The Conspirators

The Conspirators--December 7, 2016

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: grace to you and peace. [1 Thessalonians 1:1]

Everybody in this verse is a conspirator, no exceptions.  So were James and John and Peter and Andrew and even old doubting Thomas.  So were Mary Magdalene, Priscilla, Tabitha, Mary the mother of Jesus, Joanna, an anonymous woman at a well, and lots of other women.  Jesus, too. And truth be told, Paul's wish, if he thought much about people reading his words 2,000 years later, would have been that everybody who ever reads this verse and the letter that follows would  become a co-conspirator, too.  Their dream was that bold and their vision was that wide.

To read this or any letter in the New Testament, and certainly the Gospels, is to be pulled into a concerted effort by an underground movement to turn the world upside down with the new ordering of the God whose power is enemy-love and whose agenda is mercy. 

"All right, all right," I can hear you saying to yourself, "isn't this all a bit melodramatic here?  I mean, may be Paul himself had a flair for adventure, what with always being on the run or thrown in prison, and getting himself lowered out of city walls in baskets or shipwrecked.  And maybe it was an exciting time to be a Christian back in the first century.  But a conspiracy?  Really--from Saint Paul, the man we name churches and half of the Twin Cities after?  And saying that the church today is part of a conspiracy, too?  Most people I know think of church as the local community bulletin board and the place where raffles and bake sales are held, not a place of daring adventure, or a revolutionary movement.  Can you just cut the drama and let us get back to having a nice plain Bible study, so I can check the 'religious activity' portion of my to-do list and get on with some other errands?"

No, I'm sticking with conspiracy.  The church is one--or at least, is supposed to be a part of God's grand conspiracy, and we are all drawn into the thick of it.  It's not a cover-up in the style of a Dan Brown novel, where "the Church" is behind a fiendish plan to hide scandalous things about Jesus.  It's quite the opposite--we are part of a movement going back two millennia to show and tell the world all about Jesus (including some rather scandalous bits, to be truthful) in our words and actions.  And the conspiracy is about how to do it in ways that will catch the world's attention without playing by the world's rules.

I'm also sticking with conspiracy because of the word itself--as plenty of others have pointed out recently, the etymology of this gorgeous word means literally, "breathing together."  (Yes, that "spir-" part in the middle of the word is the same as in "respiration" or "inspiriation" and even "spirit." And the "con-" at the beginning is the root for "together" or "with," as in "construction" or "concord.")  A conspiracy, then, is those who are breathing the same air, whose sails are caught by the same wind.  We are people who breathe the same air, we Christians, or more to the point, who breathe the same Spirit, who has been seen to indwell us.  All of us, then, who are filled with the Spirit, are a part of what Dallas Willard calls "the divine conspiracy." 

It's not a conspiracy of our invention--it's not a bunch of Christians getting together saying, "Let's become really powerful in political circles and accomplish our own pet agendas."  Awful things tend to happen when supposedly Christian folks sell out the Kingdom vision of Jesus and trade it in for a spot at the table of Caesar. The conspiracy comes from the Spirit himself, who brings to us and breathes into us God's agenda, God's design, and God's vision of a restored creation and of victory over death through Jesus.

All of that brings us full circle--we are all conspirators, we Christians.  That's an important part of the Christian message and way of life. We are all players.  We are all a part of same world-changing, life-changing movement.  We all will play our own roles, and not everyone will go running all over the world like Paul did, but we are all a part of the movement.  We are all conspirators.  It's the same in our local congregations.  Maybe it feels sometimes like we are tucked back in the safety and obscurity of small towns.  Maybe we like to imagine that Christianity is just a small compartment of my life that is there to give me warm, fuzzy feelings when I am feeling pouty, but it's always been a movement meant to grip all of us--anybodies and nobodies and everybodies.  It's not up to pastors or book-writers to carry the movement forward.  It's not up to "youth ministry experts" or "praise bands" to draw people in.  We are all a part of the movement--we, in western Pennsylvania at the end of a rough 2016, our older brothers and sisters in the faith who lived in 1st century Thessalonica (on modern-day Greece), and Paul, Silas, and Timothy, too.  We are all conspirators, breathing the same Spirit.

The real surprise about our conspiracy--or really, God's conspiracy that we get to be a part of--is that, as the last words of this opening verse say, our movement is about filling creation with grace and peace.  We're not about getting a political party elected, our economic philosophy carried out at the Fed or on Wall Street, or putting ourselves in power. We should be the first to object when somebody tries to co-opt our faith and brand themselves as the standard-bearers for the Kingdom of God.  That's not us.  No, we are about infecting (if you can hear that word in a positive sense) a graceless and hostile world with the reconciling grace and peace that come from Jesus.  That is the revolution we are caught up in.  That is what makes us fellow-breathers, co-conspirators, with the likes of Saint Paul himself.

Today, what different would it make if you saw yourself, not so much as a mild-mannered respectable citizen who fits in religious 'stuff' in between the kids' hockey practice and dance lessons and your favorite TV show, but rather if you and I saw ourselves as the New Testament imagines us: conspirators set on turning the world upside down with the unexpected justice and mercy of the God whose face is Jesus?

O God who is the Source of all life, as you did in the beginning, breathe into us, your people, again, and bring us to life.  Give to us the life that really is life--the kind of life offered to us in Jesus, and let us breathe together with all your people of all times and places the same Spirit that drives us forward and sends us out to be your agents of grace and channels of peace.  We pray it in the name of Jesus, whose motion began and sustains our movement.