Jesus went to Galilee and called his disciples - those who were passionately desiring to be like him with fire of Elijah. What would happen when their teaching, their message began to bear fruit and they made disciples, and they made disciples, and those disciples - or maybe some of the Galileans, too - had to go out into a Greek world and teach in such a way that Greek people - Romans, people of a very different culture - would see and want to follow Jesus? 

It's a very beautiful location here today that we've come to visit and to learn more about what it means to be a disciple. It's called Priene. It's actually in two parts. There's an acropolis up here. They didn't have a city up there, apparently, at the time that the Good News got here. And then the lower city. We're among the ruins of the lower city. It's along the Meander River Valley. The sea today is about five miles away. In the first century, it was much closer - it's silted in today - in the region called Ionia.

About 1,000 B.C., a city was established here by the Greeks who were coming East across the Aegean. They had Athena as their goddess, and they created a small community called Priene with a seaport. Very Greek in nature obviously. It became Persian. Alexander the Great took it back. It became Greek again. And then it came into the Roman Empire. So it's a small - about 35,000 to 40,000 people - Greek Roman city in the first century. It's not far from Ephesus - about a two-days' walk. 

Why are we here? Well, none of the disciples was here. The closest I can tell you is the Bible puts Paul at Miletus, which is the hill just across the valley over here. So he was close. I don't know how the Good News got here, but we're here because in the first century, there was a community here that became followers of Jesus. So I'd like to look at what's it like when that message reaches a typical Greek Roman city. Come. Let's look.

This is a really important part of the city. I'd like to have you follow it with your eyes for a moment. This is what is called the agora. The best way I can think of is to say sort of a cross between a mall and a flea market. Imagine many long rows of small tents selling every imaginable product that you could get along the trade route here. Everything from spices from India, to African wood, to local pottery and food all being sold by hundreds and thousands of individuals - some small farmers, some big merchants - and up here, the permanent shops, the people who owned their own stores. 

Now, you know agora. And here, probably on this seat or certainly one like it, sat the agoranomos, a very important man, whose job it was to manage the agora. When you came to the agora to bring your products, you had to dedicate them to the god of the agora. So when you came in with a cartload of pottery, cabbages, or spices, the first thing you would do is roll your cart there by a small altar, take a pinch of incense, drop it on the altar to say, "I devote this pottery, these cabbages, these spices, to Zeus." 

So the agoranomos sat here, and as you entered, he might step up and say, "Good to see you today. Boy, that's fine pottery. We're so glad you come to our agora. Your pottery is the best there is. There's a new altar. Stop and sacrifice to Zeus." 

"But I don't believe in Zeus." 

"You don't believe in Zeus? You reject our gods? Then you can't sell your pottery."

So all of a sudden, this little community, trying to be like Jesus, can't be involved in the economics of their world. They can't, in a sense, buy and sell. Or at least, it became very difficult and certainly, their neighbors looked down on them because they threatened to anger the gods.

So you're counter cultural. You're not going to change this world by engaging it in its own institution, because you can't even be involved. You've decided to follow a different teacher, rabbi, messiah. Come.

This small theater-like building is called bouleuterion. The Greek word boule means council. So this was the city council. You get a little bit of an idea of the size of the council in this city. So we come to a council meeting. As we walk in, we note in the middle of the room, a beautiful marble podium. On top of it would have been a basin - square in this case. And in the basin, coals are glowing. This is not for the meal afterwards. Because if you look at the podium, there are carvings - Aesculapius on one side and on the other, Apollo. So at the door, we pick up a pinch of incense and we walk in. There's a puff of smoke, a sweet smell, and we say, "We acknowledge the authority of Apollo and Aesculapius." And I'll bet you Athena was one of the faces on here as well in this city of Athena. Now, we sit down and conduct council business. Because everything in this world is religious. 

So fellow believers who have decided to follow Jesus, we just lost our place on the council. Are you going to put incense on here? You can't acknowledge the authority of these gods. You've decided there is only one God as taught by his Son. Yes? How long do you think they'll let you stay on the council if you won't acknowledge their gods? You've attended your last meeting. Here me. Being a believer, being a Jesus follower here was to be counter cultural big time. Every single thing has changed. You've lost your economic edge. You may drop several economic notches. You've lost any political power you can ever have imagined. You're a nobody. If this city is going to come to know Jesus, it's not going to happen - because of politics. Maybe their teachers, their rabbis remembered the text. 

Say these words after me. The Hebrew text - "Not by might nor by power but by my Spirit declares the Lord." Being a disciple is to re-arrange your whole life. Not as individuals but as a community. But do you know what? That was so radical that it began to unravel the social order. Because, you see, in the Roman world, they had feasts and guild celebrations. And at those feasts, the equestrians would eat first, then the Akurians, then the free-born. If there was anything left, the freedmen. And if there was anything left - probably not - the slave.

Now, imagine, coming to our place and you, a former slave, are served by an equestrian. You cry. This new system. You've never been served your whole life by anyone. And you, an equestrian, discover the joy of lowering yourself to be the servant of someone else. The whole order unravels, because in the Roman world, that order, that class system was iron-clad. And do you know what's more? You become my brother. You can't be my slave anymore. 

This community didn't have to say one word. And the way they lived unraveled the whole system. And not by might. There is no power. Not by economics. You can't keep your economic place. There's another example of what it was like to be a believer here. Come.

This is called prytaneum. The best thing I can think of in English is town hall. Prytanis means clerk. We would say in English, mayor. This was an important place, because this was where the social political fabric of the society was interwoven. So would we have any advantages or disadvantages here now that we've decided to become disciples of Jesus? Let me show you.

Over here is a pillar. Typically, in the prytaneum, there were pillars with the laws of the town on them, saying, "This is the official rules of our community." We have no influence on that anymore.

Over here is a basin, probably for washing a sacrifice. Just step up a little bit and look, if you wouldn't mind, a moment. Now, the mayor of the town was responsible to offer an animal every day for all the gods. He probably offered it at the main temple - in this case, Athena. But we've got to keep all the gods happy. So picture you stopping by here at some point, and low and behold, the mayor says, "I haven't seen you in a while. I'm about ready to make the sacrifice. I've got to include your god. Who's your god?" 

So you reply, "It's the God of the Jew, the God of heaven." 

"Okay. That's a legal God. How about we make an offering for him along with..."

"I can't."

"You can't? Why not?"

"Because I don't accept your gods."

"What? You're going to anger them and risk the anger of the whole city."

We're counter cultural. We don't fit in anymore. But there's more. If you turn and look over this way, right over here in the corner, you see what looks like a mound of dirt. Do you see it? Originally, there was a hearth there with a fire in it dedicated to the goddess Hestia - the goddess of hearth and home. 

What the Greeks believed is that one time, fire came down from heaven on Mount Olympus and burned there continually. So one day, someone from this town - a group - went to Mount Olympus, got a torch, lit it, and carried it home, all the way back to Priene. Fire from the gods. They took the torch, lit the fire in the hearth. Now, it was believed that the presence of that fire washed away any offenses against the gods. We say sins, but they didn't use that word. 

Every one of you, before you came to know Jesus (unless you were Jewish, of course) came here and took some of that fire and put it in your house so that you had the presence of gods in your house too. 

So let's imagine, fellow believers in the small house church, a wind storm, a rain storm last night and the fire in your hearth went out. I didn't have matches. So what do you do? Do you come and take the fire? Do you say Hestia is nothing? Or do you say, "There's only one God. And I'm going to eat a lot of cold cuts." Come.

So we walk down the main street through the public district of the city, and we've come down into a lower part of the city, into a small dwelling area. Maybe not so small, but what might be called a villa, just off this main street. When archaeologists, excavated this block here right off the street, they found something interesting. At some point, these people removed some walls here and created a much bigger space, blocked off the alley, and made kind of a corridor right there. 

They wondered why this big space. Was it an outdoor courtyard for people to sit and enjoy the sun? That would Greek. Or did it have a function? As they excavated it, they began to discover some things. For example, along this side was a bench. You can see it running right there, just clearly sticking out from the wall. And apparently, it originally had flat stones on it like people sat there. But nowhere else in the room. 

On this end, they noticed something really strange - a closet. That's not so strange until you realize that that closet is cut into the neighbor's house. It must have taken some real talking to allow them to cut their closet all the way into--. So obviously, that closet was very important. So they began to wonder, with a closet, a niche like that at one end, was this a religious place? Then they found, on this stone over here, a menorah. Look. See the branches? A seven-branched menorah - the symbol of the Jewish people of the presence of God - a synagogue. 

What's fascinating is this was a house synagogue. It's not a building built as a synagogue. This is part of someone's house. So apparently, there was a Jewish community living here. And they simply turned part of their house into a worship space and maybe invited other Jewish folk or God-fearers who wanted to join them. But at the very least, the people who lived in this house not only cooked together, ate together, raised their families together, but they naturally worshipped together. Do you know what? Doesn't that sound exactly like Bethsaida? 

Now, I don't want to go beyond what's probable here. So what I'd like to suggest is that this is probably what the early church looked like. And I think they thought of that community as family. For example, Paul says in Galatians, "You belong to the household of faith. You're family even if you aren't related." 

Maybe he's echoing his rabbi, his teacher, Jesus, who said, "Who are my father, mother, brothers, sisters? Those who do the will of my Father in heaven." We're family if we live for God together.

In other words, those early believers didn't come here just with a great new message or a new way of interpreting the Hebrew Bible to say, "Jesus is the answer to all of those teachings in the Hebrew Bible." They came with what we might call the Word in flesh. They came to demonstrate to their world literally, physically what it meant to follow Jesus. 

You see, when they walked into this city with the Jesus message for the first time, I always thought they came and said, "If you believe, you go to heaven." 

I'm sure they said that, but every religion taught that. Nobody here thought, "I'm not going to heaven." Every god promised it. What did they bring here that the Greeks, the Romans, those of a Helenistic world would never have seen before? That's the love of God in flesh. Not only in words but in real flesh. 

So here they were in little house communities that must have looked a lot like this synagogue. What would it be like when they went out their front door - this community who knew the text, who loved each other - walked into the world of a Greek city? Where was the hearth in Priene? 

You are the temple of the Holy Spirit. The fire of the hearth of the prytaneum lives in you. And God wants the world to know who he is by the way his disciples live in community.

Last modified: Friday, August 28, 2020, 10:09 AM