"Purpose"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE LETTERS 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17 Click here to watch the sermon "Purpose"

Several years ago, before we moved to New Mexico, I was attending a conference where I met a fellow colleague from Iowa. We lived on either end of the state but we had both seen an event advertised at our local YMCA. The relay across Iowa. Now, this was not the more popular, and better known event called RAGBRAI, which stands for the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Race Across Iowa, where participants take five days to bike from the Missouri river that forms the state’s western boundary to the Mississippi that is its eastern boundary. No, the relay was a little different. Teams of six to twelve runners took turns running as they traversed 339 miles across the state in one go over the course of somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 hours. We were both recreational runners and thought it sounded like a challenge. It was, in more ways than one. One of the challenges was to pick a name for this team we were trying to assemble. And being the Presbyterian theology nerds that we were, we chose the name Team Telos. When the weekend of the relay came around and our first runner set out from the Sergeant Floyd monument on the banks of the Missouri River in Sioux City, we cried in unison, “Team Telos! To the End!” That’s what telos means in Greek. The end. But the word doesn’t just mean the conclusion of something; the finish line overlooking the Mississippi. The end is also a way of talking about our purpose in doing whatever it is that we’re doing. It is the why of life. To what end are we living? These letters to the church in the Greek community of Thessalonica are the oldest documents in Christian scripture. The people to whom they are written lived nearly a thousand miles, and a world away from Jerusalem. But they give us a glimpse into the challenges that appear to have been with the church from its inception. One of the those challenges has to do with the end. Or, as Paul puts it in the parlance of Hebrew prophets, the day of the Lord. It’s an image that goes back to the Exodus and the people’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. That event, when God made a way in the sea for the people to escape captivity came to be known as “the Day.” The day that God freed God’s people and set before them a new future. Over the centuries, as they came into the land and grew into a kingdom, those same people faced threats from both without and from within. The prophets called by God to speak uncomfortable truths would often invoke the Day of the Lord as something that was impending; an accounting before God, a judgement in which God would finally make things right. Sometimes that had to do with the threat of an outside enemy and sometimes that had to do with the injustice of the people themselves who were oppressing and neglecting the most vulnerable among them. It was a powerful promise to a people held captive to their fear and powers that often felt beyond their control. Because as insurmountable as the conditions appeared, they trusted that God would redeem their situation in the end. Then along comes Jesus, God’s anointed, the Christ, whose death is often understood as sacrificial, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The Passover lamb whose death and resurrection will finally usher in the Day of the Lord, judging the fate of all of humanity and setting them free. That judgement appears to be rendered in the form of his crucifixion. Jesus suffers death, and not any death but a violent death at the hands of earthly power. Jesus endures the only real threat that earthly power is built on and renders it powerless by his resurrection. And here is where things get weird, right? Because we may affirm resurrection, but we’re not sure we completely understand it. We have the stories of the risen Christ appearing to his disciples, eating with them, and instructing them before ascending to… who knows where. The troposphere, the stratosphere, a low orbit around the earth? But with his disappearance came the understanding that he would return. And that his return would be the thing that brings the promised day of reckoning; the day of the Lord.  All of this is very much on the mind of the nascent community of believers that Paul established in the Greek city of Thessalonica. Chances are they were familiar with the prophetic image of the day of the Lord, and they were enthusiastic to see its fulfillment in Jesus’ return given their own struggle against the often oppressive power of the Roman Empire. In fact, based on our reading, it would appear that they might have been a little too enthusiastic; to the exclusion of everything else contained in the good news of Jesus Christ, risen from the dead. Here in the oldest letter we have to the church is a snapshot of one of the earliest Christian communities and its concerns. And while much has changed, this preoccupation with the end times, the Day of the Lord, the return of Jesus, persists. About a hundred years after this letter was written a charismatic Christian leader name Montanus in what is now modern-day Turkey, claimed to speak under the influence of the Holy Spirit and announced the imminent return of Christ. Whole communities were abandoned as believers flocked to the plain where Montanus claimed the heavenly Jerusalem would descend. Pope Sylvester II predicted a millennial apocalypse as the year 1000 approached, and two hundred years after that Pope Innocent III predicted that the end would come 666 years after the birth of Islam. The idea of the so-called “rapture” in which the return of Christ is preceded by the rescue of believers before earth is subject to God’s judgement is a fairly late development in the past 200 years. Over that time there have been any number of doomsday predictions from the Millerites of nineteenth century New England, who eventually grew into what is now known as the Seventh-Day Adventists, to the Prophet Hen of Leeds, a chicken who was purported to lay eggs that bore the words, “Christ is Coming.” Just last month I received a call from a man who wanted to know if we had received the flyer he sent out regarding a book that he had published about Revelation and the end times. I confess that I was a little irritable and not very polite. “Do you talk about the prophecies,” he asked. “No,” I replied, “at least not what you are suggesting.” He wanted to know why and I explained (borrowing a phrase gifted to me by a member of this congregation) that we didn’t go in for Bible fan fiction. We were too busy trying to follow Jesus as his disciples.  And that’s just it. When the focus of faith becomes some kind of literal end of time in which the faithful are whisked away like some kind of alien abduction scenario, we have definitely lost the plot. I got into this discussion on a long road trip to Living Waters University, the school for teaching mission teams how to partner and build clean water projects for folks with lack of access to that precious resource. A member of our team wanted to explain to me how the whole thing was going to unfold. The end of time, not the water project. Finally, I asked him what difference that made to what we were doing in that car, going to learn how to make people’s lives healthier and better by providing them with clean water.  Likewise, Paul makes it clear that while the promise of Christ’s return fills us with hope, elaborate predictions based on world events in order to pinpoint the date of his arrival is not the actual end that God has in mind for us. The purpose for which we are called according to Paul is to be the first fruits of salvation chosen by God through sanctification of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. I know, it’s a mouthful. And not the kind of language we’re used to using in our everyday lives. So let’s break it down shall we.  To be chosen as first fruits, is to be chosen as an offering. And not just any offering, but the best, the first to be harvested and brought as a gift. It isn’t what’s leftover, or whatever there is on hand. God doesn’t choose people for their own benefit, but as a gift to others. And as the first fruits of salvation, we are given to be sign, a demonstration of God’s saving love. Too often people translate salvation as some kind of afterlife reward. But remember how the Day of the Lord started. It started with a people saved from slavery, saved from lives not their own but beholden to the power of Pharaoh. God would save us from ourselves, save us from being enslaved by the powers of this world who would own our labor, and dictate our worth. God would save us from the powers of sin and death that turn us inward and makes us afraid and submissive. God’s love in Jesus Christ saves us from all of that by declaring that we are worth dying for, so that we might be raised from all the death-dealing ways of a world that would define us in terms of borders or bank accounts, skin color or stock-holdings, productivity and profit. This is the true end for which we have been set apart by the Spirit as we trust in the truth of this good news. That God is already and always with us. With us in our fear, with us in our feelings of powerlessness, with us in the violence of a world still enslaved to idea of getting ahead and making the grade, and being worthy of something that can never be won, it can only be given by the gracious hand of God. When we understand that this is our purpose. When we stand firm and hold fast to that in face of all that would shake, alarm, and unsettle us, there is no end to what God can and will do.