Subversive. Gentle. World-changing.
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There’s a funny scene in The Life of Brian, the controversial 1979 movie from the Monty Python chaps. Brian, a Jewish zealot played by Graham Chapman, paints “Romans go home” on the walls of Pontius Pilate’s palace in Jerusalem. He is caught in the act by a Roman centurion played by John Cleese. The centurion points out that Brian’s Latin grammar is incorrect and orders him to paint the correct phrase 100 times while two soldiers stand guard to make sure he completes his punishment.
Just like today, the early church existed in an age of empire. And the Roman Empire was passively and actively against God’s Empire. What were these new communities of Christ-followers to do, especially in an environment that only grew more hostile (up to the Peace of Constantine)? If they knew they would not be arrested, tortured or executed would they have picketed on the sidewalk in front of the Roman Senate? Should they have formed anti-empirical militias? Or maybe kept painting anti-Roman slogans on public buildings (with the correct verb from, of course)?
Actually, the Biblical text never encourages 1st-century Christians to do anything illegal. Furthermore, most passages about the Christian response to Empire encourage compliance. And while this may have preserved the church as being known as a gospel-of-Jesus group and not a [insert-specific-issue-here] group, those Christians in the Roman Empire still maintained their unique stance as Jesus followers in an exploitive, elitist oligarchy.
How did they do this? They did it by being subversive. They did it by demonstrating a new empire. God’s empire where women, slaves, foreigners, widows and orphans were treated as valuable, loveable and just as important as the richest senator or the estate-holding equestrian. Those churches, scattered across an empire where 90% of the population was impoverished, revealed an alternative empire that treated people as though Christ died and was resurrected for everyone.
So despite polarized politicians who care more about Washington’s favor than they do their own constituents, churches are collecting food for families without SNAP benefits. Despite masked agents ignoring due process, churches are ministering to refugees. Despite ideological rhetoric and dystopian policies that sound like prophecies from a Margaret Atwood novel, churches are supporting and empowering women.
For anyone who claims their “side” is “God’s side,” I encourage you to read the first chapter of the letter to the Colossians. After Christ is placed above Creation, he is immediately identified as head of the church — not the head of a political platform. God has determined that the place for Christian identity and expression is not the shadowy halls of Washington or Little Rock, but subversive, neighborhood faith communities that love as Jesus loved. So feel free to write this phrase on the walls of your church: Romanes eunt domus! Uhm…errr…maybe…Romani ite domum!