We Haven’t Forgotten You!

I invite you to pretend that you are God for a moment.  I am sure you will love that!  Then, as you are God, you have a challenge before you.  Let’s do some blue sky thinking.  The challenge before you is this:  you have sent your son, Jesus Christ, into the world that through his life and his ministry to his death and his resurrection, you have shown the world your love and your forgiveness and your redemption.  But now, you are faced with this challenge: How do you get the message of what you have done out to the world?  What method, what strategy will you use?

So, you are thinking to yourself, “How do I reach the world with this wonderful gift?”  Maybe you would start with just a few people who know your son, who could speak about him passionately, and tell the stories of his life.  You could add on some others who had also an encounter with your son that causes them to commit their lives to sharing what they have seen with the rest of the world.

You also know that selecting a handful of people and calling them, disciples or apostles, isn’t enough.  You need something else.  You need them to be able to enter the marketplace, to get into the homes of the nation, to minister to the people in society as a whole, so they create a community that is based on what and who your son is. We call them Christians.
 
We give them a fancy Greek name to describe how they get along, Ecclesia, meaning, a fellowship, a group of people who share the common values of the leaders who have known and who have seen Jesus.  You not only create them, but you decide to give them some kind of power, you want to give them some energy, you want to give them a dynamism to be able to do what they do, so you give them your spirit.  As God, you say to this group of people, “Go into the world and let people know about what I have done” and you call that group of people “a church.”

If you followed that model, and if you think that is the way to go, then you have thought like God did, certainly in the first century, for there is no question that is exactly how the Christian Church emerged.  But then you have to think strategically beyond that:  Where is the best place for your church to be?  You would look around the world and you would see that it is in the cities, that it is in the big cities where people are gathering and where there is commercial movement and intellectual thought and energy and governance and power, and you think, “My church should really be engaged in these communities!”
 
You start out with the one that you know, which is Jerusalem, but you know you just can’t stay in Jerusalem, you want to go to the whole world, and you want this church to have an effect of sharing your son beyond the boundaries of Jerusalem, so where do you go in the first century?  You go to Thessalonica!  This is the wonderful place that we heard about in our Scripture reading this morning.  This is the place where Paul wrote his first letter; the congregation that had its first great impact.  And, as today’s passage from the Book of Thessalonians, the first and the oldest of all the books that Paul wrote, he makes some fascinating comments.
 
Why Thessalonica?  This is because Thessalonica was the biggest city in Macedonia.  It was named after the sister of Alexander the Great in the 300s, and from that moment on it had grown into a city of around 200,000 by the time the Apostle Paul was writing to them.  It was at the gateway, at the crossroads of many great roads of the time.  The Ignatian Way, which went from Italy eastwards through Europe and Asia Minor was going through Thessalonica.  The other great Roman road at the time went from the Danube to the Aegean, and again, went through Thessalonica.  

Thessalonica was the crossroad, a center of commerce and activity, but it was more than that, it was also a place the Romans loved.  They loved Thessalonica because in the civil war fifty years or so before Christ, Thessalonica had been on the right side:  it had been on the side of the Romans, who won the war.  Therefore, they were given the status of being a free city.  Although they had to pay homage to Rome, they had the right to make their own decisions, to govern themselves, to set up their own businesses, to make contracts between Europe and Asia Minor. Thessalonica had become a mightily important city.  With Rome saying it was so good, it was also a city that had loyalty to Rome and loyalty to the Emperor, and that loyalty meant more than anything else.

It was also a very unusual place spiritually.  Thessalonica was not only the meeting place of commerce and traffic; it was the meeting place of different religions.  For example, there was a god that was very popular in Thessalonica called Cabirus, and he was the god that had been created to care for the poor.  Myths and legends built up around Cabirus, Cabirus did different things and took on different powers, but then something very interesting happened.  Cabirus, it was believed, became incarnate in Augustus Octavia, the Emperor of Rome.
 
This cult that had developed as a Greek cult ends up becoming part of the Roman power base.  The same thing happened to Dionysius, to Isis, and other gods that were very popular in Thessalonica.   Thessalonica was a religious city, with many cults and many gods, but all of them seemed ironically to be in support of the Roman Empire and the Roman government.  They had become part of the culture of Roman rule.
 
Enter the Christians.  Enter the Apostle Paul.  Enter the Christian Church.  They see this empire and all of a sudden there is a conflict because the Christians worshipped Jesus of Nazareth, and he was not a God that was easily co-opted into Roman rule and power.  They created a community that worked with the poor, a community that was shown to be full of grace, a community that was supportive of people in need, but they did it not for political gain or to get the eye of the Romans. They did it simply because they were a fellowship to Christ.

The Roman idea of one family with all these different gods under the headship of the emperor of Rome found this new community that saw itself under the headship of Jesus Christ to be a threat.  No sooner had the Christians established the Church in Thessalonica than they were suffering from persecution.  Paul was writing to them because he knew that this group of people he had helped create were going to face even more of it.  He calls it “the wrath that is to come.”  He knows that there are going to be bad things happening to them, and he tries to write a word of encouragement to them.
This brings me to today.  If this is God’s way of dealing with the world, if God desires to create the Church for the sake of bearing witness to what it believes, then where are the most important places for the Church to be active and vibrant but in the cities.  When you look at our own nation of Canada for example, 81 per cent of our population live in urban centers – 81 per cent!  In the world, it is only 54 per cent, according to the United Nations, although that is increasing dramatically by 2-3 per cent a year in fact, particularly in Africa and in Asia.  There is tremendous growth in urbanization.  

Cities are becoming more and more important, not only as commercial centers, intellectual centers, places of the arts and places of governance, they are taking on what Thessalonica had:  they are becoming almost free cities, cities that govern themselves, and their government is an important part of the life of the church. Think of Toronto.  What is the nature of our Toronto government when you look in terms of the pecking order of the budgets of all the governments in Canada, what are we?  Number five in the whole of the country!  We are not even a province; we are a city, but the budget is great!  Cities matter.  Whether you are talking about Los Angeles, Mexico City, Beijing, or whether you are talking about the emerging great cities in Africa, like Accra.  There is tremendous growth taking place.  Cities are important places.  
And if cities are important places for the way people act and live and interact with one another, then it seems to me that if we are going to take our faith seriously, churches have to be an important part of the life of the city.  The reason I say that is because I look at how the Apostle Paul approached Thessalonica.  He used three words over and over again to describe what the Church should be like in the city.  It should be, and you heard this so many times that you know it by rote, but “faith, love and hope.”  You probably said this and read this at your wedding.  You probably said this and read this at someone’s funeral.  You know “faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love” from 1 Corinthians I3.  But “faith” “love” and “hope” are terms that Paul uses interchangeably throughout his letters, and they are always important.
 
Writing to the Thessalonians, he says, “I want you to celebrate and to acknowledge that you have great faith” and it is this faith that he says is being recognized everywhere. Maybe Paul is exercising a little bit of hyperbole here, maybe he is getting carried away, maybe not:  “Everybody is recognizing their faith” but one thing he knew for sure, the powers of Rome in Thessalonica were aware that the Christian Church was there.  They could see the faith in the people, as Paul says, by their good works, by the things that they did, and they did them on the basis of the faith they had.  The Christian citizens of Thessalonica wanted it to be a better place.  They didn’t just want it to be captured with commercialism, or to be a city that only promoted Roman rule.  They didn’t want it just to be a place where there were pagan gods, or a place of hardcore business.  They wanted it to be something more.  They wanted it to know what God has done, and how God is reaching out to them.

I love what the late Peter Gomes, who I used to go and hear at the Harvard Memorial Church, once said, “You know, we are in our world are only interested in the good life; but rather we should be interested in the life that is good.”  He was arguing that it is not just the good life or the so called perfect faith, wealth, prestigious, beautiful life that matters, but rather it is the life that is good, compassionate, caring, that reaches out to the world and sacrifices itself for the world.  That might not be in everyone’s definition of “the good life” but it is the definition of the “life that is good.”

Paul, in writing to the Thessalonians is saying, “Your faith is known to everyone and because of this, they are watching everything you are doing. When they see the good, they look at Jesus in an entirely different way.”  All that Thessalonian Church had was the Gospel and faith, nothing else. No power, no prestige, no chapels, no chancels, and no cathedrals, just faith!  As a group of people who shared their faith, they had an effect on the city.  

Why?  It was because they also had love.  Paul says, “It is because of your love that you have produced good things.”  And because these people felt that they were loved by God and that God loved them, they then ipso facto poured out their love on the city.  When often the gods had sacrifices to them in order to appease those gods and Roman powers, the Christians sacrificed themselves for the sake of the love of others.  You look at that Thessalonian Church, and you see the compassion they had for the world that they were in.

I read a wonderful story not long ago about a young woman who went into a fabric.  When she went in, she asked the manager if she could have some cloth that made the most noise possible:  something wrinkly, something that when it rubbed would make a loud noise.  She looked at different cloths and she found one – it was wide, it was wrinkly, it was shiny, and it made a lot of noise every time she moved in it.  The manager was absolutely befuddled by this, and said, “Why do you want a noisy piece of cloth?”

“Well, I’m a bride, and I am using this for my wedding dress.  You see, my fiancé is blind and when I come down the aisle I want him to hear me.  When I get to the front, I want him to know that I have arrived.  Then he will be at peace and love will be fulfilled and the service will begin.”

The manager simply said, “Beautiful!”

When I look at the church like that bride, maybe making some noise, being “the bride of Christ’ to use a biblical image, coming into a world and into a city making noise in order that the city knows there is love –  there is the love of God.  I want to say this right from my heart, because I think in our city right now there are many, many, many people who in their daily lives need to know that there is a God who loves them, that they are not alone, that the city does not exist alone, that they are not isolated individuals in a great big city, but they are actually loved.  If the purpose of the church is not to say to the city they are loved by God, then I don’t know what the purpose of the church is!  

If Christians are truly empowered by the Spirit, they will not be complacent about this; they will understand that this is something that has to come, but it comes from the Church.  It comes from those who have bound themselves to Christ and are willing to share that love in the world.  I am not sure that our city sees the church that way.  I am not sure that the people sitting on the outside looking in see it that way.  But we have to get like that Thessalonian church!  That is how the Gospel that we preach has got to be seen and heard.  
 
It is also one of hope.  Those Thessalonians suffered just like the Christian in northern Iraq are suffering today.  They know what it is like to keep your faith.  They know what it is like to keep it in the faith of an empire that has its own gods, and they know that holding on to that is the most important thing.  Paul said, “You have turned from your idols and you have turned to the living God.”  The Thessalonians are not alone in this world either in terms of the love and the fellowship that they have for one another or in terms of the love they have from God.
 
The difference between the gods the Roman Empire worshipped that were set up to adore the Emperor, and the God of our Lord, Jesus Christ, is that the God of our Lord, Jesus Christ, is the living God.  That is the great point that Paul wants to make.  It is based on the Resurrection, it is based on the life eternal, and it is based on the power and the presence of the living God.  The Church is not alone in the world.  The Church has not to be frightened from engaging the world.  The Church is not intimidated by the world, but rather will send that message of love regardless, and will do it because the love of Jesus Christ makes a difference.
 
That also means that everyone has to turn from their idols.  It means that the idols that we have built up that define “the good life” that say “this is what makes a great city” or “this is what makes a great world” that are based on things that are not congruent with the love of God need to be changed.  For, with the love of God, then even as Paul says, “When the great rough comes, there is hope.”

This morning, I challenge you again, not just to read “First Thessalonians” but be the writers of “First Torontonians”!  When you do that, you think about your role as a citizen:  not only a voter, a citizen!  And when you think about what it is you want say by being a citizen, you realize that the key things you offer are: faith, love and hope. For our city of Toronto needs these things more than anything.  Amen.