In church we're just coming to the end of a series of studies on Paul's Letter to the Philippians. Philippi, at the time Paul was writing, was a small city which had been refounded as a Roman military colony little more than 60 years before... As such its citizens prized their citizenship of Rome and one of the greatest honours they could receive was a visit from a Roman Emperor, who was known (among many other similarly humble titles) as the “Saviour of Mankind”. We have no records confirming that Philippi ever did receive such a visit, but while he was in prison in Rome awaiting trial before the Emperor, Paul wrote to his friends in Philippi, saying: "our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ..." Philippians 3:20 (ANIV) Last week, while the news focussed on the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Britain's erstwhile colony of Dublin, a substantial number of people in that other former British colony, also known as
Dialogues, monologues, sketches, poems, rants, theological and liturgical bits and bobs and miscellaneous other verbal doodles...