1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
This is kind of a rare month of preaching for me. This will be the second time in just three weeks that I have preached on the epistle. So often, the epistle, whether one of Paul’s letters or someone else’s, seems to be a sermon of its own, and I usually have enough of an opinion that I’m not eager to share the sermon with another preacher. But today Paul brings together what I consider to be two necessary, interdependent pieces of what it is that we are about in the Christian tradition. Paul says to the Thesalonians, So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our own selves. We share the gospel of God, and ourselves.
I have something I want to show you this morning. It was made for me by a friend over thirty years ago. Actually, he was an old boyfriend of my sister’s who showed up in town not long after she’d gotten married. Seems they hadn’t kept up with each other all that well. His name was Dane, and since he wasn’t going to be staying with my sister, he ended up at my apartment for what seemed like a long time. He camped out for a couple weeks before moving on, and what he left behind was this ball of sticks and string.
Dane had spent some time studying with Buckminster Fuller, and was into domes and interesting architecture and such as that. One evening early in his stay, he asked me to get him some small dowel sticks and some heavy fishing line. By the time he left, he had built me this neat tensegrity as a thank you for the couch. It has held up pretty well over the years. I still find it fascinating. It is nothing but sticks and string. None of the sticks touch each other, and yet this little ball seems solid. You can play catch with it. You can bounce it on the floor (not too hard please), and while it is substantial enough to hold up much more than it’s own weight, it is flexible and resilient. It’s name, tensegrity, explained my friend, describes it perfectly. Tension and integrity. Without the sticks the string is nothing. Without the string the sticks fall in a heap. Brought together and into tension with each other, they create something substantial and enduring.
Paul offers the Thesalonians the good news of God.....and himself.
When Paul isn’t preaching or giving instructions to congregations, he is often telling a part of his story. “I used to persecute the Christians,” says Paul in one letter. “I am the worst of sinners,” he says. “I was on my way to Damascus one day when this voice from heaven spoke to me.” At other times Paul talks about his worries, his fears, his difficulty living the life he believes he should live. Paul preaches the gospel, and he speaks of the complexity of his life, of his own ongoing need for conversion. He speaks of his own fragility and fallibility, and somehow, hearing what sort of person God is in the process of transforming--Paul himself--the Good news of a loving God sounds a little more compelling. Because of the good news Paul is free to be honest about himself. He doesn’t need to take credit for his accomplishments or build himself up. He cares about people he used to mistreat. Paul’s life gives form to the good news he proclaims. “We bring you not only the good news, “says Paul, “but ourselves as well.”
I had a little epiphany a few weeks ago at the clergy retreat. Our speaker was the new dean of the seminary, Ian Markham. As a bit of a skeptic myself, and a friend of skeptics who have difficulty finding a way into church, I have long been somewhat suspicious of theologians with carefully worked out answers to the problem of God. I have long preferred questions to many of the Church’s answers. So I am often on guard around theologians. I expect to take issue with at least some of what is said. And so I was surprised when Ian discussed the nature of the trinity, sin, redemption and liturgy all without pushing any of my buttons. In fact, I realized as he spoke that I had been aching to hear someone reaffirm the basics of our faith in language that wouldn’t turn me away.
I felt so good about what I had heard that I wrote to him after I returned from the retreat and told him that I appreciated what I had heard. I told him that I had realized listening to him that I had never really been skeptical about God, only about certainty....about brittle answers to bottomless questions. I told him too that he spoke as one who had had to do some revising of his views along the way, and he wrote back and said that was indeed the case.
He was raised in an extremely rigid sect of Christians who kept themselves separate from the world. He had had to do a lot of work to arrive at his current theological position which he calls orthodox and open. I was hearing from one who speaks with authority in the Church these days, one who having lived for a time with rigid answers had decided that they were not for him. I was hearing the good news, and I was hearing a life. This is the tradition, he was saying, and this is what is has come to mean for me. He went on to say, and this really caught my attention, that what he was sure of today might change sometime down the road. Good news and a life. A life something like mine.
I too had at an earlier time in my history sought comfort in unquestioned answers to deep questions. I spent some time in the charismatic movement, believing for a time that if I only prayed hard enough I would be able to believe every word the Bible said. Later, when my certainty turned into questions I met others who wanted desperately what the Church claimed to offer but whose questions kept them from approaching. I began to regret the harm I had inflicted on others along my way by preaching that Jesus was the only way and that the Church’s answers were the answers.
The good news Paul speaks of is the good news of a loving God. I have found that love to be the love of an ongoing relationship of transformation through little epiphanies, some hard some easy, each one requiring that I let go of some earlier understanding in order to receive it.
What about the Bible? some might ask. Isn’t the Bible the word of God? Aren’t the answers in the Bible? No, they aren’t--not unless someone’s story compels you to believe it or at least encourages you to open it. It takes the good news and a life.
In recent years I have played with the idea of having some sort of tent revival for progressive Christians. That may sound like an oxymoron, but I hope you have heard today that I believe very strongly in the importance of a relationship with God. That is where we change and grow and are led into new kinds of belief by the Spirit. I think too that progressives and skeptics are harder to invite than some other folks, so some sort of invitation, some sort of call to relationship might be in order. I have told Mark and Elizabeth that someday I want to preach a revival for progressives waving a floppy Bible like those TV preachers. This isn’t what I had in mind, but maybe this is my chance.
The tensegrity is solid, sticks and string holding each other in tension so that they are strong. A floppy Bible is just that, a floppy Bible, until someone holds it up and says there is good news to be found here.
We come here week after week. We hear the stories, we say the prayers, we reach out our hands to take tangible signs of God into our lives. What all those things do in your life, what they challenge, the questions they raise the signs they become......those are as important as the Good news because they are the good news at work in a life. We celebrate the good news of God because of lives whose stories give it shape and substance. For some of us it might be those first disciples whose stories bring all this to life, for others it might be the person sitting next to us in church this morning. Good news and the stories of real people like you and me. It takes both.
JB