Steadfast in…
painting credit: https://jaimebyrd.com/product/solidarity/
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy,To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring.
To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
For the next three weeks, as we work up to Thanksgiving and then Advent, we’ll be reading excerpts from 2 Thessalonians. The scholarly consensus is that 1 Thessalonians was absolutely written by Paul; there really isn’t clear consensus about 2 Thessalonians, however; most believe it was written by someone else as an imitation of Paul (for a number of reasons, I am more convinced by that argument), other scholars believe this was written by Paul shortly after 1 Thess to further encourage, warn, but primarily to correct misconceptions from his first letter. But if we’re adhering to the theory that this wasn’t written by Paul, which, again, I am, then there’s a lot up in the air here. If this wasn’t written by Paul, it’s virtually impossible to date this letter, virtually impossible to try to speculate on what kinds of “persecutions and afflictions” these early Christians were enduring; as we’ll see next week, when the author is talking about the sort of adversary to the movement, it means it’s impossible to know what person or organization he’s talking about—so that makes this epistle kind of a strange one to preach on. It means that in a lot of ways, the best we can do is to take this passage sort of at surface level, and apply it to our modern situation in more broad ways; but that’s not a bad thing, necessarily—but if we’re taking this passage at face value, it seems clear that one of the main themes of this letter will be the importance of solidarity in times of trouble, and maintaining love for each other amidst the persecutions and afflictions the author mentions, whatever they may be.
And you may also notice, similar to last week, and we’ll see it again next week, the lectionary skips a handful of verses here. I won’t read these verses to you verbatim, at the risk of outing myself as a hypocrite—I know I always talk about how I don’t cherry-pick—but this is some seriously rough stuff here. It’s all about eternal destruction of righteous judgement… it’s real eye-for-an-eye stuff. I’ll tell your right off the bat that because I don’t believe this is written by Paul, I can reconcile that this was written by someone with a specific agenda… and it was written by someone who was very angry—someone who was really hurting. Whatever these persecutions and afflictions were, they were obviously rough enough that this author was hoping for some serious comeuppance for the people causing these issues. And while I can’t abide by that, I can understand it. I can empathize with it— maybe we haven’t actively wished harm on someone, but we’ve surely all harbored some ill will towards people at some point in our lives. It’s a part of being flawed, it’s a part of being human.
So I imagine that this group of early Christians had quite a bit going against them… and again, we don’t know exactly what those things were. But—you know, I don’t know if it really matters for our purposes today. Because whatever they were facing was all too different than whatever we might be contending with today, as modern-day Christians. Jesus-followers in those days could be ridiculed for what seemed to outsiders as strange rituals; they could be harassed, they could be facing jailtime for their beliefs, even a death sentence. As much as some American Christians would like to claim victimhood today, it’s just not a reality. In this country, Christianity is the majority religion, and because of the threats and sins of White Christian Nationalism these days, sadly, some Christians have, in fact, become the persecutors and afflicters.
But that doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and rainbows. We actually have quite a bit to contend against. This won’t make us bloodthirsty victims full of righteous anger, but we have plenty reason to want to stick together and for our faith to stay strong as “the love of everyone one of [us] for one another [must increase,]” as it’s written in verse 3, if we want to keep survive and thrive in this ever-changing world.
I just got a book that I’ve been working my way through—and one I think I might incorporate for some kind of Lenten book club, called Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. You know, just some cheerful, light reading, no big deal. Anyway, the author of the book is Christian Smith, a professor and sociologist at Notre Dame, and he wrote this pretty exhaustive book not just about the fact that traditional church numbers are declining and have been for some time—he recognizes that that is a given for anyone even remotely familiar with traditional mainline Christianity in America—his goal in the book is to answer the question of why. And yikes, there are a lot of reasons.
But that’s really the point—that, for the past 50, 60 years or so, there has been a perfect storm of cultural and political events that have come together to create this avalanche of a decline, as he describes it, though he pinpoints to the true beginning of the end to 1991, specifically. We’ve talked about many of the reasons Smith mentions in his book—the hyper-individualistic culture of the country, the breakneck pace of technological advances, religious trauma and abuse; but this book is exhaustive. There are so many well-researched reasons Smith gives, that it was honestly overwhelming. It sent me into a bit of an existential spiral over this past week, if I’m being honest.
And while I do believe this book is important and deeply informative, and I do intend on doing a Lenten book study around it, when I really sat back and thought about it, nothing was especially surprising. As I mentioned earlier, Smith pinpoints the true beginning of the end to 1991, and he calls it the Millennial zeitgeist. Beginning in ‘91, and going through the mid-2000s, there were so many technological advances, so many huge moments in politics and culture (think the 2000 election, 9/11, the Iraq War, the continued rise of the Religious Right, the great recession, the bank bailout)—and all this was happening as social media proliferated; and so it all came together to, to use a word smith uses, “pollute” traditional American religion. Remember, I was born in 1987. You don’t get much more millennial than that. So… I get it. I get why my generation is the one whose culture kind of sped up this process of decline. I understand why I’m in the minority of those around my age who actually see a use and a fulfillment in traditional religion like our own.
And I could get bitter about it. I could, like the author of 2 Thessalonians, go on a bitter and violent rant about how all those who are against us, all those who contributed do this decline will get what’s coming to them. And I can understand why some people would. It’s scary when things start changing that quickly. We want to make sense of it; and one way that people do that, is embracing victimhood and creating this false good vs. bad dichotomy. But I know that, A., that won’t do any good, and B., I understand why so many have lost their faith, so who am I to say they’re wrong and they should be punished?
So today’s scripture passage might actually be a good argument for cherry-picking a little, for skipping over some scripture that doesn’t quite serve us. Because in the situation we’re in now, and by we, I mean the capital-C church, not this church in particular, is one in which we can abide by the exhortations of the sections of scripture Brian read for us today. The author writes to this Christian community, “…your faith is growing abundantly and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing… we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflicitons…”.
In spite of it all, faith grows. In spite of it all, our love for one another also grows. We remain steadfast during, maybe not persecutions or afflections, but during cultural unheavals and tests of faith. It’s the solidarity that the faith community in our scripture passage exemplifies that allows this steadfastness to maintain itself, and that makes them worthy of boasting about.
So how, during this extended season of change, do we make ourselves a community worth boasting about? How, during these years of tumult do we remain steadfast in our faith? And how, during this time of fierce division and hatred, do we continue grow in our love for one another? Yes, there’s this unfortunate section of vengeance in verses 5-10 in 2 Thessalonians. but the ultimate theme of this epistle is that of solidarity, and encouragement to remain in solidarity with one another in spite of what comes our way.
So if this is a community you still believe in, if this is a faith that still brings you peace, if this is an hour every week that grounds you, hold onto that—and build onto that. And if there’s something you’re struggling with, whether it be in terms of faith or something outside of that, know you have this community to rely on, to support you.
Our passage today, the beginning of this letter, mention three that the community of Christians may be praises for—their faith, their love, and their steadfastness. This is very similar to the introduction of 1 Thessalonians, with one, in my mind, big difference—in 1 Thessalonians, Paul praises not their steadfastness, but their “steadfastness of hope.”
I wonder—did the author of 2 Thessalonians lose hope long the way? Is this why his mind is set on vengeance, rather than the love he writes of otherwise in this letter? With this question in mind, I’m going to cheat a little, and combine lessons for our passage today with 1 Thessalonians, which, I think we can say, for lack of a better word, inspired this letter. Sure, we must be steadfast—but steadfast in what? Steadfast in our faith and love, of course, as mentioned in both First and Second Thessalonians; but we must be steadfast in hope as well— steadfast in hope so that we don’t need to rely on fantasies of vengeance to make the world better; and steadfast in hope that we are, indeed, able to be always in solidarity with one another and support each other and those around us in these times of increasing need; and of course, steadfast in the hope that we can surivive and thrive and bring about an earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
