The War That Matters

Recently I had a chance to catch up with a former intern who worked at the health center where I work. They were a very passionate young mental health clinician who contributed a great deal to our center, and we, in turn, helped to provide some foundational experiences that shaped their professional work. This intern went on to get a doctorate, and is now doing some incredible community projects. I felt so fortunate to have crossed paths with them on their journey.

I imagine that Paul might have been feeling similarly as we read from 1 Thessalonians today.

The church Paul helped to found in Thessalonica (in modern day Greece) was a small church that was not well received by the locals. The book of Acts chronicles Paul’s struggles there. So when he says today that he and his missionary friends, “give thanks to God always for all of you, remembering you in our prayers, unceasingly calling to mind your work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope,” he’s not kidding.  This faithful crew of people in Thessalonica endured during hard times. Paul goes on to remind them that the community there was deeply loved by God and that the gospel was given to them not just in word alone “but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with much conviction,” and remarks that “in every place your faith in God has gone forth.”

There’s so much in these words that I relate to.

First off, I actually want to say thank you to those of you who read (and comment on) these blog entries. I honestly echo Paul’s words every week when I prepare to write them. I am so grateful for you and i pray for you. I imagine so many of you – not unlike the church in Thessalonica – as people working hard to be faithful in a world that may not often support the values and perspectives that you try to live out. I imagine the many labors of love that you perform in this world, the sacrifices that you make and the ways you endure. And it makes me smile.

Maybe you have people like that in your life that you are holding in gratitude and prayer. They may have been there for you during a difficult time. Maybe they sustained you when you needed it or breathed some new life into you. While our faith tradition can tend to focus on people like Paul, it’s important to remember the influence of the people on Paul himself. The Thessalonians encouraged him (literally meaning to give him heart) and helped him keep going.

Maybe we can just pause for a minute and call to mind people that you are grateful for who have en-couraged you.

Paul goes on to speak of the power that he witnessed in the people and how their faith in God has gone forth into the community.

Again, I relate this to all of you. You are all such powerful light-bearers in this world – taking “good news” to so many different places, spaces and contexts. And in a world where there is so much negativity and division, this is certainly a welcomed development! I appreciate and want to lift up the many ways that you live out your faith, and in my moments of discouragement, I actually call to mind all of the good people I know who are doing good in ways that I can’t even imagine.

We don’t read it in today’s reading, but as the church in Thessalonica grew, some “leaders” emerged who were false teachers. They taught things that were inconsistent with the gospel and passed themselves off as Paul’s disciples. 

Jesus encounters a similar situation in today’s gospel. He knows who God is, and he knows the power of his faith tradition. So when he sees how the “scribes and Pharisees” are acting, it makes him really angry. The scribes and Pharisees were religious leaders (the scribes being legal experts in the law and the Pharisees being religious leaders who often helped people apply their faith to everyday life), and Jesus had serious concerns about their teachings and their self-righteousness.

And he was public about his criticism!

In Matthew 23, we read him say, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You lock the Kingdom of heaven before [the faithful]. You do not enter yourselves, nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You traverse sea and land to make one convert, and when that happens you make him a child of Gehenna twice as much as yourselves. Woe to you, blind guides…”

You can see why they were not pleased with him and plotted against him!

This passage underscores for me the need for people to keep speaking out and being vocal about what they see happening around them. What made Jesus such a powerful teacher is that he was saying out loud what a lot of people probably thought or felt (but may have been too afraid to say themselves). But more importantly, his saying it helped everyday people who were suffering under the weight of these teachings to know that there was an alternative.

I recently came across the work of poet Diane Di Prima. In her poem Rant (which I highly recommend), she says, “The war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed by it.”

Jesus’ naming the behaviors of the scribes and Pharisees wasn’t just some form of wokeness or “calling them out” for their actions. I think that Jesus realized that he was in a (nonviolent) war of the imagination with them. His articulation and embodiment of the kin-dom of God and his calling out what he saw them doing made it possible for people to imagine a different future. The scribes and Pharisees’ way of doing things was not the only way, and Jesus does not normalize their actions.

We’re in a similar imagination battle these days (and we probably have been for a long time). The current powers that be – especially in this country – wish for us to accept particular narratives and actions as “normal” (and even inevitable). They offer us a certain version of reality (not unlike the scribes and Pharisees). And we, like Jesus, need to keep speaking up and speaking out that this is not the only way and that alternatives are possible (and present) – alternatives that benefit the least, center the priorities of the downtrodden and lift the lowly.

Of course, being vocal comes with a cost, and in a climate of retribution and harassment, this is not an insignificant risk. Jesus knew this back then, and many throughout history have known it. Again, I am encouraged and inspired by so many – locally and nationally – who keep raising voices for justice and equity as they stoke the fires of our collective imagination that another world is possible.

In their book, Let This Radicalize You, authors Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba say that “we are world builders” and remind us that our actions in this world matter and that “possibility is the hope that we bear.”

The community of Thessalonica knew this.

The community of Jesus knew this.

And may we come to know this ever more deeply “in every place [our] faith in God has gone forth.”

I give thanks to God always for all of you, remembering you in my prayers, unceasingly calling to mind your work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope.