The Rev. Austin K. Rios
9 October 2022: Proper 23
One year after the completion and consecration of this church, St. Paul’s first rector, The Rev. Robert Jenkins Nevin, wrote a book to document the experience.
It’s a fascinating story that stretches from our early days of worshipping in the American Legation and an abandoned granary outside the walls of Piazza del Popolo, to the events and efforts that culminated in this space in which we now worship.
Nevin intersperses the historical account with his own personal reflections on why our church’s witness in this city was so important.
He was convinced that the first non-Roman Catholic church built within the ancient walls of this city had a responsibility to remind the St. Peter heavy Vatican of the larger promise of the gospel as proclaimed by St. Paul.
Nevin was especially passionate about this mission because of what he saw during the First Vatican Council from 1869-1870 as a blatant temporal power grab by Pope Pius IX and the theological innovations used to justify it, of which the novel doctrine of Papal infallibility was the most offensive example.
As our church tower was erected on Via Nazionale, with an unimpeded sightline to the dome of St. Peter’s across the Tiber, a series of bells were installed within it.
The largest of these bells, which rang out over the city then and continues to sound throughout the neighborhood even now, is inscribed with Paul’s famous words from our Epistle today: Verbum Dei non est alligatum.
The Word of God is not chained.
For Nevin, the tolling of this great bell was a constant reminder that even though St. Paul suffered incarceration and martyrdom because of his commitment to proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ, nothing could ultimately chain that message or stop the good news from spreading.
As we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council this Tuesday, the ecumenical gathering from 1962-1965 where the possibilities of a diverse and united church were on full display, this foundational message of Paul in his letter to Timothy deserves our renewed attention.
Even as the gospel message was unfolding during Jesus’ lifetime, it faced significant opposition.
What was good news to the poor, the outcast, the desperate, and the devastated was received as a revolutionary movement threatening social upheaval for those who benefitted and preferred things to stay as they were.
Jesus was sentenced to die on the cross because the imperial powers and the religious elites made a deal with each other in order to quell the subversive Jesus movement.
And yet, the good news that emerged after three days when all hope seemed to be extinguished, was that even a state-sanctioned, cursed, and gruesome death could not stop the love of God.
The Word of God that existed before the world began, was alive and flowed in Jesus, and was resurrected on the third day to destroy death forever is not chained.
The good news of a present and eternal freedom that arises when we make the Living Christ’s life our own cannot ever be restrained, bound, or extinguished.
And yet, as Paul was aware, due to of his own zealous efforts to crush the gospel message, the fact that the word of God is not chained would not keep others from trying to silence it or strip it of its power.
This is why Paul found himself in prison on account of the gospel and the threat the gospel message posed to the powerful of his day.
And yet even when Paul was beheaded here in Rome, the word of God he proclaimed only continued to spread throughout the world.
Even when persecutions and chains befell the growing number of those living and professing “The Way,” the movement grew stronger until the very Empire that opposed its message adopted it as the official religion.
From this point in our church’s history—the transition from outsider resistance movement to widespread imperial acceptance— the Jesus movement has negotiated a difficult compromise.
The worldwide spread of Jesus’ words and memory were aided by the vast networks and reach of the empire and have been preserved and passed down to our own age due to the Constantinian bargain.
And yet, time and time again, the truly liberating nature of that message has been so tamed by generations of its caretakers in order to make it pliant and useful in controlling the social order, that the domesticated creature that often passes as Christianity looks like a pale and powerless shadow of its former self.
When this broken form of Christianity is passed off as the real thing, it loses its ability to transform our world into the reign of God Jesus so readily proclaimed.
No denomination is immune to this kind of degradation, lest we be tempted to point our finger at any one member church in this Body of Christ we share.
As those who wish to proclaim the good news in our own day and age, we must not absolve our ancestors from the abuses of the past, nor deny that such perversions of the gospel have inhibited and chained our gospel efforts.
But we have a responsibility to do better and to allow the truly wild and redeeming word of God to transform the way that we live and to be proclaimed unfettered through the witness of our lives and the according words of truth we speak together.
I believe that is the mission of God that Nevin built this church to perpetuate in this ancient heart of Christianity.
And such a proclamation has never been more necessary my siblings in Christ.
As our planet reels from the excesses of our greed and lack of vision, as we still enslave one another by refusing to understand that our destiny is either a shared one or will be none at all.
As the dominant form of what passes as Christianity is domesticated to serve primarily secular interests—we, regardless of how many we are—must witness to the fullness of the good news we know in Jesus Christ, and trust that God will bless the mustard seeds of our lives and testimony to bring freedom and life to a world still bound to shadow versions of the truth.
The word of God is not chained, my siblings in Christ.
How will you order your life and witness this week to ring out the good news to a world that needs to hear it?
Let us renew ourselves in worship and freely choose the holy restraints of service to one another and to our neighbors once more today.
Let us join in the tradition of those faithful ancestors who have proclaimed the good news in their generation even when it came at great cost, so that both we and the whole creation God loves may experience the unchained, transformative freedom of the living word of Christ.