Romans 16:1-16
“Personal Touch”
November 13, 2011 - Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

         “Hello, Steve and Beth!” Eldon Johnson the pastor at Libertyville Covenant Church greeted us as we walked in the door. The thing is, it was only the second time we had visited that church, it was two weeks later, and Eldon had only spoken briefly with us on our first visit. We were surprised, impressed and very comforted to be remembered by name.

         Paul’s long list of personal greetings to members of the church in Rome is even more surprising, and even more impressive and comforting than our new pastor’s memory of our names a couple weeks after a short encounter. Paul had never been to Rome, yet here he is naming and greeting more than twenty-five individuals in that distant Christian community.

         At first glance, this list of unpronounceable names seems pretty dull, the sort of stuff any sensible preacher would skip over. But there are three great and beautiful lessons to be learned from this list. The first begins with the first person he names, not somebody living there in Rome, but a person he has sent to Rome, the one carrying his letter. Her name is Phoebe and she is a deacon. More than a third of the people mentioned are women and it’s perfectly clear that several of them are prominent leaders in the Christian church.

         “Phoebe” was a Greek pagan name associated with the moon goddess. She was a Gentile and she came from Cenchreae, one of the ports of Corinth. Paul’s request that the Romans “welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for all the saints,” reminds us of the theme of his letter, that God has brought Jews and Gentiles together in Jesus Christ.

         From verse 2 we learn that Phoebe was a person of means who aided Paul and other Christians. The very fact that as a woman she could travel and be entrusted with the letter shows she was a significant and able figure in the early church. Translations like the New International version try turn her office into a “servant” or “minister,” but Paul said she was a deacon. She wasn’t even a “deaconess.” That church office, specifically for women, wasn’t invented until about three hundred years later. No, Phoebe “our sister” was a deacon and a church leader as much as any man Paul names here.

         That theme of women in church leadership is carried through this list. In verse 3 we hear the familiar name of Prisca, called Priscilla in Acts. She’s almost always named before her husband Aquila, indicating she was probably the stronger and better one of the two. Paul knew them because they left Rome and traveled to Greece when the emperor Claudius banished some Jews and Christians from the capital city in the 40s. They must have returned when Claudius died in 54 A.D.

         In verse 6 we hear about Mary, a common Jewish name. We don’t know if she was any of the Marys we know from the Gospels. But she “worked hard” among the Romans. For Paul that had to mean that she did the work of the Gospel. She taught people about Jesus and led them to faith. The same is said about Tryphaena and Tryphosa, and Persis in verse 12. Paul acknowledged his Christians sisters as fellow workers in ministry.

         Verse 7 gives us Adronicus and Junia, who Paul says are his “relatives,” and are “prominent among the apostles.” In later centuries Martin Luther and other Christian chauvinists tried to sneak an “s” onto the end of Junia’s name and make her a man, because folks were uncomfortable with the idea of a female apostle. But for Paul an apostle is anyone who saw Jesus risen from the dead, and women were the first ones to do that. So it’s no problem for him to acknowledge his kinswoman as a witness to the resurrection and someone who knew and taught about Jesus before Paul himself did.

         Farther down the list we meet the mother of Rufus, one of the sons of Simon, who carried Jesus’ cross. There are Julia and the sister of Nereus. With personal greetings, Paul is demonstrating that in Christ God has welcomed and included men and women with equality in His kingdom. This list is a concrete evidence of what he wrote in Galatians 3:28, that in Jesus there is “no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ.”

         This list of names is part of the biblical evidence we in the Covenant Church give for our 35 year old practice of ordaining women to be pastors and teachers. It’s not some  new innovation brought on by modern feminism. It’s our recovery of the ancient understanding of the Bible and the Christian Church since the beginning.

         Wednesday I brought greetings from Valley Covenant to our own Phoebe or Prisca or Junia. Dawn Taloyo came here seven years ago exploring her own call to ministry. We heard her preach and offer spiritual direction. Then we prayed over her and her husband and sent them off to our new church in Corvallis where Dawn became a leader. God called her two years ago to be the associate pastor of Trinity Covenant in Salem. Their senior pastor left at the beginning of this year. So now in the interim Dawn has been preaching and leading our brothers and sisters there. God’s Holy Spirit calls and gifts women along with men in His Church. We see it here in Paul’s greetings and we see it among ourselves.

         The second lesson that comes to us from Paul’s need to say hello to so many people in Rome is a snapshot of the beautiful variety of the Church of Jesus Christ. For several years now in our Covenant theology class, I’ve heard my friend Jeff Crafton explain that we can see three distinct forms of church gathering mentioned here. When I contacted him this week to brush up on what I’d heard, he was thrilled that I was going to preach on this passage. He said he’d never heard anyone do a whole sermon on these verses.

         Thanks to Jeff, I can ask you now to look at verse 5 and the fact that along with his greetings to Prisca and Aquila, Paul greets “the church that meets in their house.” The church in Rome didn’t have a nice large sanctuary like ours that could hold a couple hundred people. They had to gather in smaller assemblies, ecclesiai in Greek, which is the word for “church.” Like our friends at Church of the Servant King and other Christian gatherings, these people came together in a home. It was a house church.

         When we hear Paul say hi to a two different family gatherings in verses 10 and 11, it might sound like a couple more house churches. But something different is going on here. Paul is greeting the “households” of Aristobulus and Narcissus. A Roman household consisted of everyone who lived under a citizen’s roof: wife and children, the families of married children, perhaps some friends, servants and slaves. For those of means, prominent men, ten or twenty or more people could be your household or pater familias.

         When Paul wrote, Aristobulus was dead. He was the brother of Herod and on friendly terms with Claudius. But those who lived with him were still known as his household and they had become Christians. The same is true of some members of the household of Narcissus. He was a freed slave who rose to prestige under Claudius but was forced to commit suicide when Claudius died. Those remaining among his household who became Christians were probably in a precarious situation.

         What we see, though, is another form that cells of Christianity took in Rome. People with a household relationship to each other worshipped and served Christ together in those households. The constituted not house churches, but household churches.

         Then in verses 14 and 15 Paul greets two groups of five named individuals and the Christians who are with them, in one case calling them “brothers” and in the other case calling them “saints.” These two groups are different because their names are all Greek and very likely names given to slaves. Jeff tells me these are the names of leaders for two small gatherings of poor Gentile Christians in Rome. They were either slaves or freed slaves living in poverty, likely in tenements, small, dark, dismal apartments in which the majority of Rome lived. These were churches of poor people gathering in their apartment buildings.

         Paul has gone out of his way here to name significant people, leaders, from all the various Christian groups in Rome. Recall what he was concerned about in chapters 14 and 15, the division of the Roman church between the “weak” and the “strong.” It’s likely that he meant to cover both groups in these greetings. We can’t say for sure which of these sub-churches might have been mostly from the “weak” party or the “strong” party, but Paul wants to include everyone equally and very personally. Christ is not divided. The Church is not divided. Weak or strong, rich or poor, male or female, we are one in Christ.

         Friday evening over two hundred people gathered here in this sanctuary to demonstrate what Paul said here by naming all these names. A congregation gathered to celebrate the life of Carla Moser. The amazing thing was that, like Paul, she was friends with and ministered to an incredible variety of God’s people in the Christian Church. As I looked around the service and talked with people afterward, I guessed that more than two dozen congregations in our community and beyond were represented.

         There were Presbyterians and Baptists. There were Pentecostals and Quakers. There were Episcopals and Catholics. There was a couple from a Covenant church in California surprised to find this church was part of their denomination. There were members of independent churches like Willamette Christian Center. And there was Deacon Stephen in his long black robe from the Orthodox church. They all came together here to praise God for the work of Jesus Christ in Carla’s life and to sing together “Holy, Holy, Holy” and “O, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus.”

         That wonderful blend of difference and welcome to all kinds of people from all walks of life was what Paul was getting at when he named all these folks in Rome. It was the very purpose of his life and ministry. I think it must have been part of the purpose of Carla’s life as well. May God make it our purpose and ministry too.

         Which brings us to the third lesson here in a text which I hope you are starting to see holds a lot more than you might have imagined. This last lesson is in the simple fact that these long-gone Christian brothers and sisters are named at all. It goes back to where I began, to the importance and significance of being named.

         I’m here today as a Covenant pastor because Eldon remembered our names. If we had received a less warm and personal greeting that Sunday morning thirty years ago, I can’t tell you how it might have gone. We might have moved on to visit another church, another denomination the next Sunday morning. Being known and named matters.

         If we had the time, we could dig deeper into the names I haven’t mentioned yet in this sermon. In verse 9, we hear of Urbanus, which is a slave name, yet he is Paul’s co-worker. And someone named Stachys is called “my beloved in the Lord,” an exceptionally close friend of Paul. And there’s Philologus in verse 15, whose name probably means he talked a lot. There are lives and stories behind each name, even though we don’t know them. God knows them, and so they are named.

         We might wonder how Paul knew so many people in a place he had never been. It’s partly explained by the fact that many of the Jewish community in general, not just the Christians, moved around a lot in that time, like Prisca and Aquila, both by choice and by necessity. Our own congregation has seen more than its fair share of people come and then move away, like Annie and her grandchildren will at the end of the month. But what it means is that like Paul many of us know many Christians in other places.

         Knowing those names, knowing each other’s names, matters deeply. When Paul named those he knew in Rome, it wasn’t just friendly chitchat. It was spiritual depth. It was an act of worship. It was like our naming of the saints aloud last Sunday to celebrate All Saints Day. It is the way we remember who we are as the Church of Jesus Christ, that we are not solitary, individual Christians all by ourselves. We are the people of God.

         Many of our hymns and praise songs use first-person language to celebrate what Jesus Christ has done. We love to sing about what God has done for me in the dying and rising of Jesus. In His death and resurrection, my sins are forgiven, my soul has been saved, I am born again into new life. But the naming of names reminds us that there needs to be another verse to many of those songs, a verse celebrating that you have been saved, that he has been forgiven, that she is raised into newness of life. Remembering names puts our own names with the others where they belong, together in Christ.

         Which is not to deny the deep individual comfort of the naming of Christian names. In God’s naming, no one is forgotten. I spoke to someone I had met from another church Friday evening and got her name wrong, confusing her with someone else. I felt terrible. But God does not forget. God does not get the names wrong. As the words we began the service with say from Isaiah 43:1, God has “called you each by name.” We name and know each other because God already knows and names each one of us.

         Paul named the people of the church in Rome and you and I are blessed because of it. From his naming we learn to recognize God’s call and gifting of Christian women. From Paul’s concern to acknowledge each gathering of Christians by individual names, we discover the variety of forms in which the Church of Jesus can take shape and worship. And in the very naming itself, we see just how much it matters for you and I to name each other and to name all those God is reaching and saving through this gathering of His Church.

         For those who are new here or who aren’t yet sure that you are really part of this whole thing yet, whether part of this local church or part of God’s people, please know that God knows your name. Your name matters. You are loved and cherished by the Lord by name. I invite you to put your name on the roll we name together by calling on the name of Jesus Christ, by accepting His grace and love for you. Join us in faith and we will learn to know you by name.

         And for the rest of us who feel well-known and well-loved by name in this place, in this gathering, let us give thanks for that gift, rejoicing in the grace of being known. Yet let’s not forget Paul’s example here. My friend Bob in Nebraska used to watch the old television series “Cheers.” It was a show about a bar, where as its theme song went, “Everybody knows your name.” Bob would say, “That’s what the church ought to be.”

         Bob was right. There’s likely someone here today whose name you don’t yet know. God knows her name, knows his name. That means it is important for you to know it too. Let’s make the knowing of names an act of worship today. There’s one last verse, verse 16, which as a physically repressed introvert, I’d love to skip, but God won’t let me. At the end of all these names, Paul wrote, “Greet each other with a holy kiss.”

         We’re not real sure what a holy kiss meant. Maybe an Italian style brush-by on both cheeks. Maybe only men kissed men and women women. My old Baptist pastor was sure it meant only a firm, manly handshake. I could live with that. But I’m going to make my own guess that whatever it was, that as this letter was being read aloud, as they heard their names called, the church in Rome in tangible form exchanged greeting and blessing with each other. Let us offer that same gift of naming and blessing to one another this morning.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj