Urging, Encouraging, Pleading
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008
Proper 26 A/ Ordinary 31 A/ Pentecost +25 (All Saints Sunday)
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Theme: Being open to guidance from brothers and sisters in the faith
“9 You remember our labor and toil, brothers and sisters; we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. 10 You are witnesses, and God also, how pure, upright, and blameless our conduct was toward you believers. 11 As you know, we dealt with each one of you like a father with his children, 12 urging and encouraging you and pleading that you lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory. 13 We also constantly give thanks to God for this, that when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.”
Again, we pick up where we left off last week, reading other people’s mail.
Paul is still in the “review and remember” phase of his letter. He is going over, just in case the memory has faded for the folks at the church in Thessalonica, just what it was that he and Silas and Timothy did while they were there with them.
The firs issue in THIS passage, is how he, Paul, supported himself – or rather, how THEY supported THEMselves.
We know even today how overwhelmingly critical the issue of hospitality is in Middle Eastern culture. The role of the host in any given modern-day Middle Eastern or North African country has evolved and been informed by the realities of living in a somewhat marginal environment: mostly desert, dry, dusty, and unforgiving to travelers.
That was even more so the case in Paul’s time. Those expectations of graciously providing for a guest – as well as the flipside – graciously RECEIVING AS a guest the hospitality offered, were critical to the fabric of the society in which he moved about. But what we read in verse 9 and what we READ last week in verse 7 – “though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ.” – tie together the reality of Paul’s case – that he did NOT, in the case of the Thessalonians, accept that hospitality from the people he befriended and soon made disciples there. It would seem to be counterintuitive for him to NOT take advantage OF that hospitality offered – especially in light of the basic difficulties that would have been involved in his missionary efforts.
If you’ve ever had the opportunity to travel to a foreign country, and on arrival have had the added benefit of visiting in someone’s home, depending on the country, you may have been exposed to what would be in many cases an overwhelming degree of hospitality. Leslie and I have experienced it each time we’ve traveled to Mexico, and I have truly precious memories of our visits with friends and newly-acquired extended family members when I traveled to Chile for my brothers wedding a couple of years ago. The point is, it is not just incumbent on the host to BE a host, it is ALSO incumbent on the GUEST to BE a GUEST; otherwise, the expectation falls apart.
Paul made it fall apart. Or so it would SEEM.
You see, not only was Paul working against the general culture of the time and place in NOT accepting the hospitality of folks in Thessalonica, NEITHER was he fulfilling the role of an APOSTLE when it came to that same factor in his travels.
Why would he do that? Why would he seemingly thumb his nose at the prevailing culture, the culture that he moved around in, breathed in and out on a daily basis, and which informed and provided him with the images to preach what he is preaching, as well as to provide the wherewithal to DO what he was doing?
He did it because his focus was on the people he was reaching out to.
There is a sense of obligation inherent in the “hospitality exchange” that sort of locks you into how you are going to respond in a given situation.
Put it this way: you hear an apostle of a great teacher, a miracle worker, is in town and he and his friends are at the synagogue speaking. You go, you listen, you begin to question, and you want to hear more. You ask the man and his companions to come to your home and stay with you while they are in town. They accept, and you are now obligated to provide them with not only room and board, but also a platform – a place where they can expound on what they were talking about initially at the synagogue. But more than that, as their host, you are now locked into the role of advocate/ally. To argue with what they are teaching or preaching would be dishonorable and would be bad form for any self-respecting first-century host. You either agree with what is being taught or you lose face and standing in a VERY big way.
Though Paul may have stayed with Jason and his family, as we read the week before last, he did not depend on them for sustenance, and from the way he is phrasing it in the passage for this morning, he was not taking from them what an Apostle would be within his rights to expect from his or her host – he and Silas (Silvanus) and Timothy covered their own expenses by working – probably at a stall in the local market – repairing tents and sandals. Paul’s learned trade.
What did that do, besides free Paul from the dependence on the kindness of his hosts, as well as the expectations of the hospitality rule in Middle Eastern and to be more precise, Southern European culture? It also freed his HOSTS from the expectation on THEM to be assumed followers of the same teachings of Jesus that Paul was espousing.
Let me say that another way. Absent the freely-offered-freely-received hospitality rule, the hosts were free to accept or reject what Paul was saying. There was no assumption, no expectation, and no socially normative pressure on them to behave a certain way because he was in their home.
These were all things Paul had been and would be accused of in the course of his travels, including there in Thessalonica. Of abusing his role as an apostle for the sake of personal gain, of buttering up the people he came in touch with to make his trip easy and to not have to work TOO hard – to not say ‘at all’ in the course of his trip, and basically just live off the fat of the land.
Paul has already said he COULD have, but he has chosen NOT to play his ‘apostle’ card (v7). What has been happening is that people have been attacking Paul’s motives. Those making the attacks know that the Gospel is incredibly appealing to the gentile populations of
Last week Paul provided us the image of a nursemaid with her baby at her breast, today we have the image of a father with his children, “urging and encouraging, pleading that you lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.”
You know, it’s the parenting illustrations that do the most to convict me when I read scripture. When I read of Paul’s urging and encouraging and pleading with the new believers to live a life worthy of God, that in and of itself, apart from the explicit understanding it provides me in reference to how I am to be and to act with believers – new or old – that I come in contact with in the dailyness of life – calls me to an IMplicit understanding of how I am to be with my own children. So I read over that verse and I asked myself “do I ‘urge, encourage and plead’ with MY children to live lives worthy of the God?”
What does all that have to do with
Something I shared with the group that was here on Wednesday evening at our Bible study following our prayer and share time was that I don’t really in any way think of them – of YOU – as my children. We are very much ‘fellow pilgrims on a journey’, as the hymn ‘The Servant Song’ says, but the call to urge, encourage and plead with you to live lives worthy of God still applies. And it is not a one-way call, it is a two-way street. The call applies to me as much as it applies to anyone else here this morning.
What I find incredibly encouraging about this passage is that in verse 13 it centers down on the fact that, although the message we are receiving has been passed down through human voice and words, that it has never stopped being so much MORE than JUST human voice and words – that it is the word of GOD – and when Paul says that “it is also at work in you believers”, that word that has been translated as work is energeitai – the same word we now translate as ‘energizes’. It speaks to the fact that it is not simply something of which we are recipients, it is also – and maybe even MORE so – speaking to something that is happening to US as WE receive the Gospel – truly take it into our hearts and lives and live it out. In this particular form, it is in the present tense – keep in mind that Paul is writing to them AFTER he has left Thessalonica – he is underscoring the fact that this living out the Gospel is an ongoing thing – not just a boost to be received and to coast along afterwards … it is an ongoing transformative event in the lives of the new believers in Thessalonica … and in OUR lives as followers of Christ.
What Paul is underscoring is that what he came with, what he was living out and teaching, what he spent his days talking about and his evenings teaching about was a Gospel rooted in love. A Gospel that wasn’t banking on the established norms of Middle Eastern culture to carry it along, but a message of love and grace freely offered and freely received – with no attached expectations save that of a transformed life. Just as the invitation God extends to us is totally dependent on our free will to accept or reject, so was Paul’s presentation of the Gospel THEN.
May we be as receptive as the believers of Thessalonica.
Let’s pray.
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