Not in Word Only

 

Sunday, October 19^th, 2008

Proper 24A/ Ordinary 29 A/ Pentecost +23

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

1 Thessalonians 1:1-10

Theme: Faith making a DIFFERENCE in our lives

 

 “¹Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and (/even) the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.

²We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly ³remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁴For we know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that he has chosen you, ⁵because 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.

⁶And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit, ⁷so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. ⁸For the word of the Lord has sounded (echoed/trumpeted/ been broadcast /thundered) forth from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak about it. ⁹For the people of those regions report about (around) us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, ¹⁰and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues (present tense) us from the wrath that is coming.”

 

Imagine you are Paul: kind of short, balding, thorn in your side, the whole nine yards. 

 

You are on your second missionary journey, you started out from Jerusalem, went through Salamis and Antioch in northern Syria, then on to Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, Antioch of Pisidia, then on to Troas and along the Aegean seacoast to Neapolis and Phillipi, and you finally land in Thessalonica – a city that has the distinction of being a ‘free’ city – one of relatively few so designated – and so trusted – by Rome in the first century as to be allowed to govern itself. 

 

Thessalonica is on the Egnatian Way, the main land route across the north of Greece, close to halfway across modern-day Greece.  There is a significant Jewish presence, enough for the Jewish merchants to have an influence on the local government, as well as to attract God-fearers – people who admired the monotheism (the worship of one God) and high moral standard of the Jewish faith, as compared to the confusing mix of polytheism and varying degrees of moral standards among the other religions being espoused around the city. 

 

As is your custom, you first stop in at the local synagogue and spend several days presenting your case to the leaders there, trying to convince them of the fact that Jesus was the expected Messiah – that he HAD to suffer and die in order to bring about the new covenant.  You have mixed results.  Some of those God-fearers, gentiles who were attending but had not yet converted to Judaism, are persuaded, even a few of the Jews become convinced, along with some of the leading women in the city – that is significant because women enjoyed a higher esteem than was the norm in other areas of Greece.  The freedom that the Gospel of Christ presents appeals to the unconverted but believing gentiles, to those who were already converted, and to people off the street. 

 

You begin to meet with them separately; teaching them about the good news of Jesus Christ and seeing others come to faith as well. 

 

Predictably, as has been the case in other places, this upsets the synagogue leaders, and, according to Acts chapter 17, they incite a riot and you get word of the crowd coming after you and get away just in time. 

 

Unable to find you, the crowd attacks the home of Jason, where you and your friends had been staying.  You find out later that Jason and a group of other believers, who probably happened to be meeting there at the time were hauled before the authorities and accused of treason – of claiming there was a king other than Caesar; namely, Jesus.  They are made to post bail, and then are released. 

 

Total time spent in Thessalonica: maybe as little as three weeks.  Total number of converts:  few enough to be able to name them all.  Probably less than were here last Sunday (28 in worship). 

 

You continue on your journey, walking as quickly as you can, occasionally looking behind you to see if anyone is chasing after you from Thessalonica.  You carry on semi-breathless conversations with Silvanus and Timothy, taking advantage of the time you have as you walk the miles between cities, occasionally stopping to rest at the wells that are the rest areas along the road that the Romans built that have been so helpful to you as you’ve travelled around over the last few years … and you finally arrive in Corinth, another booming metropolis. 

 

You meet a couple, already believers, who happen to be tentmakers just like you – it’s what you do to support yourself on these trips.  Their names are Priscilla and Aquila, and you just CLICK with them.  Aside from the more profound sharing you have in calling Jesus Lord, you laugh at the same jokes, you like the same foods, you end up at the same tentmaker hangouts … you get the picture.  But when you FIRST meet, a funny thing happens; when you introduce yourself, they look at each other and then back at you and say “you’re the guy from Thessalonica!” … and they begin to tell you about what happened to Jason and the other believers, how they stood up in court and didn’t cave to the folks who had dragged them in or to the governing authorities, and how they took the opportunity to proclaim the Gospel even there, and it’s just been a few days since you had to run to get away from the riot!

 

Then they introduce you to some other believers who are passing through town coming from other cities, and THEY do that same double take when they hear your name.  And all you can do is stand in wonder at how the Thessalonians received the Gospel and how they are living it.  So your heart swells with love and with pride, and with Joy, and you decide to sit down and write them a letter.  You want to tell them what you’ve heard over the month or so since you had to get out of Dodge, and to encourage them and lift them up … and to maybe try to put some other things to right – things you didn’t quite get to tell them when you were face-to-face, since you left so suddenly, and you realize that, in the business you are in, you may not get a chance to get back there – period. 

 

So this is your letter.  Your time with Jason and the other believers was short but incredibly sweet – made all the more so by what you have been hearing.  You saw some go from worshipping idols in one or more of the multitude of temples to worshipping and praising THE one true God through the Lord Jesus Christ … a transformation so radical that you have almost – ALMOST, but not QUITE gotten used to seeing it … even in yourself when you sit back and think on what the last several years have been since that day on the road to Damascus. 

 

You talk about how it feels to hear about what they are doing, you praise them for their dedication and their faith, for the way they have not fallen away and renounced their faith in your absence, and especially in the face of persecution.  You work on remembering what you had told them, what you had taught them, and try to touch on those things that are most central, most critical. 

 

So you pray again that God’s peace would continue to be with them, regardless of what they are going through, and you share with them that you’ve been astounded at what you have heard about them from people they don’t even know – that the stories of THEIR faith and THEIR courage, THEIR strength in the face of trials has ALREADY spread throughout the area.  And then you get to what you wanted to get to:  that no matter what they are facing, no matter what persecution might come their way, God’s action on the cross through Jesus Christ did, is and will continue to rescue them from not just the superficial, temporary persecution they did suffer or might suffer, but ultimately, that perpetual movement of God to overcome evil in the world … to heal the sick, to make the broken whole again, to free the captives, and proclaim the freedom that is found in Christ.      

 

You pace as you dictate the letter, and Silvanus has to stop you over and over and over again just so he can get everything you are saying so quickly down on papyrus.  Timothy is sitting in the windowsill, watching the people go by outside, and here and there interjects a correction of how you said something, or to give you a name of a place or a person, and he keeps chuckling as Sylvanus is getting more and more frustrated with you for going so fast, until finally he just stops writing and you go on for several sentences before you realize that he’s just looking at you with this completely exasperated look on his face, and you just stand and stare at him for several seconds, until you realize the humor in the situation, and you start to chuckle, then shake with laughter, then you all burst out laughing and keep laughing until tears are streaming down your faces.   

 

What, you may ask, does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, nearly a full 2000 years from the date of the letter? 

 

We treasure scripture.  We hold it to be Holy.  We consider it to be inspired; we go to it for all kinds of guidance, and correction, for reflection, for illumination in our darkest times. 

 

When we take words that were written thousands of years ago, and put them beside other words that were written centuries before THAT, we have a natural inclination to let the passage of those centuries do what would happen to anything preserved in desert monasteries and clay jars in Cliffside caves around the world – we let them dry out.  We need to be reminded every now and then that, when it came down to it, people like you and me were sitting down and putting God’s thoughts, working through their minds, down in ink and sending what they wrote to OTHER people JUST like you and me, who had their own quirks and warts, funny views and flawed lives, but who all, one way or another, were figuring out what it means to serve God and the Lord Jesus in real, tangible, significant ways – and putting that into practice in ways that have touched people’s lives all over the world.     

 

“Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the Emmertonians in God the Father and (/even) the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.”

 

Lets pray.