SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF St FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27th 2011
(FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT)
Readings:
Isaiah 64.1-9
Psalm 80.1-7, 17-19
1 Corinthians 1.1-9
Mark 13.24-37
There are times in the journey of scriptural interpretation when we have to set aside the rational, logical brain – to the extent that we have one! – and allow ourselves to be, as two Isaiahs and a Jeremiah saw so clearly, clay in the hands of the potter. It isn’t altogether easy, though as I have often said in previous faith communities, it is easier for someone like myself, who had apparently slipped away to the toilet when scientific brains were handed out, than it is for those who have a scientific mind. Nevertheless, there are respected and highly intelligent scientists and philosophers who are able to ensure that they know the limitations of human enquiry, know that there is a moment in which we can surrender to the ‘too big’ and ‘beyond our ken’ vastness of God and acknowledge that ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’ (to borrow Anselm’s phrase)
is greater than the human mind. This, incidentally, is not to lapse into
fundamentalism, a surprisingly modern, more or less late nineteenth century
form of biblical interpretation that imposes a literalist interpretation on the
text – the Hebrew and early Christian minds were always far larger than that.
Nevertheless, in the 21st century it is hard not to be slightly swayed by the reasonable scientific suggestion that, given the current evidence, the Christian doctrine of a second coming of Christ is somewhat spurious. Some scholars argue that even as early
as the time in which Paul writing his letters, the decade from the late 50s to early 60s of the first century, the Christian community was altering its expectation of the imminent return of the Messiah. Certainly in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians all systems appear to be go: describing the role of the faith community Paul reminds them ‘you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven’ (1 Thess. 1. 9b-10a), and when Paul prays for his Thessalonian audience, ‘may he so strengthen your
hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’ (1 Thess. 3.13), he does so believing that this coming is imminent: ‘the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever’(1 Thess. 4.16b-17). Do we have to say of Paul that he would have received a nasty shock some years later when he was executed by the Romans, his Lord still seemingly absent, in visual terms?
Perhaps, but I am not convinced. The Book of Revelation, a little later than Paul, hangs tenaciously to the expectation of the Second Coming or Parousia. The gospel records and Acts do likewise. Like many doctrines of New Testament theology it would have been far easier to jettison this belief in order to sidestep the mocking antagonism of the critics and enemies of Christianity. Yet those early Christians were prepared to hold to it, even as, one by one, the eye witnesses of Jesus died out, and the first generations of Christians followed them. Certainly, later, as Christianity became a significant and later
still the dominant paradigm in society, interest in the Second Coming dwindled. But, from time to time, as Christianity stagnated, the expectation was reawakened (not always to the good!), and, in each era, it has been as hard to believe and as risible as it is in our own. Do we dare to jettison this belief in our century?
In geological terms we know now we live on an ancient planet, circling a sun that will one day grow old and die. It may be that this is all that is meant when we speak of the second
coming – that, long after our species has surrendered to its own exploitation of the planet, and long after new cycles of warming and cooling have restructured this blue globe, after new tectonic shifts have rearranged our continents far beyond our present imaginings, then life will simply peter away, and the final surviving species will dissipate into nothingness.
Maybe – and the doctrine of the Second Coming says that is okay too. For it says, primarily (as we remember in the rites of Easter), that the Alpha is the Omega: that the author of creation’s beginning will be the author of its endings. But the Doctrine of the Second Coming says more than merely that, for it says that not only the life of the
universe, cosmological history, but the life of the sparrow and the life of you and the life of me is held in the tender, redeeming, hope-bringing hands of God. It is for that reason that Paul could write so confidently ‘may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’. The details of what John of the Apocalypse calls ‘the new heavens and the new earth’ are in the hands of God – but that is the point: they are in the hands of God. They are in the hands of God: Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. And
in the hands of God: judge.
Much contemporary theology – and even more contemporary a-theology – is keen to do away with the doctrine of judgement. We do so at great peril. Not that I want people to listen to hell fire and damnation sermons or want to attempt to frighten people into the clutches
of faith. Apart from anything else, it is clear that those so-called evangelistic techniques are counter-productive in our current, nonchalant world. Judgement? Who cares?
For us the answer must be:‘we do’. There is an onus on us to live as a people under judgement. The tragic trail of sexual abuse in the church – though no worse than in some other institutions – is a sign of amnesia in some individuals as they forgot the doctrine of judgement, and predatory and exploitative sexual gratification became a greater creed. I suspect a Jesus saying about millstones, necks and oceans has much to say about the perpetrators of such evil. But for those of us who are not perpetrating such evil there is still always the need for long, hard self-scrutiny. Advent – and later, Lent – provide opportunity for just that. I do not understand the mechanics of the end of time, nor the mechanics of the Second Coming. But I try to remind myself that I stand in the shadow of
that event, and try with the help of God to live a life at the closure of which
I may be gently led into the unfathomable mysteries of God’s for-ever.
For that reason, more than 25 centuries after he wrote the words, I can add my amen to Isaiah’s plaintive
prayer:
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider: we are all your people.
Amen.
Saturday, 26 November 2011
Monday, 7 November 2011
God's Garden
SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6th 2011
PENTECOST 21 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 32: (CARE FOR CREATION SUNDAY)
Readings: Joshua 24.1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78.1-7
1 Thessalonians 4.9-18
Matthew 25.1-13
By way of apology I should outline my caution towards so-called special Sundays. A little like the ‘Year Of’ pronouncements that emanate, I suspect, from a small office in the labyrinthine corridors of the United Nations – with its religious ‘Year Of’ counterpart in the smaller but equally labyrinthine corridors of the World Council of Churches – these declarations can become a hailstorm of cataclysmic proportions, spitting passionate and often worthy concerns at us faster than the speed of light and initiating 'awareness faitgue', let alone compassion fatigue . It seems to me on any one day we can, if not exhausted, find ourselves in the Decade of Evangelism, the Year of the Child, the Year of Being Nice to Endangered Species, the Year of Looking Out For Nasty Weeds, The Month of Being Kind to Grandmothers, The Month of Protecting Endangered Rock Oysters, the Day of Remembering Dolphins and the Day of Making Sure You Are Proud of Your Prayer Book, Hymn Book and Pew, all unawares. I’m a kind of Church Year and lectionary junky, not because I’m some sort of bombastic Anglo-Catholic (though I might be), but because I believe these are the best tools available to ensure that neither worship nor preaching becomes a cyclical focus on the Michael Godfrey personal obsession collection. By preaching and praying the liturgical calendar, imperfect though it may be, we are taken out of cosy comfort zones and forced to encounter the often discomforting regions of the scriptures of our faith. We are not forced into a form of dead mechanicalism, but we are steered away from smorgasbord faith, popular in some churches (evangelical and liberal alike), where we pick and choose the flavours that we like.
That whinge aside, however, I am on this occasion allowing a degree of special focus in our thoughts, for Care of and Hope for what I call ‘God’s Garden’, Creation, is a fundamental mission of the Christian Community. For many years now the Anglican Consultative Council has recognized and affirmed five marks of mission:
• to proclaim the Good News of the Reign of God
• to teach, baptize and nurture new believers,
• to respond to human need by loving service,
• to seek to transform unjust structures of society, and
• to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
The fifth – (which reads like a sentence put together by a working party!) – was a late addition to the first four, arriving on the scene in 1990. Nevertheless it is an important acknowledgement that Creation is an act of God’s sharing love, that the nurture of Creation is a commission given to humanity in the creation stories, and that the lives of many of our sisters and brothers in the human race lie perilously balanced as we often selfishly devour and destroy the resources of God’s earth.
There is then a sense that all our interpretation and application of scripture at all times must incorporate a degree of concern for the garden God has entrusted to us. It would be false to pretend it was overt all the time – as it would be false to pretend that every scripture selection commissions us to evangelize or to strive for justice – but it is there. And serendipitously, it is there by implication today, as our readings towards the close of the liturgical year begin to pick up the crescendo of apocalyptic expectation. It is even present in Paul’s impassioned and moving address to the Thessalonians, which, while hardly a Green Party Manifesto, commissions his audience to live their lives in such a way of love that they benefit and enhance the lives of those around them: ‘live quietly, … mind your own affairs, … work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one’. Paul was far from considering ecological issues, but if we are to read Paul in the 21st century we must ask whether our western lifestyles really demonstrate propriety towards others. Many analysts suggest that the fury that runs through the veins of El Qaida is nurtured at least in part by the bitter gaps in economic status between the West (or, as it is now inexplicably called, ‘the global north’) and the Muslim world, as we gobble up resources that could fuel and feed and clothe all seven billion in the world. It is simplistic, but it is a partial truth.
Sadly, as the Christian community read its apocalyptic texts, as I have mentioned now many times, it read them from a listening or reading site vastly different to that in which they were written. Those of us engaging in the Advent studies will be reminded of this yet again during December. Too often, though, Christians, especially those with an apocalyptic or millenarianist bent, have used expectation of a glorious Second Coming as an excuse to disregard or, more shamefully still, to hasten the desecration of the earth: an ecclesiatical 'bring it on' so that a selfish elect can skiddle to 'glory'. That parody of Christ-mission has understandably led socially compassionate Christianity-averse writers such as Seattle songwriter Charlie Murphy to remind us bitterly ‘the earth is a witch and we still burn her’.
To ignore our responsibility to nature is to drive a wedge between the miracle of our origins, in which God commands us to ‘husband’ creation, and the expectation of Christ’s return. To drive a wedge in such a way is blithely to forget the doctrine of judgement, and to forget those parables in which Jesus warns us that will be asked to account for the gifts we have had entrusted to us. It is to forget, too, that while we often emphasize the ‘friendship’ of Jesus, parables such as that of the ten maidens are texts that remind us of our obligation constantly to evaluate and re-evaluate our lives in the light of the glare of Christ: where were you when I was naked or hungry or thirsty in the global south or in the nations disappearing beneath rising sea-waters?
I do not believe we are called to follow any political party line in approach to these questions. I do believe, though, that we are called over and again to re-focus our lives to ensure that we nurture and care for the gifts that God has given us, and use them constantly in ways which glorify God. We are called to ensure that our lifestyles are not destroying God’s earth, and where they are, or where they are denying the livelihood and the very existence of our fellow humans and other species, to seek forgiveness, make alteration, and in that way ensure that our candles burn with eagerness as the bridegroom arrives.
May God help us so to do.
TLBWY
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6th 2011
PENTECOST 21 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 32: (CARE FOR CREATION SUNDAY)
Readings: Joshua 24.1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78.1-7
1 Thessalonians 4.9-18
Matthew 25.1-13
By way of apology I should outline my caution towards so-called special Sundays. A little like the ‘Year Of’ pronouncements that emanate, I suspect, from a small office in the labyrinthine corridors of the United Nations – with its religious ‘Year Of’ counterpart in the smaller but equally labyrinthine corridors of the World Council of Churches – these declarations can become a hailstorm of cataclysmic proportions, spitting passionate and often worthy concerns at us faster than the speed of light and initiating 'awareness faitgue', let alone compassion fatigue . It seems to me on any one day we can, if not exhausted, find ourselves in the Decade of Evangelism, the Year of the Child, the Year of Being Nice to Endangered Species, the Year of Looking Out For Nasty Weeds, The Month of Being Kind to Grandmothers, The Month of Protecting Endangered Rock Oysters, the Day of Remembering Dolphins and the Day of Making Sure You Are Proud of Your Prayer Book, Hymn Book and Pew, all unawares. I’m a kind of Church Year and lectionary junky, not because I’m some sort of bombastic Anglo-Catholic (though I might be), but because I believe these are the best tools available to ensure that neither worship nor preaching becomes a cyclical focus on the Michael Godfrey personal obsession collection. By preaching and praying the liturgical calendar, imperfect though it may be, we are taken out of cosy comfort zones and forced to encounter the often discomforting regions of the scriptures of our faith. We are not forced into a form of dead mechanicalism, but we are steered away from smorgasbord faith, popular in some churches (evangelical and liberal alike), where we pick and choose the flavours that we like.
That whinge aside, however, I am on this occasion allowing a degree of special focus in our thoughts, for Care of and Hope for what I call ‘God’s Garden’, Creation, is a fundamental mission of the Christian Community. For many years now the Anglican Consultative Council has recognized and affirmed five marks of mission:
• to proclaim the Good News of the Reign of God
• to teach, baptize and nurture new believers,
• to respond to human need by loving service,
• to seek to transform unjust structures of society, and
• to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
The fifth – (which reads like a sentence put together by a working party!) – was a late addition to the first four, arriving on the scene in 1990. Nevertheless it is an important acknowledgement that Creation is an act of God’s sharing love, that the nurture of Creation is a commission given to humanity in the creation stories, and that the lives of many of our sisters and brothers in the human race lie perilously balanced as we often selfishly devour and destroy the resources of God’s earth.
There is then a sense that all our interpretation and application of scripture at all times must incorporate a degree of concern for the garden God has entrusted to us. It would be false to pretend it was overt all the time – as it would be false to pretend that every scripture selection commissions us to evangelize or to strive for justice – but it is there. And serendipitously, it is there by implication today, as our readings towards the close of the liturgical year begin to pick up the crescendo of apocalyptic expectation. It is even present in Paul’s impassioned and moving address to the Thessalonians, which, while hardly a Green Party Manifesto, commissions his audience to live their lives in such a way of love that they benefit and enhance the lives of those around them: ‘live quietly, … mind your own affairs, … work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one’. Paul was far from considering ecological issues, but if we are to read Paul in the 21st century we must ask whether our western lifestyles really demonstrate propriety towards others. Many analysts suggest that the fury that runs through the veins of El Qaida is nurtured at least in part by the bitter gaps in economic status between the West (or, as it is now inexplicably called, ‘the global north’) and the Muslim world, as we gobble up resources that could fuel and feed and clothe all seven billion in the world. It is simplistic, but it is a partial truth.
Sadly, as the Christian community read its apocalyptic texts, as I have mentioned now many times, it read them from a listening or reading site vastly different to that in which they were written. Those of us engaging in the Advent studies will be reminded of this yet again during December. Too often, though, Christians, especially those with an apocalyptic or millenarianist bent, have used expectation of a glorious Second Coming as an excuse to disregard or, more shamefully still, to hasten the desecration of the earth: an ecclesiatical 'bring it on' so that a selfish elect can skiddle to 'glory'. That parody of Christ-mission has understandably led socially compassionate Christianity-averse writers such as Seattle songwriter Charlie Murphy to remind us bitterly ‘the earth is a witch and we still burn her’.
To ignore our responsibility to nature is to drive a wedge between the miracle of our origins, in which God commands us to ‘husband’ creation, and the expectation of Christ’s return. To drive a wedge in such a way is blithely to forget the doctrine of judgement, and to forget those parables in which Jesus warns us that will be asked to account for the gifts we have had entrusted to us. It is to forget, too, that while we often emphasize the ‘friendship’ of Jesus, parables such as that of the ten maidens are texts that remind us of our obligation constantly to evaluate and re-evaluate our lives in the light of the glare of Christ: where were you when I was naked or hungry or thirsty in the global south or in the nations disappearing beneath rising sea-waters?
I do not believe we are called to follow any political party line in approach to these questions. I do believe, though, that we are called over and again to re-focus our lives to ensure that we nurture and care for the gifts that God has given us, and use them constantly in ways which glorify God. We are called to ensure that our lifestyles are not destroying God’s earth, and where they are, or where they are denying the livelihood and the very existence of our fellow humans and other species, to seek forgiveness, make alteration, and in that way ensure that our candles burn with eagerness as the bridegroom arrives.
May God help us so to do.
TLBWY
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Pie in the sky?
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS, BATCHELOR
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23rd 2011
(PENTECOST 20 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 30)
Readings: Deuteronomy 34.1-12
Psalm 90.1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2.1-13
Matthew 22.34-36
Paul’s remarkable letter-writing ministry began, as far as we know, when he wrote to the Thessalonians. As he moved around the Roman Empire, proclaiming the gospel that he fervently believed had been entrusted to him, to which he had been commissioned primarily by his encounter with the risen Lord, Paul left behind him faith communities that were forced to find their way on their own. He had no choice: it was his belief that he was called to move on and on – in the end he never reached his final destination, which was the area we now call Spain and Portugal – covering enormous distances and undertaking great risks to serve his Lord. The cost of his wandering, peripatetic ministry was that the communities he founded and nurtured in faith had to learn to fend for themselves. Like a parent, he had to set them free to fly solo.
Paul’s was a pastoral heart, and he never ceased to care for his people: as news reached him of trials that were being experienced by his beloved Thessalonians he turns to quill and papyrus to stand in as a substitute for his own comforting and encouraging presence. In an age of easy email it is hard for us to imagine the thrill his letters – at least those to Philippi and Thessalonica – would have brought to their recipients.
Thessalonica, though not one of the major cities of the Roman Empire, was no backwater, either. It was a city whose inhabitants were keen to stay onside with the leadership of the Roman Empire, and the presence of a new upstart religion in its midst was bound to be a course of concern to many in positions of power. Slowly the Christians found themselves first ostracized, alienated and shunned in the markets and other social circles, and then persecuted for their faith in Jesus. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remain optimistic, as many were barred from purchasing food in the local markets, and as normal community infrastructures were being denied them. Some Thessalonian Christians were dying – not necessarily as a direct result of the persecution, though that was no doubt a factor – and life was increasingly difficult.
This then is the dire context Paul addresses – with in part a heavy heart – as he writes to the Christians whose suffering is a direct result of his own ministry and evangelism. He seeks to encourage them by reminding them of the joy they experienced as he worked, preached and pastored amongst them, reminding them of the first flushes of divine energy they experienced as they surrendered their lives to the risen Lord.
Paul asks the Thessalonians to reconnect with their previous joy: when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word. But as he writes the Thessalonians he uses another technique, too, a kind of pre-membering, looking forward to the experience of the fullness of the Kingdom, the completion of God’s work in the realm that is yet to come. It is a primary technique of the style of thought that we call apocalyptic, a vision forward, cynically able to be dismissed as ‘pie in the sky’, yet in reality able to transform the hearts and minds of believers for more than two millennia. In particular we can recall the way in which hope of a better existence kept the Afro-American slave communities alive through decades of abuse and neglect.
The hope of heaven, as we might call it, is a powerful medicine, even if it can be criticised by some as keeping the downtrodden in their place. Paul makes clear though that he sought always to share not just words but his very life as a sign of the compassionate love of God: So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us. It is perhaps because of the quality of Paul’s love that we still have and read his letters today. It is this kind of life-transforming quality of love that Jesus is referring to as he speaks of love of God and neighbour. But central to all he writes to the Thessalonians is a word of hope: God is in control. Martin Luther would one day capture Paul’s hope in his own remarkable and most famous words:
Despite all foes, the Word shall stand
against all their endeavour;
God’s gifts and Spirit, close at hand,
shall be with us for ever.
What can it mean for us? Few of us have suffered or will suffer much for our faith, and pray God we won’t have to. Paul urged the Thessalonians and other Christian communities that they would not be tested beyond their ability to endure, but it is clear that some at Thessalonica had undergone considerable trial. Paul was pitting the claims of his God against the claims of Caesar, and there was always potential for that battle to end in tears. For us life is more simple. Nevertheless there are times we need to stand up for values that our wider society has forgotten. There’s a tacky-but-true bumper sticker that says ‘if you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?’ There’s no doubt that for the Thessalonian Christians the answer was ‘yes’; the challenge you and I face is to ensure that this would be the case for us as well, as we strive on in our witness to the God who comes. This will involve proclamation of a word of hope – a dimension some theologies dismantle, as well as a word of compassionate love and justice. This is the commission we share.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23rd 2011
(PENTECOST 20 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 30)
Readings: Deuteronomy 34.1-12
Psalm 90.1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2.1-13
Matthew 22.34-36
Paul’s remarkable letter-writing ministry began, as far as we know, when he wrote to the Thessalonians. As he moved around the Roman Empire, proclaiming the gospel that he fervently believed had been entrusted to him, to which he had been commissioned primarily by his encounter with the risen Lord, Paul left behind him faith communities that were forced to find their way on their own. He had no choice: it was his belief that he was called to move on and on – in the end he never reached his final destination, which was the area we now call Spain and Portugal – covering enormous distances and undertaking great risks to serve his Lord. The cost of his wandering, peripatetic ministry was that the communities he founded and nurtured in faith had to learn to fend for themselves. Like a parent, he had to set them free to fly solo.
Paul’s was a pastoral heart, and he never ceased to care for his people: as news reached him of trials that were being experienced by his beloved Thessalonians he turns to quill and papyrus to stand in as a substitute for his own comforting and encouraging presence. In an age of easy email it is hard for us to imagine the thrill his letters – at least those to Philippi and Thessalonica – would have brought to their recipients.
Thessalonica, though not one of the major cities of the Roman Empire, was no backwater, either. It was a city whose inhabitants were keen to stay onside with the leadership of the Roman Empire, and the presence of a new upstart religion in its midst was bound to be a course of concern to many in positions of power. Slowly the Christians found themselves first ostracized, alienated and shunned in the markets and other social circles, and then persecuted for their faith in Jesus. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remain optimistic, as many were barred from purchasing food in the local markets, and as normal community infrastructures were being denied them. Some Thessalonian Christians were dying – not necessarily as a direct result of the persecution, though that was no doubt a factor – and life was increasingly difficult.
This then is the dire context Paul addresses – with in part a heavy heart – as he writes to the Christians whose suffering is a direct result of his own ministry and evangelism. He seeks to encourage them by reminding them of the joy they experienced as he worked, preached and pastored amongst them, reminding them of the first flushes of divine energy they experienced as they surrendered their lives to the risen Lord.
Paul asks the Thessalonians to reconnect with their previous joy: when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word. But as he writes the Thessalonians he uses another technique, too, a kind of pre-membering, looking forward to the experience of the fullness of the Kingdom, the completion of God’s work in the realm that is yet to come. It is a primary technique of the style of thought that we call apocalyptic, a vision forward, cynically able to be dismissed as ‘pie in the sky’, yet in reality able to transform the hearts and minds of believers for more than two millennia. In particular we can recall the way in which hope of a better existence kept the Afro-American slave communities alive through decades of abuse and neglect.
The hope of heaven, as we might call it, is a powerful medicine, even if it can be criticised by some as keeping the downtrodden in their place. Paul makes clear though that he sought always to share not just words but his very life as a sign of the compassionate love of God: So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us. It is perhaps because of the quality of Paul’s love that we still have and read his letters today. It is this kind of life-transforming quality of love that Jesus is referring to as he speaks of love of God and neighbour. But central to all he writes to the Thessalonians is a word of hope: God is in control. Martin Luther would one day capture Paul’s hope in his own remarkable and most famous words:
Despite all foes, the Word shall stand
against all their endeavour;
God’s gifts and Spirit, close at hand,
shall be with us for ever.
What can it mean for us? Few of us have suffered or will suffer much for our faith, and pray God we won’t have to. Paul urged the Thessalonians and other Christian communities that they would not be tested beyond their ability to endure, but it is clear that some at Thessalonica had undergone considerable trial. Paul was pitting the claims of his God against the claims of Caesar, and there was always potential for that battle to end in tears. For us life is more simple. Nevertheless there are times we need to stand up for values that our wider society has forgotten. There’s a tacky-but-true bumper sticker that says ‘if you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?’ There’s no doubt that for the Thessalonian Christians the answer was ‘yes’; the challenge you and I face is to ensure that this would be the case for us as well, as we strive on in our witness to the God who comes. This will involve proclamation of a word of hope – a dimension some theologies dismantle, as well as a word of compassionate love and justice. This is the commission we share.
TLBWY
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