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Thessalonians vs Thessalonians Part 4
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Hi, everyone. I'm Bobby. I'm one of the pastors here on the team at Commons. Pretty pumped about closing up this series in Thessalonians and balance today. So let's dive into a recap so far.
Speaker 1:Jeremy set up this series by introducing us to the narrative behind the epistles to the Thessalonians. These letters seem sometimes contradictory. However, Jeremy argued that their difference, their differences are a result of just good pastoral work. These new Christians are encouraged to see that faith in Christ and change are intrinsically linked. Staying open to change often initiates a course correction.
Speaker 1:Therefore, balance isn't so much about tidy, well measured segments in life. It's about passion and contemplation. Wise counsel and wild transformation. Scott walked us through the marginalization of these first century Christians. This newfound faith was at odds with their culture.
Speaker 1:Scott made the case that balance isn't a cause and effect equation where if you plug into God, then God will zap all these great blessings into your life. Life is filled with joy and pain. And Scott encouraged an attitude of reception to both. Balance in joy and sorrow. It's complicated.
Speaker 1:It can be messy but it's also really beautiful. And Devin took us down the road of authenticity. He set out an important reminder that authenticity isn't about who you are, full stop. It's about who you are becoming. For these new Christ followers, Paul their mentor and their teacher, he had left them way too soon.
Speaker 1:So he writes to tell them to find more good people in their lives who can share hard truths with them. While the big theme in this series has been balance, it's helpful to remember that balance is a bit of a myth. In as far as balance as this bull's eye that we just aim our life at. Our position on balance has been that it's about passionately leaning in to self awareness, relationships, work, and faith while being open to tweak things along the way. Today in this final chapter in our series, I'm going to talk about rules.
Speaker 1:In particular, when and how rules change, what remains the same, and how we participate in spirit led transformation. So let's pray together and then I'll do a jump kick and we'll get started. All of that is true except for the jump kick. Let's pray. Loving God, we quiet ourselves before you.
Speaker 1:Jesus, we are mindful of your incarnation that you stepped into this experience of being human and you did this with your divinity intact. We have so much to learn from you that you balanced both the mundane and the sacred. Holy Spirit, we ask that you open the eyes of our hearts and our minds to see that you are present in our joys, in our struggles, and questions. And we pray into this conversation today. For those who are seeking comfort, will you meet us?
Speaker 1:For those who are seeking renewal and freshness, will you meet us? And for those of us who are ready for change and healing, meet us. In the name of Christ we pray. Amen. So a week or so ago, I posted this question on Facebook.
Speaker 1:What rules do you live by? Then I did that thing where you watch a post really closely and wait for it to explode in social media because it's so cool. Well, that didn't really happen at first. But then it actually kinda did. All sorts of rule responses popped up in my feed from the serious to the silly.
Speaker 1:And what seemed clear to me was this, whatever our associations are with rules, they matter. Like this one on my Facebook feed from my friend Kevin. Be wary of those who are 100% sure of what God says, thinks, or approves of. Embrace those who are hashing it out. Think that rule has lived a little.
Speaker 1:And it's a little more serious than Joel Braun's rule, do what Hillary says, or my friend Carolyn's family rule, she has two little girls, mommy poops alone. It's more serious. Right? So let's reflect on rules today. What rules do you live by?
Speaker 1:What rules have you reshaped throughout your life? What rules have you left behind altogether? Maybe you drove out of the city and you dug a big deep hole and you buried an old rule quite unceremoniously because it just didn't serve you anymore. Some rules deserve this kind of expulsion. So I wanna pause for a little footnote for the few.
Speaker 1:If you're a child or a teenager in the room today, let me assure you that the rules that your parents have for you are 100% trustworthy all of the time. Right? These rules are meant to keep you safe and to keep you smart. And I get that you have a unique relationship with rules, and I trust that you too will hear wisdom today. Alright.
Speaker 1:So before we roll up to the Thessalonians and take a look at the rules that Paul imparts in the community, let's pay a visit to a story in Acts 15, which chronologically takes place just before these letters. We are heading to the council of Jerusalem. Exciting. Right? Church councils?
Speaker 1:But it's actually a pretty cool story. Paul and Barnabas, they're coworkers in the gospel, And they're in Syria when they hear that some dudes are teaching new Christ followers to follow the ancient Jewish custom of circumcision in order to be saved. The text says that Paul and Barnabas get into a big debate with them about this question, arguing forcefully and at length. Now for the first time in history, arguing doesn't solve the conflict. So they head to Jerusalem and kick up a council with the apostles and the elders.
Speaker 1:The question is put before them. Should new converts be held to the old law of Moses? After deciding on that question, this is what happens. They have a big old discussion and Peter stands up and he tells personal stories of what God is doing. And then Paul and Barnabas back him with stories of signs and wonders of what God is doing to the Gentiles.
Speaker 1:Then James cites the prophets, Isaiah and Amos, to emphasize the inclusion of the rest of humanity in what God is doing to bring restoration and renewal. Finally, after these arguments and these anecdotes and these citations, a decision is made. They will no longer tell the Gentiles that they have to follow the law of Moses and be circumcised, but they should obey the following three rules. Number one, they should abstain from meat sacrificed to idols. Number two, from sexual immorality.
Speaker 1:Number three, from consuming blood or eating the meat of strangled animals. They find a third way. I mean, it's not exactly our third way, is it? But for them, it's grace. It honors what they believe about God and creation.
Speaker 1:So a letter is sent out to new believers to make these corrections and it reads beautifully. We understand that some men from here have troubled you and upset you with their teaching, but they had no such instructions from us. So it seemed good to us having unanimously agreed on our decision to send you these official representatives along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. So we are sending Judas and Silas to tell you that we what we have decided concerning your question. For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay no greater burden on you than these requirements.
Speaker 1:First and second Thessalonians transport us to a time and place in early church history. These letters flow from that letter. So since the early Christians didn't have the law of Moses to follow so strictly, what other rules should they follow to please God? I've broken Paul's advice to the Thessalonians into three categories. The first is rules for intimacy.
Speaker 1:The second is rules for community. And the third are rules for living in the culture. So first, rules for intimacy or as my friend Crystal said in the list of rules on Facebook, loved folks love folks. Chapter four of the first letter begins by urging the Thessalonians to live in a way that pleases God. The noun for this is sanctification.
Speaker 1:Maybe if you went to bible college, that's a word that was thrown around a lot, sanctification. Being set apart or the process of being made holy. The letter says, it is God's will that you should be sanctified, that you should avoid sexual immorality, that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the pagans who do not know God. That in this manner, no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or the NIV adds a sister. In Greco Roman culture, male privilege allowed sexual freedom for married men in a way that was out of the question for married women.
Speaker 1:It is reasonable to assume that the exhortation was aimed primarily at male converts. It's likely also that Paul is aware of a situation in the Thessalonian community where there is some real case for sexual immorality. And Paul seemed to always kinda know what was going on. An adulterous arrangement between a man and another man's wife or maybe a household slave. Even in the particulars of this long forgotten situation, there is something here for us.
Speaker 1:These instructions are about raising a sexual ethic that looks out for the intimacy and the vulnerability of all people. A little Bobby listens to a lot of podcast sidebar here. I heard an interview with L'Arche founder and Catholic theologian and humanitarian Jean Vanier on CBC's ideas this week. In it, he explained that in the old testament, sanctification was about being separate from dirt and impurity. But, Manier notes, Jesus' mission is about holiness that puts feet in the mud and hands in the dirt.
Speaker 1:Jesus' good news reaches out to the lost and the less loved to show them that they are wonderful and precious and more beautiful than they can even believe. Jean Vanier whose life work has been to live in community with people with disabilities explains that our greatness is not in our mind but it is in being in contact with others through our bodies. The apostle Paul and the saint Louis Jean Vanier urge us to honor our bodies and the bodies of others. Where the Thessalonians were worried about death in the afterlife, Paul says to be alive from your head to your toes and everything else in between. Wink wink.
Speaker 1:Admittedly, sometimes when I hear Paul launch into advice or rules about bodies and sex, I kinda wanna tell him to shove it. But that probably has more to do with me than what Paul is up to. I was a teenager during the purity movement of the nineteen nineties. People wore true love weights t shirts, fathers gave daughters purity rings, and the only option on the table was abstinence all the time till marriage. Now, I'm not saying that I would have done anything differently.
Speaker 1:I was after all a bit of a late bloomer. But the silence and the shame that shrouded the sexual development of evangelical Christians caused me and many others to shy away from healthy conversations and explorations about what it means to be a person of integrity and a person with a body. So maybe even I can get on board with what Paul is saying here because Paul reminds his audience that they are bodies, but they aren't just bodies. Paul talks about sex in the bible and he does it more than once. He shapes a new sexual ethic reminding hearers of what matters.
Speaker 1:Commitment matters. Equality in your intimate relationship matters. And love is much more than an economic arrangement or an opportunity to get off. The rules I took on from the Christian culture around me in my adolescence changed as I got older, as I understood myself better, and I made loving connections with people I loved. And that's the beauty of rules in all their forms and their imperfections.
Speaker 1:We can change them. We see the beauty of change in the council of Jerusalem. And we see the beauty of change as Paul advocates for intimate relationships that don't take advantage of others or only look out for the lusts of men. So what or who should guide these alterations? These beautiful changes.
Speaker 1:It would be easy to say, God does. Just turn the page. But I want to offer some Quaker wisdom from Parker Palmer who writes about the voice of God being present in us as an inner teacher. He says, my working definition of truth is simple. Though practice practicing it is anything but.
Speaker 1:Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline. Truth cannot possibly be found in the conclusions of the conversation because the conclusions keep changing. So if we want to live in the truth, it is not enough to live in the conclusions of the moment. We must find a way to live in the continuing conversation with all its conflicts and complexities while staying in close touch with our inner teachers. It's an eternal conversation and thank God because the rules if the rules don't change, sometimes that means we aren't growing.
Speaker 1:And so the wisdom in this letter stretches past these intimate relationships to how to live together in community. Paul does this by diving into rules about work or as my friend Danielle said in the list of rules on Facebook, work hard, be nice. Paul sets up these rules for work by talking about love. First, he writes about the love that they have for one another in their community. Now, about your love for one another, we do not need to write to you for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other.
Speaker 1:The noun for the first reference of love is Philadelphia, brotherly or sisterly love. The second word for love in that verse is agape love. It's a reciprocal pronoun. Paul praises these Christians for living out reciprocal divine like love as God's family. So yay Thessalonians.
Speaker 1:You've got all this sorted out. You're on your wait. Just wait a minute. There is this tiny little thing. Word is that some people, they're pulling back and they're leaning too heavily on the community.
Speaker 1:They're quitting their jobs and they're just waiting around for Jesus to come back. And Paul definitely has something to say about that. He didn't risk his life so that the Thessalonians could get lazy to enjoy their special Jesus club status and build a wall around their love. No. That's not what he was interested in.
Speaker 1:The rules have changed and now they see that the nature of God's love is reaching way past the few to the many. So second, Paul stretches love beyond their comfortable community. It's not flashy. It's not showy. It's more genuine and transformative than that.
Speaker 1:And in fact, you do love all of God's family throughout Macedonia, yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life. You should mind your own business and work with your hands just as we told you so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody. Love and self sufficiency. Paul is concerned with the broader social dimensions of their communal love saying, don't ditch out on your trades. Don't withdraw from social involvement.
Speaker 1:We're not gonna do that. There's still so much mystery to explore in this story. Or as the Eastern Orthodox theologian Callistos Ware writes, a mystery is something that is revealed for our understanding but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God. And by that he means the luminous and dazzling darkness. God is hidden from us but God is also revealed to us.
Speaker 1:Revealed as person and as love. The Thessalonians need a healthy dose of mystery. A God is so much bigger than all this noise in our world checkup. They thought that Christ was returning ASAP so they checked out and they put strains on the relationships in their community. And I get it.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, it does feel easier to just go numb, to check out when life is hard, when you don't feel like you fit in, when stress is like this beast just breathing down your neck. But Paul says, hold your apocalyptic horses. You think I don't know how hard it is out there. It's okay that you don't have it all figured out right now, but you do have love sorted. So get on with that.
Speaker 1:Love is what remains. So pack up your tool belt, head out the door, do your part because it matters to the family of God that you live to work and that you work to love. Now, I'm pretty new at being married so I know that you basically don't have to listen to anything I have to say about marriage for like the next fifteen years. But even in just one year, it's amazing to me how quickly things can disintegrate when I don't do my work. All kinds of work.
Speaker 1:The work of knowing myself, the work of being engaged in what matters to me outside of my marriage, the work of saying sorry, and the work of saying or actually sometimes not saying everything that's on my mind. Love means that you do your work. Sometimes it requires that you cut back on your hours at your job to bring health to you and to your family. But sometimes it actually means the exact opposite. Nobody is saying that you have to get it right all of the time.
Speaker 1:Letters like this one to Thessalonica, they zipped around the Roman empire encouraging people, offering advice, correction, prayers, and benedictions to shape a religion that believe it or not was lit up by love and social justice. So let's zoom out even further and see how these letters cross paths with Christians in their culture, more specifically with threatening powers in their world. Or like my Facebook friend, John Legend. Just kidding. We're not really friends, but he did say this on Facebook.
Speaker 1:The world's a better place when it's hashtag more inspired. For the recipients of the second letter of the Thessalonians, the world had not gotten easier to live in. It had gotten harder. And what's more, the belief in Jesus's imminent return wasn't helping them. Particularly, when it came to how to live as Christians in such a threatening empire with brand new kind of baby like faith.
Speaker 1:Instead of engaging, some of the Thessalonians they tune out and they pull back. The author corrects them. He corrects their passivity by writing about the signs that will take place before Jesus's return. The second letter says, don't let anyone deceive you in any way for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs. And the man of lawlessness is revealed.
Speaker 1:The man doomed to destruction. And then the lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroyed by the splendor of his coming. Every time I read those verses, think, man, that's so wacky. But then again, maybe it's actually quite human. We do this thing all the time where we try really hard to make sense of unchecked power in the world.
Speaker 1:I mean, my podcast feed right now is full of all kinds of assessments and theories. So let's take note of just a couple things. First, religion and politics are bedfellows in Thessalonica, A city that had been under Roman rule for over two centuries. It was the capital of the province of Macedonia and was therefore the seat of Roman administration. Becoming Christians didn't transport them to another planet.
Speaker 1:They still had to live on this one. Second, the writing about this lawless one, it personifies evil and injustice like many old testament passages. Daniel spoke about Antiochus Epiphanes, Ezekiel refers to the king of Tyre, and Isaiah points to the king of Babylon. This is just how these forms of literature look up to see God's big picture justice in a world that can feel like it's going off the rails. And the letter went on.
Speaker 1:It goes on to remind them that they didn't have to live in that kind of future yet. So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we pass on to you, whether by word-of-mouth or by letter. So why did the Thessalonians numb out or just wait for Christ's return? I wonder if it's a bit like, well, like this thing that Chris Rock said. To be clear, I'm actually not quoting Chris Rock directly, I'm quoting the comedian Neil Brennan who was quoting Chris Rock.
Speaker 1:When talking about the emotional state of comedians, if ignorance is bliss, then consciousness can be miserable. I think this is what's happening in the second letter a little bit. Paul and his compatriots, they're moving around the empire so fast. They're preaching and gathering new followers and getting chased out of town doing it. There's a lot of energy around Paul.
Speaker 1:It would be easy to just get so caught up in it. But after he's left, these followers, they're left to figure things out on their own. And sometimes really living, really paying attention, really feeling pain and suffering and facing unanswered questions while sticking it out in faith is hard. Right? It can be hard.
Speaker 1:The temptation to just check out, to give up, and to believe in a simpler narrative, one that takes you out of the world rather than more deeply into it, that's real. But the goal should be to stay sharp and to stay engaged. Alain de Botton, in a conversation with Christa Tippin on You Guested, another one of my favorite podcasts, said this. We associate love with private life, but don't associate it with life in the republic, with civil society. But I think that a functioning society requires two things that don't sound very normal, love and politeness.
Speaker 1:And by love, I mean a capacity to enter imaginatively into the minds of people with whom you don't immediately agree or to look for the more charitable explanations for behavior, which don't always appeal to you, which could even seem plain wrong. Prophets are everywhere, you guys, even in podcasts. Sometimes the rules change right beneath our feet, but sometimes we get to choose the rules that ground us. Curiosity and compassion can go a long way in our culture. So let's be people who always always start with empathetic love.
Speaker 1:In our conversation about rules today, I wonder, maybe you have rules in your life that you need to straight up get rid of. But maybe you realize that your life needs a few more good rules, gentle guidelines maybe, that keep you open and loving. Rules that rope off and protect what really matters to you. Lent, which begins this week, is a great time to consider some new rules. And after all, you only have to keep them for forty days.
Speaker 1:So ask yourself and the holy spirit maybe a couple questions before Ash Wednesday. What can I give up or fast that will bring spiritual and emotional clarity into my life? What might I take up that could form some new maybe neurological pathways in my mind and health for my body? So what might I give up? What might I take up?
Speaker 1:As we head out into this week, let's remember the council in Jerusalem where through a good question, a little reflection, and dialogue. In reading the scriptures together, they were able to discern what was good to the holy spirit and to them. And let's remember the church in Thessalonica waiting up in the night for Jesus' return only to have these letters arrive on their doorstep. Not promising an easy way out, but reminding them of their goodness, their ability to love more and more, and their need to get on with the details of living. God meets us in the continuing conversation.
Speaker 1:And as my friend Emma said about the rules that she lives by, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and it takes guts to be kind. These little Facebook rules compiled on my wall this week, they did something really cool for me. They showed me that sometimes we can choose our own rules. We can, in a fact, in a way, write our own epistles. I watched kind of an everyday epistle take form right before my very eyes through Facebook and the wisdom of friends.
Speaker 1:These personal posts along with the biblical letters are invitations reminding us that our intimacies in community with one another and as global citizens in the world, sometimes our rules change, but love remains. So join me in writing your own epistle. Let's pray together. God of the expanding universe, As we close this series on balance, may we hear your invitation. That there is room for us to make some changes, to live with wisdom and engagement and deep deep love for ourselves, our beloveds, and even for strangers.
Speaker 1:Expand our hearts and minds to see that even if the rules are changing, we stand in the security and the safety of your love. And we participate in your shalom with the help and the direction of your holy spirit. You are walking with us this week Jesus And for this we give you thanks. Amen. So once more reminder that Lent begins this week.
Speaker 1:It's our forty day journey in the church calendar towards Easter. So join us on Wednesday for our Ash Wednesday service, which starts at seven. Next Sunday, we'll be in a new series for Lent called Sermon by the Sea.