Sour Faith

1 Thessalonians 5:12-22

May 30, 2021 • Mount Pleasant UMC

It is good to be back with you all this morning. Last Sunday was the last day of a week off for me, and it was different. A good different. Most of the time, when I have a week of “staycation,” I start the week with a list of projects, things I want to accomplish, whether around the house or whatever. This time, though, that list was strangely empty, and with Cathy and Rachel both working, it was just Barnabas and I around the house during the day. That first day, there was a stirring in my spirit because, honestly, I’ve been quite tired. This COVID thing and all the stuff around it in the church and in the world has left me spiritually worn out, and as the week began, I clearly heard the word “sabbath” in my spirit. Sabbath, as you may know, is the Biblical idea of rest; we’re all called to rest one day out of seven. That’s the rhythm God established at creation and reinforced in his Top Ten commandments: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” (Exodus 20:8). Now, I could go down a big rabbit hole with that, but suffice it to say that I have not been resting my spirit well, so Barnabas and I spent a good part of the week on our deck. He played, dug up the flowerbed, and I read a lot. I even read a book on Sabbath keeping. I read, and I cooked, and in the evenings, I had time with my family. It was honestly one of the best weeks I’ve had in a long time, and I appreciate Pastor Rick and the staff here carrying on. I’m not even sure they knew I was gone! Anyway, thank you. I can’t say enough about each of us finding rest for our souls; you’ll probably hear more about it in the months to come.

But today we’re starting a new series, different from that topic. A few years ago we looked at some Old Testament stories where God seemed to be “behaving badly,” stories in which he seemed to be angry and wrathful and randomly smiting people (isn’t “smiting” a good Old Testament word?). Then last year, we applied that same theme to Jesus, considering the times when he overturns tables or curses trees, when he is judgmental, angry and provocative—or so it seems. And we discovered how Jesus is sometimes a paradox, how we have to look beyond the action to what he is actually doing. Okay, so God is God and Jesus is God and because they are God, they’re bound to act in ways we don’t understand. But this year, for the next couple of weeks, we’re turning to someone who is not God, who is an ordinary human being. Well, he maybe ordinary, but he is someone whom God used in extraordinary ways. No one other than Jesus is more responsible for the shape of the Christian faith than the Apostle Paul. In fact, Paul shapes our theology more than we might imagine, if for no other reason than he wrote the largest part of our New Testament! But let’s be honest: there are times we read what Paul wrote and we sort of cringe, or we want to cut that verse out of our Bibles, or we decide that he was just having a bad day. Paul can be kind of a jerk; sometimes, Paul behaves badly, especially when it comes to people who disagree with him, to women, and to people of other races. So next week, we’re going to ask whether or not Paul was a racist (yep, we’re going to go there), and the week after that we’ll ask if Paul was a hypocrite, but today we’re going to start in what might seem like a simpler place: was Paul a killjoy? Because a lot of people believe Paul just wanted to take away all our fun.

Paul certainly was sure of himself, especially for someone who never knew Jesus while he walked on the earth. Paul only became a Christian after Jesus’ resurrection, and only then when Jesus literally knocked him to the ground and called his name (cf. Acts 9:1-19). Before that, Paul had been persecuting Christians, overseeing their deaths (cf. Acts 8:1). But once he said “yes” to Jesus, he was all in. And the confidence that had once propelled him to kill Jesus followers now compelled him to spread the faith through preaching, teaching and letter writing. But along the way he said some things that no doubt riled people up—and still rile people up today. To the Galatians, Paul said his gospel was the only one they should follow: “If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!” (Galatians 1:9). A little further down in that same letter, he brags about his superior abilities (Galatians 1:14), and in another letter, he claims he worked harder than any of the original disciples (1 Corinthians 15:10). That’s pretty bold! And then, on top of all that, he encourages the Philippians to follow his example—not Jesus’ example. He says, “Follow my example” (Philippians 3:17). It’s not hard to see, just from these few verses, why some people think Paul was kind of a jerk (cf. Richards & O’Brien, Paul Behaving Badly, pgs. 23-25).

It would be kind of like a new employee coming into your business, someone who has no experience in this particular business, and this employee begins telling everyone else how to do their job. This new employee is certain he is doing it right and isn’t even concerned about calling out one of the main supervisors, right in front of everyone. That’s what Paul does. Paul, the newbie, calls out Peter, chief of the original twelve disciples. In Antioch, when Paul and Peter ended up at the same gathering, Paul confronts Peter because of Peter’s waffling about including Gentiles in the faith. In front of everyone, Paul criticized Peter. If I had been Peter, I would have wanted to say to Paul, “Who do you think you are? I was one of Jesus’ best friends!” And it’s not that Paul was wrong, but there’s a right way to correct someone and there’s a way that makes you a jerk. And it sure seems Paul falls into the latter category (cf. Richards & O’Brien 28; Galatians 2:11-21).

It’s easy to see why some people love Paul. You know the kind: the ones described by a journalist who have a “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy” (qtd. in Richards & O’Brien 42). If you’re wanting to find a Bible verse that will kill joy, or at least make someone feel guilty about having fun, you would probably find it in Paul’s writing. Texts like the one we read from 1 Thessalonians this morning make Paul seem like the leading proponent of sour faith. This passage, at the end of a letter to the church at Thessalonica, ends with a very broad statement. In the NIV, which we read this morning, Paul says, “Reject every kind of evil” (5:22). The NLT, Pastor Rick’s preferred version, puts it this way: “Stay away from every kind of evil.” And the way I learned it is this way: “Abstain from all appearance of evil” (KJV). You read a verse like that and get a picture in your mind of a sour-faced Puritan, watching and waiting for you to make a mistake. After all, “Americans never use the term ‘puritanical’ as a compliment” (Richards & O’Brien 42). Instead, we picture an old, withered saint shaking their bony finger in our face and warning us that what we are doing just might look like evil (cf. Russell, “Topping a Faulty Moral Pillar,” 5/13/2011, The Good Book Blog). Avoid the appearance of evil; don’t have any fun because it might look bad. That’s the essence of sour faith.

I knew a person growing up whose faith tradition wrestled with this idea. Their tradition had a firm rule against going to movies in the movie theater—which isn’t really a problem anymore, but in the “before times,” we used to go to movies, remember? Anyway, this person’s church prohibited going to the theater based on this verse. After all, if someone saw you coming out of the theater, they would have no way of knowing if you had gone to see a G-rated movie or an R-rated (or worse) movie. That was all well and good until I asked about going into a video store (we used to do that, too) and how people would know whether or not you were renting something appropriate. How do we determine what is the “appearance of evil” and what is not? I read this week about a person whose church regulated what you could and could not drink. Root beer and ginger ale were out because “beer” and “ale” on the label could make people think you were drinking alcohol. Boy, I would have hated a childhood without root beer! And then there was the time two friends of ours got into it because one had seen the other’s car parked at the local tavern. Now, honestly, some of those places have the best food, am I right? And my pastor when I was growing up spent a lot of time at the tavern; his sermons were regularly populated with stories of people he had shared his faith with there. But a car parked outside a tavern could give a bad impression or the wrong idea to some people. What is “the appearance of evil”? Paul said, “Reject every kind of evil.” Without a clearer definition, was he just trying to take away all our fun, to make us into serious, sour Christians?

Well, it is true that Paul had no problem telling Christians how to behave and how not to behave. And sometimes he was more specific than he is here. Let’s look over his shoulder at some of his letters to local churches. To the Colossians: “Put to death…sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry…Rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other…” (Colossians 3:5-9). To the Ephesians: “Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking…No immoral, impure or greedy person…has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God” (Ephesians 5:4-5). And then there’s this whole discussion with Timothy about young widows, anyone under 60 who had lost her husband. They were not to be put on what we might call the care list for widows because, Paul says, they will “get into the habit of being idle and going about from house to house. And not only do they become idlers, but also busybodies who talk nonsense…I counsel younger widows to marry…and to give the enemy no opportunity for slander” (1 Timothy 5:11-14). No, Paul has no trouble telling us what to do.

So we’ve learned to do the same thing. If you ask someone outside the church today what we believers stand for, they will be more likely to tell you something we stand against. The church is viewed as a killjoy, as a negative in society. And we’ve done it to ourselves. We’re busy pointing our finger at what is wrong rather then opening our arms to those in need of grace and, honestly, that’s one of the reasons the church struggles today. Several years ago, the Barna Group (a Christian research firm) released their study of why young people were dropping out of the church. These were young people who were raised in the church but between the ages of 18 and 29, they drop out. And we’ve always said, “Oh, they’ll come back when they start having kids,” but that urban legend is becoming less and less true as the years go by. Today, many never come back, and the COVID pandemic has only made that statistic worse. Barna’s researchers found that, in many ways, it’s because the church has an image problem. People perceive the church negatively because they see us pointing fingers. They hear and know more what we are against than what we are for. Specifically, researchers found that young people perceive the church as anti-science, anti-gay, judgmental, hypocritical, too political and generally “out of touch with reality” (cf. Hamilton, When Christians Get It Wrong; Kinnaman, You Lost Me, pgs. 20-25). The perception, at least is that like Paul, we’re good at telling people what to do—or maybe we’re better known for condemning them when they do it.

But we don't usually have the same motive as he did. We point accusing fingers at the culture while Paul was trying to help the church survive and thrive in an unfriendly culture. In that first-century world, Christians were accused of atheism, which to me is funny, but it was because the Christians didn’t worship the Roman gods. Imagine someone who used to be faithful going to the temple of Apollo and offering sacrifices, and then suddenly, that person is no longer going. For many, their work was tied to the worship of the gods, and suddenly they stop participating in the union worship service. They were atheists, it was said; they didn’t believe in the official gods. Then they were accused of cannibalism. This accusation probably came from a misunderstanding of the central part of the early church’s worship: the Lord’s supper or what we call holy communion. After all, they “ate Christ’s body” and “drank Christ’s blood.” What sort of strange religion was this? The third thing they were most often accused of was incest, probably because it became common to call each other “brother” and “sister” and refer to the church as a family. There were other accusations from other corners, but the bottom line is this: the early church had an image problem. Paul is not trying to just manage that; he’s trying to overcome that. Because they were accused of being immoral (and that was saying a lot, considering the way the Romans lived), Paul urges the believers to live a way that brings honor instead of shame to the name of Christ (cf. Richards & O’Brien 46-51). He’s not trying to kill their fun; he’s trying to make sure nothing hinders the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Paul knows and we should know that people are watching us. Each and every one of us. Are we as concerned today that the gospel gets out unhindered to those who are lost and hurting? It’s no mistake that Paul calls us “ambassadors of Christ” (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:20). Wherever we go and whatever we do, we represent Jesus Christ. The sayings are trite but they are true: you’re the only Bible some people will ever read, and you’re the only Jesus some people will ever see. Have we forgotten that, or have we just forgotten how important it is? There are many today who “profess to know Christ but become the center of scandal and controversy, seemingly unaware of how their actions and words are damaging the witness of the church” (Stetzer, Christians at Our Best, pg. ix). Just this last year alone, I’ve been amazed at the number of pastors and well-known Christian leaders who have been fired or stepped down from ministry positions because of their own mistakes and sin and compromises with what is evil, and the others who have walked away for various reasons from the church and, in many instances, from the faith. One of my new favorite authors and thinkers, Scot McKnight, writes and blogs about the fall of several churches and leaders while identifying seven characteristics of a “toxic church.” We don’t have time this morning to get into detail with these, but I do want to list them and I’d be glad to talk with any of you about them. The seven signs are these: narcissism, fear, institution creep (by which he means preserving the institution becomes more important than people), false narratives (or lying), loyalty at any cost, celebrityism (is that a word?), and becoming leader-centric. He says what we need are not more rules but a new culture: a culture of tov, the Hebrew word for “goodness.” According to McKnight, a tov church is centered around seven different qualities: empathy, grace, people, truth, justice, service and Christlikeness (A Church Called Tov). I encourage you to do some reflecting this week: how does our particular local church measure up when it comes to creating, building and maintaining a culture of tov?

But back to Paul. Paul is writing to a church that the culture does not understand, to people who feel rejected by former friends and maybe even family members. The temptation to give in, to compromise, is great. Paul calls them to “reject every kind of evil” so that the culture can see the true goodness of Jesus Christ. The intent of this call, and Paul’s other instructions to the first-century church, is not to be a killjoy. He’s not saying Christians cannot “have fun” or enjoy life. That’s not the point. He is calling us to live in such a way (a counter-cultural way) that others see Jesus in us. “Counter-cultural” means we can’t just live the same way as the culture around us, that we must cultivate a different way of life—a culture of goodness. Paul wasn’t really concerned about what others thought of him personally. He was concerned first and foremost about the reputation of the Gospel. Are we?

Now, notice Paul doesn’t just tell us to reject evil. Right before that verse is this one: “Hold on to what is good” (5:21). I’ve said it before many times: if we’re busy doing what we ought to be doing, then we won’t have time to do what we ought not to be doing. Still, the temptation toward sour faith is great, especially in a sour world. One of the things I most enjoyed during my sabbath week was not being on social media. I hopped on a couple of times to get some information, but for the vast majority of the week, I stayed far away from Facebook and other such media. I think that helped me rest as much as anything! Friends, let’s face the truth: we are often not our best on social media. I have a friend who says that Facebook is the devil, and I tell him that Facebook isn’t the devil, but the devil often shows up or maybe even lives on Facebook. The technology by itself is neutral. It’s just a tool. But the way we use it makes it good or evil. There are many times, especially in the last few years, where Christians are no different than our culture in creating drama, stress and sometimes just plain evil. Someone posts something we disagree with, and “without thinking twice, we jump recklessly into the fray, trading shot for shot with others on social media or in the line at Starbucks” (Stetzer ix). Holding on to what is good might mean letting go of your online presence. It might mean letting go of some of the causes you can’t imagine living without—causes that have, somehow, become more important than Jesus. It might mean choosing to change some habits or some attitudes or some prejudices or some long-ingrained practices. We might have to talk to someone with whom we disagree. We might have to be kind to someone who is not kind to us. The antidote to sour faith is holding onto the good and rejecting every kind of evil. The thing is, we can’t hold onto both “evil” and “good” at the same time. We have to let some things go. Trust me, it will be okay. It won’t be easy, but it will be okay. And when we let those things go, we might even find we have time to do good to those in our neighborhoods, “in real life.”

Paul’s goal was not to be a killjoy; after all, he told us to rejoice always (cf. Philippians 4:4). He constantly urges his fellow believers toward joy, even listing “joy” as part of the fruit of the Spirit (cf. Galatians 5:22). Now, granted, he was a serious dude. I doubt he would be the life of the party even today, but then again when you consider the treatment he went through (like frequent beatings and constant persecution), you can begin to understand why he was so serious (cf. Richards & O’Brien 55). In everything he did and said, his main concern is that we who claim to follow Jesus represent the Gospel well. I long for the day when we will have that same passion, that same focus! Reject evil, hold onto the good, and remember that you serve the one who has in all things “overcome the world” (John 16:33). Let’s pray.