Recovering the Good News...

Part of a sermon from this afternoon, reflecting on 1 Thess 2.1-8.

In our text this afternoon we learn that what is most important to Paul and his companions is the Gospel. They have endured persecution, they have forsaken the pressures of the world, especially the approval of those from whom most would seek approval, but it is the Gospel that is of utmost importance because it is only the Gospel that brings true meaning and hope to life. Paul and Silvanus and Timothy did not come with flattery or greed because the Gospel is enough—who needs the praises of men in the face of what God has done? Who needs the prestige of multiple degrees in the face of what God has done? Who needs worldly success in the face of what God has done? Who needs to cling to the old ways when the new ways have been demonstrated in Christ, given the stamp of resurrection, and made available to us?

The problem is that we have been duped in the ways of greed. We have become soft to the ways of the world. There is a poem of Wendell Berry’s that gets very close to what I am trying to say this afternoon. It begins with the line “We who prayed and wept for liberty from Kings, and the yoke of liberty, accept the tyranny of things we do not need…” This is the American story. The struggle for freedom from tyranny ends in freedom that has become complacent. Consider the poem:

We who prayed and wept
For liberty from kings
And the yoke of liberty
Accept the tyranny of things
We do not need.
In plentitude too free,
we have become adept
beneath the yoke of greed.

Those who will not learn
In plenty to keep their place
Must learn it by their need
When they have had their way
And the fields spurn their seed.
We have failed Thy grace.
Lord, I flinch and pray,
Send Thy necessity.

The same may be true for the church in America. “In plentitude too free, we have become adept beneath the yoke of greed.” In our prosperity and our freedom we have lost a sense that the Gospel is good news. We don’t understand what it means to give up our idols and, like the Thessalonians, let the word of the Lord sound forth from us. Belief is too easy while our idols are too much a part of who we are for us to recognize them as idols. Instead we spiritualize the Gospel, domesticating it to the comfort of our private selves, filing it away as the correct assent to certain propositions, and fitting it neatly into lives we have learned to live from others for whom the Gospel is only an oddity. Religious freedom may be a blessing, but it carries with it a curse. And in that curse we too easily lose the goodness of the Gospel.

But, thank God for Paul. Thank God for the scriptures. For through them we can come again and again to catch a glimpse of the way the world really is. We can come to be challenged and reminded that Gospel is good news. We can come and be challenged if only to consider how we might have lost the sense that it is good news, and struggle to recover what it would require giving up for it to ring true again. We can be reminded by Jesus’ sermon at the beginning of his ministry that good news is proclaimed to the prisoners, the blind, the lame, the oppressed. We can be reminded that the Gospel is good news for the poor, for the least of these, for the outcast. We can be reminded through the telling and retelling of the story of Israel that without Israel Jesus makes no sense. Without God’s promise to his people, the fulfillment of which came in Jesus of Nazareth, there would be no good news, no salvation, no revelation, no hope. We need to tell the stories, too, of our Mennonite tradition: stories of Menno Simons, a bishop on the run, shepherding little churches all over northern Germany and the Netherlands, not for the sake of Anabaptism, or Mennonites, or the Swiss Brethren, but for the sake of the Gospel. Not for the honor, prestige, and position it offered, but because something in the story of God saving humankind in and through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ—his life, death, resurrection, and ascension—is good news worth risking all to tell. We need to preach this good news to one another, to our families, to our friends, and to our neighbors.

But like Paul and his companions, we need to share ourselves with our neighbors. “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” This is, of course, a proper analogy of the Gospel, because what is the Gospel but God caring so deeply for us that he gave himself for us. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son….If God has given himself for us, we then ought to give ourselves for one another. If it takes a new season of trial and difficulty for us to relearn this, then so be it. If it takes, as Wendell Berry put it, the fields to spurn our seed, then so be it. We may indeed need to “flinch and pray, send Thy necessity.” But we must learn, in plenty or scarcity, in freedom or oppression, the exceeding value of knowing Jesus Christ our Lord so that the church, this church, can continue to proclaim in faithfulness and conviction, the good news that is the Gospel.