The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
October 27, 2002

Driven by the Word
1 Thessalonians 2 

Last week, we began looking at First Thessalonians. I want to continue this week with the second chapter of that book. For, as I mentioned in my sermon last week, this letter is the oldest written evidence of Christianity. Scholars who find little to agree on at times, all agree, that this letter was written between January and August of the year 51, or about 20 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  

The letter gives us our earliest glimpse at what it means to be a Christian. In the second chapter of the letter, which we read today, Paul shows us how the Word of God drove the disciples to action and is now at work in the Thessalonians. 

The authors, Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, give us some insights in to what it was like to be a first century evangelist and church planter. The trio tells us they had arrived in Thessalonica after having been shamefully mistreated in Philippi. Persecuted for spreading the new Christian movement in Philippi, they are driven out of town and land down the road in Thessalonica.  

If ever there was a time to lay low for a while and let physical and emotional wounds heal, this is the time. That’s not what the apostles did. The Word of God drove them to continue to share the Good News of Jesus once again. 

The three apostles got jobs working in the town so that they could support themselves as they had done in Philippi. Then Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy began at once to proclaim boldly the Good News that God had been born as a human, lived among us, suffered, died and was resurrected. They taught that faith in this risen Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, was the best way to come into a relationship with God. 

Paul goes on, at what might look to us like suspicious lengths, to describe how the three had proclaimed their message. Paul says they were not motivated by deceit, impure motives, or trickery. He said they were not trying to please mere humans but rather to please God. Paul reminds them that the apostles could, like other teachers of the times, have made demands for support from the congregation. Instead, they had worked night and day, keeping their day jobs so that no one could question that the apostles were sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ out of love and for no other reason. 

To our 21^st century ears, this second chapter of First Thessalonians sounds defensive. As soon as someone starts denying something, we begin to wonder if they did the thing they deny. If announced today that I am not planning on leaving King of Peace anytime soon, you might wonder why I had brought up the issue at all. Am I, in fact, thinking of leaving? Why mention it if it is not on my mind. Did someone else bring up the issue? Likewise, why else would Paul bother to say there were no impure motives or trickery, unless someone had accused him of this very thing? 

It helps to know thar it was a common practice for teachers of the times to make just such claims. Public teachers often stated a case for why the audience should trust them, then the audience could examine for themselves if the claims were true. Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy are really laying their own lives on the line saying in effect, “We lived among you for too long to have hidden anything. You know us too well. You yourselves know that we never benefited in any way from preaching Jesus among you.” 

This move would have been disastrous if Paul’s statements were untrue. With this letter in hand, the Thessalonians would start to think about the money they paid to the apostles or the other benefits they had received and would decide they could not trust their teachers. If, however, Paul is writing the truth, them his statements serve to uphold the mission to the Thessalonians as one beyond reproach. The conduct of the apostles serves as further proof of their claims. Paul reminds the Thessalonians that they know this from experience. 

Another important aspect of this chapter is how Paul says the apostles gave their own selves. He describes the apostles’ relationship with the Thessalonian Christians using a wonderful mix of familial images. He refers to the Thessalonians as siblings and describes the care the apostles showed the Thessalonian Christians was like a wet nurse who is nursing her own children. Then Paul writes that the apostles were like a father caring for his sons.  

Paul then turns the equation upside down, proving that the relationship was never about power. Paul describes the apostles’ separation from the Thessalonians as leaving the apostles as orphans. You might expect the letter to say the separation left the Thessalonians orphaned, but rather it is the apostles who are now like children cut off from their parents.  

Finally, Paul tells the Thessalonians they are the apostles’ glory and joy. Whatever else characterized Christianity in its earliest form, first and foremost, it found its center in loving relationships—as close as any family relationship you can think of, and perhaps closer. 

There is no exaggeration here. Imagine how important these fellow Christians were to Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy. After all, the apostles are far from home working in cities where their message is often greeted with derision. They have been beaten, shamefully mistreated and run out of more than one town for spreading the Good News of Jesus. To have these converts to think of would be crucial. All the work, all the suffering, they were not for nothing. There were those Christians in Philippi and these in Thessalonica who really did come to a close relationship with God through the Good News of Jesus.  

Paul writes, “We 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.” Of course they constantly give thanks. Every time they run in to troubles on the road, the apostles can remember these faithful Christians. Anytime someone laughs off their teaching, they can remember this group who was inspired by the Holy Spirit to understand that the apostles’ teaching was really God’s teaching. 

The Thessalonians know for themselves that the apostles’ teaching was from God for as Paul notes, the word of God is now at work in those believers. First they believed what they heard, now they know for certain as that same Word of God is active in their lives. 

This is what Christianity was like in its earliest form. Christianity in the year 51 was a persecuted sect within Judaism spreading rapidly through the courage of leaders driven by the Word of God to share the Good News of Jesus with others no matter the cost to themselves. Christianity spread rapidly because as the new Christian converts would begin to live lives worthy of God, they too would be driven by the Word of God to share God’s love with others.  

The Word of God was no tame thing for Paul but instead a driving force that led him and his fellow Christians to change the world life by life. The Prophet Jeremiah had struggled with this same problem centuries earlier. The Word of God came to Jeremiah and he did not want to speak out. But Jeremiah could not help but speak. He wrote, “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary from holding it in, and I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:9). Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy could hold the Word of God inside themselves no better than Jeremiah. They were driven by God to speak. 

To even a careful observer in the mid-first century, Christianity was just one tiny religious group among many. But God’s view must have been somewhat different. With hindsight we too can see that Christianity was going off like a bomb amidst the status quo of the Roman Empire. The Word of God was fanning out through the kingdom gaining momentum as lives were changed for the better through a relationship with God.  

Christians shifted their allegiances from looking to Caesar for protection to looking to God as known through Jesus. If their own families turned against them, they followed the example found in this morning’s reading and had close familial bonds with their fellow Christians. By example in persecution they showed the Christians showed they were able to love their enemies and that alone had a powerful effect. Within three centuries, Christianity won, conquering the Roman Empire through the example of Christians willing to live lives worthy of God even when it cost them those very lives. 

I look around today, even at my own life, and rather than seeing Christians driven by the Word of God, I see lives driven by distraction. It is all too easy to let the Word of God grow dusty on the shelf and therefore even easier to keep it shut up in our bones. For Paul, the answer in the year 51 was to encourage and even plead with Christians to live lives worthy of God.  

Paul did not even at that point go on to enumerate what he meant precisely by a life worthy of God. He seems to have trusted the Holy Spirit to handle some of the teaching for he wrote that God is the one calling you into his own kingdom and glory.  

We must be willing to let God’s Word be for us God’s Word and not just another human word so that that Word of God can work in us believers. I’m quite sure that Paul was not limiting the Word of God to scripture alone, but was writing of all the ways God makes God’s very self known to us. Yet, we should also not overlook scripture as it remains God’s Word for our lives. And to scripture we can add prayer as a way of hearing God’s Word for our lives.  

Open your ears to hear God speaking to you. Open your heart to conforming yourself to God’s desire for you. Don’t let the world weary you in to being driven by distraction. Listen instead to the Word of God and to the first century apostles who encourage and plead with you to lead a life worthy of God. 

Amen.

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