominations would disqualify me from the ordained ministry on that basis.
On the matter of condemning slavery, likewise, Peter and Paul were walking a tightrope. They might have come out against it with guns blazing and struck a blow for social justice. But I’m convinced they had good reason to do otherwise, a reason we have not discussed as yet.
That reason is the New Testament principle that it is those who suffer with Christ who will be glorified with Him. This is the inevitable outcome of seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, of making the things of that eternal kingdom more important than those of this temporal one.
So doing, we put ourselves at odds with this world and with the legions who insist that what it offers is all that matters. Go back and read the Sermon on the Mount one more time and meditate on our Lord’s words that command us to do just that.
We’ve had it easy, you and I. It appears unlikely our descendants will have it so good.
In our country, Christians led the crusade against slavery and for civil rights and Christians now see our liberty in peril. Slavery arrived in Great Britain’s American colonies in 1619. The first formal protest against it arose in 1688 and it came from Pennsylvania Quakers, who held fast to a belief in the inner light of conscience.
In the 19th century, Christians argued simply and eloquently that every person was created in God’s image and as such was entitled to equal protection under the law. They made abolition their goal.
From the early days of the struggle down to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, Christians marched in the vanguard of the cause of reform. But in the ‘60s, something changed. The agents of the sexual revolution co-opted both the methods and the uncompromising goals of the Civil Rights movement . . . and they added a twist. Fay Voshell explains:
“The radical fringe of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s coincided and was parallel with the Civil Rights movement, gradually poisoning and then determining to kill outright the Christian religious conscience that was and still is the backbone of reform in America. The radicals behind the sexual revolution substituted in the place of Christian conscience answerable to God a militant view of self-determination that held to no god but the inner god of human will and power.
“In an astonishing perversion of the Quaker idea of the inner voice of conscience answerable to God, the inner voice of the individual human being was determined to be infallible in matters of sex and practice – ‘If it feels good; do it.’ What any individual believed to be his or her inner voice granted unqualified authority to remold the world according to the latest revolutionary fatwa concerning sexual freedom.”
From clamor for equal treatment this movement has ratcheted up the pressure to demands for same-sex marriage and now unrestricted access to public bathrooms for persons who have decided to cast off the gender of their birth and adopt the opposite one in answer to the inner god.
And that is not their end-game. With legal assaults on the rights of conscience of Christian wedding planners and photographers and bakers and on pastors’ determination of whom they will marry based on the standards of the Bible and their denomination, they are maneuvering to enslave followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Callistus transitioned from slave to pope . . . but the train runs in both directions. Fay Voshell sees a parallel between the aims of 21st-century American sexual revolutionaries and those of socialist and communist regimes in the Soviet Union and elsewhere that made it their mission to stamp out Christianity.
In Callistus’ day and in our own, a nation that will not honor God will enslave His people, and worse. With Christ as our example we must stand against the tide in humility, hope and love . . . but we must stand, or we will surely fall. Amen.