Make A Wake

Wading in the wake of Paul’s missionary journeys

05/10/2020

Acts 16:11-15 We set sail from Troas, making a straight run for Samothrace, and on the next day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, a leading city in that district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We spent some time in that city. On the sabbath we went outside the city gate along the river where we thought there would be a place of prayer. We sat and spoke with the women who had gathered there. One of them, a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, from the city of Thyatira, a worshiper of God, listened, and the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying. After she and her household had been baptized, she offered us an invitation, “If you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my home,” and she prevailed on us.

Have you ever sailed on a ship or been on a boat? Perhaps you will this summer at the lake. If you have stood on the stern (the back of the boat), you no doubt saw how all ships make a wake. Some ships make such a wide wake, though, that they change the course of history. For instance, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in 49 B.C. at the head of the Roman Army, the wake he made inaugurated the era of the Roman Empire.

When Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue in 1492” he made a wake that led to the exploration of a new continent and the establishment of a new nation. When General George Washington crossed the Delaware River in 1776, the wake he made changed the Revolutionary War. All ships, therefore, can make a wake, but some ships’ wakes are so wide they chart a new course for history and humanity.

In the first reading from Acts 16, we hear how St. Paul sets sail and would make a wake that changed human history even more than Caesar, Columbus and Washington combined. We read: “We set sail from Troas, making a straight run from Samothrace, and the next day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, a leading city in that district of Macedonia and a Roman colony.” If you study Acts, you will recall this is part of Paul’s “second missionary journey” where he crosses over the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Europe.

St. Paul’s setting foot in Europe as the first Christian missionary would prompt the proclamation by Hilare Belloc, the great Church historian, who said: “The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith.” In other words, one of the ripples from the wake of the ship of St. Paul is our belief in the “Roman” Catholic Church. That is how wide the wake he made was on that sea crossing in Acts 16.

Another writer, A. N. Wilson, from Oxford, elaborated eloquently on Belloc’s bold statement asking what Europe might be like without Paul: “Europe without Benedict, Europe without Dante, Europe without the cathedrals, Europe without the medieval universities…No Ambrose, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Marsilius, no Duns Scotus…No Bach, no Michaelangelo, no Shakespeare.” Wilson concludes: “We, whether Christian or not, inevitably think of Paul’s arrival in Europe as the harbinger of a new dawn, when the first seeds of Christian civilization are sown in pagan soil” (Paul, 137). In other words, Paul’s ship made a wide wake, as wide as the whole world.

Incidentally, St. Paul would undertake a third missionary journey in Acts 18-21, where he would make a yet wider wake. Have you ever seen people on the lake who like to splash people with the wake they make? Sometimes they spin their ship in a tight circle and splash people on the dock or on the shoreline. Well, St. Paul made a very wide wake and splashed the whole world with the water of baptism, like Lydia in Philippi. I bet he was loving it and laughing all the way, like Leo Anhalt on Beaver Lake or Bill Buergler on Lake Tenkiller. Some people, like Caesar, Columbus, Washington and Paul, know the kind of wake they make.

My friends, what kind of wake do you make with the little sailing vessel of your life? The first people the ripples of our wakes touch are our family members. Our interactions with our spouse, our siblings, our parents either splash people with grace, or drown them in our own distresses. What kind of wake do you make at work? Our actions and aspirations, our words and our work-ethic, our jokes and jabs, all make a wake that either blesses or burdens our coworkers.

And surprisingly, the biggest wakes we make and the most sensational splash, is when we go to our room, close the door and pray to God in private, as Jesus urged us to do in Mt 6:6. Why? Our Lord continues: “And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.” How so? The Father will guarantee that the wake you make is as wide as the world.

Praised be Jesus Christ!