Sermon: Sharing Our Selves

Text: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

Date: October 23, 2005

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

Sometimes when you’re reading the Bible you just really find yourself wishing you knew what was going on! I, for one, would really like the back story on the first letter to the Thessalonians. Paul mentions being shamefully mistreated in Philippi—that back story can found in Acts 16. He and Silas were publicly accused of unlawfully trying to convert Roman citizens to Judaism, and were subsequently stripped and beaten in the marketplace and then thrown in prison. So he’s saying that after that it took some guts to preach in Thessalonica, but they did it anyway.

But there’s other information that is missing. Clearly Paul is on the defensive in this text. Somebody was slandering him. Who was it? What were they saying about him? Were some of the people in the church leaving because they believed the slander? It was hard enough to be a Christian there, a tiny minority of people in a start-up faith in a Roman provincial capital. Hard enough without having the character and motives of the church’s founder being the subject of gossip.

We don’t have the other side of the story, but we get a picture of what people were saying about Paul and his colleagues from what they say they are not. They don’t have impure motives, they are not trying to be tricky, they are not greedily trying to squeeze money out of the folks, they aren’t trying to be popular or gain flattery. The questions he is trying to answer seem to spring from other people wondering about his motives.

Well, I understand that. Our older daughter is living out on her own this year, sharing an apartment with a friend, working part time, and learning about the cost of living. She told me a few weeks ago she and her friend were going to a free vegetarian restaurant they had heard about in Seattle. Mama Bear (that’s me) was immediately suspicious, having been taught that there is no such thing as a free lunch. I quizzed her on who was behind the free restaurant and what they were trying to persuade her to do or be by offering her free food. I respectfully asked her not to become a Hare Krishna no matter how good the food was (though there was no evidence that they were the restaurant’s sponsors).

I automatically assumed there might be impure motives afoot. So I can certainly understand how the parents, neighbors, and friends of the new Christians in Thessalonica would probably have interrogated their loved ones who were joining up with what would have looked to them like a new cult, the cult of Christ. Can’t you imagine them asking a lot of questions: Who was this Paul fellow? Who was this Jesus? Are these people playing on your loneliness, your need for community? Why are they trying to convince you that you are loveable? Are they going to get you on board and then bilk you out of your savings? Is whatever they are selling valuable enough to make you risk persecution by the authorities for getting involved in an illegal religion? Paul didn’t need to have any real impure motives; all he needed to have questions raised was the suspicious relatives and friends of new Christians.

One of the scholarly articles I read about this text suggests that another back story factor that would have put Paul on the defensive was the presence of many philosophers in that region who were out peddling their ideas among the folks. There is plenty of cultural evidence that there were numerous free-lance teachers looking for students, and not all of them had pure motives. Paul had to distinguish himself in his defense from the “competition.” This scholar lists several types of philosophers that Paul is trying to prove he is not.

First, there were some philosophers who never appeared in public at all. They just stayed in their homes and sent out messages with disciples. Paul would have said they are useless, because they would not engage in the struggle of life (as he had).

Second, there were philosophers who were hucksters; they deceived people with flattery instead of speaking with the boldness and frankness of the true philosopher. They went around teaching for their own glory, personal pleasure, and money.

Third, there was a type of philosopher who was difficult to distinguish from rhetoricians. They made speeches that lacked substance, and the people themselves were vain or empty. They were like a physician who, instead of curing his patients, entertains them.

There was a fourth group of philosophers that Paul would have said he was most like. There were serious philosophers who spoke with the boldness of the philosopher who had found true personal freedom. He spoke in this manner out of a desire to benefit people, his “philanthropia”. He adapted his speaking to the people's needs to lead them to virtue and sobriety, partly by persuading and exhorting, partly by abusing and reproaching, also admonishing them in groups every time he found opportunity, with gentle words at times, at others harsh.[1]

I shared this philosophical back story at some length because as I was reading about Paul’s cultural milieu I saw some similarities with ours. We also have an incredible number of philosophies out in the marketplace of ideas competing for people’s attention and loyalty. People in our time face the same dilemmas in terms of trying to sort out which teachings are genuine, which are healing and helpful in the struggle of human existence. People are constantly having to make decisions about the credibility of the message based on a judgment about the credibility of the messenger. That aspect of human culture hasn’t changed much since the early days of Christianity.

Even within a broad category of a philosophy there may be teachers promoting it that have impure motives. Let’s take Christianity as an example. It’s a religion, a faith, and also a philosophy, a way of looking at the world that tries to make sense of our existence. Within the very broad category of Christianity there are some leaders who fall into all four of the categories of philosophers we just reviewed. There are Christian teachers who are sequestered far from the struggles of real life, pretty much out of touch with the daily life of regular people, potentially rendering their teaching useless. An example of this might be an ivory tower theologian writing essays on the Filioque clause[2] in the Nicene Creed, a disputed part of the creed that is still causing trouble between Catholic and Orthodox Christians after more than 1000 years of debate. There are hucksters among Christian teachers, genuine hucksters who are using Christianity to get rich and powerful. The former televangelist who had gold-plated plumbing fixtures and an air-conditioned dog house comes to mind. There are Christians teachers whose version of Christianity seems hollow at the core, designed to entertain rather than heal.

I’m going to veer off on a little side bar here, because I think the lure of making Christianity entertaining in order to compete in the marketplace of ideas is such a vital issue in our time. First let me admit that with some 85% of mainline Protestant churches in decline, it’s hard for someone in my position to say anything that doesn’t just sound like “sour grapes.” I’ll try to avoid that, but of course I may not succeed. I recently read an article from the August 2005 Harper’s magazine that helped me put a finger on my unease about some of what’s unfolding in more popular Christian churches. The author, Bill McKibben, says that he thinks many American Christians are missing the main point of Jesus’ message, which is that we are to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. McKibben makes a case that in churches that are really thriving these days, the leadership focuses not on the need of the neighbor but on you and your individual needs. He cites a New York Times reporter who visited one booming megachurch outside Phoenix and found what is fairly typical at such worship centers: a drive-through latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about “how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt.” On Sundays children played with church distributed X-boxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. The music and use of video technology in such megachurches is professional and…well, fun.

A list of bestsellers compiled monthly by the Christian Booksellers Association confirms the impression that Christianity can be shaped to be all about me. It includes texts like Your Best Life Now, which one critic called “a treatise on how to get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals.” There was Humor for a Woman’s Heart, a collection of writings designed to “lift a life above the stresses and strains of the day”; The Five Love Languages, in which Dr. Gary Chapman helps you figure out if you’re speaking in the same emotional dialect as your significant other; and Karol Ladd’s The Power of a Positive Woman, a five-part plan for creating a life with “more calm, less stress.”

Nothing wrong with that; we could all use help managing stress. It’s just that the focus of most of the Christian bestsellers is so often a simple reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting self-obsession. Jesus’ radical and demanding focus was on others. Love your neighbor as yourself. Further, Jesus made it clear that the neighbor you were supposed to love was the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person, the weak and vulnerable person.

It’s quite a challenge to avoid the siren song of simply making people feel good about themselves in an entertaining, flattering, mild-mannered way that will keep ‘em coming back for more. But it seems to me that much as we want the church to grow, we don’t want to be “like the physician that instead of curing his patients, entertains them.” Part of what is healing about the gospel is the radical call to love that leads us in paths of righteousness, that saves us from the bottomless pit of selfishness and self-obsession.

Paul turns from speaking about what he is not—a flatterer, a greedy trickster, a deceiver, a teacher interested only in pleasing mortals—to what he is: a leader who loves the members of that church community like a nursing mother tenderly caring for her own children. He says he and his partners were determined to share not only the gospel of God but also their very own selves, because the Christians there had become so dear to them.

Paul’s not especially famous for his admiration of women, so it is a sweet surprise to hear him use this very intimate feminine image for himself as a Christian leader. Any mom who has nursed a baby can tell you that it takes a lot of energy and commitment to share your body that way. But it’s not a drag or a drudgery, except once in a while at 3:00 in the bleary-eyed morning. It’s a true labor of love and a joy to be able to nourish this little critter with your own essence. It also feels mysterious, how your body just starts producing food—as I look back on the experience it seems like I “channeled” milk more than I produced it. That’s how it is with God’s love! When you give yourself in love to your neighbor what you give begins to flow from someplace beyond yourself. It’s not a drudgery or a drag to love your neighbor, except once in a while at a long-running bleary-eyed church meeting.

If we really want the gospel to have a place in the marketplace of ideas, what could communicate more clearly than a community pouring itself out in love? Entertainment in church can’t possibly compete with the genuine article of Christians sharing their very selves in love along with sharing the gospel. We do have to give ourselves to that love; it takes energy and commitment. It takes a certain generosity of spirit that may not come naturally. Sometimes we are more reserved in offering love than we could be. We might want someone to please us in some way before we commit to loving them. Paul’s image challenges us not to love grudgingly. After all, you don’t nurse a baby by the clock, saying to a hungry child that you only had 3.7 minutes to feed her and time’s up. You give the baby what she needs. People need love along with the gospel, the kind of love that both accepts them where they are and loves them too much to leave them that way. A cautious little serving of lukewarm and conditional love is not the sort that goes hand in hand with the gospel. The gospel calls us to share our very selves, joyfully and unstintingly.

I can’t resist telling you this story from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom. Rachel met Yitzak at a retreat she was running for people with cancer. Yitzak was a survivor of a concentration camp and was fighting cancer, hoping by attending the retreat that he could defeat his enemy with the power of his mind, the aspect of his being he trusted most profoundly. At these retreats people touched each other more than was Yitzak’s custom. Disconcerted at first, he would ask “Vat is all dis, all dis huggy-huggy? Vat is dis luff the strangers? Vat is dis?” But he let people hug him anyway, and even did a little hugging back.

Late in the one week retreat Yitzak was meditating and had an experience. It seemed to him that through his closed eyelids he could see a deep pinkish light, very beautiful and tender. It was like being inside a big rose. Startled, he realized the light surrounded him and came in some mysterious fashion from his chest. He became frightened. He was aware that the light had a direction, it was pouring out of his chest “like a big hemorrhage.” It seemed to be coming from his heart and it made him feel vulnerable.

Although Yitzak was loving with his family, his concentration camp experience had made him very cautious with respect to his heart. He had felt safe all his life avoiding closeness with strangers but now this vision was stirring things up for him. He was profoundly uncomfortable.

After the last session of the retreat, Dr. Remen, trying to tie up loose ends, asked him how things were. Yitzak laughed. “Better,” he said, and began to tell of a walk he had taken on the beach the day before. In his mind, he had talked to God, asking God what this was all about, and had received comfort. Dr. Remen asked him what God had to say. He laughed again. “Ah, Rachel, I say to Him, ‘God, is it okay to luff strangers?’ And God says, ‘Yitzak, vat is dis strangers? You make strangers, I don’t make strangers.’”[3]

As we share Spirit, selves, souls

With one another,

May God witness

To our witness;

To our hearts intertwined

Pulsing with love.[4]

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[1] http://www.religion.emory.edu/faculty/robbins/SRI/Examples/texts/paul/paul18.html

[2] http://filioque-clause.area51.ipupdater.com/

[3] Remen, Rachel Naomi Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal New York: Riverhead Books, 1996, p. 154-56

[4] Wes Howard Brook, untitled poem in Seasons of the Spirit curriculum