Being a Jesus follower is more about verbs than nouns, more about doing than describing.

We’re all familiar with the fact that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus talks entirely about what we do, how we live and not about what we believe. But I have discovered that Paul is pretty similar. And this pleases my anabaptist soul.

So we are starting a new season at our small anabaptist gathering in Peckham reading and reflecting on Philippians and in particular on seven verbs to which Paul is particularly keen to draw our attention.

He is urging his readers in this letter to live well, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus as they navigate a world that doesn’t understand them, probably won’t respect them and could well give them a hard time.

We tend to think of Paul as a religious leader, perhaps the greatest religious thinker of the western world (lots to question in that sentence about how a Jewish tentmaker from modern day Turkey can be a great thinker of the Western tradition. But we’ll let that hang).

When Paul arrived in Thessalonica after his stay in Philippi where he founded a community of Jesus followers in Lydia’s workshop, he was greeted not as a religious guru or a noted philosopher, but as a trouble maker. The crowds who picked on Jason, one of those who welcomed Paul and his team, and probably hosted the gathering in the city, denounced the new movement as having turned the world upside down by acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, ‘saying that there is another king named Jesus.’ (Acts 17:6-7).

This is not Paul offering yet another religious option to the already crowded supermarket of faiths, but a new politics based on who really ruled the world, not Caesar but Jesus. No wonder he was not welcomed in a Roman city like Thessalonica, a city that owed its prosperity to Roman rule and ways.

And no wonder that when Paul wrote to the communities he founded in these European cities, he spoke about how we live and not just what we believe. Like Jesus, Paul focused on how those who join the movement should live in this dog eat dog world.

And his simple, central message to the Philippians is that we live like Jesus did, hence one of the key verbs in the letter being ‘thinking’; we think as Jesus did (2:5) and so model our lives on the way he lived (2:6-11; 3:4-17). We live as citizens of King Jesus’ kingdom rather than Caesar’s (1:27, 3:20-21)

Here is a Paul much closer to the Sermon on the Mount that he is often painted. It is what makes him such a compelling figure to me as I learn from him how to follow Jesus.

The title comes. if I remember rightly, from Charles Frazier’s novel, Cold Mountain. Credit where credit is due.