1 Thessalonians 1: 6 – 10
1 Thessalonians 1:6-10 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
6 And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction, with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit; 7 so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. 8 For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. 9 For they themselves report concerning us what a welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, 10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.
One of the refrains I keep hearing, even this early in the crisis that was also taken up by The Herald Newspaper on Monday is that things will never or even can never be the same again. As people are scrambling to work in this foreign environment, as churches struggle to keep in touch with their members and support its members. As communities rediscover what it means to be a good neighbour let us indeed hope that the good things, the positive things that are coming out of this crisis remain once it is behind us. This sense that the world has changed was very real after the first world war which caused W B Yeats to write the poem second coming. Here is what he wrote:-
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
In the poem he is writing of the crumbling of certainties on which people had grounded their lives. The centre that doesn’t hold. As you face the uncertainty that lies ahead and as you reimagine what life will be like when this is all over, have you got a centre that will hold? That will be crucial as we move forward or we will be like the poet Danii Damned who wrote the poem all is lost.
The heartless voice clouds my mind
telling me dark truths
teasing my heart with pain
The tears gather in my eyes
bleeding away my happiness
and my suffering begins
and I realize the cynical truth
We are all victims of the suffering world
and all is lost
If we are going to have meaningful lives during this crisis and once it is all over we need to have reliable resources to live by. Not a round of fads or fashions, not a bunch of sugary sweet soundbites that do not hold up under the heat of struggle. It is very sad that so many people rest their fortunes and their lives on things that cannot hold in the heat of struggle. Beauty that fades, antiquated perceptions, supposed truths that do not hold water. When our lives are built on the shifting sands of popularity and fashion and those things fall apart consistency is hard to maintain, the centre fails and the end result is disillusionment and the death of the Spirit.
So what was it that kept the young church in Thessalonica stable? What was it that helped move them from being imitators of Paul to being examples of faith? What buoyed them up and encouraged them so that in spite of all that was afflicting them, in spite of opposition and persecution they continued to serve God and wait on their deliverance? It was the unstoppable and immutable Word of God. It was the Word of God that was a stable and reliable resource for them. This is why the teacher in Proverbs could write of a noble wife that charm was deceptive, beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord will be greatly praised. Fear of the Lord, standing on his promises, adhering to his word is what got the Thessalonians through the tough times they faced and it will get us through these times that we face. The word of God provides a centre for us which does not fail and around which we can build our future, even if it is very different to what went before this crisis.
As I read this week:- “For us today, the unfailing truth of God’s promises still provides us with a centre that holds. When wells dry up, when famine comes, when disaster ruins all that is around us, the word of God provides a ready and reliable resource. It is both a ballast and a buffer – a ballast bringing security to otherwise insecure lives and a buffer to shield us from self-destruction. By the living word of God I shall prevail, standing on the promises of God.”