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Thessalonians vs Thessalonians
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
My name is Scott. I'm one of the people who gets to serve in the community as a pastor. There's a couple things that I'm doing these days. One of them is working with a small group as we get ready to launch a second parish in the coming year, which you'll hear more about I'm sure. And the other thing I do is coordinate our dinner party network.
Speaker 1:Some of you may not be familiar with what that is, maybe you're a guest with us today, maybe I should just fill you in. All our dinner party network is, is just a group of hospitable people who open their homes for people who might be new or people who are looking for more connection to come, have dinner, really informal social gathering, gives us a chance to connect maybe a little bit better than sometimes we can on a Sunday when it's busy and crazy and frenetic. So consider this an official invite. You can sign up for a dinner party at any time on our website so I invite you to do that today, tomorrow, whenever it works and then I'll get back in touch with you when and I'll tell you that you're on our guest list. With that said, today we're picking up week two of our Thessalonian series where we're looking at these two letters that Paul wrote in the first century.
Speaker 1:Let me take this gum out of my mouth. Sorry about that. Unlike much of our teaching here at Commons, this particular series we're not doing an exegetical sort of play by play verse by verse approach. Instead what we're doing is we're spending some time identifying some of the major themes in each of the letters and as we noted last week there is some tension between the two at times where Paul says one thing in the first letter only to come back subsequently and change his mind or change his instructions. And the presence of that tension is why we're talking about the concept of balance in this series.
Speaker 1:How Paul is doing good pastoral work when he adjusts his instructions and encouragement to this burgeoning Christian community as they attempted to try and make sense of what this story of Jesus was all about. And so and consequently, it can also help us as we integrate the notion of balance in our own attempts to be faithful. Now, we talked last week about how the fledgling church in Thessalonica had come or had some pertinent questions about just what exactly Jesus was intent when he was intending to return, to bring this new age that Paul had been talking about. And Paul actually used some really delirious language in his first letter, and that threw some people off to the degree that they started using this sort of rushing for the bus approach to life. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 1:That sort of like frantic, hairy dash around the house clutching and grabbing everything you think you're gonna need, leaving your life in a haphazard mess for your roommate or your spouse, your partner to clean up after you. And that's literally what people appear to be have been doing because they were so convinced by Paul's first letter that Christ was coming now that they rushed out of their everyday lives, out of the responsibilities that they were carrying. And so Paul actually has to write again. It's like, woah. Woah.
Speaker 1:Woah. Woah. And he nuances his instructions a little bit and he says, hey. You gotta still pay attention to life and all of the responsibilities that you already have. And so we see this dynamic in the two letters where Paul encourages his friends to lean into life and then later reminds them to, like, woah.
Speaker 1:Pull back a little bit when they get out of hand. And far from that's not really a problem for us because this is actually how we learn and develop and grow as human beings. Now to be honest, it's these big themes about the future and how we're supposed to respond to it that can tend to dominate the the airwaves when people talk about or preach from these texts. And that's why and part of why we're zooming out a little bit. We're just trying to come up and draw out some insights from some lesser known portions of these letters.
Speaker 1:I I loved Jeremy's challenge last week to rethink the conception of balance in life, where many of us try to reduce life to a series of multitasking contortions, stretching ourselves across a wide array of interests and commitments. And he teased out this notion that this kind of balance leads us to an unattainable ideal where we give pieces of ourselves, chunks of ourselves to all of the various parts of our lives, which if we're honest, it leaves us or it leaves us feeling pretty fragmented and harried at times. He encouraged us to cultivate the practice of rhythm making where we center ourselves in each moment and each activity. So when we're at work, we work. When we pray, we unapologetically pray.
Speaker 1:And when we're with someone, we're truly with them. And it's in that rhythm that we lean into what we're excited about for sure, and we can get carried away. And that's why we remain open to trusted voices that can help us adjust when we need to. I hope you've been able to reflect on some of those themes this week because today, I wanna focus our attention on some verses from both letters. But instead of finding attention between the two letters, we wanna explore some of the tension in the experience of the people that Paul was writing to, The tension between joy and suffering.
Speaker 1:But before we launch into that, let's pray together and let's center ourselves as a community. Oh god, our father, we thank you for your presence that's here with us. It marks our time together. We thank you for drawing our attention to your life, to your death, and your resurrection which we gather around, we celebrate, we find our hope there. We thank you for the blessed sacrament of community in which we experience your nearness in the faces and in the hands and in the hearts of the people we see here.
Speaker 1:We ask, oh God, would you help us to be sensitive to what you speak through the scriptures to us today? Give us courage to embody your love in our faulty and in our broken but yet beautiful everyday lives. We pray this in the name of Christ and by the spirit. Amen. So let's start at the beginning.
Speaker 1:As we discussed last week, these letters that we're looking at, they're believed to be some of the earliest writing from Paul that we have. Paul was forced to leave the community much sooner than he anticipated. So these letters are things that he sent to do what Margaret Mitchell calls restore the hope of the community. There are hints of or hints of pastoral empathy throughout both letters, and scholars note the fact that unlike much of Paul's other correspondence, Paul's not going off on someone in these letters. He's not mad, and he's not defending himself.
Speaker 1:These these are his friends, and he's deeply concerned about what's going on in their lives. So he writes with his ministry partners, Paul, Silas, and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God, the father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, grace and peace to you. We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. We remember before our god and father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our lord Jesus Christ. For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit, and deep conviction.
Speaker 1:You know how we lived among you for your sake, and you became imitators of us and of the Lord for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit, and you became a model to all of the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. So there's a couple of things that we can look at right away as we look at this text. First, this new church that's emerged, it's not located in some backwoods hamlet. Thessalon Thessalonica, I'm gonna get that right. It was a significant city in the first century, and it actually still is.
Speaker 1:Greece's largest university is located there if you're ever traveling in the area. Its location at the top of the Aegean Sea and at the sort of the crosshairs of a Roman highway that went east and west, it allowed this city to become an economic hub in the region, and it was the most populous city in all of Macedonia. This central and socially significant location is a likely contributor for how and why early believers from this church had already begun to stretch out and take the message of Jesus abroad, and Paul writes to commend them for doing this. Now this notion of the city's significance is important to how we interpret Paul's reference to the, quote, unquote, severe suffering that the believers have been experiencing. And for the record, this is a recurring theme in both letters.
Speaker 1:In chapter two of this letter, Paul claims that he preached the gospel to these people in the face of strong opposition. And then in chapter three, he references that he had assured them that they would experience persecution in the future. It wasn't good news. In the second letter, he writes back to them, and he writes to them that, quote, among God's churches, we boast about your perseverance and your faith in the midst of persecutions and trials that you are suffering. Now this language isn't surprising in many ways because Paul does sound like he derives a sense of enjoyment from suffering at times.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna get bogged down here, but the point is that if you go and read the book of Acts, you end up feeling sorry for Paul because he keeps getting into trouble and getting his butt kicked. And in second Corinthians chapter 11, we actually find Paul boasting about his suffering. And he does this because there apparently were some others who were going around talking about Jesus and talking about how churches should be organized in ways that contrasted with Paul's perspective. So in his letter, he gets into a bit of an argument with them, and it sounds a little like a comedic game of one upmanship because Paul's opponents apparently have been saying that we are the real Jews. We're the true Israelites.
Speaker 1:We're children of Abraham. And then to top it off, they're like, and we serve Jesus. And Paul basically looks at them as like, so what? And then for real, it's in the text, he says, I'm more than that. He's he's like that guy at a barbecue that's better than everybody else.
Speaker 1:He get he got closer to the stage. His fish that he caught is bigger than yours. He's been to more countries in South America. And Paul basically is like, oh, yeah. That's nothing.
Speaker 1:I've worked harder. I've been imprisoned more frequently. I've been flogged more severely. I've been exposed to death again and again. Five times, I've received 40.
Speaker 1:Three times, I was beaten with rods. Once, I was pelted with stones. Three times, I was shipwrecked, spent a night and a day on the open sea. I've been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, from bandits, from my fellow Jews, from Gentiles.
Speaker 1:This is that freestyling thing we were talking about. In the city, in the country, at sea, in the danger in danger from false believers. I have labored, and I have toiled, and I've gone without sleep. I have known hunger and thirst, and I've gone without food. I've been cold and naked.
Speaker 1:Besides everything else, I face my pressure for my concern for all of the churches, and, yes, that's in the text. It's a true quote. This is and you can see people at a party kinda just backing away from them like, dude, sorry we mentioned it. In the passage that we're looking at, Paul seems to align suffering and opposition with the measure of Christian faithfulness. And it might be why Paul loves the Thessalonians so much.
Speaker 1:He calls them his imitators after all. So there's suffering. That's what he says. Well, what does that mean? We'll talk about the terminology that Paul uses in a moment, but it's worth returning to our discussion of Thessalonica as a as a key city in the empire.
Speaker 1:The city had for a couple of centuries already at the time of Paul been loyal to Roman imperial power during various uprisings and revolts. And consequently, when Paul arrives in the city, he encounters a place that's marked by prominent architecture everywhere signifying how Rome had invested in its loyal constituents there. Included in that landscape were temples that had been erected for the sole purpose of venerating the emperor as a victorious deity. So when we look in Acts 17 at the craziness that's going on in this city, the words of Paul in this letter start to make sense for us. The citizens have joined a mob, and they're opposing Paul's work.
Speaker 1:And their accusations against him stem from their fear that significant conversions to the way of Jesus might result in civil unrest and incur Rome's wrath, and they don't want that. It's possible that some of the tension that some of the early Thessalonian Christians would have been experiencing was derived from a sense of civic or political alienation. Because in choosing to affirm that Jesus was Lord instead of Caesar, that would have marginalized them socially. And part of what this broader or larger story along with Paul's letters reminds us of is that we have to be careful that our trust in Jesus doesn't get confused or co opted by the political and institutional powers of our day. And this can happen in so many ways, in our capitulation to forms of faith that foster unchecked power and wealth or in allowing ourselves to be reduced to one voting bloc amongst many.
Speaker 1:What's tragic in sin in instances like this is that call or Christ's call and his compassion get lost in the shuffle of us defending our own interest. I thought of this text about ten days ago when I was attending a conference that was put on by the Evangelical Covenant Church, which is this organization of churches that we're part of here at Commons. And I was thrilled there along with many other attendees when Gary Walter, the president of the organization, passionately affirmed our commitment to continued refugee resettlement and racial reconciliation. This in the middle of political turmoil and ongoing contest surrounding immigration in The United States. And I was deeply moved then, and I pray that in hearing Paul's words today, we as a community are moved to continue standing with and for those who are displaced and abandoned and neglected and lost in everything that we do.
Speaker 1:And I understand our political climate here in Canada isn't nearly as hostile or as oppositional to some of the things we feel God has called us to, but Paul's encouragement to his friends should remind us that at times, to remain faithful to the way of Jesus will put us at odds with systems of control and systems of power. And we shouldn't be surprised, especially when a close examination of Jesus' life shows us that to live a life of holy disruption for adverse advocacy and mercy, that's gonna pit us against those who are perpetuating and benefiting from inequality. Now at the same time, I want to acknowledge that some of you may have experienced opposition directly related to your confession of faith in Jesus. Maybe it came in the form of a family member who just doesn't understand how and why faith makes you do what you do, or maybe it was a combative professor who took exception and mocked your public stance, or maybe it was just a boss or an employer who made life and trying to be involved in Christian community really difficult. Today, you need to hear the encouragement at the heart of our text.
Speaker 1:And remember that Jesus told his followers that they were blessed if they suffered in his name. Blessed, we should ask? Yes. Because in choosing faithfulness in the face of suffering, Jesus tells us that we actually stand in a long line of faithful people who have gone before us, and we model ourselves on their humble example. I wanna encourage you to know that in choosing to be faithful in those situations, you've participated in a deeply holy thing.
Speaker 1:And while some of us might have experiences like that, it's probably not the majority of us. And don't get me wrong. There are places in the world where Christians are being oppressed and violently persecuted. Amnesty International releases a report every year where you can go and read about all of these types of things going on in the world each and every day. But I wanna zoom out in our remaining time together and consider the broader implications of this text to those of us who are balancing suffering with joy.
Speaker 1:Paul addresses his friends and acknowledges that they've been undergoing severe suffering. And depending on what translation you're reading, you're actually gonna find a range of terms there, including words like tribulation or persecution. And that range exists because scholars aren't unanimous as to whether Paul was actually referring to the threat of physical harm that these people were experiencing or whether he was speaking about something that a scholar calls the distress and anguish of the heart experienced by people who have broken with their past as they received the gospel. We can't say for sure, but we might imagine that both of those things might have been going on in this community. And what might inform our perspective is the Greek noun that Paul uses to refer to this suffering, and it's the Greek term, which literally means pressing.
Speaker 1:Did my mic die? Or perhaps more aptly, a time of pressure or a season of pain. And I think that's terminology that might land a little bit closer to most of us than the word persecution does. Because I've never felt any pressure to recant my faith or my belief in Jesus, and I don't ever feel unsafe when I'm trying to get here to meet with you guys on a Sunday. What I imagine most of us could admit is that we live with some pain, some discomfort, some pressure, some suffering regardless of where it comes from.
Speaker 1:And if we're honest, we probably struggle to reconcile that with our faith journey. And isn't that pressure some of the worst? That sense of disorientation that comes when our confidence in our work or in our in our own bodies or our resources, it dissolves all while we have stayed faithful? To feel as though you've done the right thing, you've made good choices, you've been wise only to find yourself in a place of pressure, a place of suffering? Now not all of you are aware of the fact that in 2015, my wife, Darlene, was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Speaker 1:And the aggressive form of her illness meant that she had to undergo surgery and treatment that drastically changed her life and the fabric of our family as well. And one of the ways that she describes the darkness of that season is that she had to grapple with these types of feelings, taking exception with the divine, with this sense of injustice at having taken care of her body through diet and exercise while watching the patients she would see as an r nurse, people who had abused their body living into old age. And those those are some really dark moments from our story, and I imagine that some of you have similar types of experiences that you can call to mind. Perhaps the hardest thing for many of us is to reconcile how helpless we feel in those moments of pain. Right?
Speaker 1:How little capacity we have to change our situation, which brings us back to our discussion of the Thessalonians and their ability to experience joy in the middle of difficulty, to seemingly balance joy and suffering. Last week, Jeremy suggested that this notion of balance, it's actually a myth because we can't possibly attend equally at all times to all areas of our lives. And guess what? I think there's a similar principle at work here too, and that I don't think we can actually balance joy and suffering. And that's because we don't control how and when these forces play out in our lives.
Speaker 1:Most of the hardest moments we encounter, most of the pressing discomfort, dryness, and pain we experience, we don't choose or determine when it comes to us. And so too with the joy filled moments in our lives. Right? Have you noticed this? That the truly joyful times in life are so fleeting that they can't be conjured, they can't be sustained in some sort of equilibrium that we bring to our life?
Speaker 1:Things like the intimate moments we share with the people that we love or moments of accomplishment like a graduation where we're there for just a minute or maybe a sense of peaceful wonder that comes to us briefly with that we giving us a sense that we found our place in the world, or or maybe it's just a laughing fit with a child or a good friend that leaves our ribs sore. These things catch us off guard because they're gifts. They're whispers of the divine, and we don't control when they come to us. And this is why had you suggested to my wife as she felt weak and incapacitated by her chemo treatment that she just needed to offset the pain and loss with a little lightheartedness, like, just lighten up, or that she needed to muster some joy to push back the sorrow, and that she just needed to believe that the joy of the Lord was her strength. I fear for what she would have done to you.
Speaker 1:And that's not because to say any of those things in and of themselves is wrong. It's just to suggest that there's that that the or it's to suggest that if there's some balance to be found in the hardest times of our lives, that there's some sort of offsetting strength that we can bring to bear, it just isn't true. That kind of balance doesn't exist. Sometimes we just can't muster the energy to make things right. Paul is thrilled with the Thessalonians because they, quote, welcome the message of Christ in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1:This word joy, it's the Greek word kara, and it's derived from another Greek noun, which means cheerfulness or calm delight. We shared just a few moments ago the eucharist, right, a word that means good gift, of which the word kara is a root, as is the word charisma, which means gift of God or divine gratuity. And we can see in this text, this joy that the Thessalonians are exhibiting, it's an it it hasn't come out of as a profound expression of tidy happiness born out of their own exertion. It's not naive, and it doesn't stem from a blindness to the seriousness of what they're going through. No.
Speaker 1:It's a gift, and it's come to them in the mystery of God's spirit. So where's the balance to be found then? If we don't control the pressure, and Paul seems to be saying that we don't get a sense of cheerfulness and buoyancy in the other than from the divine, it seems like we have no options. We don't have any control, and that's true almost. If we look at this passage, Paul commends his friends for receiving the message he had brought to them, or as some translations say, they received the word.
Speaker 1:In the middle of a time of pressure, these people have postured themselves to receive god's gifts to them, and it resulted in joy. Now maybe some of these things that I'm saying, they they they ring true in some way for you because maybe you're facing some difficulty or maybe you feel pressure in some part of your life. And then on top of it, you can't possibly identify with the Thessalonians in this experience of joy. There's no calm delight in your work or in your pleasure or in the quiet moments of your life. And whether or not that actually describes all of us, I doubt it does.
Speaker 1:I think we might all ask ourselves where god's word might be breaking into our current situation. Where might I be able to see? And if I can't see, maybe I can just sense the divine drawing near. This practice of fostering a discipline of awareness, it's always been at the core of Christian spirituality, which means that some of us might want to begin or begin again to read and to pray with the Psalms with all of their openness to the range of human experience. And this could be particularly helpful as we draw near to the season of Lent.
Speaker 1:Some of us would benefit from creating some moments of pause or quiet in our day even if we just get those by hiding from our kids in the bathroom. It's true. People do it. Perhaps you want to start scheduling a series of prayer reminders on your phone, intending to just disrupt your business as usual and spark an awareness of the divine that'll come in the middle of a meeting, for instance. Or maybe some of us need to recall Bobby's brilliant encouragement in her epiphany sermon where she talked about her, line a day journal, and she talked to us about how it had helped her hone her spiritual awareness to god's quiet leading in her daily life.
Speaker 1:Regardless of the form that we adopt and whether or not we fail initially in making these things part of our daily practice, it's so important for us to posture ourselves. Looking around, seeking for how god's word might be coming to us. For you, maybe it's already coming in the small breakthroughs in a relationship that you've been working on for a long time. Perhaps your health has improved. Perhaps it's just stabilized.
Speaker 1:There's grace in that. Perhaps you've received a job interview or an offer that just serendipitously came out of nowhere. Perhaps you've had a sense of the divine as you walked in the mountains or as you did everyday tasks. Perhaps you just need to be aware of the faithful witness of hilarious and close friends. Learning to be mindful of the divine doesn't mean we end up developing this sense of mastery, that we get the balance right.
Speaker 1:That's not what it means. It doesn't mean that we end up experiencing equal measures of joy and pain. What it means is that we work to make sure that we don't close ourselves off from both of those things that are part of this beautiful life. And it means that we own where we are, the hurt and the pressure. And having done this, and I'm quoting Michael Casey here, we can invest then our limited energies not in massive programs of self improvement, but in trying to perceive where God's grace is leading us and responding or following that impulse.
Speaker 1:Learning to be mindful of the divine won't mean that everything balances out as much as it will mean that we have adopted a receptive posture so that when we have those fleeting joy filled moments, we can do our best to savor them, aware of god's implicit goodness in all of these little simple gifts. My prayer today is that you would have grace to receive god's word in whatever form it's coming to you. In all of the simple ways that born of the spirit, he is around you. Let's pray together. God, our father, in this moment, we bring our pressure and our suffering to you.
Speaker 1:For those who pray even now with us for relief, we ask, oh, God, that you would have mercy. We thank you for the encouragement from the scriptures today. And even in this moment, we posture ourselves so that we might, in some small way, become aware of how near you are. And as that awareness grows, Lord, I ask that you would teach us to see and know the joy that comes only from you. And, Lord, too, we pray for your church abroad today, hidden, humble, and yet powerful.
Speaker 1:We ask that you would strengthen our friends with true joy in the middle of the darkness and suffering that they encounter. And we ask that you would forgive those that harm them. We pray these things in the name of Christ and by the spirit. Amen. Amen.