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.

A Defiant "Nevertheless!"

If there is one word that continues to dominate public discourse, it is “confidence”. There is this game that the government is playing with the markets and a major part of that game is to do things that will encourage banks to lend money to other banks again. So far the game isn’t working and confidence is sorely lacking in the worldwide economy. Without confidence that money loaned will be repaid, the banks won’t lend money. If the banks won’t lend money, the economy can’t grow. If the economy can’t grow, we all feel the pinch. Confidence is a sort of faith, faith that things will turn out as we think they should, but confidence—and faith—is placed in something or someone. Banks place their confidence in the market—that in the marketplace things will naturally sort out for the benefit of the market. It’s faith in the process; a confidence in the system. The market has become a “power” in the Biblical sense of Paul’s “principalities and powers” and that power is coming under deep suspicion as it seems to be faltering. Paul, in last week’s text, had placed his confidence in himself, viz., in his lineage and his ability to follow Jewish teaching with consistency, integrity, and zeal. The transformation that affects Paul is that in knowing Christ he discovers that his own righteousness is futile compared to Christ’s righteousness and that Christ has offered his own righteousness for Paul. Therefore, Paul is freed from his own efforts and instead can rest in the righteousness of Christ! Paul’s confidence is transferred from himself to Christ. It is this confidence that Paul recommends to the Philippians and to us:

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ [or, the faithfulness of Christ] the righteousness from God based on faith. (Phil 3.7-9)

For Paul, it is not that suffering had ceased, or that hardships were done away with, but rather that he had gained a new way of seeing the world as he saw it in the light of Christ. Instead of seeing life as a challenge to be overcome through hard work and zealous effort at following Torah, he discovered in the faithfulness of Jesus that it was God at work in the world—not himself. Life was not about Paul and what Paul would accomplish, but rather it is about God and what God had accomplished in Jesus. And beyond this, it is about what God is accomplishing in and through people like Paul and us—disciples of Jesus—for the sake of the world. Because of this, Paul was able to place his confidence in God—the only one truly worthy of confidence. What you and I are supposed to see in this is that the turmoil of the markets, the back and forth of election politics, and the uncertainty of many confusing circumstances in our own lives, are put in right perspective by the story of Jesus. For in Jesus God is at work redeeming and reconciling the world to himself. And this touches ground in the particularities of our lives. It offers a critique of our misplaced confidence in the markets. It critiques our misplaced confidence in ourselves. It critiques our misplaced confidence in our political process. It draws our lives into the story of Jesus and only in that story do we truly find hope and peace—and joy.

This week’s text introduces another word that may seem odd at this time: rejoice. Paul calls us to “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice!” [here I'm following Stephen Fowl's commentary on Philippians] The difficulty we usually find in following this exhortation is most likely because we think of joy as an emotional response, a spontaneous emotion that is the result of happy circumstances. But this is not how Paul uses it. Consider Phil 1.18 in which rejoicing is in the context of false motives of preachers, or his own deliverance. In Phil 2.17-18 he writes, “But even if I am being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and the offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you—and in the same way you also must be glad and rejoice with me.” Here we see rejoicing in the context of suffering. In Phil 4.10 we see Paul rejoicing even in the context of his having need—or being content when others would be attentive to their lack.

I know that I find rejoicing hard to do when the bills are piling up, when the prospects for the economy look so bleak and our house continues to sink in value, when the kids throw fits, when I’m not sure where the next job will come from…all of these things make rejoicing hard. What circumstances in your own lives make rejoicing hard? Yet these are just the same or similar circumstances that surround Paul’s exhortation to us to rejoice. So Markus Barth tells us that “Joy in Philippians is a defiant ‘Nevertheless!’ which Paul sets as a full stop against the Philippians’ anxiety.” Joy is what comes when we consider the circumstances we are in and compare them to the goodness of the world seen through the story of Jesus.

Essential to understanding this story is not that by rejoicing and releasing our anxiety then all our problems will go away. It is that the future is in God’s hands. This is what Paul means when he speaks of the Resurrection. To rejoice is to defiantly claim the Resurrection in the face of the economy. To rejoice is to defiantly claim the Resurrection in the face of illness. To rejoice is to defiantly claim the Resurrection in the face of uncertainty, persecution, and suffering. To rejoice is to see the world as the arena in which God is working his salvation.