I Thessalonians 1:1-10
“Shared Faith”
May 17, 2020 – Sixth Sunday of Easter
Laurie Halbrook is a registered nurse in New Orleans. A month ago one of her co-workers at a hospital in New Orleans tested positive for COVID-19. A few days later, Laurie began to run a fever and have bronchitis-like symptoms. She received a COVID-19 test. While waiting for results she spent the next few days in a single room in their house, locked away from her husband and two children. She tells how hard it was to explain through a door to a 3-year-old that Mommy couldn’t hug or snuggle with him for a while.
It turned out that Laurie’s test came back negative, but we have all heard about health care workers, police officers, and even grocery store clerks whose stories did not turn out so well. They are regularly and faithfully putting their lives on the line for others. Their bravery is inspiring and beautiful. It is good in these times to spend part of our time in prayer thanking and praising God for such people.
For our last look at the Christian virtue of faith, we turn to the beginning of I Thessalonians and find Paul thanking and praising God for the congregation of Christian believers in that large city in northern Greece. In particular, in verse 3, we hear him say that what he remembers in prayer before God about the Thessalonians is “your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Here at the beginning and again at the end of I Thessalonians, chapter 5 verse 8, Paul puts together the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and love. We are focusing on those this spring, believing these are the virtues you and I need in this difficult time. Yes, we may also need virtues of bravery like those on the coronavirus frontlines or patience to keep staying at home or wisdom about our next steps as things start to reopen, but faith, hope and love are the heart and soul of Christian character at any time.
Talking about virtue and character helps us remember that morality and ethics is not just about making good choices, like wearing a mask to the store or tipping the delivery person a little extra. Good character goes beyond simply making right decisions. It is letting ourselves be so well-formed in our minds and hearts that many times we don’t have to choose at all. We simply do or feel or think what is good by long and established habit.
You may remember, though, that I said at the beginning of all this that faith, hope and love are different from other virtues. At least in their Christian forms, the theological virtues are called that just because they come from God rather than from our own efforts. You may actually be able to develop the habit of being brave by pushing aside your fear and doing things that make you afraid, like going to work at a food service business or a medical office. But you can’t really grow faith or hope or love that way.
Faith is far more than just believing certain facts about God or the Bible or your own self, but belief is usually part of it. And as Alice realizes in Through the Looking Glass, you can’t just make yourself believe things even if you want to. In a conversation with the White Queen, the Queen tells Alice how old she is, “I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”
Alice responds, “I can’t believe that!” Then we read this:
“Can’t you?” the queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carol the author was a Christian clergyman and he was playfully rubbing our noses in the fact that faith, even the part that is simple belief, is not something we can create for ourselves. If we are going to have faith, it has to come from outside us. And Scripture tells us it is the gift of God. We might ask, then, if there is anything we can do to develop or increase our faith? Shall we just sit back and leave it up to God?
Go back to that idea of making good choices. As I said, you might be able to form some virtues by habit. Choose to do brave things often and you may become more courageous. Choose to give unselfishly often enough and you are on your way to being generous. But for faith, hope and love, particularly for faith, it’s not so much our choice as God’s choice which matters. In verse 4, Paul says “we know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that he has chosen you.” Faith is ours because God chooses to give it to us.
That’s how faith, hope and love came to be the character of the Thessalonians. They didn’t choose those virtues. God chose them. God chooses to love us and it’s in response to His love and grace that we become people of faith. But there is one aspect to that virtue of faith which is somewhat like other virtues. As Paul writes here about this church in Macedonia, faith benefits from example.
That is why in verse 5 Paul turns to the process by which God actually brought faith, hope and love to the Thessalonians. He says, “our message of the gospel came to you not in word only”—Paul and Silvanus and Timothy did not just preach to them—“but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.” And here’s the key part: “just as you know what kind of persons we proved to be among you for your sake.”
The faith of the Thessalonians, and their love and hope, did not come just from hearing and believing a message. They did that, yes. Their faith did not just miraculously appear in their hearts and minds as God infused it, though that also happened. But their faith also grew out of observing “what kind of persons” the apostles were, how they lived and behaved. The Thessalonians had an example for their faith.
I’ve been trying to tie some flies while at home the past few weeks, though I’ve discovered I don’t have as much time or focus for it as I thought I might. I have a couple of excellent books with pictures and directions for many of my favorite flies. But in this time of on-line activity I’ve discovered another incredible resource. For almost any fly pattern I want, I can find and watch a video of an expert tying and talking about the process step by step. For one great variation of a gold-ribbed hare’s ear nymph I’ve watched the video a dozen times, pausing, backing up, making sure I have the steps down right. I’m getting better at that pattern by watching someone else do it well and trying to imitate it.
Faith is like that. We get better at it by observing and living in the presence of others who are good at it, or maybe just better at it in certain ways than we are. We grow in faith by doing what they do, by trying to see God and life through their eyes. That’s why verse 6 goes on, “And you became imitators of us and of the Lord.” You learn to tie flies or drive a nail or change a diaper or bake a cake by observing and imitating someone who can already do it well. Christian faith and life are like that.
Paul wants to be clear, “you became imitators of us and of the Lord.” Ultimately we learn Christian virtues by becoming Christlike, by imitating Jesus. But God also gives us people like He gave the Thessalonians, people who have already learned something about being like Jesus. We learn by watching and imitating them. They may be parents or Sunday School teachers or just Christian friends, but we learn faith, as well as hope and love, by watching those virtues demonstrated in the lives of people around us.
That’s one of the big reasons we have tried to hang together on-line during this crisis, whether by sharing a recorded worship time together or talking with each other in a Zoom session. We need those examples Christians are to each other, and we need to practice following them. I’m struggling at fly-tying because it’s not something I do very often, usually only once or twice a year. But if you really want to learn and develop a skill, you practice and observe how it’s done all the time, week in and week out. We accomplish that with faith by getting together however we can and learning from each other to be like Jesus.
The rest of verse 6 in part highlights why I am glad to be preaching on faith, hope and love during this time. Paul tells how it helped the Thessalonians’ when they imitated the faith of the apostles: “in spite of persecution you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit.” Their shared faith allowed them to be joyful together in the Holy Spirit in spite of troubles and suffering.
I know my own faith needs help in difficult times. I get down from being cooped up or frustrated by a computer not working correctly or sorry for myself because I’ve got arthritis in my left wrist I’ve never felt before. My first thought is not prayer or turning to Scripture or simply giving thanks to God for the blessings I do have. Instead I just get gloomy or I try to come up with some solution on my own or I go have some ice cream I really don’t need. It is in just such times when I’m in need of an example of something else, some faith better and stronger than my own.
You might suppose that we always ought to be focusing on Jesus as our example. And Paul does say that. The Thessalonians imitated him and the Lord. He told the Philippians to have the kind of mind which was in Christ Jesus. Peter told us to endure suffering with the same patience Jesus did. But sometimes the example of Jesus just seems so far out there, so unreachable, too good to even think about being like Him. That’s why God gives us more immediate, more approachable examples of faith. God lets us observe other people being like Jesus and helps us realize that maybe we can be like them.
The result of all those examples of faith can be amazing. In verse 7, Paul told the Thessalonians that their imitation of the apostles’ example was so good “that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia.” The faith of the Christians in that one city was observed and remarked upon not only in their own geographic region of Macedonia north of Greece, but in the whole region of Greece south of it.
We visited Thessalonica 18 years ago. It’s Thessaloniki in modern Greek. It’s a busy modern city, blessed by the same geography which made it important two millennia ago, a good port situated along land routes in all directions. One new attractions then was a museum of Byzantine culture, the great Christian revival of civilization in the east that began in the 4th century. After Constantinople, Thessalonica was second most important city of that time.
Part of the Byzantine museum is a great display of Christian history, beginning in the earliest centuries. It’s not only art and architecture, but kitchenware and artifacts like household icons that Christians used then. Walking those aisles and seeing pillars decorated with crosses and images of Jesus and Mary and the apostles we felt connected with ordinary Christians who kept following that first example there in Thessalonica and continuing to live in faith down through the ages.
That is how shared faith works. Paul and his fellow apostles imitated Jesus. The Thessalonians imitated them. Others started imitating the Thessalonians. Jesus was the original example. Then the apostles became examples. Then the Thessalonians themselves became examples. Now people from all over the world come to see the record in stone and metal and dabs of paint in that museum. What Paul said in verse 8 is still true, “in every place your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak about it.”
Part of God’s plan for giving us the virtue of faith is for it to be passed on by example. Those who receive it, in turn become examples. You and I receive the gift of faith in that way and we in turn are meant to be examples for those around us. We’ve been blessed to read or hear about those who lived out their faith in “power and in the Holy Spirit and in full conviction” and even more blessed to meet people like that.
As I said in the first sermon on faith, it doesn’t take much to receive the gift. Just looking toward the Lord and acknowledging your need is all it takes. That’s how Paul describes the Thessalonians first reception of faith which was being reported all over Greece, “how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.” Faith begins, is given by God, when people turn toward God.
If you are wondering this morning if you have faith, or how healthy your faith might be in these difficult times, then ask yourself this, “Am I turned toward God?” Or is my life aimed in all sorts of other directions? Most of us don’t have actual wood or metal idols set up in our homes, but we may have all kinds of substitutes for faith in the “true and living God,” whether it’s ice cream or another episode of some TV show.
Fortunately, to get us turned back toward God, to renew our faith He gives us examples. This past week my daughter Susan sent me a bit from a medieval book about the life of St. Anselm a famous Christian philosopher of the 11th century. It was a couple of silly stories she knew I would like because they involved fishing and a philosopher. In the first, Anselm and his brother monks are traveling and ask for lodging. Their would-be host agrees but says there is nothing to eat but bread and cheese. So Anselm sent him to find a fisherman and cast out a net. The old fisherman complained that the whole thing was joke, but he hauled in a trout big enough for everyone to have a meal with some left over. He said that he had fished that river for twenty years but never seen a fish like that.
The second story was equally amusing, about the provision of a huge sturgeon also predicted by Anselm. My immediate reaction was to laugh and send the stories on to my friend Jay who is both a philosopher and my oldest fishing buddy. I suggested Anselm would be a good guy to take along on a fishing trip.
But then I realized that Christians tell stories like that because it helps us to remember examples of confident faith, like Anselm’s assurance that he and those around him would not go hungry in hard circumstances. Like Christians back then, you and I can look for those examples around us now, examples of Christians in Africa or China staying faithful in incredibly hard circumstances, or examples of believers in our own church or family who are staying strong in faith during these times.
If you are feeling discouraged or faithless, look for an example. Yes, Jesus is the one we all want to be like. But it may be easier and closer to home if you find an example of faith in Sally or Juan or your Uncle George or your grandmother. Or maybe you could download and read a biography of some famous Christian, ancient or modern. But find someone who tried hard in faith to be like Jesus, ant then be like them.
Then remember that there is very likely someone for whom you in turn could be that kind of example, someone whose faith could benefit from seeing your faith. Maybe you could reach out this week with a phone call or an e-mail message or even a hand-written note saying you know all too well how hard it is to hold onto faith sometimes, but you are trying and you hope that friend and relative will find that same faith too.
May the Lord, may the Holy Spirit, give you your own models of faith. Keep an eye out for those examples as He sends them your way. It could be the person you turn to when you shut off this video or it could be the clerk checking out your groceries or it might be someone gone but not forgotten whose old story you remember or read or watch again. Look for the examples God gives you in order to give you faith. If you can, talk with them. Learn from them. Then let God make you an example of faith for someone else. He will.
Together then we will do what Paul says in verse 10, “wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.” But that’s hope, which is the next virtue on the list. Faith leads to hope, and I hope we will get to talk about that next week.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj