Twenty-fifth Sunday After Pentecost Year A 2008

1 Thess 2:9-13 (NRSV)
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.



Playing Kingdom

One of the things we love most about our newsletter are the missives from the once-fictional Samantha, who reminisces about growing up nearly a century ago in a big family of sisters headed by a loving pastor and his amazing wife. Elaine Miller’s mom is in my book the real hero of her stories, a woman of incredible determination and courage and seemingly bottomless love who, as Paul says in our scripture passage this morning, toiled day and night among her little community of daughters.

Elaine’s family is a magnificent example of what had been the norm for Christian discipleship in Europe and in the newborn United States since the Reformation in the 16th Century. Luther had been the first to describe the Christian household as a little church in which mom and dad, or sometimes grandma and grandpa or the aunts and uncles, were the pastors. Thus churches were comprised in those days by multiple smaller congregations, large family groups led in their Christian development by parents and adult extended family who daily and untiringly trained their children in the study of the bible, the practice of prayer, the discipline of self-examination, reconciliation, generosity to others, and commitment to the community and the world at large.

The church itself was in those days organized around the raising of children and was largely run by the mothers, even though the dads held all the official leadership positions. The churches trusted parents to do the day-to-day training of their children in the basics of Christian life, and pastors simply helped parents to do this.

This model of the Christian family as mini-congregations led by parental pastors somehow fell apart after World War II. It persisted for a while, but by the time the children of the veterans of that war were in college, the family as an institution was in trouble, and the family as a mini-congregation was beginning to fade into history.

In the early church, the emphasis on family was largely impossible. A church suffering persecution does not attract parents to bring their kids and therefore put them in danger.

The church then reached out mainly to adults, and the appeal of the gospel was especially powerful to the poor, including slaves, aliens (people barred from Roman citizenship) and socially disenfranchised groups like women, or Jews who had been ejected from the synagogue. Paul made it easy for such people to be educated and baptized into the church by not requiring, as did many other teachers and priests of the day, that they support him. In order to do this, he had to toil day and night, essentially working two full-time jobs.

At the same time, Paul always maintained that he had the right to demand support, and he always encouraged congregations to support their pastors.

To this day, there are many churches, especially among the poor, in which the pastor is called a “tentmaker,” so-called because Paul’s day job. The pastor in such churches is bi-vocational. Many of us in the church today think that the future of small churches, given the shrinking middle class and the increasing division between rich and poor, may be with pastors who have regular jobs and also serve the church.

But Paul may have a wider intention in this comment. It may be that Paul is speaking also about the question of spiritual practice. Paul had been trained in Judaism, and knew by heart the many laws and ordinances and practices of that religion, rules about purity and prayer and sacrifice and so on. These rules had been in place for very good reasons. They pointed the believer toward a renewed and joyous life under the rule of God. But the way of Jesus went farther and more effectively achieved the goal than had that incredibly complex system of rules and laws. As Jesus said himself, he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. He also said that his yoke was easy and his burden was light.

Paul goes on to mention how pure, blameless and upright he had been among the believers. Paul uses this word “blameless” when he talks elsewhere about his success as a Pharisee, so we may be thinking here about Paul’s moral conduct. We’re not sure. This is one of those one-sided phone conversations. Paul is saying “you know,” and he’s not saying it to us. We don’t know. We weren’t there. But Paul goes on in the next line to talk about being like a father to his children, encouraging, urging and pleading with them to live lives worthy of the God who was calling them into the kingdom. Elsewhere in the letter, Paul speaks about the discipline of mimesis, or imitation, as the proper conduct of a believer. Paul himself is imitating God’s relationship with humankind, the relationship Jesus brought to light by teaching us to pray to our father in heaven. A child imitates his or her parent. Just as God is like a father to us, encouraging, urging and pleading with us to live lives worthy of his kingdom, so those he calls to the ministry of evangelism encourage, urge and plead in the same way and for the same thing.

Paul is talking about his leadership style, his way of being with those he was sent to teach. Paul often uses the metaphor of birth and childrearing to speak about spiritual development. If baptism is new birth, the Christian is then called to a lifetime of growing up. Like a child, the new Christian plays “house,” as it were, imagining creatively what life will be like when he or she grows up into a citizen of the kingdom, and is continually nurtured and encouraged along the way by those who are farther along in the process.

What does this mean now? It means that we live in a culture that is more like St. Paul’s than like Elaine’s childhood, a culture in which the Christian faith is on the fringes and in the spare time category. We can no longer trust families to do the basic Christian training they did in Elaine’s young life. It is possible that we will have to begin with older children or adults more than we have in the past, just as Paul had to do. We may have to start with people who know little or nothing about Jesus Christ or the values of the kingdom of God.

And so as Philippi becomes a larger congregation, some of us will have to become real Christian leaders, and it is leadership that Paul is speaking about to us this morning.

God does not give up on those he calls. Like a father tenderly loving his children, God toils day and night to find some way to communicate his love, no matter how his children run from him, disobey him, turn away from him. He passionately struggles to avoid laying undue burdens on his children, so that nothing will stand in the way of their coming to him.

And so it is with the leaders he calls to carry his message, his ministers, which are all of the members of his church. He entrusts us with the role of mediation, the carrying-out of his caring presence, not just to the lovable and the willing, but especially to the unlovable and unwilling, not just to those who admit the need for help, but especially to those who are desperately trying to run their own lives and want nothing from God at all, not just to the ones we know who are close to home, but even to those far away who are strange and different and even frightening, not just to those who are friendly, but especially to those who are enemies.

The demand on church leadership is far greater, since we cannot depend on families to do the work. This is not to say that what parents teach their children is bad or evil, or that we should turn people against them, but rather that the way of the Messiah Jesus is significantly different than the way of the world. We are therefore called as leaders to do as Elaine’s parents, and especially her mother, did, except we must do it in the context of the congregation and with mostly grown people.

There are three dimensions to this leadership as Paul outlines it today:

First, we must work hard to remove obstacles to faith. Good doctrine is vital to the health of the church, but we must be careful not to reduce that doctrine to complex lists of rules or overcomplicate it into some impossibly deep philosophy. A citizen of the kingdom is radically different from a citizen of the world, but good doctrine helps rather than hinders believers in transforming from one to the other. Leaders must be clear in their own minds exactly what constitutes the difference and be able to communicate it clearly.

Second, leaders must be skilled and authentic imitators of the father in heaven and of his son Jesus Christ. This can be achieved only with disciplined study and practice. It may sound dreary, but if we think of the process as similar to children playing house, we may find that it is in fact a joy. Leaders must spend time imagining creatively what the kingdom of God might look like, how they would act if they were there, and might approach it as a child approaches growing up. The child observes his parents, relates to them frequently and then plays at the skills of being a grown-up. In the context of the church, this equates to observing God in the form of biblical study, relating to God in the form of regular fellowship with others on the path, and playing house by taking action in the form of strategic work in service to God.

Third, leaders must in turn become the embodiment of the father in heaven to those who are new and developing in the Christian faith. This is the goal of Christian discipleship and it is the mission of our congregation. Our church must become a playground for newborn children of God, no matter how old they are.

In the long run, of course, we are all nothing but children. Even those who are leading are still essentially only playing at something that has yet to come to pass. But is this really a bad thing? Or is it not the joy of being Christian?

Amen.