Scripture: Philippians 1:1–18
We are fortunate for friends who help us see things differently.
Here at Newman Church, we have a good friend across the Atlantic Ocean. Every Friday a group of folks gathers in the minister’s office and on Zoom for Bible Study and faith-based discussion. One of the members of the group who joins via Zoom is Barbara, who joins the discussion group from her home in rural Switzerland.
Barbara is American-born, but has lived in Switzerland for over forty years. She is a wise discussion partner who draws inspiration from the beauty of the Swiss countryside around her — an environment that is familiar to us here in New England, but different too.
While we in Southern New England live in this flat, coastal environment, Barbara has the large perspective of one who can look up and see snow in the mountains, and look down into the warm valleys below, and appreciate the mud right outside her door. In the spring, the blooming season arrives to her region a little earlier than it arrives to us. And the agricultural parts of the Bible —the shepherds and harvests — mean something different to her, living in a place shaped by cows, milk, and manure.
Zooming in from six hours ahead of us, Barbara is familiar and different all at once. She is our beloved Swiss connection who helps the group to remember what is happening outside of our immediate experiences.
In a way this is what the “imprisoned Apostle” Paul does for early Christians by writing so many letters. He reminds the uncertain, fledgling Christians that even though they all have regional differences, they are connected in Christ, and they are not alone — even though Paul is in a jail in Rome, he is thinking of them in Philippi — even though they may feel isolated, there are other small groups of Jesus followers just like them, and completely different from them, in the cities of coastal Africa, Asia, and Europe.
And while there is a lot to learn from comparing and contrasting the Apostles’ ministry in places like Philippi, Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica, Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and on…
I want to think a little more about Switzerland.
Because if Christianity in the first-century was mostly shaped by people from around Jerusalem, Christianity in the twentieth-century was notably shaped by people from Switzerland — both Protestants and Catholics.
The importance of Switzerland can be seen in the fact that the robe that I’m wearing this morning is often referred to as a “Geneva gown” — Geneva being a famous city in Switzerland; this robe was what academics at places like the University of Geneva wore. The black robe became the clothing of choice for Protestant Reformers as they rejected the proscribed vestments of the Roman Church as the two churches were splintering in the 1500s.
In the 1520s and 30s, reformers in Switzerland like Zwingli and Calvin helped start a branch Christianity that could change and reform. John Calvin turned Geneva into something of a “Protestant capital” as he helped shift understandings of religious authority in Christianity away from Rome and onto individual believers and local congregations.
Switzerland’s status as a neutral nation today comes out of the violence and warring that came out of the need to find common ground after this transformative Reformation period.
By the 19-hundreds, both Protestant and Catholic theology was flourishing in Switzerland, when Swiss theologian Karl Barth begins his career.
Barth is famous for many things in Christianity, but a few are especially interesting to us today as we circle around Paul and the Philippians.
Barth believed that God is “wholly other” and beyond our comprehension. Rather than finding God in nature and appreciating the work of a creator by the beauty of creation, Barth said that the place where we encounter and understand God is in Jesus, seen through the revelation of good-news scripture. On these grounds, he pushed back against John Calvin’s idea of a small group of predestined spiritual elect who would alone benefit from God’s salvation.
He also taught that scripture requires a believer to have a defiant spirit to counteract the anxiety and reality of struggle in the world. And he also believed in a self-emptying Jesus, a servant God who emptied and gave so that we could overflow in love and have abundance.
And when the Nazis were coming to power in Germany, Barth put this theology into practice by writing a Barmen Declaration opposing the Nazi’s German Christian movement. He asserted that the Nazis were not divinely sanctioned, they were not a source of truth, they could not co-opt the church into their political agenda, and that leadership in the church belongs to all its members and there was no place for the domination of a Führer.
Theological commitments shaped civic commitments in the face of authoritarianism.
These convictions of Barth stem from the theology of Paul, who was also supporting Christians in the context of authoritarian threats to their ability to follow Christ — Paul writes to the Philippians that “even though I am imprisoned, God’s love is becoming apparent in our midst”; and that we are producing a “harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.”
We know that Paul was imprisoned and eventually executed for his convictions. Just as we know that all the people who signed Barth’s Barmen Declaration in 1934 — over one hundred people — were executed, or exiled, or imprisoned for declaring their theological beliefs.
Barth himself was arrested at his University in Germany and deported to Switzerland.
And so I am glad that we have Barbara, a Swiss thinker in our midst, to remind us of the Swiss tradition that site of conflict can become site of peace; and that our faith can change and evolve and reform; and remind us of the importance of confessing our faith and living it publicly so that our faith will not be co-opted and that others will be kept safe from the mis-use of our convictions.
We also live in a time when our theological commitments are civic commitments.
So let peace and grace, overflow.
Let grace and peace, overflow for all.
Let peace and grace overflow.
Amen.
