Paul wrote:
It is indeed just of God to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to give relief to the afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 2 Thessalonians 1:6-8 – May 9, 2012)
OK. I know that scholarship is sort of settled that Paul really didn’t write the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, but regardless of who actually authored it, here it is in the canon of Holy Scripture, and we are bidden to read it and deal with it. I love the apocalyptic image of Jesus and “his mighty angels” swooping down through the skies “in flaming fire.” This is the stuff of good science fiction movie special effects! It’s that next bit, “inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God”, that gives me pause. Reading from the initial greeting in Verse 1, it seems incredible that the author (whether or not Paul) goes so far afield so quickly, from gratitude (“We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters,” v. 3) to the depths of tribulation, punishment, and exclusion from God introduced in these verses. Is the author’s gratitude enhanced with a little anticipatory schadenfreude? Is the flip side of gratitude hostility? ~ When the introductory verses of Second Thessalonians are used in the Eucharistic Lectionary (Proper 26C), verses 5 through 10 are excluded; all we get is the author’s gratitude. But here in the Daily Office Lectionary we must confront the vitriol of these verses. If nothing else, this brief excursus into what is clearly an outpouring of anger against those who persecute the church reveals the “humanness” of Christian scripture. These are not the words of God; these are the words of a human being giving vent to human emotion, to genuine frustration. These words, it seems to me, are written by someone in a community under pressure. These are the words of someone surviving oppression and maltreatment left with little ability even to think of loving their enemies. It may be the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that has led the author to express his anger, but the anger is his, not God’s. Encountering these verses, we are confronted by ourselves. Coming to grips with this letter, we come to grips with our own hostility or anger towards those we perceive as different, as “the enemy”. ~ When Paul wrote to Timothy that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” (1 Tim. 3:16) he, of course, was referring to the Hebrew Scriptures, not to his own letters. However, I believe what he wrote is as true for the church’s received canon of Christian scripture as for the so-called “Old Testament” in this way – there are times when what is written provides us an example of what not to do! The writer of Second Thessalonians was righteously angry and intended to comfort his readers by expressing that righteous indignation. This letter teaches us to be careful about what we write in anger; it may be preserved and hundreds or thousands of years later crazy people may use it as the basis of religious doctrine! In other words, don’t shoot your mouth off carelessly, especially on paper!
There’s a church camp song based on the sentiment of this bit of scripture: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice!” (The lyric is actually a quotation from Philippians 4:4, but Paul repeats the sentiment here.) A group of campers (or, where I learned it, a bunch of Cursillo candidates or a Sunday morning congregation) can really get going just singing “Rejoice! Rejoice!” over and over again. Praise choruses like that can get the Spirit moving among a group of singers. I always have to remember the admonition Paul adds here, “Do not quench the Spirit” because (truth be told) I don’t really like praise choruses. A friend of mine refers to them as “7/11 songs” – the same seven words sung eleven times. . . . Praise choruses are formulaic; both musically and theologically they are generally mediocre, run-of-the-mill, and unremarkable. ~ This ending of the First Letter to the Thessalonians is also formulaic. Paul ends with his standard “Good-bye” filled with admonitions to do good. Compare this to the end of the Letter to the Romans, for example: in Romans 12:9-18 we find Paul saying very much the same thing in very nearly identical words. Several years ago a biblical scholar referred to these endings as Paul’s “shotgun paraenesis” (that fancy Greek word means “moral admonition”): he writes a letter, begins with a formulaic greeting (usually “We give thanks for you. . .”, deals with the issue at hand, then ends by pulling out his musket and blasting the reader with a lot of “do goods”. ~ I once served under a bishop whose standard blessing included a pared-down version of the end of the Letter to the Romans. The first few times I heard it, I thought it was great. But after a while, I stopped paying attention. That’s the thing with formulaic praise choruses, formulaic novels, formulaic blessings, and formulaic admonitions. After a while, we stop paying attention. The Spirit may be moving, but we’re not really in tune with why that is. ~ But here’s another thing with formulas. . . They are formulas because they work! There’s a reason we use the word to describe medicines, baby’s food, and the established forms used in religious ceremonies and legal proceedings; they work! We just need to pay attention to them. ~ So . . . advice for the day: Let down your guard and let Paul’s shotgun formula hit you right between the eyes! Rejoice always! Do not quench the Spirit! Hold fast to what is good! Abstain from evil!
Today’s Daily Office gospel is the Matthean version of what has come to be known as “the Lord’s Prayer.” (I remember someone years ago suggesting that it would better be called “the Disciple’s Prayer” since it is not a prayer actually said by Jesus, but rather one he instructs his disciples to say. Good point, but probably a losing argument.) Anglican prayer books, of course, lift the word trespass out of Jesus’ subsequent commentary in verses 14-15 and substitute it for the debt language in the prayer itself. The “trespass” version is the one I learned during a Methodist childhood and then found in the Episcopal Church when I made that move in high school. Thus, the “debt” version is always jarring on my ears; it makes God sound like some sort of cosmic bookkeeper! These days, I prefer the modern translation that petition, “Forgive us our sins” because, after all, that is what we’re talking about! ~ I also prefer the language here in the penultimate petition, “Do not bring us to the time of trial.” The traditional liturgical version, and even the modernized version in the American BCP, render this as “Do not lead us into temptation” which is similar to the King James translation of Scripture. It’s always struck me as a particularly poor translation theologically. I can make sense of a God who might impose a trial at some time . . . a God who would “lead us into temptation” sounds like a trickster to me. I’m not into Loki or Coyote worship, personally. I’m glad for the modern translation, although it was rejected by the liturgists who put together the most current American BCP. ~ Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the Lord’s Prayer all day because of this reading. I say it every day, of course, as part of the Daily Office, so I should think about it more, but I don’t. I just say it. Like some mantra of meaningless nonsense syllables meant to put one into a trance-like state. For all the thought I usually put into it, I could be reciting a laundry ticket or a shopping list. Prayer shouldn’t be like that. It should be intentional; it should be thoughtful and well-considered. I must work on that. Otherwise, God might as well be a trickster or a bookkeeper . . . or both. Would that mean that God is a supernatural embezzler? Or . . . not praying thoughtfully, is that what I am?
To be honest, I am not “encouraged” by these words; I’m confused as hell! What is Paul talking about? What was he smoking? I mean, c’mon! Archangels descending, God playing a trumpet, the dead rising, the living floating in the clouds, everyone meeting the Lord in the air! What is this? Is this the “Rapture”? ~ Well, no . . . what this is is Paul’s apocalytic vision of something called a “Hellenistic parousia“. What Paul is talking about here is comfort, comfort for relatively new Christians in the city of Thessalonika who expected Jesus to return almost immediately but who, instead, had experienced the death of loved ones and now were worried whether their loved ones would share in the expected victory of Christ over the world. They and Paul would have experienced the arrival of, if not kings or heads of state, at least very high and important government figures to their town or another. Their arrival was a “parousia” (and word meaning “presence”). In the First Century Greek-speaking or “Hellenistic” world, when such personages arrived it was the tradition that the people would go out to greet them and escort them into the city. In this vision that Paul describes, the members of the church, both the dead and the living, will great Christ on his return and escort him into their reality. Since Jesus had been observed “ascending” into the heavens (Luke 24:51), it must be that he will return from the sky and, therefore, his followers will “meet the Lord in the air.” This isn’t about Christians being snatched away from some “tribulation” which will then follow; it’s about Christians meeting Jesus as he returns to comfort them and begin his long reign. As a comfort to those who had lost loved ones, Paul assures them that their beloved departed will be among the first to welcome the Lord’s return. ~ It’s still pretty fantastic, though, isn’t it? Blaring trumpets, angels, rising dead, and a descending god . . . that’s pretty amazing stuff! And that’s the nature of apocalyptic. It speaks to its reader in the here-and-now with fantastic visions of an imagined future, but it’s purpose is to address the present. The Rapture nonsense, which treats it as some sort of oracle or “prophecy” laying out a timetable for the end of the world, is just that – nonsense. The message for us in the 21st Century is the same as it was to the Thessalonians in the First Century, not a message predicting the end of the world, but a message of comfort and hope. Comfort that our departed loved ones have not “lost out” on the coming fulfillment of God’s reign, and a very present hope that we will be (as the Book of Common Prayer puts) “reunited with those who have gone before.” So I guess, after all, I am encouraged by these words!
I hadn’t really planned to do a sermon series about my childhood summers spent with Edgar and Edna Funston, but these “I am” statements of Jesus from the Fourth Gospel keep taking me back there, so once again . . . a story from Winfield, Kansas, fifty years ago.
I’ve been fascinated by the Shekhinah, which is what the cloud and fire described here are all about, for years. The Hebrew word which names the pillar of fire and cloud which accompanied the escaped slaves on their trek across the Sinai desert means “the Presence”, i.e., the presence of God. Whether the Shekhinah is separate from God has been a matter of some debate in Judaism for centuries. Moses Maimonides, also known as Rambam, the 12th Century Egyptian Jewish philosopher, believed the Shekhinah is a distinct entity, a light created to be an intermediary between God and the world. In the next century, the Spanish Rabbi Nahmanides, known as Ramban, disagreed; he considered the Shekhinah to be the essence of God manifested in distinct form. ~ The Shekhinah was believed to be present in the First Temple, but not the Second. In the absence of a Temple, later rabbis have suggested that the Shekhinah appears in a variety of circumstances: when two or three study the Torah together, when a minyan (ten men) pray, when the mysticism of the Merkabah (the divine chariot) is explained, when the Law is studied at night, and when the Shema is recited. God’s Presence is said to be attracted to prayer, to hospitality, to acts of benevolence, to chastity, and to peace and faithfulness in married life. ~ The idea that the Shekhinah is present when two or three study Scripture reminds me of Jesus’ promise: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20) The Daily Office, both Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, ends with a collect said to have been written by St. John Chrysostom which recalls this promise: “You have promised through your well-beloved Son that when two or three are gathered together in his Name you will be in the midst of them.” ~ The Book of Exodus makes it very clear that the People of God were terrified of the Shekhinah. They would not go near it; only Moses could do so and, as this bit demonstrates, even he could not approach sometimes. Smart people, those ancient Hebrews! They understood the Power they were dealing with. Not so, us modern folks. Christian writer Annie Dillard, in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk (Harper & Row 1982), makes this point in an oft-quote observation: “Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” ~ We are, indeed, children playing with dynamite – or maybe even playing with a nuclear bomb! Thank Heaven our God is a playful god. I do not believe God will awaken and take offense, but I do believe God wants us to move beyond games, to stop simply playing with the power his Presence provides, and to start using that power for good!
The notes in my bible say that this is alternatively rendered as “. . . anything more than this comes from evil.” The King James Version follows that reasoning: “Let your communication be , Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” In any event, the plea of Jesus here is for clarity in communication, for plain, simple, easily understood communication. ~ The Letter of James picks up this same thought: “Above all, my beloved, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your ‘Yes’ be yes and your ‘No’ be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.” (James 5:12) Again, a plea for clear communication, an admonition to eschew obfuscation, a command from Holy Scripture to avoid prevarication. ~ In this political season (when, in modern society, isn’t it a political season?) we are bombarded by messages, speeches, advertisements, editorials, robo-calls, and news commentaries, none of which seem to have gotten this message! Today’s 24-hour news cycle and with the ease with which technology allows words and pictures to be manipulated seems to encourage folks to say and publish anything and everything but a “yes” which is truly “yes” or a “no” which is really “no”. ~ We’ve all heard the post-modern excuse for not believing anything: “That may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” I don’t buy it. Maybe I’m not post-modern enough, but I really do believe there is a capital-T Truth that is true for everyone. We may not all recognize it; we may all be so seeped in a culture in which “yes” is not always “yes” and “no” is not always “no”, but that does not mean that there is no capital-Y Yes in the universe! There is. I’m convinced that there is! ~ Alfred North Whitehead, on whose philosophy process theology is based, once remarked, “There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.” While I find process philosophy and process theology very instructive, I respectfully disagree with Mr. Whitehead: I believe there are whole truths, at least one – God. ~ If one believes that, as I do, one should do as Jesus instructed; stick with “yes” that is truly “yes” and “no” that is truly “no”, and make sure one’s communication is as clear and direct as possible.
This psalm is not the only time Holy Scripture reports God’s displeasure with the sacrifice of animals. Consider these words from the first chapter of the Book of Isaiah, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation – I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.” (Isa. 1:11-13) Despite all of the ritual directions found in the Law and in the Histories (see, e.g., Exodus 29, Leviticus 1, Numbers 7, and 1 Kings 18), the Psalmist, the first Isaiah, and especially the Prophet Micah make it very clear that sacrificing innocent animals is not what Judaism (or religion in general) is all about. Micah writes, “‘With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8) It may be that doing justice, loving kindness, and walking with God may (and often does) require one to give up one’s possessions, one’s livelihood, even one’s life. But such “sacrifice” without the demanded ethical basis, sacrifice done only to curry favor with God, is not what God asks or wants. ~ It is from this ethical stream in ancient Judaism that Christianity flows. It is unfortunate that early Christian writers looked back to the sacrificial practices of the Temple to find an analog to crucifixion of Jesus; we might have seen the Christian religion develop differently if, like the writers of the Gospels, they had looked more to the prophets. Jesus certainly did: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40) ~ So spare that bull! Sacrifices of animals (or their modern analogs, whatever they may be) are not the sacrifices that demonstrate love of God and love of neighbor. Rather, the core of ethical religion is as the writer of the Letter to Hebrews said: “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” (Heb. 13:16)
A NYC Taxi driver wrote:
This is one of those biblical tales that I just love and wish the English would tell correctly. The Hebrew ‘achowr would better be translated “hindquarters”, “rear”, or “rear parts”, or even as “butt” . . . “Back” is just so bland! God is being a little earthier with Moses than that, and in that earthiness I find a counterpoint to the grandeur of this story. ~ This is a “grand” story, a big story, the story of God “choosing” and adopting as his own a whole people, the story of God giving the Law, the story of God continuing the motion, the arc, the trajectory of the whole sweep of Jewish and Christian history. This is a big story! And in the midst of it, here is this same God rather jokingly, perhaps teasingly saying, “You can’t see my face, but you can see my backside.” ~ One of the traditional depictions of the face of God has been that of a bearded old man (think of God talking to King Arthur from the clouds in 
