The following is the text of the sermon I preached when I led Evensong on Sunday, 31 August; at Church — St Mary the Virgin, Godmanchester.
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.
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