Christus Paradox

When you think about the Church as a whole, what images come to mind? I think first of the great cathedrals of Europe, places of beauty and wealth, places of worship that sometimes took centuries to build. We live in a world that still remembers Christendom—the time when the Church sat at the center of culture, power, and influence. Christendom isn’t what it once was, but, even now, echoes of that time shape our expectations. We assume the Church should be visible, respected, influential.

But the early Church wasn’t like that. The Church was born at the margins—outside the gates, in hidden spaces, among people others overlooked. The Church didn’t start at the center of things.

We see that Church of the margins in today’s reading from the Book of Acts. Paul has a vision. A man from Macedonia (modern-day Greece) pleads, “Come and help us.” And so Paul travels for the first time to a region that we’d call Europe, to the city of Philippi.

Once there, Paul and his companions don’t start preaching in the town square. Instead, they go outside the city gate. To the river. To a quiet place of prayer. To a gathering of women.

And there they meet Lydia. Lydia is from a city in modern-day Turkey. She’s a dealer in purple cloth. Purple dye was expensive, and purple cloth was worn mostly by royalty and nobility. So Lydia isn’t just an ordinary merchant. She’s probably fairly well off—running a household and a business. She’s a “worshiper of God,” a Gentile drawn to the Jewish faith. She has some power as the world judges such things—but it’s a quiet sort of power. And still she’s an outsider—a woman and a foreigner.

She listens to Paul. And “The Lord opened her heart.” She and the members of her household are baptized, and she invites Paul and his companions into her home.

That’s how the Church in Europe begins. Not with a great cathedral. Not with some dramatic miracle. But with an open heart on a riverbank.

There’s a paradox in faith I suspect we can see more clearly when we look for Christ on the margins, in places like that in which Lydia and Paul met, in the subtlety of an open heart.

That encounter on the riverbank invites us to reflect not only on where the Church began, but also on the kind of God who met Lydia there.

Last Sunday, our choir sang an anthem that I love. The lyrics are by Sylvia Dunstan. It’s a hymn of praise to a God of the margins, to a God of the sort of paradox that Lydia opened her heart to.

“You, Lord, are both Lamb and Shepherd.

You, Lord, are both prince and slave.

You, peacemaker and swordbringer

of the way you took and gave.”

“You the everlasting instant;

You, whom we both scorn and crave.”

“Clothed in light upon the mountain,

stripped of might upon the cross,

shining in eternal glory,

beggar’d by a soldier’s toss.”

“You, the everlasting instant;

You, who are both gift and cost.”

“You, who walk each day beside us,

sit in power at God’s side.

You, who preach a way that’s narrow,

have a love that reaches wide.”

“You, the everlasting instant;

You, who are our pilgrim guide.”

“You, the everlasting instant;

You, who are our death and life.”

The anthem is called Christus Paradox. It’s filled with contradictions—but they’re holy contradictions that somehow hold together. Jesus is gift and cost, peace and strife, death and life. Each adjective makes its opposite more meaningful. The anthem doesn’t try to explain Jesus. It doesn’t even try to understand him completely. It just names the mystery—and dares to stay in that space of wonder.

This kind of naming—through paradox, not certainty—is part of an ancient Christian tradition called apophatic theology. From the Greek for “unsaying,” it teaches that God is greater than our words, beyond our categories. Even calling God “good” can be misleading, because God’s goodness is unlike any we know. Apophatic theology invites us to let go—not to define God, but to be drawn into God’s mystery.

That’s a God of the margins. Not a God who waits for us to be strong, but one who enters our weakness. Not a God who rewards our perfection, but one who meets us in the chaos. A God who is Lamb and Shepherd, Prince and Slave. A God of the cathedral, sure—but also a God of the riverbank.

And Lydia doesn’t just receive the Gospel—she becomes a leader. Her home becomes the first church in Philippi. She becomes patron, host, disciple. The first convert in Europe becomes the first minister of hospitality and welcome.

I suspect that the God known to Lydia and to Paul and to all the early followers of the Way, to all the faithful who gathered on riverbanks and in catacombs and in private homes—I suspect that the God they knew was a God of paradox. A God of mystery.

In Christendom, the church wielded power. But in Acts, the church bore witness—humbly, vulnerably, often dangerously—on the edges of society.

And maybe that’s how God can still show up in our lives. When things fall apart, when the road ahead isn’t clear, when all that we’ve counted on shakes beneath our feet—that’s when we might find ourselves beside the river, listening for a voice, waiting for something new to begin. And maybe, like Lydia, the most faithful thing we can do in that moment is simply to let our hearts be opened.

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to be willing, like Lydia, to listen. To be present. To let your heart be opened—opened to love, to God, and sometimes even to paradox.