The boat which Saint Paul took on his first missionary journey arrived in what is modern day Turkey, from which he traveled about a hundred miles up the river valleys to the city called "Antioch of Pisidia.” But, as you heard in that first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, his first try at establishing a Church there did not go so well.
I suppose he chose Antioch because it was, by far, the largest city in the region and the center of the Roman government. With four roads leading into the city, it was home to people from everywhere: Jews, Phrygians, Greeks, and Romans.
But what seems to have attracted Paul most to Pisidia’s was its large and well-established Jewish community. Trained as a rabbi of good Jewish stock, Paul saw in each of his kinsmen a prospective convert to Christianity, this new brand of Judaism.
And so, when the Sabbath arrived, he went immediately to the synagogue and, after the law and the prophets were read, responded to an invitation to preach. And preach he did, giving a real barn burner of a sermon, the longest recorded in the scriptures. He began by recalling God’s faithfulness to Israel throughout the centuries, ending with the establishment of the Davidic Kingdom. But then, he threw them a curveball. On the heels of the story of King David, he told them bluntly: “From the descendants of [David] God brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus, just as he promised.”
No sooner had the words flown from his mouth then the city was divided into two groups: a sympathetic group of Jews and Jewish converts who “invited Paul and Barnabas back] to speak on these subjects the following sabbath;” and a second group “filled with jealousy and violent abuse [who] contradicted what Paul said.”
One week later, we are told, the whole city was there to hear Paul and Barnabas make the divisions even worse by telling the Jews who would not accept Jesus that ‘now we turn to the Gentiles,’ at which all those who were not Jewish rejoiced and converted, and the Jews drove Paul and Barnabas out of town.
So here’s my question: What was going on in the minds of those Jews who drove Paul and Barnabas out of town? Why would they not accept what he had to say about Jesus? What stood in their way of accepting the faith?
One factor, I would suggest, had to do with the city of Antioch Pisidia, which at that time was filled with immigrants: Greeks with their strange new language, their different customs and way of life. And then there were the Phrygians, this Balkan people, who worshipped the great “Mountain Mother,” Cybele, all while wearing funny hats and costumes at their festivals. But the ones who most frightened the old Jews of Antioch were the Romans, who came in like they owned the place. They had taken over the Temple in Jerusalem and barely a decade later sent 4,000 soldiers to build a base in Antioch Pisidia.
Antioch was changing, and the Jewish community resented it. Because change is always hard and learning to live with all these new and exotic tribes is the hardest thing of all.
But if only they had been parishioners of Saint Paul’s Cathedral they would have understood. For from our first days, Saint Paul’s has been the home to new and different groups from all over the world.
It was on May 29th, 1884 that my maternal great grandparents, Nora Lynch and Stephen Loughlin were married here at Saint Paul’s by Father O’Sullivan. The Church had been dedicated just ten years earlier, the same year they were just getting off the boat from Ireland.
They were part of the second wave of Irish immigrants, that followed the building of the Blackstone Canal some fifty years before that. Drawn to these rows of smokestacks which marked the new factories along the canal in the last decades of the Nineteenth century were “potato” Irish and Swedes.
These “new Irish” came to live in the North End, especially since they weren’t so well accepted by the old more well established Irish who had spread from the Green Island shanties to the tenements of Grafton Hill. The Swedes settled most famously in Quinsigamond Village, but then spread up Vernon Hill.
And so it is today. Where, according to the latest census Worcester’s largest immigrant communities hail from Ghana, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Albania and Brazil, each facing the same challenge of Saint Paul in Antioch Pisidia.
And so we, the sons and daughters of the Apostle to the Gentiles, are left asking: “How do we preach the faith to a new world, so different from the one we knew as a child? How do we come to love peoples so different from ourselves and accept them from God as his special gift, a new revelation of his love for us, and a new glimpse of his face.
That is the challenge and the opportunity which stands before us in this Cathedral Church. To be Christ’s Church in Worcester in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Not clinging to a past which is no more, nor longing for a future not yet within our grasp, but in the words of Saint Paul, striving, groaning and aching for a Church where there is “no longer Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female. But where all are all one in Christ Jesus, Our Lord.” (Galatians 3:28)
So like Paul in Pisidia, Father Power watching his church be built, or Nora and Stevie walking down this very aisle, let us seek Christ together in the rich mosaic of which God has made us a part.
