Test Everything

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 12.14.14

Scripture Lesson:  1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

You meet all sorts of interesting people in churches, people whose stories set into you, and whose lives play out across the way you understand the world.  

Sometimes, one of those people has had life experiences that are so...different...that you just can’t help seeing how their story resonates with that broader story we hear in the Gospel.

So this Sunday, I’d like to highlight that person, talking about them and their experiences, some of which play powerfully across the text for today.  And you’re thinking as I’m talking, oh Sweet Lord Baby Jesus, please don’t be me, please don’t be me.

No, it’s not you.

It’s a member of my last church, who passed away several years ago.  Horst was an interesting guy for many reasons.  I got to know him in his early nineties, when he was still active and energetic and sharp as a tack.  He’d spent much of his career traveling the world and working as an agricultural economist for the World Bank, along with his beloved wife Judy.  His backstory was more interesting still, although he didn’t bring it front and center unless he was asked.

Horst, you see, was the only American prisoner of war I’ve ever really gotten to know.  And when I say, “American prisoner of war,” I don’t mean he was an American.  As a young man, Horst had been a Lieutenant in the tenth Panzer Division, serving under General Rommel in North Africa.  As American and British forces overcame the Afrikakorps in mid-1943, his division was overwhelmed, and he and others surrendered to the British.

When I talked with him about his experiences in a prisoner of war camp in Kansas, what he most wanted to convey was just how different it was than he’d been lead to believe by Nazi propagandists.  There was the expectation, reinforced by what the Nazis told their soldiers, that imprisonment by the Allies would be a difficult and potentially brutal thing.  There would be interrogations, which would be rough.  There would be near-to-starvation living conditions.  There would be all manner of unpleasantness.  Nazi propaganda was pretty relentless about just what a place America was.  According to that propaganda, America was a dangerous, unpredictable enemy, a cruel and aimless nation of racial mongrels and avaricious profiteers.  Many things were a possibility when imprisoned, but it was better than dying pointlessly in the desert for a battle that was already lost.

Or so he hoped.

While being a prisoner of war held by the United States wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, the reality proved to be very different.  It was nothing at all like the POW camps of the Axis powers.  He and the others in the camp were treated respectfully, allowed to send communications to their families, fed and housed in ways that made it clear that the country where they were held respected human life.

What they experienced, as captives, showed that the propaganda they’d been bombarded with by the Nazi party was nothing more than lies and manipulation.  When tested against the reality he encountered, it was clear that what he had been told was a falsehood, and that the truth about the nation that held him was rather different.

Sometimes, the world around us tells us one thing, a thing that resonates with what we want to believe.  It might be seductive.  It might make us feel powerful, or significant, or reinforce an existing bias or predilection.  But that does not make it right, and, more importantly it does not make it part of the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed.

Paul’s first letter to the small church at Thessalonika is a remarkably hopeful, positive letter.  It comes to us as what scholars believe to be the very earliest Christian writing.  Of all of the letters of the New Testament, this one likely was the first to be written down, somewhere between 40 and 50 CE.

I’m fond of this letter, for a bunch of different reasons.  First, I’m connected to this town personally.  Many of the smaller cities to which Paul wrote faded and were abandoned. Ephesus no longer exists.  Corinth, messy, backbiting, morally bankrupt Corinth?  That faded away into a ruin, like Vegas in 2137, standing abandoned, a waterless ruin.  

Thessaloniki is not one of them.  A healthy little port city still sits, just where it was, right there on the bend of the Thermaic Gulf, overlooking the stunning blue waters of the Aegean Sea.

For thousands of years now, there’s been a strong Jewish community in Thessaloniki.  When my wife’s ancestors fled Spain during the Inquisition, it was in Thessaloniki that they sought refuge.  There, they lived for centuries, mingling with the families there before emigrating to America.  Which means, in some way, that my sons are potentially related to some of the Jews who threw the Apostle Paul out of  town.  Reading Acts 17, or 1 Thessalonians 2?  It’s like reading a family history.  

Mostly, though, I like this letter because it’s positive, hopeful, and affirming, a letter that shows a deep connection between the Apostle and those to whom he was writing.  Here, as Paul wraps things up, a sweet letter of encouragement and support to a community that he cared for, he offers a sequence of moral imperatives, each of which rests on the radical compassion that is so central to Paul’s witness.

Those moral orders begin before the passage we just heard, as Paul gently but firmly challenges those who heard him to push themselves, to hold themselves to the high ethical standard he saw in Christ.  He presents them with maxims, plain and simple measures of what it will mean to live out the life that Jesus taught.

“Respect those who work.”  “Be at peace among yourselves.”  “Be patient with everyone.”  “Never pay back evil for evil, but show good to every single human being.”  

More than anything, he challenges those he loves to test themselves, their every action, their every commitment, their every moment, against the reality that permeates all of Paul’s early thought.  That reality?

That in Jesus of Nazareth, the world has been changed.  No matter what the reality you think you inhabit, no matter what experiences you feel define your existence, what Paul proclaimed that this reality needs to be tested against a new metric for what is good and right and true.

The new community in Thessalonica faced significant challenges.  They were small, and they were struggling, and they were exposed to intermittent imperial persecution. Paul exhorts them: Here, you know what is good.  You know that when you hold on to that good, hard as it may seem, you are serving the Reign of God that Jesus came into this world to proclaim.  That’s what gives a person their integrity.

In every time of trial, there is going to be the temptation to set aside those principles and do what seems expedient.  There is the temptation to chase after whatever feels right at that very moment, the hot fierce light of our passions.  There will be the temptation to believe things that might seem bright and clear, carefully constructed and argued, but that fundamentally violate the principles that give us our integrity.

My conversations with Horst came floating back this week, as our nation struggled to process the outputs of a report on what were being called, as George Orwell would have put it, “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

There were all manner of justifications and explications being offered up, rational arguments and arguments appealing to expediency and what is necessary in a time of crisis.  Funny word, krisis.  The word derives from a Greek term, which means “a time that forces a decision.”  A time of crisis is, among other things, a test of authenticity.  Do you hold to your principles, or do you set them aside?

It is self-evident that in this instance, the choice was to set them aside.  That is a challenge for us as citizens of this country, one which illustrates the challenge we face as Christians.

Our lives, and our culture?  They offer up tests, moments of krisis, every single day.  Power and pride, anxiety and greed, desire and self-serving, all of these things come pouring at us.

When they do, and when they try to command your allegiance and your obedience, remember the words of Paul.  “Test everything.  Hold fast to what is good.  Abstain from every form of evil.”

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.