Speak, for I am with you
Acts 18:1-16

Lord God, take my words and speak through them, take our minds and think through them, take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you, you who are Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Athens
Paul and Silas have set out on a second missionary journey, picking up Timothy along the way. But after being pursued from city to city by some troublemakers, who wanted to harm Paul, he’d gone ahead of the others into Athens, while they stayed a while with the believers in Berea. Paul spoke to a group of philosophers in Athens, but didn’t get a particularly enthusiastic reception. So he moves on to the next town: Corinth.

Corinth
Athens is the more familiar city to most modern ears, but in Paul’s day, Corinth had surpassed it in importance. The Roman military had attacked and destroyed major portions of the city in 146 BC, after its citizens had taken part in an anti-Roman uprising, and it had remained in ruins for a century. But in 46 BC, Julias Caesar passed through, and saw its potential as a Roman colony, so the city was rebuilt.

By the time Paul passed through Corinth, it was probably the wealthiest city in Greece — a major multicultural urban centre, with a population of some 750,000 people. It was a bustling seaport on the narrow strip of land that joins the southern part of Greece to the northern part.

In addition to the financial wealth of Corinth, it had a wealth of religious options as well — most of them pagan. A noted temple to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, was there. Prostitution was so rampant in the city, that the Greek word meaning, “Corinthian girl”, came to be a slang term for a promiscuous woman. Corinth was also a centre of homosexuality, with a temple to Apollo, the epitome of male beauty.

The city had no time for a little Jewish tent-maker called Paul, who wanted to tell them about another Jew, called Jesus. Things didn’t look very promising for him, but he persevered.

Friends and enemies
Paul made many friends in Corinth, and many enemies. He stayed with a Jewish husband-and-wife team, Aquila and Prescilla, with whom he shared the trade of tent-makers. They were in Corinth because that’s where they’d gone when, along with the rest of the Roman Jews, Claudius ordered them out of Rome.

It was a custom in New Testament times to teach every Jewish boy a trade. Jesus had been trained as a carpenter. Paul learned the craft of tent making, which involved working with leather, hair and wool. It may be that it was Paul’s shared trade with Aquila and Prescilla that brought them together at first — not necessarily a shared belief in Jesus. That may have come as Paul sat cross-legged in their shop and gossiped the gospel to the customers as he plied his needle.

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
  Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in his justice,
  Which is more than liberty.

There is no place where earth’s sorrows
  Are more felt than up in heaven;
There is no place where earth’s failings
  Have such kindly judgement given.

For the love of God is broader
  Than the measure of man’s mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
  Is most wonderfully kind.

But we make his love too narrow
  By false limits of our own;
And we magnify his strictness
  With a zeal he will not own.

There is plentiful redemption
  In the blood that has been shed;
There is joy for all the members
  In the sorrows of the Head.

There is grace enough for thousands
  Of new worlds as great as this;
There is room for fresh creations
  In that upper home of bliss.

If our love were but more faithful,
  we should take him at his word;
and our life would be thanksgiving
  for the goodness of the Lord.

Frederick William Faber (1814-1863)