Sunday,
September 6, 2015
Have you ever noticed how much an
issue changes when it involves a personal relationship? This hit me quite drastically many years
ago. I felt pretty confident about my
views on immigration. Then I discovered
that one of my closest friends in the world was at that time in the United
States illegally. He entered with a visa
and then stayed for years after it expired.
All of a sudden this was no longer a question of undocumented workers or
illegal aliens. This was my brother,
Juan[i]. When I discovered his status, did I drop him
as a friend? Was he no longer Juan?
More recently, this sense of
perspective-shifting has come again in the debates swirling around same sex
marriage. I have good friends who are
gay and in relationships. No matter how
one feels about the issue, I still love my friends. I love Morton.[ii] No one outside my family has been my friend
longer than him. When he decided to come
out of the closet, he called me. We
lived in different states at the time, and he felt he had to tell me. It was awkward, no doubt. But, he shared it with me.
I love Morton. I love Juan.
At a certain level, an important level, it is not about homosexuality or
immigration. It is about my
friends. It is about Morton and Juan,
people I love.
This is because God made us to be
relational. Theologians contemplate the 3-in-1 nature of God, the trinity. Many have come to the conclusion that God is
inherently relational. Father-Son-Holy
Spirit exist in an eternal relationship of perfect love and mutuality. This certainly defies our understanding
because we read the New Testament and see each person of the Trinity to be
distinct. Yet we see each is God and not
three separate gods, but each is fully God – the one and only God. Fully understanding this is beyond the
capacity of the human mind.
But even in our limited understanding it
is important to recognize that God is relational. This is as crucial a trait of God any we could
name. We say it is crucial to say God is
transcendent and all-knowing and all-powerful.
I think it is just as necessary to say God is relational. Genesis 1 says God made human beings in God’s
own image. Thus, we are relational. It doesn’t matter if someone is shy and
appreciate solitary time or someone is social butterfly with loads of
friends. We are all made for intimate
relationships.
I am going to do something when I finish
today that I have never had a physician.
We are in the middle of a series in which we talk about a prescription
for living life in Christ; this prescription works for both individuals and
churches. As I conclude today, I will
step out of the metaphor and do something doctors are not expected to do, but
pastors are.
I know many doctors are Christians and
have done this, but in my years of visiting people in hospitals and in my own
doctor’s appointments, I have never had a doctor end his or her time with me by
suggesting we pray together. This morning
we will see in 1st Thessalonians chapter 3 the importance of
relationship. That’s the first
diagnosis. We are made for
relationship. Then we will look as the
second part of the diagnosis. It is a
caution. We need to heed this
warning. After the two diagnoses, I’ll
pray.
Relationships: simply hear the words of
Paul in 1 Thessalonians 3.
When I could bear it no longer, I sent to find
out about your faith; I was afraid that somehow the tempter had tempted you and
that our labor had been in vain.
Timothy has just now come to us from you, and has
brought us the good news of your faith and love. He has told us also that you
always remember us kindly and long to see us—just as we long to see you.
How can we thank God
enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of
you? 10 Night and
day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore
whatever is lacking in your faith.
Paul’s deep love for the people who make up the churches he has
planted is expressed in vivid color in the letters he writes. This is especially evident in 1st
Thessalonians. Chapter 3 begin with Paul
making the decision to part with Timothy.
Paul would remain, alone, in Athens.
He felt orphaned by the loneliness but he did it because he wanted
Timothy to travel to Thessalonica so he could find out about how the church was
doing. When Timothy came back to Athens
with a good report, Paul was thrilled.
He says in verse 6 that Timothy delivered good news. The word he uses is derived from the same
root as the word Gospel. Gospel means
good news. When Paul heard that the
Thessalonians were doing well in the faith and were concerned about him, he
felt that was Gospel truth: good news! More
than anything, the relationships were what mattered to Paul.
Church is meant to be a place of relationships. I often to refer to us as brothers and
sisters in Christ. In some churches they
actually call each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister.’ I have never developed that habit. It just feels weird to me to speak that
way. But even though I have not adopted
the lingo, that is how I feel. We are
family – an eternal family linked by love.
I know that in church someone will do something you don’t
like. He may do many things you don’t
like. Her personality may grate on
you. You see her walk in the room and
you cringe and inch toward the door.
What I am proposing here is that in spite the imperfections and it has
plenty, and in spite of the flawed people who make up the church and we are all
flawed, we are each called to fully invest our hearts in the family. I don’t see any New Testament model of
someone attending church in a casual, non-committed kind of way. There are no nominal Christians. And Christianity is not a solitary
venture.
Paul felt the deepest of connections with the Thessalonian
church. We are called to enter this
church family in the same way. And if
this is your first time among us or you have been visiting recently, I want you
to know what we’re all about. You don’t
have to conform to some image or expectation to be among us. We invite you in as you are with the hope
that you will join your heart with ours.
We will worship God together. We
will confess our sins together. We will
celebrate one another’s baptisms together.
We will grieve together. We will
eat the bread and the take cup together.
The only way we know how to do church is with God as a Father and us as
one another’s brothers and sisters.
This deep feeling of connection is why Paul was nearly
paralyzed with worry for the Thessalonians and with grief at being separated
from them. Simply put, he loved
them. So when he heard from Timothy that
they were thriving as disciples, nothing could make him happier. That’s how much we belong to each other.
The second part of the diagnosis this morning comes in the
form of a warning. We’ve been told that
God is relational and for us to live as God intended we must see relationships
as our top priority. Our church must be
built on the relationships that are fueled by self-giving, agape love. There is a threat and Paul names it in verse
5. “I was afraid that somehow the
tempter had tempted you and that our labor had been in vain.”
In the previous chapter Paul said Satan was who prevented him
from coming to the Thessalonians (2:18).
We know that it was a combination of political and religious
opposition. We could point to human
causes. But we also know from Paul’s
letters, especially Ephesians 6, that underneath any human opposition to the
success of the Gospel, Paul saw the workings of demons and the fallen angel,
the evil who opposes God at every turn.
In 1st Thessalonians 2 he is Satan. In chapter 3, this enemy is called the
tempter. In 2nd Thessalonians
2, he is the power that drives the “Lawless One.”
Paul fears that the Tempter would uses human forces to
undermine the worship and community in the Thessalonian church to the point
that the church would dissolve. For
Paul, no death would hurt any more than this.
Nothing could be worse. Upon
hearing Timothy’s good report, he says in verse 8, ‘we now live, if you continue to stand firm in the Lord.’
Seventeen
years ago, I was in church that was renting space to another congregation. That congregation was made of Roma Christians
– gypsies. There was a bit of a conflict
that the Gypsies were having with other Gypsies in the area. Threats of violence were made. The leaders in the English congregation, the
group that owned the building and thus had the power felt it would be prudent
to avoid getting in the middle of this.
They wanted to avoid any trouble for themselves. So they told the Gypsies who were worshipping
in their building they had to leave.
It felt
like a death. As the pastor, I had to
tell the Gypsy pastor they had to go. I
felt like the knife was in my hands and dripping red. The look on his face – I can still see it and
still feel convicted by it. Why was it
so easy for those Christians in the English-speaking church so easily shove
another community of believers out the door and into the street? They could do it because they didn’t feel any
sense of relationship. It was all about
the security of the building for them.
The Gypsies were ‘that church,’ not ‘our church.’ The people were ‘them,’ not ‘us.’
As I
reflect this event that has haunted me all these years, I think my reading of 1st
Thessalonians 3 puts it in fresh light.
The English-speaking Christians, people I still deeply love, did not
connect relationally with the Gypsies, people I also love. That sense of belonging to one another so
evident in Paul’s words in Thessalonians was not there.
The tempter
stepped into that relationship void. The
devil used fear – a perceived threat, not even a real one. That fear was enough to get the Gypsies
kicked out. For their part, the Gypsies
had up to that point found it very hard to find a church that would welcome
them. In their discouragement, the
people of the church went their separate ways.
The devil used fear with one congregation and discouragement with
another to kill one church and neuter the other. It never could have happened if the two
congregations joined with one another the heart level. If they felt that they belonged to one
another, they would have stood together in faith and faced any threat that came
along.
When Paul says he’s afraid the tempter
would render his work to be done vain and would do so by killing the church, he
means it. I have witnessed first-hand
this happen in real life.
So then is the moral of the story that
we all need to love one another with great intensity and invest our hearts
fully here at HillSong? Yes! That’s it.
But then, if you have been here any
length of time, you know we are already doing that. In the past 12 months, the work of the Lord
in this place has expanded greatly as now on Sunday afternoons a
Spanish-speaking church meets under Pastor Lucio’s leadership. Also on Sunday afternoons, a Karen-speaking
church meets in here under Pastor Kerpaw Htee’s leadership. And we each belong to each other.
In a sense, what I am doing in holding
us up alongside the Thessalonian church and Paul’s letter to them is I am
urging us to continue as we are.
Continue being a community of love and welcome that takes full family
ownership of each other’s hearts. Grow
in love as an expression of the Gospel and as a guard against the enemy’s evil
designs. Keep on as you are. And you who are new among us, find out what
this community is all about.
With that in mind, I close with that
prayer I mentioned earlier.
May our God and Father himself and our Lord help us increase
and abound in love for one another and for all.
May the Lord
so strengthen our hearts in holiness that we may be blameless before our God
and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.
AMEN
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