13 November 2011
I Thessalonians 5: 1 – 11

If we needed any reminder recent events bear home to us the fact that all empires are temporal.  Moreover, the leaders of empires are, like all the rest of us, just penciled in. 

Recent events in Libya illustrate the mortality of both empires and would-be Caesars.

Muammar Qaddafi built his personal headquarters and hide-out on Martyrs’ Square in Tripoli, from which, eighty years and more before, Mussolini had addressed the masses.  Martyrs’ Square, in what is now Tripoli, was the center of the Ottoman Turks’ eastern capital, Medina, which the Turks built upon the Roman ruins of the ancient major city of Leptis Magnus.  Putative Caesars evidently like to establish themselves on the ruins of major empires that have since passed into history.  So Qaddafi, so Mussolini, so the Turks.  All were, like you and me, headed for death, despite the grandeur of their domiciles. (I was a 17-year old in the American Armed Forces when the Italian partisans captured Mussolini and hanged him, upside down, with his mistress, in a public square in Milano.)

All empires and cities have their own stories.  Tessalonika was built by the Romans on the Thermatic Gulf and became the major harbor of Macedonia.  The Romans built docks, and wharves, and a naval station, and Thessalonika became a center of trade, and a great cosmopolitan city.  It was a crossroads of the world, and many different cultures, and cults, thrived there.  It was the home base the Salt Lake City, of the Dionysian religion, wherein the God Dionysis dies and rises at the hands of priests who administer ritual, ecstasy and drunkenness.  It was also a major center for the religion of Orestes, an heroic figure.  Worshippers of both flourished at night, with plenty of wine and sex.

There was a thriving Jewish synagogue at Thessalonika, and many devout Greek Jews.

In approximately 42 A.D., here came Paul and his colleagues, Sylvanus (Silas) and Timothy.  All three founded the Christian Church at Thessalonika, and apparently all three wrote both I and II Thessalonians.  The trio stayed in Thessalonika from anywhere from three to eight months. They came from Philippi, and when they had finished their work they headed for Corinth.

While the trio was there, they all did day labor because Paul, who was a tent cloth maker, felt that there was no free lunch for Evangelists…. They all worked everyday, and preached at night, and did not live off their converts -- as did the priest of Dionysius and Orestes and other cults -- but were self-sufficient.

Both letters were written in response from Corinth to word from Thessalonika that converts to the new faith were beginning to die off, and the urgent question came to Paul’s attention: what happens to adherents of the new faith if they die before Jesus returns?

The entire early Church believed that Jesus was coming soon. It is here in this first Letter that we first encounter the word, Parousia, which translates as, The Day of the Lord.  People were expectant, and then Christians started to age and die, thus creating a huge theological problem.  What happens to those Christians who die before the Lord returns?  This letter, like all of Paul’s letters, says to such Christians, Don’t worry, and proceeds to instruct the Christians at Thessalonika, how members of the new faith were to live.  Indeed, all of Paul’s letters are manuals for Christians living in a temporal world.  Paul’s message was this, “Jesus became human for us. He died for us, and he rose for us.  And he represents in himself the destiny of being human.”

“Whether we wait, or we sleep, we live within the Lord.  The day of the Lord comes as a thief in the night.  Nobody knows the times or the seasons when the night of the Lord will come. “ Paul’s answer to the Thessalonians is a prescription for living.  He tells us how to live, and he tells us how to learn to die.  That is, to be truly, wholly human.  The promise of Jesus’ resurrection is that you can be fully human in this world, so to live that we all live into each other  (Luther at the Eucharist: We are all through the love of God changed into each other).

Paul was way ahead of his time:  “Put on the breastplate of faith and love, and the helmet of hope and human fulfillment, that whether we live or whether we die, we live together with him who became human for us.”  “Comfort each other, hold each other up.”

The Bible is full of stories: the Gospels recount the history of Jesus of Nazareth; the Epistles of the early Church tell us how to live as humans in this world, between the times of our birth and our death; the journey between the two summons us to live well and love well, and to find each other.

And there are modern interpreters of Paul’s teachings….  For those who want to read these truths in a modern context, I refer you to Mark Nepo, especially his latest book, “As Far as the Heart Can See”  It is about the finding of each other in truth and kindness that connects my soul with yours, and your life with mine.  If we do that, we will know the journey into the community of the Lord, and our fellow humans.

Then Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, and we will, because of that good thief, be truly as God intended us to be, fully human.

Life is a journey….  We are all on journey to a city without walls; on a journey together with the one who comes to us as a thief in the night, that good thief who steals away our fears and restores us to what God intended us to be, human beings.