Sermon - Thessalonians - 1 Thessalonians 5

Whenever our denomination plants new churches, we come up against opposition. Usually one group or another - probably calling themselves 'Christians' - challenges us by using some biblical texts out of their proper context and in a particularly literal and irrational way. Other organisations - often calling themselves 'churches' - continue turning blind eyes to varying degrees of homophobia and transphobia within their structures, and question why our particular ministry might be needed when there are so many choices available already and, provided you're discreet, there should be no problem.

And then there is the distrust within the very lgbt communities that we may seek to reach, because their only experience of Christianity might be the one which grabs the headlines and is so frequently seen as judgmental, hypocritical, exclusive, discriminatory, or downright hostile.

When we plant churches it often feels as if we are repeatedly fighting the battles which Troy Perry our founder fought at the birth of our denomination. In fact, we are repeatedly fighting the battles which Christian communities fought at the birth of Christianity itself. And for the next four weeks we are going to look at how four of the earliest Christian communities came into being, usually in the teeth of bitter opposition from the vested interests and powerful religious institutions of their time.

We are going to travel with a strangely gifted and highly complex missionary called Paul to two locations in present-day Greece, and two locations in present-day Turkey to see if we can understand why faith in Jesus of Nazareth worked for them, and perhaps gain some insight into why that same faith works for us.

In coming weeks we shall meet the first ever convert to Christianity on European soil: someone who befriended Paul, worked alongside him, led the local church and supported it faithfully. Who was this first European Christian leader - the first among all the popes, patriarchs, bishops and metropolitans in the western world? Perhaps their name is not immediately on our lips because it was a woman!

We shall also visit a church which was beginning to splinter into factions because of a fascination with mystical gifts which some members were experiencing and promoting; and those who could not achieve these mystical states were starting to feel second rate. Here was a community starting to be riddled by human pride based on a false hierarchy of gifts and talents.

I hope you'll stay with us for our short Mediterranean cruise - there are some interesting visits ahead. Today we call in at the major port and regional centre in Northern Greece, Thessalonica. And we observe Paul deal, among other things, with a touch of confusion over the small matter of the end of the world!

On his missionary journey to Macedonia, Paul founded two churches. Both of them took shape partly from within the Jewish communities in those towns, and partly from the inclusion of non-Jews who were drawn from the fringes of society towards the gospel of love and salvation which Paul offered.

In the middle of Macedonia he planted a church at Philippi and was eventually run out of town by the local religious and secular authorities who objected to his message and saw him as a threat to local stability. He continued to travel west and arrived in Thessalonica where much the same kind of thing happened: Paul gathered together a community of believers, stirred up all kinds of local opposition by his teaching, and was run out of town.

But as Paul continued his journey across Greece, eventually arriving in Corinth, he sent one of his helpers, Timothy, back to Thessalonica to see how the Christian community was doing. Timothy reported to Paul that the Thessalonian church was doing really well, and Paul decided to write to them, from Corinth, so that he could congratulate them on their faithfulness to his teaching, and so that he could address a few topics which had come to the surface in that community.

To the best of our knowledge, this letter to the Thessalonians is the earliest of Paul's letters to have survived and to have been incorporated into the Christian scriptures. This means that Paul's explanations of Christian principles in this letter are the earliest picture we have of how a Christian understanding of God was starting to take shape after the death of Jesus some 15 to 20 years previously. It will be another fifteen or twenty years before the first gospel will be compiled by the writer we know as Mark. It is these words of Paul, as he encourages and challenges those first Christian communities, which give us our best sense of how our earliest churches took forward the first great religious reformation created by the gospel of Christ.

But, like most reformations, the new ideas and beliefs were strongly resisted by those who held to what were the orthodox, conservative or protectionist positions of the day. And so the overriding message of Paul to his community in Thessalonica is 'remain steadfast, keep the faith, your reward is worth the struggle'.

We get an interesting glimpse into the communal mind of that Thessalonian church when we see how Paul deals with a question which had emerged as a result of his teaching. Perhaps Paul had needed to get out of town before he had finished his teaching on this, but the Thessalonians wanted to know the mechanics of how the living and the dead would rise into glory at the Second Coming of Jesus. There seemed to be a fear that those who died before the great event happened would somehow get left behind or overlooked in the process of general resurrection.

Paul addresses this by saying that all the faithful will rise to glory at the Second Coming; but it does make you wonder why this question was uppermost in their minds. The answer seems to be that those early Christian churches believed that the Second Coming was nearly upon them. The teaching that Paul originally shared with them, reinforced by a traditional Jewish view that the coming of the Messiah foreshadowed the end of the world, must have left a powerful conviction that the Second Coming would occur within the lifetimes of some of those who were alive at that time. It does seem that within those first few decades after Jesus's death, there was a real and practical sense that his followers should be preparing for the Last Judgment.

Today, apart from a few denominations which hold to a theology focused on the end of the world scenario, the priorities of our Christian faith have broadly moved into different areas of life. Most mainstream churches take the good news of Jesus as a message for our time rather than as a precursor to the end of time. And yet that searching for knowledge around what happens when we die, which the Thessalonians wanted an answer to, remains a point of faith in our 21st century churches where we repeatedly seek assurances for ourselves and for others, but can be given no proof.

Resistance to change and dislike of theological challenge still seem to be characteristic of those who hold to particularly orthodox, conservative or protectionist positions in today's faith communities; and we see that demonstrated when the modest reformation which MCC tries to bring about with a new community in a new place is opposed by those who fear such reforms. Not long ago, an MCC Pastor seeking to form an MCC church in Nigeria was forced to flee in fear for his life - he was tipped off just in time to save himself by getting out of the country. There are people here today who ran for their lives, just as Paul did from the Macedonian authorities, because of threats of violence, heavily reinforced and given legitimacy by local religious conviction.

But that community of followers in Thessalonica - that inclusive collection of people from different religious traditions (and none), and from a wide range of social backgrounds, who took hold of the good news of Jesus which Paul delivered to them and remained steadfast in their beliefs - they quietly and persistently survived the opposition, they grew in numbers and in understanding, they laid firm foundations for the future, and they more than repaid their founder's trust in them as a beacon of Christian love to the world: indeed Paul calls them 'children of light' and 'children of the day'.

It's an interesting model for developing a church. Does it sound at all familiar?

Amen.

(Philip Jones)

Sermon - 5th October 2008

Paul's Letter to the Thessalonians

Scripture - 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11