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ISSN 2195-3171

Third Sunday of Advent., 12/14/2014

Sermon on 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24, by Frank C. Senn

How's my week been? (Here the preacher names some unfortunate things that happened to members of the congregation---e.g. laid off work, death in the family, troubled medical diagnosis, etc.)

And how do I feel about St. Paul's exhortation to "rejoice always?" Well...we don't always feel like rejoicing, do we? Yet this is what St. Paul tells us to do in one of his earliest letters, written to a small congregation in Macedonia.

St. Paul believes he must tell the Thessalonian Christians how they are to behave as Christians. That's always a perplexing question: how do you behave if you are a Christian? It's an especially vexing question for people new to Christianity. And the key to the behavior in Thessalonica as Christians this:

Rejoice, always.

Pray, without ceasing.

Give thanks, in all circumstances.

And if you don't always feel like rejoicing, if you don't always have time to pray, if you don't regard every circumstance with gratitude, what then? Tough! "for it is the will of God in Christ for you." If you are not rejoicing always, praying always, always giving thanks, then you are not doing what God wills for you in Christ, and the implication is that you had better shape up. Whatever that grumpy attitude is that you've got, you'd better lose it right now.

Why? Because God's making a list and checking it twice. He's gonna find outoops.

Sorry. That's not God, is it? Things can be confusing this time of year, so close to Christmas.

That's part of our problem. Sometimes it's hard to keep things "out there" in the world separate from things "in here." "Out there" it's a likely bet that most people do not rejoice always, pray unceasingly, and give thanks in all circumstances. In point of fact, "out there" sometimes measures the level of rejoicing "in here."

St. Paul must have understood that. He must have known that "out there" does sometimes come "in here." We bring to the place of worship - do we not? - all the circumstances of our lives. We'd like to leave our worries on the doorstep, but it is not always possible.

We cross the threshold from "there" to "here" and the conditions and circumstances, the worries and anxieties, the griefs and the sorrows, all come in here with us. Nobody can say Poof! and they are gone. These things nag at us like hangnails.

So what does St. Paul expect from us? I do not always rejoice. At times I can summon no words for prayer. There are some things, and events, and activities for which no thanks can be given. What does the man want? How could he write this with a straight face?

You know, though, our Eucharistic liturgy says about the same thing. In what's called the Preface the congregation hears these or similar ancient words:

"It is indeed right and salutary that we should in all times and in all places give thanks and praise to you, O Lord, holy Father, almighty and everlasting God."

Our communion liturgy echoes St. Paul's command. And if over the years we have not regarded these words as exaggerations or merely a pious nod to God's providence, then in some small corner of our hearts we must believe that there is reason for rejoicing, for praying, for giving thanks. Our cause for doing these things exists somewhere outside the circumstances of the moment.

If the conditions around us cannot be a constant cause for joy and prayer and thanks - and who's kidding whom if anyone says they are - then another reason exists to give thanks always, to pray unceasingly, to rejoice everywhere. There must be a deeper reason for this.

For if God may expect of us things we do not feel like giving, then God must know something we do not. It must be something that matches God's will to our need. It must be so: that God created a new set of circumstances for us, when Christ was born in Bethlehem. The axis of history turns on a manger and all of human life, even yours, is changed.

So God through St. Paul doesn't just lay it out like an impossible demand, to rejoice always, pray always, give thanks always. No, it is the will of God - mark these words - in Jesus Christ, who has changed all things.

And because we believe that, what we are really being invited to do is to reframe the picture. Sometimes how you feel about something, or react to it, is dependent on the size of the frame you draw around it. If you are experiencing serious pain in your chest, and you just focus on the immediate experience of the pain, then you may feel fearful and despondent. But if you focus on the fact that yesterday you had a lifesaving heart transplant, and the present pain is a short term side effect of the surgery, then your dominant feeling is more likely to be relief and joy. It is all a matter of how wide you draw the frame.

We do this reframing thing quite naturally in ordinary conversation. You'll hear someone say, "We've been suffering a drought and you're upset about a bit of rain on your barbeque?!" Reframing! Are you looking at the big picture or the small? Which is dominating the way you feel about life and the world around you? And if the big picture seems actually worse than the trivialities of the things that preoccupy us, St. Paul is asking us to draw the frame bigger again until we see a picture worth rejoicing over and giving thanks for.

Interestingly, John the Baptist does something quite similar when the Jerusalem inquisition comes out to demand some answers from him. When they ask him why on earth he is baptizing people if he is not the Messiah, not the reincarnation of Elijah, and not a prophet like Moses, he doesn't actually answer their question; he reframes it. He says in effect, "Look, you are all so focused on me that you're missing the bigger picture. I'm just giving people a symbolic bath, but right there in the midst of you - rubbing shoulders with you - is someone you haven't even noticed, let alone recognized. He is the One who is coming to take over where I leave off, and let me tell you that when he gets into action, you'll be wondering why you wasted your time worrying about anything as insignificant as what I'm up to.

Isaiah too is on the same sort of track. "The Lord has filled me with the Holy Spirit and sent me to bring good news to the downtrodden, to announce freedom to the prisoners, and to heal the brokenhearted." He doesn't say he is sent to break the captives out of detention centers, but to preach a message of freedom; to reframe the situation; to enable them, and their oppressors, to see beyond the barbed wired and the razor ribbon and to catch a glimpse of the coming day of the Lord when those who have sown in tears will reap great rewards, singing and dancing and laughing; when those who have been trampled down and known nothing but despair will be lifted up rejoicing and made strong like great big trees planted by the Lord.

The mother of our Lord does the same thing when she sings her song of praise, "My soul magnifies the Lord." She sees the big picture of God entering into human life: he has scattered the proud in their conceit, cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

Reframing: that's looking at the bigger picture and allowing that bigger picture to determine how we will live and act in the here and now. Rejoice and celebrate always, and be thankful in all circumstances, because when you look at the bigger picture of what God is coming to do, you can see that the pain and injustices of the present will not have the last word. It is just a step on the way to a great new reality.

As St. Paul put it in another letter, you begin to see the pain of the present as the labor pains of creation as it brings the new reality to birth. And as most mothers will tell you, the ultimate experience of reframing is the way the pain of labor is subsumed under the anticipation of birth. As Christians will affirm, the sorrow of death is reframed in the bigger picture of the resurrection of the dead to new and eternal life with Christ and all his saints.

This is not some escapist claptrap. It is not a minimizing of very reality of suffering, and it is not pieintheskywhenyoudie as a way of muting the protest about the pain and injustice of sickness and death. Rather it is an active and potent protest against the harsh realities of the present, and an aggressive refusal to let them dictate the terms and conditions of our lives. It is a confident assertion that the war against injustice has already been won, and that the only reason we are still seeing it is that we are living in the period between the announcement of the victory and the full implementation of the postwar peace conditions

And at the Eucharistic table, in our deepest need to know God and his love in our lives, here at last we know the reason for giving thanks whatever our circumstance or condition because whatever our circumstance or condition, God in Christ is present in all our moments.

For it is only by Jesus Christ that what seems like a demand in fact becomes a promise. Whatever is going on "out there," or in our own lives (repeat some of the concerns mentioned at the beginning of the sermon), "in here"---in our liturgy, in our public work before God and the world---it is Gaudate, Rejoice Sunday. And we believe we have reason to rejoice. In fact, we will list twelve reasons in a moment, when we say, "We believe..." Those reasons frame everything in our lives and give us cause to rejoice, to pray, and to give thanks. Amen.