Upside-Down
Is Right-Side Up—April 4, 2018
“After Paul and Silas had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia,
they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul
went in, as was his custom, and on three sabbath days argued with them from the
scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Messiah to
suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This is the Messiah, Jesus whom
I am proclaiming to you.’ Some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and
Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading
women. But the Jews became jealous, and with the help of some ruffians in the
marketplace they formed a mob and set the city in an uproar. While they were
searching for Paul and Silas to bring them out to the assembly, they attacked
Jason’s house. When they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some
believers before the city authorities, shouting, ‘These people who have been
turning the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has entertained
them as guests. They are all acting
contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named
Jesus’.” [Acts 17:1-7]
It's going to be planting season soon, so here’s a bit of
advice. When you till the ground to break
up the clods of soil up from last year’s garden, you will necessarily have to
turn some of the earth over with your spade work or roto-tiller. Otherwise, the earth will be so compacted, so
dense with the remains of roots from last year’s weeds, and so dry on the
surface that no new life will be able to break forth when you plant seeds.
I’m certainly just an amateur gardener here, but on this
point there are no two ways about it: if your attempt at tilling the ground
doesn’t turn over the earth, you’re doing it wrong.
And I can say the same with even greater confidence about
the life of the Easter People called “church.”
If our faith in the risen Jesus doesn’t in any way turn the world upside
down, we’re doing it wrong.
Let me step aside from the analogy to be perfectly clear: if
we take the resurrection of Jesus seriously—if we are indeed filled with his
own risen life—it is going to stir up trouble, and it is going to run us afoul
of the powers of the day, because the powers of the day never want to admit
that there is a power greater than theirs.
Empires of every age abhor being told that there is “another king” whose
reign questions theirs, and the early Christians were clear on that point: if
Jesus was risen from the dead, then Jesus was (and is) really Lord, and the emperor for all his
bluster and intimidation was just a tired old bully shouting to keep his grip
on things. The first followers of Jesus,
going all the way to the book of Acts, did not run from the accusation that
their faith in a crucified-and-risen Christ was “turning the world upside down.”
Think about that for a moment. These charges lobbed at Paul,
Silas, Jason, and the rest of the Christian community are pretty serious:
they have been "turning the world upside down," and they have been
announcing "another king," the Lord Jesus. This is subversive
stuff--not violent revolt, but a clear statement that for the Christian
community, ultimate allegiance goes to Jesus, and not to Caesar; to Jesus, and
not to local authorities; to Jesus, and not to their own self-sufficiency and security.
These are weighty allegations--and, yet, surprisingly enough, Paul and Silas do
not dispute them.
At least they do not dispute the charge that they have come
to announce the Reign of God and the Lordship of Jesus, and I hardly suppose
they would dispute that their message really is turning the world upside
down. Not only does it turn the world upside down in the sense that their
message is shaking up the nice and quiet order they had had, but it is turning
the world upside down in the sense that the Good News of Jesus tells of a God
who lifts up the lowly, who deflates the inflated proud, floating above the
crowd in illusion, and who uses weakness and foolishness to shame the strong
and the wise. The crowds and the authorities are spot on when they accuse
Paul and the other Christians of "turning the world upside down," and
they are right on the money when they accuse the believers of announcing a new
king. That is precisely what the Gospel is: the declaration that the risen Jesus
is Lord of the universe, and that his way
of justice and mercy, of generosity and enemy-love, are in fact the way God
rules the cosmos. The first Christians got that… in a way that I sense we often
do not.
I can remember as a teenager the first time I came across
these words in the Bible and thinking, "This doesn't sound like church as
I've seen it! We never talk about turning the world upside down,
and we hardly have much enthusiasm for talking about Jesus as our king."
There was surely a good bit of adolescent foolishness and naïveté in that
reaction, but that doesn't mean it was wrong. I think it was nevertheless
an accurate read of church as I had seen it. We Christians--at least by
and large in America--have for a very long time lived with a sort of
gentleman's agreement with the orders of the day, saying that we would not rock
the boat if they would let us religious folks be. We would not raise the
question of whether being a good follower of Jesus and a good citizen were
always the same, and in turn, churches would not pay taxes. We would
expect special treatment and “protection”… and in turn we would turn a blind eye
at the terribly un-Christ-like things going on around us. We would agree to get
comfortable with the order of the day--even if it meant comfort at the expense
of others who could be marginalized or killed or exploited--and in exchange,
well, we could live in that comfort. We would promise not to mention that
the emperor had no clothes on, and in return, we would get front row seats for
his parade down the street.
We have not talked much about "turning the world upside
down," maybe because we either believe that everybody has already heard
the News about Jesus (which is incorrect) or because we believe that the News
of Jesus isn't really earth-shaking stuff (which is also incorrect).
Sometimes, the closest we can muster is playing church, where we all
agree to be in worship on a Sunday and we smile at the presence of children and
will occasionally mention to friends and acquaintances about "what a
lovely church we attend," and invite them to come, with the same casual half-heartedness
as inviting someone to join you for a concert or a movie. But Paul and
Jason and Silas and all the rest here in this scene, none of them find the
message of Jesus to be tame. They don't protest when the accusations are
read, "They have been turning the world upside down!" Paul
doesn't stop the proceedings and plead, "But you've got us all
wrong! We don't want to affect people's actual lives, just to make
them feel a little more spiritual!" And Silas doesn't say,
"You've misheard us--Jesus is our Lord, but that doesn't actually affect
they ways we buy or sell or act or love. Don’t
you worry—we won’t let our faith affect our loyalty to Caesar! No, we're still
good subjects of the emperor on those counts!" And you don't hear
Jason saying, "All of this Jesus-is-king business is just spiritual--we
don't really believe what Jesus said, or live under the way of life he taught
us! No, he's just our ticket to heaven, not our way of life on
earth!" Nope--not a word like that from any of these holy
troublemakers.
They seem to believe that the charges fit--or at least, they
reflect how you would hear the message of Jesus if you thought in terms of the
Roman Empire's legal system. Any other "lord" is a threat to
the unquestionable rule of the emperor. Any other "logic" than Rome
In his still stingingly relevant “Letter from a Birmingham
Jail,” Dr. King astutely noted that “We
should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and
everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’
to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.”
And after having been arrested, jailed, surveilled by the government,
and called a troublemaking agitator himself, Dr. King himself was assassinated
fifty years ago today, because his movement of nonviolent resistance (which was
grounded in his Christian faith) riled so many people up and disturbed the
peace they had gotten used to. Dr. King
understood what so many of us good respectable churchgoing folks have tried to
forget or ignore from the pages of the New Testament: that faith in the risen
Jesus will always feel like it is turning the world upside-down… even if what
is really happening is simply putting things back right-side up. If our practice of religion has no place for
such action or challenge, well… we’re doing it wrong.
Could we hear the Good News that way again? Could we
let it sink in today that the news of God's free gift of grace in Christ Jesus
up-ends all the earning-schemes and winner-take-all ways of life as we are used
to it? Could we see again that if Jesus--the one who defeats death by
dying--really is lord, then he has exposed every emperor's need for
dominating others with bigger guns and bigger treasuries as just pathetic, naked
aggression? Could we recognize that if Jesus really is Lord, then our
priorities and finances and commitments are all subject to re-ordering--and yet
that it is good news, because the old rat-race system we lived in no longer has
power over us? Could we be the kind of Christians who do not try to
soften the charges when people say we are "turning the world upside
down"? What could that look like for you and me today?
It’s time for planting season.
Get your shovels ready to overturn some
earth so that life can break forth.
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