The Shadow of Death

This is an edited and expanded version of the sermon for the Third Sunday before Advent. The sermon itself is available as a podcast. To hear it, click the link below.

The Shadow of Death

The Third Sunday of Advent

Reading: 1 Thessalonians 4:13

‘We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:13)

Yesterday was St Martin's Day. In the past in some parts of the Church, this marked the beginning of an extended season of Advent. Although we do not follow that practice nowadays, our readings and our service nevertheless take on an Advent theme. In our reading this morning, St Paul tells the Thessalonians that he does not want them to be uninformed about those who have died. This, he writes, is so that they will not grieve as others do who have no hope.

St Paul raises two issues here. Firstly, what has happened to those who have died? And, secondly, just how are we as believers to grieve?

In response to the first issue of what has happened to those who have died, the standard Christian response is that those who have died have gone to heaven to be with God. In heaven, we believe, they enjoy a blissful existence, hence the phrase, ‘they have gone to a better place’.

So secondly, when it comes to the question of how we should grieve as believers, while understandably we miss those who have died and passed away and feel their loss, we can be happy for them - or so the argument goes. This even leads to Christians saying that funerals can be a time of rejoicing.

If all this is what St Paul believed, it is not what he says, not here at least, and certainly not as most Christians mean it. We need to backtrack a bit and ask why St Paul writes what he does. A clue to the explanation lies, in fact, in our Gospel reading (Matthew 25:1-13). Jesus tells his disciples the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids to teach them that they should always be ready for his return. He warns the disciples that he will return at any time and at a time when they least expect it

So, after Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension, the first believers took Jesus at his word and expected his return at any time. It was imminent in their minds. Jesus was coming soon, and when he came, he would bring about the Kingdom of God on earth, as we pray for every week in the Lord's Prayer.

When Jesus came back, they believed, he would judge the living and the dead; he would give eternal life to those who had trusted in him, and he would punish those who had not. This hope of Jesus’ return was a central part of their message. It was not something peripheral to it but belonged to the very core of the Gospel they preached. It followed that if Jesus was coming soon, the majority of believers would still be alive when he did. Their focus, then, was not on those who had died and passed away, but on those who were still alive and being prepared for when their Lord came back. Those who were still alive had to be ready for his return.

As time went on, however, Christ’s return seemed to have been delayed and the issue of what would happen to those who had died became much more pressing. Would those who had died before Christ’s return miss out?

St Paul is anxious to reassure the Thessalonian who were worried that this would be the case, and the answer he gives is perhaps not quite what we would expect. St Paul does not say that those who have died have gone to be with Jesus in heaven; he says that when he returns those who have died will rise to meet Christ first, and it only after he has gathered up those believers who have died that he will then gather those who are alive to himself. We do not grieve for those who have died as others do who have no hope, St Paul writes, because Christ, when he comes, will come for them too. The hope that St Paul talks about remained firmly the hope of Christ's return: Christ’s return to us and for us.

The hope was not that we would go to be with Christ in heaven but that Christ would come to us on earth. It was possible to hold onto this hope while believers thought that Christ could return at any time. As time passed, however, and Christ did not return, believers had to face the reality that Jesus was not going to be coming back any time soon.

So, there developed in the Church what we can describe as a two-sided hope. Firstly, the fundamental hope remained that Christ would one day return, and believers’ hopes remained focused on this expectation. It was then, and only then, that our salvation would be complete. Believers in Christ would be rewarded with the gift of eternal life; sinners would be punished; and the kingdom of God instated here on earth.

Secondly, in the meantime, however, those who died before Christ’s return would go to be with Jesus in heaven to wait for the Day of Judgment and Christ's return. This received some refinement over the years, but you get the general idea! Heaven was not the destination; heaven was the waiting room. It is here that believers waited with Christ for the Day when God would raise them, and Christ would take them with him when returned to earth in glory.

This hope of the return of Christ was not just about the future; it affected how believers saw their life in this world in the present. This life, they believed, was a preparation for the life to come. They saw this life as transient, temporary, and testing. This life, in other words, was about God getting us ready to live, as we saw last week, in the City of God.

In the old funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer, there are these words:

‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?’

Full of misery! Believers in the past were far more realistic in their assessment of life in this world. Their hope, as a result, was very much for a better life in the future when Christ’s Kingdom came and Christ returned. This life here and now was a preparation for it, but the life of the world to come would only be fully ours when Christ returned.

This, however, has all changed in today’s Church and for most believers. It is, though, only comparatively recently that it has changed. The reason it has changed is because we have largely given up on the idea of Christ's return. This is why we never talk about it. On those occasions when we cannot avoid talking about it, such as at Advent, we talk about it without any expectation that it will actually happen. What is more, we have also largely rejected the idea of any future judgment. God is just too loving and too nice. Our belief now is that we are all, each and everyone of us, going to a better place, regardless of what we do or fail to do here.

So, what about here? Well, we find all this talk of life being short and full of misery and of being cut down like a flower far too depressing for words, and far too depressing for us modern day Christians to believe. Rather than worrying about the future and what will happen to us when we die, our focus is on getting the most out of life now. In any case, we do not think we have to worry about the future, for the simple reason that there is nothing to worry about. God is going to look after us anyway. Instead of worrying about the future, we want to make the most of this life for ourselves and for our family, and, if we have any time left over, to use that time in making this world a better place for our children to grow up in.

Our goal now as believers is to enjoy this life and all that we have, following our hopes and ambitions in this world, doing what good we can as we do. The problem for Christians, of course, is that this does not sound very different to what everyone else is doing. Where does God fit into all this?

I think God fits into modern-day Christians’ hopes and dreams in three ways. Firstly, as a way to justify our goals and give them divine authority. Secondly, in helping us to achieve those goals. And thirdly, by being there for us when we do not achieve them or find it hard to do so.

As believers in the 21st century, we need to see that all this leaves us with a very different faith and hope to that of the Thessalonians and to that of previous generations of believers.

Now I am not asking you this morning to choose between these two different ways of seeing things, just to see the difference. To see the difference between the sort of faith expressed, for example, in the Old Book of Common Prayer and the faith of most modern-day believers.

Rather than having a hope centred on Christ and what God is going to do in the future when Christ returns, our focus has become on ourselves in the present and what God can do for us now. We often use the same words and phrases as they used in the past, but we have given them a very different context and certainly a very different meaning. If we can see this, it is at least a step in the right direction.

Over Advent and the time leading up to it, I hope to examine more fully the direction I believe we should be going in. But in closing this morning, let me just ask briefly, what practical difference does this make? What I have been saying can seem very theoretical and perhaps even irrelevant. What difference, if any, would it make if we regained the perspective of the past?

The first difference it would make to us is that we would stop deceiving ourselves! We who live in the 21st century have a narrative of progress. Things are better now, we think, than they were in the past, and what is more, they are only going to go getting better. We are so much wiser, cleverer, and richer than previous generations. They lived in ignorance, superstition, and fear. We know better! But is that really true? Well, it is certainly true that some things are better materially now than they were.

I, for one, prefer living in a world with anesthetic, antibiotics, and vaccines, for example. But let me ask this question. If things are so much better nowadays, why doesn't it feel like it?

Only this week, here in Christ Church, I was recorded as part of a video for secondary school students to attempt to give them some hope when they are feeling suicidal. Because, as you will have read, suicides among secondary school students have risen, and risen dramatically. What is all the talk amongst young people today? It is of mental health issues. Huge numbers of young girls, for example, are engaging in self-harm and in self-destructive behaviour. Our material achievements have resulted in our spiritual poverty. And so, blinded by our material wealth, we continue to gamble on everything being okay in the end as we concentrate on trying to enjoy our life in this world now, and not doing a very good job of it.

How can we talk of a narrative of progress when there are two major wars taking place in our world, sucking in the nations of the world? Who would have thought that after two world wars we would see war in Europe and war in the Middle East? And these are just the wars we are talking about. Any thought that we give now for the well-being of others is for well-being in the present, and we are not even achieving that.

‘We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope’, St Paul writes.

We believers do grieve, we grieve as people who know that death is terrible. Death is an enemy still waiting to be destroyed. In this life, in the present, we, like all people, are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Death isn't just something that happens at the end of life; it is a powerful enemy that casts its shadow over the whole of life and the whole of human endeavor. But while a powerful enemy that is to be taken with the utmost seriousness, we as believers face that enemy with hope.

As we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we do not walk through it alone. We walk through it with the Lamb who is our shepherd, who will lead us to the springs of the waters of the river of life (Revelation 7:17). We walk through the valley of the shadow of death with the One who has conquered death and who will one day seal that victory with his return.

And so today, as we remember those whose lives were cruelly cut short in war, and as we think of the power of death, we think too of the power of Christ, and we rejoice in him and look for his coming again. We rejoice in his triumph and his victory over sin and death, a victory in which one day we will share.

Even so, come Lord Jesus!

Amen.

Even So We Speak

I have not given up hope that one day I won't have to be constantly watching the clock when I preach and that I will be able to take the time I think it needs to preach on the reading in a relaxed way. That day is not yet!

Until it comes, it means making sometimes difficult decisions about what to say and what to leave out.  This week for the Last Sunday after Trinity rather than give a written transcript of the sermon, I have edited the transcript and expanded it a bit.

The sermon itself is available as a podcast. To hear it, click on the following link:

Even So We Speak

The Last Sunday after Trinity

Reading: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

St Paul, in chapter 1 of his first letter to the Thessalonians, has already referred to the persecution that the Thessalonian believers have suffered since becoming believers (1 Thessalonians 1:6). St Paul will refer to it again later in the chapter from which our reading is taken (1 Thessalonians 2:14). He will tell them that they are not alone and that the believers in Judea are also suffering severe persecution from those they live among.

In our reading for this week, St Paul begins by reminding the Thessalonian believers of the suffering and the opposition he and his team experienced at Philippi before coming to Thessalonica. Before that, St Paul had also experienced real opposition when he had gone to Galatia with Barnabas. Opposition that saw St Paul being stoned and taken for dead (Acts 14:19).

Suffering and persecution were to become the norm in the early church. St Paul in his letters tells believers to expect it, and Jesus had given similar warnings. We are, I think, generally aware that believers in the early Church faced opposition, but we tend to lump it all together and treat it as all being of the same kind. In fact, opposition and persecution came from different sources for different reasons.

Firstly, the early Church experienced opposition from the Jews. We know that the leaders of Jesus’ own people were responsible for his death, and St Paul will refer to the part they played in Jesus’ death, again later in this chapter (1 Thessalonians 2:15-16). While after our Lord’s resurrection many of the Jewish people became believers, there remained many who were opposed to the new movement. St Paul himself was originally one of the leaders of the Jewish opposition to the movement. Ironically, St Paul was himself to be on the receiving end of opposition from Jews, and it was Jews who violently forced him out of Thessalonica when he, St Silvanus and St Timothy first went there (Acts 17:5-9).

Secondly, the early Church experienced opposition from the pagans. At Philippi, for example, it had been from pagans that St Paul and his co-workers had suffered persecution (Acts 16:16-40). Pagans would not normally have worried too much about a new religion. The problem was the exclusive nature of the message that St Paul and his team preached. The demand that the pagans turn from their idols to serve the living and true God (1 Thessalonians 1:9) did not just have personal consequences for the individual believer, it had social, political, and economic consequences as well. That had been part of the problem at Philippi, while at Ephesus, people responding to the Gospel undermined a whole industry that was based on the worship of the goddess Artemis (Acts 19:23-41).

Thirdly, opposition also came from within the Church itself. The early Church was originally a movement within Judaism. St Paul was accused by people he describes as ‘false brethren’ (Galatians 2:4; 2 Corinthians 11:13, 26) of teaching Jews to abandon God’s Law and customs integral to Judaism (Acts 20:20-21). It was Jewish believers who caused so much trouble for St Paul within the churches in Galatia and then later in Corinth. It was the fear that St Paul was leading people to abandon God’s Law and Jewish customs that eventually resulted in St Paul losing his freedom.

So, all in all, the early Church found itself having to confront and cope with real opposition on several fronts. When St Paul talks in our reading, then, of having had courage in God, he is not exaggerating. The Church faced opposition on all sides. Faced with such opposition, we might have thought that St Paul and his associates would have been eager to make as many converts as they possibly could, and we might have expected them to tailor their message accordingly. But St Paul is anxious to stress how he, St Silvanus, and St Timothy sought to please God rather than to please any human audience. St Paul refuses to be deterred from preaching the Gospel he has been entrusted with and refuses to try to please those that he is preaching to by changing it in any way. St Paul and his co-workers did not preach what they thought their audience wanted to hear. They did not say what might be to their own benefit, nor did they seek praise or popularity.

Now this uncompromising attitude might have made them seem somewhat hard, cold, and detached. People who refuse to compromise can come across like this. But this was not the case with St Paul and his co-workers. They were so committed to the Thessalonian believers that they were like a nursing mother tenderly taking care of her children. St Paul and his co-workers were committed to God and to the Thessalonians, and it was this dual commitment that was on display when St Paul and his co-workers went to Thessalonica.

Three things, then, from this for us today. Three keywords if you like: opposition, orientation, and operation.

1. Opposition

If we preach the Gospel faithfully, we are going to meet opposition. We should not seek it or provoke it. In fact, St Paul says, that as much as depends on us, we are to live peaceably with everyone (Romans 12:18). And that's not easy, because it means compromising our own feelings and our own desires. But if we are to be faithful to the Gospel, then we, like St Paul, will not be able to compromise our message.

Jesus warned his disciples that if the world had hated him, it would hate them (John 15:18). In the world, Jesus warned them, they would have trouble and (John 16:33). As those societies that have traditionally been sympathetic to the Christian faith turn from it, they will increasingly turn against it. And that is what we are seeing at the moment, and it will only increase and get worse.

There are two reactions in the Church to this. Firstly, to try and hold on to the past, and, secondly, to embrace the changes that we see taking place in society in the hope of keeping our place in it. I think it is the second reaction that is gaining the most pace in the Church at the moment. We in the Church are facing demands from within the Church itself to change traditional doctrine and to embrace a progressive agenda, not least when it comes to sexual ethics.

We need in the Church to wake up to the fact that opposition is coming. We have seen some of the ways that that opposition might come to us in the so-called ‘new atheism’ of a few years ago. It is only going to get worse. And I have to say that most leaders in the Church are in complete denial about this. They hope that by holding on to the past or by becoming more like the world, we will win people back. It isn't going to happen! We in the church need to be prepared for the opposition that we are inevitably going to have to face.

2. Orientation

Opposition is not all bad. It shouldn't be sought, but as Samuel Johnson said in the eighteenth century:

‘Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’

The fact that we are going to face opposition, indeed are already facing it, should make us concentrate and decide what it is that matters to us. It should force us to determine just what our message actually is.

We need in the Church to accept that the past is past. There is no going back to where we were in the world and to the position we once had in it. The Church is not going to have the place, the role, or the influence that it had in the past. And it is not going to regain that place, role, or influence by seeking to be relevant.

As a Church, like St. Paul, we are not called to be either popular or relevant. We are called to have courage. Courage like that of two saints I have mentioned in previous sermons and talks: Saints Perpetua and Felicity. These were two young mothers in the third century who went to their death rather than compromise their faith in the Gospel.

We are to be like them. Their orientation was toward God and what he wanted of them and not to themselves and their own well-being. We are far too concerned with our image, with how we are seen, and with how people respond to us. St Paul knew that the audience he had to please was not the people he was preaching to, but God. The Gospel is a message that we have been entrusted with by God to pass on to people faithfully.

Now, if someone asks you to be a messenger and deliver an important message for them, what matters is that you get the message right. If, for example, someone is sent to tell a whole group of people who live in one particular street that the road is going to be closed or that for their own safety their apartment block needs to be evacuated, the important thing for the messenger is to make sure the message they deliver is accurate and correct. Whether people respond to that message or not is not the messenger’s primary concern. The messenger might hope that those they take it to will respond to the message, but it is getting the message right that they must focus on.

If you were sent with a message like this, you would not think, ‘Well, I'd better change the message so the people who live on the road aren't inconvenienced too much or those in the building are not offended by it.’ You would want to make sure that the message was actually the message you had been given.

God has given us a message, and we change it at our peril, and we fail to take it seriously at our peril. Of course, we hope people will listen. Of course, we will do all that we can to see that they do. But ultimately our concern must be to preach the Gospel faithfully. We must pass on to people the message of the Gospel and God has revealed it to us.

3. Operation

Opposition, orientation, and, thirdly, operation. How we deliver our message is important. Some years ago, Marshall McLuhan - I don't know if anyone remembers him, he was a Canadian philosopher - famously said, the ‘medium is the message’. In other words, how we deliver the message cannot be separated from the message itself. And St Paul makes a similar point in our reading this morning.

God is the one that we are to be orientated towards. God is the one that we are to please as we deliver his message, and as we deliver God's message, St. Paul writes, God will test our hearts. He will test our hearts to make sure our motives are right as we deliver his message and that the way we deliver the message does not change it or distort it.

St Paul stresses that he and his co-workers were anxious to ensure that in delivering the message of the Gospel that they got their motives and methods right. St Paul gives three examples of approaches they refused to use in delivering the message God had given them. They never used flattery, they were not greedy, and they did not seek praise, either from the Thessalonian believers or from anyone else.

Firstly, then, in preaching the Gospel, we too are not to use flattery. We are not to tell people what they want to hear and which makes them feel good about themselves. Again, our main concern is to be whether what we tell is the truth as God has given to us, not whether they will like it or not!

Secondly, we are to avoid greed. We may not be people who preach the Gospel for financial gain, although, sadly, we see examples of so-called evangelists who clearly do. Greed, however, can take many forms. Greed can show itself in ambition and a desire to get on and get ahead. Clergy, for example, are often encouraged to see their ministry in terms of career advancement. We talk about positions in the Church and whether they are senior or not. We discuss what positions clergy have in the hierarchy of the Church. St Paul would be horrified with such talk. He would see it as an example of greed.

Now you may say to me this morning, ‘Ross, that's just sour grapes on your part because you haven’t got very high in the hierarchy.’ Well, fair enough, but if you do not want to listen to me, listen to His Holiness Pope Francis who has said exactly the same thing just this past week!

Thirdly, we should not seek praise. We all like to be popular. It is always nice when people praise us, and we should indeed praise people for doing something good and right for God, but we should not do something good or right in order to get the praise.

Our desire for a response, to do well for ourselves, or to be popular can easily lead us to distort our message and to make ourselves the focus of the message. St Paul reminds the Thessalonian believers in our reading that when it comes to ourselves, we are not to worry about what we can get out of the Gospel; we are to worry about how much we can give for the Gospel. He and Saints Silvanus and Timothy gave their very selves to the Thessalonian believers. We must reject all false methods and motives and be prepared instead to give ourselves completely, so that people that may hear the Gospel.

St Paul writes:

‘… but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the Gospel, even so we speak, not to please people, but to please God who tests our hearts.’ (1 Thessalonians 2:4)

Amen.

A Dangerous Gamble

This is the transcript of my podcast for this week, the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity.

This is the link to podcast itself:

A Dangerous Gamble

The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity

Reading: 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10

We are beginning to read through St Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians.

St Paul first went to Thessalonica immediately after he had visited Philippi with Sts Silvanus and Timothy (Acts 17:1-8), and after they had established the church there (Acts 16:11-40). We have been reading through the letter to the Philippians for the past few weeks.

Although he went to Philippi before Thessalonica, St Paul wrote first Thessalonians before he wrote the letter to the Philippians. Some think that it is earliest of St Paul’s letters that we possess. I personally don't think it the earliest, but it is certainly one of the earliest. It was written about AD 50 from Corinth, not long after St Paul’s initial visit to Thessalonica, at a time when Saints Silvanus and Timothy were with him.

St Paul writes of the positive reception he and Sts Silvanus and Timothy received from the Thessalonian believers when they were with them. St Paul sees this as evidence that the Holy Spirit is at work in the believers. The faith of the Thessalonian believers, St Paul writes, has become something that is talked about throughout the whole of the region. But what was it about the Thessalonian believers’ faith that got it so talked about?

We don’t really understand nowadays just how significant it would have been for pagans to become believers. The first believers after all were Jews. For Jews who became believers, following Christ was about recognizing Jesus as the Messiah they had been hoping for. This was a major step, but while much changed as a result, much didn’t. The God they believed in remained the same; the Scriptures they used were the same; and how they lived ethically remained largely the same. This was not the case for pagans. For pagans, becoming a follower of Christ involved a complete change in their lifestyle and worldview.

Pagans, for example, made physical representations of their gods. Jews were absolutely forbidden from doing so. Most pagans had no prior knowledge of the Scriptures. When it came to ethics, while there were pagans who lived ethical lives, the pagan gods themselves didn’t much care. The behaviour of the pagan gods in the stories about them left a lot to be desired. Indeed, behavior forbidden to Jews was actually encouraged among pagans, especially when it came to sexual ethics. Hence some of the guidance St Paul gives in his letters to new converts from paganism.

The dramatic change coming to faith in Christ involved for pagan converts helps explain, then, why the Thessalonians becoming believers made such an impact in the region. It was a very big deal indeed. St Paul explains what it meant. St Paul writes:

‘For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.’ (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10, NRSV)

This helps to explain something else that would otherwise be something of a mystery to us. St Paul refers in our reading to the persecution the Thessalonian converts had experienced on becoming believers. He refers to it again in chapter 2 (1 Thessalonians 2:14). Why would these Thessalonians becoming believers attract persecution from their neighbours? Pagans after all worshipped a whole multitude of gods. Why would the Thessalonian converts now worshipping the Jewish God be a problem? Why would anyone care?

The answer is that no-one would have cared, and it wouldn't have been a problem, if the Thessalonian believers worshipped the Jewish God as well as the pagan gods. Some pagans did do just that without it causing too much trouble for them. The problem was, as St Paul explains, that the Thessalonian believers had stopped worshipping the pagan gods to serve the living and true God, and that really was serious.

In the ancient world, worship of the gods wasn't simply a matter of individual choice. Every family had their own household gods. Cities too had their gods and all a city’s citizens were expected to worship and honour them. Rome had a whole variety of gods of which the Emperor himself was one.

There are still parts of our world where changing religion has huge social, even political consequences, but for most who are listening to me now, who we do or do not worship is largely our own affair. So, we naturally find it hard to understand what whom or what you worshiped meant socially, economically, and politically in past ages.

Christians in the early years of the church were to be accused by pagans of being atheists because they did not worship the pagan gods. Later, early in the fifth century, St Augustine was to write one of his most important books, The City of God, to respond to the charge that the reason Rome had suffered a humiliating defeat was because it had abandoned the pagan gods in favour of the Christian religion. Turning from idols to serve the true and living God was serious, with serious consequences for those who made the move, and many believers were even to suffer death because of it.

It is amazing, then, looked at from this perspective, that anyone would want to become a believer; the cost was simply too great. Understanding what it meant for someone to become a believer also helps to explain why St Paul puts so much emphasis on God and the role of the Holy Spirit in the Thessalonians he writes to becoming believers. St Paul writes:

‘For we know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that he has chosen you, because our message of the Gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction; just as you know what kind of persons we proved to be among you for your sake.” (1 Thessalonians 1:4–5, NRSV)

Given how much the Thessalonians had to lose and the prospect of what they would suffer, it needed God to be at work within them if they were to come to faith. It was because God was at work in them that they were able to receive the word of God with joy from the Holy Spirit, despite the opposition they experienced to them becoming believers.

So, what does all this have to say to us today? Surely it can’t have much to say given that we no longer believe in idols and pagan gods? On the contrary, it has something fundamental to say to us.

An author I much respect has described Christianity as the ‘destroyer of the gods’. What he meant by this was that as Christianity took hold in the Roman Empire, as well as not worshipping idols anymore, people stopped believing in their existence. The Christian worldview increasingly became the dominant worldview. It was the dominant worldview, as far as Western civilization was concerned, for many years – until comparatively recently in fact.

It was not that during this time everyone was a Christian – they weren’t; or that there weren't varieties of belief – there were. It is rather that the Christian worldview provided the framework within which society functioned. In recent years, however, there has been a systematic dismantling of this framework of basic Christian assumptions about the world and how we should live in it. We have progressively abandoned fundamental beliefs, not least when it comes to God himself. ‘In God We Trust’ might be printed on what is still the world’s dominant currency, but it is no longer the dominant belief of the country that issues it.

More concerning still, however, is that the church itself has also abandoned many aspects of its historic worldview. Unpacking this would take a lot longer than there is time for here. But let me give an example.

St Paul writes that the change in the Thessalonian believers’ worldview meant that they now were waiting for God’s Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.

The worldview that most of us operate with has very little place in it for waiting for anything, and we certainly don’t think we need rescuing from the wrath to come, not least because we don’t think there is any wrath to come. We are not here to wait but to get on with enjoying ourselves and to getting the most of out of life. Something that we are constantly being urged to do.

For those who don't believe in God, there is in any case nothing to wait for. However, it is also true that many who do believe in God and in an afterlife also think that God doesn’t want us to wait and that we too are to get on with enjoying life in this world. Many churchgoers also no longer believe there is anything for us to be rescued from, as God (assuming he does exist and even as churchgoers we are not always sure he does) will welcome us anyway. It is, in any case, unthinkable that God would be angry with us and reject us.

Well, that’s fine if that’s what we want to believe, and I accept that it is what the majority of people in the Church do believe, but let’s be clear about one thing. This is a very different worldview and way of thinking to that of our Lord and the New Testament writers. It is also a very different worldview to the worldview that has been held by the Church for most of its history. So, as long as you are happy to gamble on our Lord, the apostles, and the Church all having been wrong and us today being right, then okay. It’s your choice. I have to tell you, though, that for me it is far too big a gamble to take.

And just remember this: you are not only taking a gamble on how you live in the present, in this life; you are gambling on whether you will live at all, in the future, in the next life. What is more, if we do make that gamble, then not only will it affect how we see and live our own lives now as individuals, it will also affect how we as a church see our mission and purpose as a church.

For this talk of worldview is not simply an issue of only theoretical concern. Our worldview results in a radical difference in how we live as followers of Christ and how we function as the body of Christ. Just how radical a difference has been brought home to me recently reading some devotional writing of those in the past who thought about things in the way the New Testament writers thought about them and comparing it with devotional writing today. The priorities and outlook are very different.

‘You shall call him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins’, the Angel said to Joseph (Matthew 1:23). We, however, have decided we don't need saving. Sin is someone else's problem; it’s not ours. All I can say is that looking at our world and the state it is in, it needs an awful lot of courage to believe that we don’t need saving and to think that everything is going to be alright. I would suggest this morning that we need to start taking the Biblical worldview a lot more seriously, and if we do, then that’s going to have huge consequences for us and how we live both as individuals and as a church. Like the Thessalonians, we too are going to be unpopular with our compatriots and on the receiving end of persecution as a result.

In closing, then, a question: what do you believe in when there is nothing left to believe in? We stopped believing in idols some years ago; now we have stopped believing in God. Instead, we believe in ourselves, a belief that is now at the heart of our worldview. Getting people to change their worldview, to turn from our idols to serve the Living and True God, isn’t going to be easy.

Our idolatry of Self and our determination to live for the moment is now integral to how we see ourselves and our world. Convincing people to turn from this idolatry to the living God is not going to be achieved through better marketing, special campaigns, or by forming more committees. It will only be achieved when our message, like that of Sts Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, comes to people ‘not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction’.

And for that to happen it needs to come to each one of us that way first.

Amen.

The Second Sunday before Advent

This is the transcript of my podcast for this week, the Second Sunday before Advent.

The Second Sunday before Advent

Reading: 1 Thessalonians 5.1-11

We are fast approaching Advent! Indeed, as members of the Facebook Group will know, there was a time in the Church’s history when we would already be in it. This is reflected in our readings for today. Advent for most people has become a time of preparation for Christmas. (There are now just 39 days until Christmas!) There is nothing wrong with preparing for Christmas and the Nativity of Our Lord. But as with Lent as a time of preparation for Easter, we prepare not by anticipating the joy of celebrating the festival ahead, but by taking time for spiritual reflection.

We do this in Advent by focusing, not on our Lord’s first coming in weakness and humility as a baby in Bethlehem, but on when he will come again in power and glory as the Lord of all.

We have, in recent weeks, been considering St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. (I hope you will think about listening to the podcasts I have posted on the letter.) Today’s reading builds on what St Paul has said so far in the letter, especially in the passage immediately preceding the one for this week’s second reading.

In that passage, St Paul has answered a question that was clearly troubling the Thessalonian believers. They believed firmly in our Lord’s return, and they were looking forward to it. This was central to their faith and provided the basis for their hope. But what about those believers who died before our Lord returned? This question, as we saw last week, illustrates the huge difference between how the first believers approached their faith and how we approach ours today.

For most of us, our hope is in going to be with Christ when we die. For them, it was meeting with Christ when he returned. If your hope is centred on Christ coming again, then inevitably you are going to be worried about what happens if you die before he comes. This was a question that clearly was troubling some in the Church in Thessalonica. St Paul’s answer to this question isn’t to tell the Thessalonian believers not to worry because those who have died are safe with Christ in heaven. Instead, he tells them that, when the Lord returns, God will first raise from the dead those believers who have died so that they meet with Christ before he appears to anyone else.

For us, this immediately raises the question of what happens to those who die in the meantime before Christ comes again. St Paul’s answer to this question is that the dead are indeed already safe with Christ and, as we saw when we looked at St Paul’s letter to the Church in Philippi, St Paul is sure that, if he personally dies before the Lord returns, then that is where he is going to be. But that is not our hope. That is about where we go to wait for what actually is our hope. Our hope as believers looks to what will happen, not when we die, but when Christ comes again. And this is what Advent, traditionally, has been all about.

Advent, in the past, had as its theme the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell. This at once creates huge problems for believers today. We only take seriously two of them: death and heaven. Far easier, then, in Advent to think about celebrating the birth of our Lord and the life he came to bring; life which begins now and which will last forever. Following on from this, we prefer to see death itself simply as a transition from life in this world to life in the next.

No matter how popular this approach may be, and you hear it expressed all the time at funerals, it isn’t the approach we find in the New Testament. As, again, we saw in our reading last week, death is neither the end nor the beginning for the believer. Death leads to a time of waiting for what we hope will be the beginning. The beginning is the time when our bodies will be raised and when we will share in the glory of God. As St John puts it:

‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.’ (1 John 3:2)

For this to happen, Christ must return, he must be ‘revealed’, as St John puts it, and judgement must take place. The mention of judgement makes us start to feel uncomfortable, and well it should. Judgement implies more than one possible outcome, which is where heaven and hell come in. The Bible teaches that the return of Christ will not be good news for everyone. As our Lord himself taught, not all will be saved; for ‘many are called, few are chosen’ (Matthew 22:14).

If our Lord’s return is so important and crucial for all of us, believer and unbeliever alike, the obvious question is, ‘When will it happen?’ This, then, brings us specifically to the question that St Paul tries to answer in our reading. He writes:

‘Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you.’ (1 Thessalonians 5:1)

I am not so sure he would say this to us! Even though the Thessalonian believers know the answer to the question of when our Lord will return, St Paul still feels it is important to remind them. The answer is, quite simply, we don’t know! The Lord will return, as he himself put it, ‘like a thief in the night’ (Matthew 24:43). It will be completely unexpected.

The first believers held together two beliefs about the timing of our Lord’s return. First, that it would be soon, and, secondly, that it would be unexpected. As we know, it turned out, from a human perspective, not to be soon, and, already in the New Testament itself, we see that people were beginning to worry that our Lord had not returned (see, for example, 2 Peter 3:1-13). Nevertheless, the Church, despite the apparent delay in our Lord’s return, didn’t give up in hoping for it, and the hope of it continued to play an important part in believers’ lives.

Regardless of when it would take place, St Paul tells the Thessalonian believers that they must be ready for it. And being ready for it means making sure we are living the sort of lives that God wants us to live. St Paul tells the Thessalonian believers that they are always to be prepared, so that the Day of the Lord will not come as a surprise to them. When it does come, it will be a time of judgement. They must be prepared as ‘children of the light’. Even if we die before Christ returns, the next thing to happen to us will be the judgement.

If, for example, we know that we have an exam coming up, we want to be ready for it or we know we will fail. The reason that the Church has a season of Advent is to give us a chance to make sure we are awake and are preparing ourselves for the examination we will all to have to go through. Many, St Paul tells the Thessalonian believers, won’t be ready for it. And, like students who don’t prepare for an exam, they will have to face the consequences. They may think that everything is wonderful and that they can get on with enjoying themselves without having to worry, but St Paul warns:

‘When they say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape!’ (1 Thessalonians 5:3)

St Paul is confident that that won’t happen to the Thessalonian believers. They may not know the precise time when the Lord will return, but they know for certain that he will, and so they should be in a state of constant readiness for it.

In the remainder of the letter, St Paul gives some guidance to the Thessalonian believers as to how they can make sure they are indeed ready. This includes respecting and honouring those who are their leaders and allowing the Holy Spirt to work among them. St Paul’s prayer is that they may be kept ‘sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

So, what does this have to say to us today? Just this:

We are not likely to prepare for something we don’t think is going to happen

The delay in our Lord’s return has meant that, historically, believers have not always lived as if it could happen at any time and, certainly, if it had have happened, the Church would not always have been ready. Despite this, believers in the past at least didn’t lose sight of the fact that it would happen, and their belief that it would happen is one that is reflected in the Creeds of the Church. In a moment, we will say:

‘He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.’

We will say it, but whether we believe it or not is another matter altogether. For while the Church in the past believed it, even if believers weren’t ready for it, we are neither ready for it or believe in it. At least, not in the way the Church has traditionally believed in it. Many believers, I think, believe theoretically that our Lord will return, even if they don’t expect it to happen any time soon, and certainly not in their own lifetime. But to judge the living and the dead? That is not how most people see it.

The Church in its history has been through many debates and arguments about what it does and does not believe doctrinally. And yet, despite the many divisions and disagreements over so many different issues, believers from different backgrounds and churches have managed to remain in agreement on certain fundamentals. Believers have manged, for example, to be able to say the Creeds together and, generally speaking, they have meant them, in theory at least. This began to change particularly in the last century when theologians started questioning such teaching as the Virgin Birth, miracles, and the empty tomb.

As people in the Church questioned these beliefs, the way was opened for a more fundamental redefinition of Christianity. Where this has now led is illustrated most clearly when it comes to the idea of judgement.

John Lennon wrote and sang a song that has become the anthem of many today:

‘Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today’

While, in the Church, we aren’t ready to give up imagining heaven, few, I think, now believe that God is going to punish anyone; fewer still that he will do so eternally. And if he isn’t going to punish anyone, then, as John Lennon suggests, we can forget about hell. The Pope himself has been reported as saying he doesn’t believe in hell. Others, in answer to the question about whether they believe in hell or not, would reply that they do, but that they don’t think there is anyone in it.

The question of whether hell exists and whether there is anyone in it may seem to be one that we can safely leave to God. It is not our concern. We should get on, it is said, with ‘living for today’, that is, following Jesus and telling people the good news about him. Except it is not quite that simple.

If there is no hell and God is not going to punish anyone, then our presentation of the good news of Jesus is inevitably going to change.

Many today base their presentation on the belief that as Jesus died for everyone, everyone and everything will one day be OK. If that’s how we think, our preaching will be about telling people something that is already true for them, even though they may not realize it yet. When we say we need to be ‘awake’, it is not because something terrible is going to happen to us if we are not, but rather that we need to wake up and see the wonderful reality of what God has done for us whether we know it yet or not.

Some would go further and base their message solely on their understanding of God as a ‘loving being’. On this understanding, Jesus’ death never was about saving us in the first place. It was about someone so committed to loving people that he was prepared to die for what he believed to demonstrate how much we are loved and to give us an example of how we too are to love.

Having, then, got rid of hell as a way of describing the judgement that those who do not believe in Christ and who fail to live lives pleasing to God will receive, we have also become less concerned about heaven. After all, if regardless of anything we do, we are going to heaven anyway, or it’s coming to us, or whatever it is that will happen in the future, we can stop worrying about the world to come and whether we will get there and concentrate instead on making this world in the present a better place for everyone.

And if believing in Jesus is about coming to a knowledge of what has already happened to everyone whether they are conscious of it or not, then how we explain who Jesus is to people changes. Rather than being the one who will judge them in the future, Jesus becomes the one who has already unconditionally accepted them in the present. Rather than being the one who can save them from their sin because they are horrible and need changing, he becomes the one who can help them to fulfil their potential because they are basically good and need loving.

What our message comes down to on this understanding, then, is this: Jesus was a prophet and teacher who welcomed and accepted people for who they were and, in his death, demonstrated the true meaning of love. By his life and example, he encourages us to be the person we want to be and to follow our dreams here and now in this life, while reassuring us that we will all live happily ever after in the next. Inasmuch as he makes any demands on us, it is for us to do what we can to make this world a nicer place; to work to remove the barriers that prevent people from realizing their identity; and to seek to create a fair and equitable society for all.

It is a message that tells us what we want to hear, that makes no difficult demands of us, and focuses firmly on our life in this world. Whether it is one that you would want to die for or even, on a Sunday morning, to get out of bed for is another matter altogether. And yet this, or a version of it, is what people are being offered in many churches.

So here’s the thing: Before you sign up to this gospel for our age, I would just ask you to pause and consider again the traditional message of Advent. To ask whether we are right to abandon what the Church historically has believed and taught about death, judgement, heaven, and hell.

In our reading this morning, St Paul writes:

‘For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.’ (1 Thessalonians 5:9-10)

Let me ask in closing: who is the ‘us’ that St Paul is talking about here. It is not everyone. As we have seen he has just told them that destruction will come upon those who are sure that they are living in ‘peace and security’. Some most certainly are going to experience God’s wrath.

No, the ‘us’ is those who have put their faith in Christ, who died for us. Those who, as St Paul describes them, in chapter one have turned from everything that is not God to the living God who reveals himself in his Son, Jesus, whom God raised from the dead and ‘who rescues us from the wrath that is coming’ (1 Thessalonians 1:10).

And that, I suggest, really is a message that it is worth thinking about this Advent.

Amen.

The Third Sunday before Advent

1 Thessalonians 4.13-18

St Paul so far in his first letter to the Thessalonians has expressed both his thanksgiving for the faith of the Thessalonian believers and also his gratitude to God for the way they have not been shaken by the persecution and suffering they have been experiencing as a result of becoming believers. St Paul himself, as we have seen, had to leave Thessalonica abruptly and prematurely because of persecution from the Jewish community.

St Paul had sent St Timothy back to Thessalonica to see if the Thessalonian believers were persevering, and he has been in a state of some anxiety waiting for St Timothy to return with news of how the Church in Thessalonica is getting on. St Timothy, St Paul writes, has now returned and the news is good: the Thessalonian believers are keeping the faith, living in love, and longing to see St Paul and his co-workers again (1 Thessalonians 3:6). St Paul tells the Thessalonian believers that he longs to see them again too, and prays that it will be possible for him to return to visit them (1 Thessalonians 3:10-11). In the meantime, in the letter, St Paul seeks to remind the Thessalonian believers of what they were taught when he was with them and of the example that he and his co-workers have given them.

Although the news is good, and clearly the Thessalonian believers are doing their best to be faithful and to follow the teaching they have been given, they are still relatively new believers. In the last two chapters of the letter, then, St Paul seeks to address areas where he feels they need particular encouragement and help. St Timothy would have provided St Paul with information about the Thessalonian Church to help him in this. It is even possible that St Timothy brought a letter from the Church, although we do not know that for certain.

In chapter 4, St Paul begins by urging the Thessalonian believers to live as they have learned from St Paul and his co-workers and to continue to seek to please God in their lives (1 Thessalonians 4:1). St Paul singles out ‘sexual immorality’ as something they particularly need to avoid and guard against (1 Thessalonians 4:3).

While at first, Sts Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy had concentrated on preaching in the synagogue when they were in Thessalonica, the majority of the Church in Thessalonica were clearly from a pagan background. Some of them could have come from a group known as the ‘godfearers’. These were pagans who were attracted to the Jewish faith but who did not fully convert to Judaism. Others, however, seem to have been converted straight from paganism, independently of the synagogue. St Paul has described their background and new found faith in chapter 1:

‘For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.’ (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10)

Pagan worship often included prostitution, and sexual freedom itself was common throughout Roman society. In the New Testament, idolatry and sexual immorality are often linked together. By urging the Thessalonian believers to avoid sexual immorality, St Paul is clearly focusing on an area where he thinks they were vulnerable.

St Paul turns next to an area in which the Thessalonian believers are doing well. He writes:

‘Now concerning love of the brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anyone write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do love all the brothers and sisters throughout Macedonia.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:9-10)

In encouraging them, however, to go loving one another, St Paul does so in somewhat unusual terms. He writes that they should aspire to live quietly, to mind their own affairs, and to work with their hands (1 Thessalonians 4:11). They are to do this, he writes:

‘… so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:12)

Saint Paul in chapter 4, writes about the ‘Day of the Lord’. Fundamental to how the New Testament describes what it means to believe in and live for Christ is the absolute conviction that Christ is physically going to return. The first believers genuinely believed both that it could be soon and that it would be unexpected. Saint Paul writes here as one who thinks of himself as being among those who would be alive when Christ returns.

All sorts of theological systems have been developed to explain what will happen when Christ returns and what the events leading up to it will be. This is not at all what Saint Paul is trying to do here. His concern is as much about what Christ’s return means for us now, before he comes again, as it is to describe what will happen when he actually does come again.

In describing our Lord’s return, Saint Paul deliberately uses vivid and symbolic language. The event itself will be real enough, but it is impossible for us fully either to imagine what it will be like or to describe it using human language. St Paul writes about it employing what would have been well-known phrases and images from both the Scriptures and from Roman culture: ‘cry of command’, ‘the archangel’s call’, and ‘the sound of God’s trumpet’.

While these phrases and images all refer to real events, which will happen in the future, they are not in themselves meant to be pressed too literally. We avoid getting it wrong, or falling into error, by keeping it simple. The fact that Christ will return is what matters, not the precise details surrounding his return.

But how are believers to live until he does? In teaching the Thessalonian believers how they are to live, Saint Paul assumes that there is a fundamental distinction between believers and unbelievers. He calls unbelievers ‘outsiders’ (1 Thessalonians 4:12). In living for Christ, we are to make it a priority to love those who, like us, are also are in Christ. When it comes to our daily lives, we are to get on with them. When Saint Paul says believers are to work with their hands (1 Thessalonians 4:11), he doesn’t mean that only manual work is of any use, although he does have a more positive view of manual work than many of us do. What Saint Paul means is that we shouldn’t give up work because we think Christ will soon be back. Nor are we to seek support from others in the Church wealthier than us, and certainly not from outsiders. We are to ‘keep calm and carry on!’

There is a question that the Thessalonian believers do need answering, however. It seems that some of the Thessalonian believers had died. The exact circumstances of their death and how they died, we are not told. It may have been because of natural causes or even as a result of persecution; we do not know. But their death did raise the question of what would happen to those believers who had died, given that they had died before our Lord’s return.

Notice that Saint Paul is writing out of a present pastoral concern and not because he wants to speculate about future events. The Thessalonian believers’ love for each other was such that they naturally grieved the loss of members of the community, and St Paul wants to offer them reassurance and comfort.

Saint Paul begins with the fact that Jesus died and rose again. This will be the future experience of believers who have died. The dead in Christ will rise first and meet with Christ as he begins his return. Those still alive, and Saint Paul writes as if he thinks he might be one of them, will meet up with Christ and the newly risen believers. And so, St Paul writes, we will be with the Lord for ever.

Saint Paul tells the Thessalonian believers to encourage one another with these words (1 Thessalonians 4:18). His words are not meant to lead to endless arguments about the future, but to give hope in the present. St Paul writes:

‘But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:13)

The believers’ sure hope is that Christ will return and that we will then be with him forever.

The question is often asked about how St Paul envisages the so-called ‘intermediate state’, that is, the time between when believers die and when they will rise to meet Christ when he comes again. St Paul never goes into details, but he is certain that whatever happens in this ‘in-between time’, we who are believers will be with the Lord. As St Paul puts it in chapter five, which we will look at in the podcast next week, Christ’s death for us means that ‘whether we are awake or asleep, we may live in him’ (1 Thessalonians 5:10).

Dead or alive, before Christ’s return or after, those who have put their faith in Christ are guaranteed life and a place with the Lord.

What does this all mean for us today?

1. We need to regain a sense of the importance of the Lord’s sure return for us in the present

Understandably, given that so many years have passed since the Lord’s death and resurrection without any sign of his return, believers have shifted their hope from the Lord’s second coming to going to be with the Lord when we die. Those who do think about the Lord’s return, mostly do so to speculate on the events that may or may not happen when he returns and the timetable for them.

Ironically, St Paul, who did believe that the Lord was coming soon, refused to enter into speculation about what would happen in the future when the Lord returned, and concentrated instead on what the Lord’s return meant in the present for us as believers. Inasmuch as we are concerned at all about our Lord’s return, we have reversed that concern and focus on the future and not the present. We need to reverse it back and focus on what our Lord’s future return means for us now.

After we die, the main event won’t be going to be with the Lord in some sort of heavenly existence, it will be when we rise to meet the Lord on his return. This will be the time when our redemption will be completed and when we will experience the redemption of our bodies, as St Paul writes about notably in Romans (Romans 8:23-25). Yes, we can be sure, as St Paul was, that when we die we will be kept safe, but we will be kept safe for a purpose. Death is not the end nor is it even the beginning. The beginning will still lie in the future. And before our salvation is complete, we will still have to appear before the judgement seat of Christ.

The general default position of the Church today is universalism. This is the belief that everyone will one day be saved. We are certain that regardless of what people may or may not have done, the love of God will eventually triumph. This combined with the common view of Jesus as someone who accepted and welcomed everyone with no questions asked means that we are insulated against the shock that these and other verses should give us. If we persist in believing that all will be well regardless, we are in for a far greater shock than we can ever imagine.

As St Paul writes:

‘For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.’ (2 Corinthians 5:10)

This means that what we now do in the body and with our bodies matters tremendously. This is not to say we will be saved by our works, but we will certainly not be saved without them. St Paul warns believers in the Church in Corinth, in no uncertain terms, that certain forms of behaviour will exclude people from entering the Kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

St Paul doesn’t say this to frighten us or to undermine our confidence in our salvation. He does so to encourage us to get our lifestyle right: so that we re-order our priorities now before it is too late.

2. Faith in Christ is a state of being that results in a way of life

St Paul begins chapter four with the words:

‘And so, brothers and sisters, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that, as you learned from us how you ought to live and to please God (as, in fact, you are doing), you should do so more and more.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:1)

Faith isn’t just about what we believe in our heads but how we live our lives. Trusting in Christ must lead to obedience to Christ. St Paul in encouraging the Thessalonian believers in how they are to live and please God focuses on sexual behaviour.

In books about ethics, one thing you will hear a lot is that the Church in the past has concentrated far too much on issues of sex and has ignored other areas that are equally or more important. The Church is frequently accused of having been ‘hung up on sex’. This accusation is made especially against some sections of the Church and against leading figures in its history, most notably St Augustine.

While it is true that the Church in the past may have got aspects of its teaching wrong, it has not been wrong to prioritize issues of sexuality. There is an irony in that those who condemn the Church for being in the past, as they see it, obsessed with sexual behaviour are themselves now obsessed with issues of gender and sexual identity. The two, however, can’t be separated. Sexual behaviour, that is, who we have sex with, and sexual identity, that is, what gender we are, go together.

Many today argue that biological sex and gender are two different things. (BTW: This is what is being taught to children in many schools.) On this view, it is perfectly possible, for example, to be born biologically male and yet to be female in gender. This view, I believe, is both wrong and dangerous.

As humans we are embodied beings. Our bodies are intrinsic to our identity and to who we are. Our hope, as believers, is that our bodies will be resurrected and redeemed. When God created the human race, he created us biologically different: ‘male and female created he them’ (Genesis 1:27).

In Romans chapter one, St Paul writes that the immediate consequence of human beings rejecting God and turning to idols is that they fell into sexual disorder and sin. Sexuality and idolatry are closely inter-related. It is no coincidence that, as we today have substituted the worship of Self for the worship of God, our sexual identity has become such an issue. Our disordered spiritual identity has resulted in a disordered sexual identity. Sexual immorality is not just about who sleeps with whom, important though that is, but how we understand ourselves as sexual beings.

Clearly this is a subject that needs more said on it than I can say today. Suffice it, then, for now, to say that as much as we might prefer to relativize issues of sexuality and leave it to individuals to make choices for themselves that is not an option open to us if we take God’s word to us seriously. St Paul writing to those in the Church in Corinth who believed that they were free to do whatever they liked ‘in the body’ tells them:

‘Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.’ (1 Corinthians 6:18)

Our bodies are essential to our identity. What we do in the body matters.

3. Faith in Christ creates a separated community made up of those who believe in Christ

When Christianity became the official religion of the Empire in the fourth century, it was to lead to the creation of ‘Christendom’ and the idea of the ‘Christian nation’. This was the belief that all who belonged to the Christian nation were themselves Christians. The process known as secularisation saw the end of Christendom as those nations that previously had adopted Christianity as their official religion largely abandoned it and removed Christianity from the public sphere, making religion essentially a private concern for individuals.

Unfortunately, the idea of Christendom continues profoundly to influence how the Church sees its role and mission in the world. We can’t bring ourselves to abandon the idea that the Church has a major part to play in the affairs of the state and society of which it is a part. We refuse to see ourselves as a separated community and to let go of the role we once had.

Our desire as a Church to be integrated rather than separated has been given fresh impetus by the adoption of universalism as the Church’s understanding of the future of humanity. On this view, everyone, it is believed, will one day be gathered into the coming Kingdom of God. This means that people, even now in the present, although they do not realize it, are part of the people of God.

Our role as a Church in preaching the Gospel on this understanding, then, is to make people aware of their status and future destiny and to announce to the world the good news of the universality of God’s Kingdom. What Christ has promised to his people, it is claimed, is promised to all people whether they realize it or not, accept it or not. All are included and all are to be welcomed and accepted.

This is not at all how our Lord, St Paul, and the New Testament writers saw it. The Gospel is about how those who are not members of the Kingdom can become members while there is still time for them to do so. Those who become members will be saved and those who do not will be lost. The Gospel tells people that it is only by turning from their present state of idolatry to the living God that they can be saved from the wrath that is to come (1 Thessalonians 1:10).

Those who turn to the living God become part of a community that does not belong to this world and who, instead, ‘seek the city that is to come’ (Hebrews 13:14)). Those outside the community of the Church are perishing and face destruction when the Lord returns. St Paul describes them as ‘without God’ and ‘without hope’ in this world. This is the reality of their situation and we are called as a Church to tell the truth and not to give false hope.

All that St Paul writes about how believers are to live is for those inside this community; those not part of the community are ‘outsiders’, who will one day find themselves excluded from the Kingdom our Lord comes to bring. In writing to the Thessalonian believers, St Paul seeks to guide them as to how they should live as they await their Lord’s return. He prays that their love for each other may increase. He expresses his desire for believers as he writes:

‘And 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 Thessalonians 3:13)

Our lifestyle in this world is to reflect this hope and understanding of the Gospel. It means we need to rethink how we behave in this world so that we may, as St Paul again puts it, ‘conduct ourselves properly towards outsiders and be dependent on no-one’, and certainly not on those in power in this world. We are to be a separated community of believers who lead lives worthy of God, who calls us into ‘his own kingdom and glory’ (1 Thessalonians 2:12).

And so today, we are a people of hope who look forward to that day when we will rise to meet the Lord who comes to save those who have put their trust in him. Until then, may we seek to lead lives worthy of him as men and women whose identity is found in Christ, who died for us, and for whose return we expectantly wait and pray.

Amen.

The Last Sunday after Trinity

Here is the transcript of my podcast for this week the Last Sunday after Trinity.

The Last Sunday after Trinity 

Reading: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-12

This week’s second reading is from St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. The Church at Thessalonica was one of the Churches that St Paul is referring to in his letters when he talks about the Churches of Macedonia. Another Macedonian Church, of course, is the Church at Philippi. These Macedonian Churches seem to have been the Churches that were the most supportive of St Paul’s ministry. They did not give him the problems that he had, for example, with Churches such as the Church at Corinth.

St Paul refers in our reading to his first visit when the Church was established in about AD51. He writes about how he and his co-workers, St Silvanus and St Timothy, had been ‘shamefully mistreated at Philippi’ (1 Thessalonians 2:2). St Luke describes both the mistreatment and the establishment of the Church at Thessalonica in Acts chapter 17. All this took place on what is somewhat misleadingly known as St Paul’s second missionary journey. This was when St Paul and his team where forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the Gospel in Asia and, instead, St Paul is given a vision of a man from Macedonia, who says in the vision, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us’ (Acts 16:9).

St Paul and his co-workers respond at once to the vision. The first place they visit, as we have been seeing in the sermon series on the letter to the Philippians, is Philippi. After St Paul and his team leave Philippi, they travel down the Via Egnatia, the Roman road linking the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire with Rome, and come to Thessalonica, some 95 miles from Philippi. I think it likely that this was one of the times that St Paul intended to travel on to Rome but was ‘prevented’ (Romans 1:13).

Thessalonica was the capital city of the Province. St Luke tells us that they preached in the synagogue there for ‘three sabbaths’, but were forced to stop because of violent opposition from the Jewish community. From what St Paul writes in the two letters to the Thessalonian believers, it doesn’t seem they immediately left Thessalonica itself. St Paul describes how they ‘worked night and day’, not only in preaching the Gospel but to pay for their stay there and to avoid being a financial burden on the Church.

Nevertheless, St Luke in Acts (Acts 17) and St Paul in this letter both make clear that the opposition got so severe in Thessalonica that St Paul had to leave abruptly, and far sooner than he wanted. The opposition was directed particularly at St Paul personally, as it often was. It was so bad that, even though the Jews in Beroea, the next place they went to, were initially more receptive, Jews from Thessalonica pursued him and stirred up trouble for him there too. The result was that St Paul, not for the first time in his ministry, had to flea for his life, this time by sailing to Athens.

St Paul and St Luke tell us that St Paul sent St Timothy back to Thessalonica to see how the Thessalonians were getting on. St Paul’s concern is that having only been with them for such a short period of time, and then leaving them so suddenly, the Church might not have survived. He realized too that the opposition to the Gospel would not end just because he had left. St Paul makes repeated references in the letter to the suffering and persecution that the Thessalonian believers are themselves experiencing.

Eventually, St Timothy comes back from Thessalonica and meets up with St Paul in Corinth. He is able to put St Paul’s mind at rest concerning the Church at Thessalonica and update him on what has happened since St Paul was forced to leave. St Paul then sends this letter to them to encourage them and to give them advice on a number of issues.

The main emotion that St Paul has in writing this letter is thanksgiving. Thanksgiving that God has chosen the Thessalonian believers; thanksgiving for their response to the Gospel; and thanksgiving that they are persevering. The response of the Thessalonian believers has been such that everyone has heard of their faith. Their response to the Gospel has made a big impression in the regions round about. St Paul writes:

‘For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead - Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.’ (1 Thessalonians 1:8-10)

This really is a big deal. The pagan gods that the Thessalonian believers turned from were part of the social, political, and economic fabric of society. By turning from them, not only did the Thessalonian believers suffer persecution for doing so, they were also alienating themselves from the life of the city in a radical and costly way. Faith is something that each individual needs to have for themselves, but it isn’t only a personal and private matter, it has huge social consequences. St Paul is relieved and grateful that despite the opposition they have experienced from other Thessalonians the Thessalonian believers have, nevertheless, remained firm in their faith.

In the passage from the letter for this week, St Paul writes how his coming to them was ‘not in vain’. Now, given that the Thessalonians have responded so enthusiastically to the Gospel despite so much opposition, we might be tempted to think that it is the Thessalonian believers’ response that St Paul is referring to. In other words, that St Paul is saying that he and his co-workers’ coming was not in vain because the Thessalonian believers responded to their message. That is not, however, what he writes. He writes that their coming was not in vain, because they, that is, St Paul and his co-workers, had the courage to preach ‘in spite of great opposition’ (1 Thessalonians 2:2). St Paul puts the emphasis on the proclamation of God’s Word, not on the Thessalonian believers’ response to it. Their response was important, but that the Gospel was proclaimed far more so.

Following on from this, St Paul writes something that every preacher should take to heart:

‘ … but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please people, but to please God who tests our hearts.’ (1 Thessalonians 2:4)

When he preached, what mattered to St Paul in his preaching was pleasing God, not in the first-place winning converts, and his desire to please God affected how he preached the Gospel. If what matters to you is people’s response, then you will focus on the methods you use to get the best response, even tailoring your message to make it more acceptable. St Paul, however, refused to go down that path. He did not use words of ‘flattery’ (1 Thessalonians 2:5). He doesn’t appeal to what he knows his audience likes or wants to hear, but concentrates instead on what God wants them to hear - whether they want to hear it or not!

Not only does his satisfaction in preaching the word of God not come from getting people to respond, it does not come from any financial reward he gets for preaching either (1 Thessalonians 2:5). St Paul probably feels the need to say this because, then as now, there were plenty of people who acted, not out of a commitment to the truth, but out of a desire to make money. Sadly, we know of all too many in the Church today who have gotten rich on preaching the Gospel. St Paul makes it very clear, as did our Lord, that those who preach the Gospel should get paid for preaching the Gospel: ‘the worker is worthy of his hire’ (Luke 10:7; 1 Corinthians 9:14), as Jesus puts it. But the motivation for preaching the Gospel should not be money, and when it comes to the money ministers of the Gospel receive: enough is enough!

The fact that St Paul had to leave Thessalonica so suddenly may have left him open to accusations of being a trickster who had been after the Thessalonian believers money. It may even have been falsely rumoured that St Paul left when he was found out The fact that he didn’t take any of their money, but worked night and day to pay his way, as the Thessalonian believers know he did, effectively answers any possible criticism on that score!

It is God St Paul preaches to please. But that doesn’t mean St Paul couldn’t care less about the Thessalonian believers. Anything but. St Paul sees the fact that the Thessalonian believers respond to the Gospel as evidence that God has chosen them (1 Thessalonians 1:4) and that they are God’s children and, therefore, part of the family of God. St Paul repeatedly uses family language throughout the letter. He constantly addresses them, for example, as brothers and sisters. In our passage this week, he describes how he was simultaneously like a child, a mother, and a father when he was with them. He uses these images to stress how he was gentle like a child with them, how he nurtured them like a mother nurses her children, and how he guided them as a father.

St Paul, then, spends the first part of the letter going over his relationship with the Thessalonian believers. He establishes the priority of the Gospel, emphasizes the importance of remaining faithful to it, and of persevering despite opposition. He confirms the depth of his feeling for them and the relationship between them. It is only once he has done this that he goes on to answer the questions he has heard they have and to give them teaching about how they are to live for Christ.

So, what can we learn from what he has written so far? I want to highlight three things:

1. The Church is a family

Christ Church seeks to be a family Church. We welcome everyone whatever their age or background. We are blessed to have families with three generations belonging to the Church. We are especially pleased to see families with children coming to Church. But being a family Church doesn’t stop there. We want to be a family in how we relate to one another and how we behave as a Church.

I imagine that many would agree with this sentiment. It sounds nice, doesn’t it, and many Churches would share our aim. But wanting to be a family Church isn’t just a nice idea; if we are serious it has to affect how we go about being the Church. Being a family Church should determine how we relate to each other; how we organize ourselves; and how we make decisions about our life as a Church. St Paul writes:

‘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.’ (1 Thessalonians 2:8)

As we have seen, the images St Paul uses to describe his relationship with them are all family images. In his other letters, he will use other images alongside that of the family to describe the Church. He will write, for example, of how we are the ‘body of Christ’ and the ‘temple of Holy Spirit’. The one image, however, he doesn’t use to describe what the Church is like is that of a business.

And yet, it is the business model, despite all our fine sounding talk using the Biblical images, that predominates in how we go about being the Church today. I remember when I first came to Christ Church. Just before the first Church Council meeting, I was chatting quite informally with one of the members. When the meeting started, however, he suddenly started addressing me, not as Ross, but as Mr Chairman. Thankfully, no-one calls me that now!

The business model is to be seen, for example, in the way we elect members to Church synods and councils, hold Annual General Meetings (when we are allowed to), and make decisions by formal motions. We even have legal canons and need lawyers to interpret them. Our structures and the way we do things are, in other words, no different to that of any business. If you organize yourself as a business, you will think like a business.

This is why, for example, we talk about promoting the Church rather than proclaiming the Gospel; getting members, rather than making disciples; and doing fund-raising, rather than giving generously. It is why we have mission statements. Why we are so obsessed with property and accounts. Why we judge success, not by spiritual growth, but by the numbers attending services. Why how much money church-goers pledge matters more than the spiritual commitment they make.

I love the Church, but I hate the way we do Church.

We desperately need to take seriously what it means to be the family of God, not as a nice idea when we meet for worship and chat over coffee on a Sunday, but as the model for how we go about being the Church.

This should affect every aspect of our church life including all the practicalities associated with it. Families need a place to live and families need to do their household accounts, but the way they do all this is very different to how a business will do it. We need to stop thinking of the Church as a religious business and take seriously what it means to be the family of God.

2. We must be true to our foundation

What is striking, in even a superficial reading of first Thessalonians, is how St Paul keeps reminding the Thessalonian believers of the word of God that he preached when he came to them. He uses phrases such as ‘as you know’, ‘you remember’, ‘you are aware’ frequently throughout the letter. St Paul will tell them in chapter 3:

‘For we now live, if you continue to stand firm in the Lord.’ (1 Thessalonians 3:8)

In 1 Corinthians, he writes:

‘According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.’ (1 Corinthians 3:10-11)

Being a follower of Christ is not easy, as the Thessalonians were finding out. It is not easy simply keeping the teaching of Jesus; it is even harder when our culture is founded on ideas and attitudes totally at variance with it; and even harder still when we are mocked or attacked for our faith. We will soon fall if we don’t have a firm foundation. We need to be like the wise man who built his house on the rock Matthew 7:24-27). This means that all of us individually we need to know our faith and be committed to it.

The same is true for us as the family of God, that is, corporately as the Church.

One of my main concerns in my own ministry at the moment is the extent to which the Church is abandoning the foundations of its faith. This is happening quite consciously and deliberately. We are so anxious to be seen to be relevant and to keep our place in the world that we are adopting the values and attitudes of the world around us, rather than standing firm on the foundation of our faith.

The Creeds of the Church, for example, which were once seen as providing a basic summary of what we believe, are now often dismissed as simply being what some people in the Church believed at the time they were written. This might have some justification if the Creeds were being rejected as un-Biblical, but the reason for their rejection is often precisely because they are Biblical and state Biblical teaching in a succinct way.

All too often in describing how we should live as believers, we begin by assuming that what we now believe to be right must be right. Having made this assumption, when we come to interpret and understand the Bible, we can then take one of two approaches.

Firstly, we can say that the Bible is wrong if it doesn’t teach what we know to be right and simply ignore what it says. This, at least, is an honest approach.

Another approach, and one which is increasingly being used, is to read what we think to be self-evidently true back into the Bible.

If we today are sure we know something is right and true, and we believe the Bible to teach what is right and true, then, it follows, or so we think, that the Bible must teach what we believe. If it doesn’t seem to at first sight, then we assume that this must be because we have been understanding and interpreting it incorrectly. We then go to great lengths to interpret it in such away as to make it mean what we want it to mean.

And so, for example, when it comes to issues of human sexuality and gender, we begin with what we now believe to be true, and then seek to show how the Bible agrees with us, even if for two thousand years no-one has understood it this way.

There is a need for open and honest discussion of the issues that are facing us in the Church and world today. But we need to begin not with what we want to believe or think to be right, but with what the Bible teaches. There will be a need for us to ask all sorts of questions about interpretation and application, but we need to begin with what God has said, not with what we would have liked him to have said.

There is a wonderful hymn the first verse of which is:

‘How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
is laid for your faith in His excellent Word!
What more can He say than to you He hath said,
you, who unto Jesus for refuge have fled?’

3. We need to be faithful in our proclamation

Our business-driven model of the Church means that we worry about Church attendance. This is not without some justification. We want people to come to know Christ. And to be entirely honest with you, I prefer a Church with people in it than one without. Sadly, church attendance in many parts of the world is declining drastically. Just this week, I was reading about how attendance in the Church of England seems now to be in terminal decline.

Paradoxically, however, the answer to such decline is not to think how we can attract more members. When we make attracting members our main priority we will, as St Paul puts it, engage in flattery. We don’t call it that, we call it trying make our message more relevant or appealing. Once we do that, however, even if it is for the best of motives, it won’t be long before we start to change our message. This often begins by leaving out of our proclamation those parts that we think will put people off. Certainly, telling people that they have to deny themselves, if they want to be a follower of Christ, isn’t going to immediately attract people.

But it doesn’t stop there: once we have left parts out, the temptation then is to change what we actually do say, so that what we say is what we think people want to hear. How God loves them, for example, just as they are; that it’s not their fault they have made such a mess of their lives; that it will all be OK in the end.

But here’s the thing: St Paul would challenge us to stop worrying about being liked and being popular. Of course, we want to present the word of God in an as attractive a way as possible. We want to make sure we are speaking in a way that people can understand. But we are to do all this knowing that the person we are seeking to please is not the person we are hoping will become a member of the family, but God himself. The audience we have to please is God.

At the end of a sermon, the question I have to ask myself is not what you thought of it, but what did God think of it. I hope you will find what I say interesting and will want to listen to me, but that cannot, or at least it should not, be my main concern. Each time I preach, I have to ask whether I have said everything that God wants me to say irrespective of whether you like it or not, or find it interesting or not.

Indeed, the reality is that very often people won’t find what we say interesting, and very often they won’t like what we say. Sometimes, not only will they not respond positively to our message, they will find our message deeply offensive and want to stop us from spreading it. Just as they did with St Paul and his co-workers; just as they did with the Thessalonian believers themselves; and just as they did with our Lord himself.

The good news is that the growth of the Church and who does or does not respond to the Gospel is God’s concern. Our concern is to please God in what we preach and then give ourselves completely to those that God gives to us. Numbers will go up and down. The size of our congregation is not what matters; what matters is whether we are faithful in our preaching of the word of God.

When I appear before the judgement seat of Christ, the question I will be asked won’t be about how many people came to hear me preach, but whether I was faithful in what I preached.

And so, like the Thessalonian believers, may we too learn from the example of Saints Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy. May we make it our goal to be the family of God, built on the foundation of the word of God, and to be faithful in proclaiming the Gospel of God, which has been entrusted by God to us, the chosen of God.

Amen.