The legacy of Saint Paul

Feast of St Peter & St Paul
St Paul’s Church
29 June 2025

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This weekend and next weekend we have two special Sundays:

Today we are celebrating one of the major feasts for Saint Paul

Next week we shall celebrate the feast of St Thomas.

These two festivals offer liturgical book ends as we wrap up our first six months together as the Ipswich Anglican Community, the new Parish of Ipswich, with our twin churches of St Paul and St Thomas.

This double celebration is an opportunity to reflect, affirm, celebrate and re-imagine.

This week I invite you to focus on what the legacy of Paul might mean for Ipswich Anglicans.

Next week we shall focus on the legacy of Thomas.

And next week I shall begin the sermon in the same way, except that I will be standing in St Thomas’ Church and all the time signals will be reversed.

Of course, next week we shall be thinking about the legacy of Thomas, and what spiritual wisdom we might draw from his legacy.

But this week we focus on Paul.

Paul is a larger-than-life figure in the New Testament.

At least in the eyes of the people creating the NT, Paul is the person who tells us most clearly and most decisively what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

A huge proportion of the NT is comprised of material linked with Paul. If we include Luke-Acts, then around half of the NT comes from the Pauline faction within the early Jesus movement.

For someone who most likely never met Jesus, that is an impressive statistic.

Whether we like Paul or not—and clearly many other leaders in the church did not like him—Paul is the most important interpreter of Jesus. Ever.

Unlike the other leaders in the Jesus movement, Paul was not from Galilee. He was a diaspora Jew with a good education and considerable social status. He was connected with powerful people in the upper layers of Jewish society and an eager “hitman” seeking to eradicate the Jesus heresy from getting a grip on their Jewish world.

His public activity probably extended over a period of 30 years: from the mid-30s to the mid-60s.

He first enters the story as an accessory to the murder of Stephen (Acts 7) and in the Epistle set for this morning, Paul is portrayed as sensing his own death as a martyr is close.

Paul could change his mind.

He enjoyed excellent personal and family privileges. He was passionate about the old ways, but he became equally passionate in his promotion of the gospel.

Paul had a life-changing encounter with the risen Jesus.

He came to see everything differently because of his absolute certainty that God had been active in Jesus and was offering the blessings once reserved for the biological descendants of Abraham to anyone and everyone who chose to trust in the faithfulness of Jesus.

Paul was a pastor and a team leader.

He never seems to have stayed long in once place, but during even a very short stay he could establish the nucleus of a Christ community and then provide pastoral oversight remotely via letters and messengers. He prayed for his people, and carried them always in his heart.

Paul as an early adopter of new technology.

Imagine what he could have done with our new livestreaming tools! In Paul’s case the new technology was the codex (book) that was replacing the scroll, and the recent development of the personal letter as a way for people to send messages back and forth across long distances. 

Paul was a mentor for ministry associates.

Paul attracted, cultivated and developed the leadership of emerging leaders in the early Jesus movement. The mentoring that he himself had received from Barnabas at Antioch was replicated and paid forward in his care for Andronicus, Chloe, Clement, Crescens, Demas, Epaphroditus, Euodia, Junia, Luke, Lydia, Mark, Mary, Onesimus, Philemon & Apphia, Phoebe, Priscilla & Aquila, Sosthenes, Syntyche, Tertius, Titus, Timothy, and Urbanus.

About half of those names are women!

Paul was an effective communicator

He was a teacher, and at times an argumentative sod. So I do have some characteristics in common with Paul! By spoken word and by written messages he explained, proclaimed, corrected and guided his congregations and his team of ministry leaders.

Paul was even endorsed by the author of 2 Peter, perhaps the final book of the NT by date:

So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. [2Peter 3:15–16 NRSVue]

Paul was not the easiest guy to understand at times, but he was someone whose writings were already been accepted as belonging to the emerging set of Christian Scriptures.

As the Church of St Paul within the Ipswich Anglican Community we have a rich and powerful legacy.

Had we been following the normal readings from the lectionary today, we would have had the OT story of Elijah ascending into heaven in a fiery chariot while his mantle falls to earth and is eagerly collected by his successor, Elisha:

Elisha picked up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. He took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him and struck the water. He said, “Where is the LORD, the God of Elijah? Where is he?” He struck the water again, and the water was parted to the one side and to the other, and Elisha crossed over. [2Kings 2:13–14 NRSVue]

May we gather the mantle of Paul and claim the spiritual blessings poured out on the church through the Apostle Paul.

Not for our sake, but for the sake of the city of Ipswich and all whose lives we touch with the good news of Jesus.