We were one of the
first
Tena
koukou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa
I am
here today to share from 1 Thessalonians Chapter One
From Paul, Silas, and Timothy--- To the people of the church
in Thessalonica, who belong to God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: May
grace and peace be yours. We always thank God for you all and always mention
you in our prayers.
For we remember before our God and Father how you put your
faith into practice, how your love made you work so hard, and how your hope in
our Lord Jesus Christ is firm. Our
friends, we know that God loves you and has chosen you to be his own. For we
brought the Good News to you, not with words only, but also with power and the
Holy Spirit, and with complete conviction of its truth. You know how we lived
when we were with you; it was for your own good. You imitated us and the Lord;
and even though you suffered much, you received the message with the joy that
comes from the Holy Spirit. So you became an example to all believers in
Macedonia and Achaia. For not only did the message about the Lord go out from
you throughout Macedonia and Achaia, but the news about your faith in God has
gone everywhere.
There is nothing, then, that we need to say. All those people
speak about how you received us when we visited you, and how you turned away
from idols to God, to serve the true and living God and to wait for his Son to
come from heaven---his Son Jesus, whom he raised from death and who rescues us
from God's anger that is coming.
I
want to take you back in time. To the beginning of the spread of the Gospel
throughout the Greco-Roman world and the mission of Paul. I want to take you
back to my day and my church. You see, I come to you today as a representative
of the church of Thessalonica. I come to you as one of the women of the
aristocracy who came to know Christ when Paul and Silas visited our gathering close
to twenty years after the sacrifice of Christ. I would like to tell you about
the letter he wrote to us and how much it meant to us. You see, it was one of
his first letters. Ok, it is possible that the Galatians got their letter a
little earlier. Time has since buried the winner of this competition, but both
us here at Thessalonica and our brothers in Galatia agree upon two things – we
were the first to receive letters from Paul and, while the Galatians received a
telling-off, we received ultimate encouragement. So, what about us – the people
of Thessalonica?
Well,
you might think that Wellington is a rich commercial city, but you haven’t seen
anything like the richness of my city Thessalonica. We were, and still are, a
thriving commercial city on the shores of the Aegean Sea. Since 146 BC, Thessalonica
was the Roman Capital of Macedonia. As a key port in the Roman Empire, we were
allowed to keep our Greek identity. The Romans even let us keep our
constitution and our gods. And talk about gods, the world is your oyster when
it comes to who you can worship here. You get to choose your religion and if
you have a lifestyle that is about wealth, fertility and drinking lots of
alcohol then you are in the right city. We have all the gods and goddesses you
can dream about. And, when you run out of them, you can worship Caesar.
But
given that we accept all gods and religions, we also have the Jews and their
synagogue. They worship only one God, who they consider to be the creator of
all things and the provider of all things. Their God calls them to live a
lifestyle that is set apart. They are called to follow this God and to not seek
other gods that give them favour. For many of us, especially my friends and I
in the aristocracy, this religion had something pure about it. There seemed to
be something appealing about this Jewish God, who wanted a relationship with his
people first. We wanted to fear this God and follow this God, but we didn’t
want to change our status and become Jews. So, we put aside our worship of the
gods of our city, and even our emperor and we started to explore our
relationship with Yahweh by regular observance of all things Jewish.
And
then, Paul and his friend Silas, who is also known as Silvanus, came. They told
us of Christ and his death for us. They told us how Christ enabled all of us to
be one in Yahweh. They told us that Christ would return for his people. They
challenged us to put aside all of our thinking and follow this Christ. Many of
us Gentiles did, which annoyed the Jews, and before long Paul got kicked out of
our city. Luke has retold this story for you in Acts 17.
But
we didn’t leave the God that Paul told us about when Paul departed. Instead, we
began to assemble (your book says church, but, really, we didn’t have an
official building as such), we just got together. We came together as one to
worship the God Paul shared with us and the sacrifice of his son. We did this
regularly, we prayed, we showed love to each other. We even engaged in acts of
love to the outsiders who were not part of our assembly. We knew that if we put
our faith into practice, God’s love would show and his Son might even return.
And
then Timothy visited us to see how things were going. Apparently, Paul sent
him. Paul was having a rough time and nearly gave up his whole mission. Timothy
was wrapped at our faith and our outward display of love and our talk of hope.
Timothy talked to us about how we pretty much were the gossip of the new world.
Not gossip in the bad sense, but that everywhere Paul and he went, the stories
of our church had gone before them. Timothy told us to keep the work going. He
took our story back to Paul.
Paul
then wrote his first letter to us. What blew us away was that our story gave
encouragement to our teacher and he could continue his good work. For us, we
learnt, that when you are going through a rough time, often the stories of the
people precious to you can give you encouragement to keep strong. So yeah, this
letter came.
It
was written like any other letter you would receive in our time. The opening
always starts from with the phrase X to Y. Then there is always some form of
thanksgiving and/or prayer. Followed by the letter itself and finishing with a
brief closing. But as Paul wrote more and more letters, we began to realise,
Paul would break the rules to meet the purpose of the letter. If you look at
his first two letters, the one to us and the one to the Galatians, you can see
this already. In our letter, the thanksgiving that he gives starting in verse
three of the first chapter goes on and on. In fact, some people of your era
tell us that it could be possible that it goes for three chapters. I personally
doubt it, but you can see just how encouraging our story was to Paul in his
hour of need.
In
contrast, in the letter to the Galatian assembly of Christians, Paul omits the
thanksgiving altogether. Where he is meant to move to thanksgiving in verse 5,
you read in The Message, Paul saying
“I can’t believe your fickleness!”
But
let’s stop comparing ourselves, while Galatia did have some things to address,
we really were no better at times. What really matters is how personal the
letter is to us. You see the letter is from Paul, Silas and Timothy. Three men
who really knew us. Most of the letter is from Paul and it is really moving
that he knows we recognise his leadership. We really did see his authority. So,
it was encouraging to us that he didn’t see the need to call himself an
apostle, disciple, follower of Christ as he did in other letters. He just
called himself Paul. Seeing this straight away for us showed us that he knew
that we would listen, he didn’t need to stamp his authority all over the
letter. He already had it.
And
then, straight away, he reminded us of our relationship; we are only together
because of our relationship to God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. There
is no other reason for us to assemble. Added to this, it is this relationship
that brought us together with Paul, Silas and Timothy. The reason that underpinned Paul writing this
letter was that we all had a shared relationship with the one true God and his
Son (our Lord). Paul, Silas and Timothy had no other reason to write this
letter – they only knew us because of shared experience of the Lord Jesus
Christ.
And
then the magic – the gift given to us from God – grace. Paul, Silas and Timothy
wished grace to be upon us. They knew that we cannot experience real peace,
without that grace first. This is so key. Years later, we would discover that
all the letters of Paul have grace coming before peace. It is like he is
sharing the gospel right there in his prayer and wish. May the grace of the
cross come upon you now so that you can receive the true peace of a
relationship with the father. Wow!
Paul,
Silas and Timothy then tell us how they remember us. To hear this being read
aloud was so encouraging. You probably know what it is like to have experienced
an intense relationship with someone and then, suddenly, they leave you. You
always want to know if they remember you, don’t you? Well, to hear that Paul,
Silas and Timothy all remembered us. It was mind-blowing.
Further,
they remembered us through our faith, love and hope. Now I know that latter
Paul would tell the assembly at Corinth that love is the greatest gift. But he
had intentional meaning in the ordering of the words for us. He knew that we desired to live a life of
outworking faith. He knew that we did not see such a faith as a path to salvation.
We honesty saw works through faith as enabling God to be present in our broken
city. This outpouring of faith could only happen through a labour of love. We
knew that the love of God was seen on the cross. We knew that this love called
us into relationship with God. We knew that such a love was always giving and
it never held anything back. We knew that our true labour of love was to allow
God to transform our lives so that others could see and turn to God themselves.
He understood that all of this demonstrated an active patience. We chose as a
people to understand that we had to prepare ourselves for the return of Christ
in hope.
It
was like we were gardeners. You would never sow your crop and sit back relaxing
for the next few weeks waiting for the best harvest. No, you actively wait, you
pull the weeds out, you trim back plants and thin out crops and you hope that
this year is better than the last. If you are growing beetroot, you even pull out
the new plants and replant them. Just as a gardener displays an active patience
of hope, we demonstrated active patience in our faith and works of love. We
weren’t prepared to wait for Christ sitting on our hands.
Because,
as Paul knew, being a Christian in Thessalonica was not an easy thing to do. We
became outsiders. People followed the gods of their commercial, personal and spiritual
desires. Those of us who chose to follow the gospel brought to us from Paul, were
considered down-right weird. We were hated by the Jews because we believed in
the Messiah. We were hated by our community because we refused to acknowledge
the idea that you could be fickle in your choice of god for the occasion.
Paul
had taught us something. We had to turn from the gods that we followed. The
Jews would call this repentance. We had to then serve the one true God. We did this
through our faith, our labour of love and our patient hope. We then had to wait
and to wait meant that we had to expect but also understand that true waiting
acknowledges that the will of God is out of our hands, and control, completely.
Christ will come in God’s time not our time, but we as an assembly need to be
preparing the way. We need to actively be working in God’s love each day. This
is want Paul taught us. This was his testimony to us. He lived this way day by
day.
So,
we followed him. We imitated him. And as such our lifestyle became a testimony
to churches throughout Macedonia and Achaia. Can you believe that? Us, a little
group of Christians, who simply followed what our teacher taught us became an
example. Well to be honest, in the language of our day, we became a tupos. This
word you would turn into the word type. But back in the day, it meant to leave
a deep impression on something, like the dents of a stamp or the imprint of a
seal. So, to be told that we were an example by our teacher, showed us that we
were having a real impact – we were leaving an impression on all those we met.
And
I wonder whether this is why, our letter, a personal letter from Paul to us. A
letter that was really affirming our relationship with Paul, reinforcing the
commitment we had to Christian living and addressing our simple questions still
exists today. Perhaps our church, our little church can continue to make an
impression on generations of Christians to come. And if that impression is
anything to me today, it would be to encourage you to put your faith into
practice, demonstrate a labour of love in your life and actively live in
patient hope of Christ’s return. Allow God’s love to transform your life today,
because tomorrow might be too late.
I
know that you are going to be exploring the letter to my church even more. But
I want to thank you so much for having me here today and hearing my story, the
story of my church and why the letter was written. If you have any any questions
I would be happy to answer them.
No
rei ra, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa
