This is the next part of my ongoing series exploring the letter written by St Polycarp to the church in Philippi, collaborating with my friend Adsum Try Ravenhill of the Raven’s Writing Desk.
You can read the previous parts at these links: I; II; III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX.
Dear Adsum
Thank you for your last letter, particularly your guidance to ask God for patience in the midst of trials. Though, I must admit, this is a “thanks, I hate it” sort of thank you. Who wants more patience? People who want to be more like Jesus.
I am not a patient man. My wife is much more patient than me, as are many others I know. I think of the dear patience of a close friend whose debilitating illness has not been healed by the Lord and his desire to keep pressing in to follow Jesus anyway. It’s an inspiration to me.
Of course, I don’t think he’ll recognise himself in that sentence, because I don’t think he thinks he’s a patient man.
Today’s passage in Polycarp is:
Stand fast, therefore, in these things, and follow the example of the Lord, being firm and unchangeable in the faith, loving the brotherhood, and being attached to one another, joined together in the truth, exhibiting the meekness of the Lord in your intercourse with one another, and despising no one. When you can do good, defer it not, because “alms delivers from death.” Be all of you subject one to another, having your conduct blameless among the Gentiles,” that you may both receive praise for your good works, and the Lord may not be blasphemed through you. But woe to him by whom the name of the Lord is blasphemed! Teach, therefore, sobriety to all, and manifest it also in your own conduct.
Stand fast! Because of the example of Jesus and of the saints that we’ve already heard we should stand firm. Christians are to be boulders. The sort of obstacle that the wind and waves of life can’t move.
I find myself drawn to rural examples. I’ve lived in cities for my whole adult life, and for all my primary school had a flock of sheep (yes, really) I don’t know much about the countryside. I do recall once driving up a steep track in Wales that a flock of sheep had decided to sit down on at night. Progress was difficult.
Progress is even harder if something larger than your car, like a cow, decides to stop in the middle of the road. You can’t do anything about it except wait. The cow has no interest in the urgency of my journey, they go their own way. Oddly, Christians in this analogy are the cow, not the car. All of our culture or experience might be saying “go this way” or “get our of our way” but we are to stand fast. However stupid, or bovine, that makes us look.
We’re to be people who are ‘immovable’ in the faith. This congregation that Polycarp is writing to has lost a Pastor who’s fallen away. They are to watch their own lives and doctrine so that they do not go the same way. Don’t be swayed, don’t be dragged, don’t be seduced, or driven off the road.
In order to stand firm we need to ‘love the brotherhood.’ Polycarp is quoting 1 Peter 2.17. The brotherhood here is just the church. Our standing firm requires that we are with one another. I think of the analogy I was often told as a teenager. A boy who is considering leaving the church for whatever reason goes to talk to an older Pastor. He still loves Jesus but doesn’t really see what the point of church is. The Pastor removes a coal from the fire and puts it on the hearth. As they watch it cool and go out apart from the other coals the Pastor says “that’s you” implying that we need each other to stay “hot” for Jesus. I’m not sure the analogy is great, not least because I think most of us are so individualistic that we receive it as a challenge as though we will be the hero who manages to stay “hot for Jesus” (not a phrase I’m fond of!) without the crutch of the church. But the broader point, that Christianity is a team sport, that to follow Jesus is to love his bride, is certainly true.
Our standing firm will require the church and that we ‘cherish’ each other. We aren’t meant to ape familial bonds in the assembly of the saints as though it were a copy of our nuclear households and family. Instead, it’s supposed to be the Ur-Family, the place that we learn how to structure our families and households because of how the household of faith is structured.
Of course, as we both know, the church doesn’t always manage that at all. We should kept striving for it though.
Polycarp wants us to give way to one another in the gentleness of the Lord, despising no one. Which would be easy if only they would do it, I instantly think. Which is, of course, the problem. While this is not a prescription for being a doormat, we are supposed to prefer one another in God. If we all do this works well. Of course, my mind, like so many of us, jumped instantly to all the occasions it doesn’t work well (because of them inevitably, rather than because of me). That’s a job for the Lord’s Shepherds.
He then follows much of the argument of 1 Peter, summarised, exhorting his readers to do good where they can because the world will praise good deeds. Where the world doesn’t praise their good deeds, or perhaps today even recognises those deeds as good, that brings judgement on them. He isn’t arguing that they won’t face persecution and suffering because of their Christian faith, but that we don’t provide the world a reason to blaspheme the name of the Lord.
Adsum, do good to the people around you in your town where you can. Encourage others to do good to those they come across. As far as it relies on you, never be a reason to cause other to blaspheme the Lord because of your sin.
We live in a moment where it feels like a great number of Christian leaders are being exposed as behaving in a way that would lead to the Lord’s name being blasphemed. It may be that it’s only that our lives are much more public than they have been in the past—in increase in knowledge rather than in bad behaviour—but nevertheless we must resolve to not be those who bring the faith into disrepute.
Woe to those who besmirch the name of Christ. Woe to false teachers and those who fall from grace—like Valens who he is about to turn to discussing.
In everything, my friend, stand fast.
With love
T. M. Suffield
Photo by Anthony Tori on Unsplash
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