When I was first moving to Philly and was trying to find my first city apartment, my dad went with me.  

Ostensibly, it was to write the deposit check for the first month’s/last month’s rent.  

The fact is, he didn’t trust me.  

He didn’t trust me not to end up getting schnookered.  

And fair enough. 

He knew that there was a high chance that I’d take a shine to some nice old character in some little office filled with papers all over every surface, or maybe a dog. 

In ten minutes, I’d know their whole life story, maybe their birthday, all that…which didn’t mean they weren’t still willing to schnooker me just the same. 

He’s a smart guy, my dad.  

So we went around looking at apartments in Philly for a day. 

They all looked fine, and after a few hours, we decided on one. 

The real estate agent took us back to his office.  It was, indeed, filled with papers all over every surface.  It was August and the guy turned on an old fan for us and put on a little sweater for himself.  I loved him immediately.  Mr. Katz, his name was.  

But we weren’t done.  

Because suddenly Mr. Katz was sitting across from an officer of the Chase Manhattan Bank.  

They were hammering out the terms of my lease like they were negotiating building a gas pipeline across Turkey.  

I think they were both enjoying it, actually.  I was horrified.  

Finally, it was over.  

Mr. Katz got out the keys to my new apartment and spun the lease around on his desk for me to sign.  

“Oh, just one more thing,” said my father.  “I’d like to add one more term. He dictated, “The lessee shall have the ‘right to quiet enjoyment’ of the property.”  

Mr. Katz looked annoyed.  I looked annoyed.  

Unfortunately, I intervened. 

“Dad, I really don’t think that matters,” I said. 

“You should listen to the kid,” said Mr. Katz. 

My dad shrugged, we signed the lease, I got my keys, and off we went. 

Well, the kid should have listened to his dad.

The kid should have listened to his dad because the guy upstairs turned out to be a drummer who liked to practice before work.  

The guy downstairs turned out to be having a tough go of it, and sometimes you’d find him sleeping in the basement by the washing machine because there was something in his apartment that frightened him, and sometimes he just wasn’t up for it.  

It was one thing like that after another.  

There was a payphone on the corner and I saw someone from another building run out in his pajamas and bare feet with a hacksaw because it kept ringing in the middle of the night and was done with it. DONE.  

It was impossible not to enjoy Philly – I loved the city.  

But there was nothing quiet about that apartment.   

II.

I’m telling you this because many of the early churches, including the communities founded or visited by the Apostle Paul, would have been “house churches.”

That is, they were churches that might meet in someone’s apartment in an ancient building where a moderately successful artisan with a family and a workshop—maybe even a couple of slaves—might live cheek by jowl with newly arrived immigrants trying to gain a foothold in the community, or above a small tavern with a backroom where a barmaid might sleep, and not necessarily alone, or right by an apartment for a widow with a son in the army, etc.  

There wouldn’t have been much by way of “quiet enjoyment” in such a place.  

Every triumph, every tragedy, every family squabble, every creep in the stairwell, every chattering toddler, everybody’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner would have been common knowledge. 

It was a hard and not very private life, even as some might really be getting ahead and others might be barely hanging on right there on the same stairwell.  

No wonder, then, that it got their attention when Paul arrived in town and began to describe a different way of living. 

No wonder that they listened when he said that it didn’t have to be this way—or, not to put too fine a point on it, that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. 

The life he talked about wasn’t necessarily quieter, of course, but it was certainly more gentle.  

He helped them picture lives with less servile bowing and scraping, and room to love more authentically.  

In Ancient Rome, “honor” was a kind of social currency that the low offered the high in exchange for patronage, to which Paul says, “what if everyone gave it to everyone?”  

“What if we tried to one-up each other in kindness or in helping out?” he asks. 

“What if we learned to live, not in a mutually respectful silence, but in harmony—in tune—with each other?” 

Doesn’t that seem like how it’s supposed to be?  

Paul thought so.  

No wonder they listened.  

No wonder that vision called to them, and when they found someone who shared it, they felt they’d encountered a brother from another mother…a sister from another mister.  

Right?  

Into a world which taught people to keep their heads down, Paul was teaching them to lift up their eyes and look for a whole new world that God’s Word in Jesus was bringing into existence. 

Imagine that Word slowly climbing up that ancient stairwell, with each resident…each life…learning to live so differently than any of them had been taught they might live.  

Imagine them coming together in the artisan’s workshop – the biggest, nicest apartment in their building – and the barmaid is cleaned up and sitting there next to the widow, and the slaves are actually sitting, themselves, and the widow’s son is home visiting from the army, not at all sure what to make of it, but chatting pleasantly enough with the artisan and the immigrants.  And everyone’s passing around the baby.  

There wouldn’t have been anything quiet about their enjoyment, of course, but what a world.  

Their needs and their realities are so different from our own, but I think we can still feel how extraordinary and beautiful it must have been… 

…How nearly unthinkable until you saw it.  Were part of it.  

We know a little bit about how, sometimes, it isn’t until we receive answer that we realize that we’d had questions.  

We know how, sometimes, it isn’t until we feel loved that we fully realize just how lonely and longing we’ve been.

We know about how life still trains us to keep our heads down.  

But the head-down life isn’t what God wants for us, any more than it’s what God wanted for those early Christians living in Rome.  

III.

What keeps us from saying yes? 

If this life is as extraordinary and beautiful now as it was then, why don’t we seem to reach for it? 

It turns out Paul has some thoughts on this, too. 

You may have caught that his tone seems to shift in this morning’s reading.  

What begins as this evocative description of what a faithful life looks like and about how blessedly immersed and enmeshed we might become in one another seems to lurch a little not far from the end.  

He begins to speak a little more ominously about vengeance. 

“Do not repay anyone evil for evil,” he says, “but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.” 

That’s not so bad.  But he’s not done.  

“Beloved,” he says. “never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine.  I will repay,’ says the Lord.” 

Still not done. 

“If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this, you will heap burning coals on their heads.”  

Ok, still not quite done, but you get the idea.  

It’s like someone changed the channel: now we’re watching “The Godfather.” 

So why get into that…and what could it possibly have to do with us? 

I think it starts back in that Roman house-church we were talking about.  

Because heaven knows, faith is not easy to live into.  

In recovery, they talk about sobriety as a journey, not a destination.  It’s a walk to be walked one day at a time.  

I think faith is like that, too.  

And so I imagine these neighbors on that ancient stairwell, now learning to see one another and sisters and brothers, and I wonder: what did the widow on the third floor make of it when she saw the barmaid crying again, sometime after welcoming another stranger behind the curtain to her bedroom? 

What did the artisan make of it when now there were all these new folks who needed his generosity and could never hope to repay it? 

What did the immigrants make of it when the slaves had more to eat and nicer clothes than they did?  

They must have had moments when they wondered why so much hadn’t changed even though, of course, so much had.  

As much as anyone shares with anyone else, there are those moments we keep private, when that sense of “why you and not me?” or “why me…and not you?” takes hold of us.  

We can be tempted, perhaps not to full-blown, Godfather-style “vengeance,” but to something more subtle and much harder to notice in ourselves. 

There is still a part of us that is immersed in the ugliness and unfairness and violence of the world that Jesus promises us is already passing away. 

That world can still convince us now and again that we’re looking down at the ground and not up at the heavens because we want to, because the ground is where there’s something to see.  

It has a lot to say about keeping and settling whatever scores we have in whatever ways we might. 

And so, as extraordinary and beautiful as our lives might be, we look away.  

Paul is affirming for us that our faith is a journey we walk day by day, reminding ourselves to look up and to take in the view.  

Our God is the God who wants nothing less than for all people to see that view for themselves.  

IV.

Ever since my first apartment in Philly, there have been plenty of times when I’ve wished I could whip out a piece of paper and assert my right to quiet enjoyment, not just of some apartment, but of jobs, of relationships, of Supreme Court decisions, of my own conscience – you name it.  

But that’s not the life that Gospel invites us to live.  

It invites us to live gently rather than quietly. Powerfully rather than helplessly.

Each day, we receive that invitation once again.  

Each day, we feel some of the impulse to keep our eyes on the ground, just the same.  

But God calls us to look up and to find our way in a new world – a new world where, finally, all of us know what it is to belong.   

Amen.