More and More--November 17, 2023

More and More--November 17, 2023

"Now concerning love of the brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anyone write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do love all the brothers and sisters throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, beloved, to do so more and more..." [1 Thessalonians 4:9-10]

One of the things that comes with wisdom is the ability to ask the right questions. And sadly, all too often, we make a mess of the Good News of the Scriptures because we are come to the Word asking the wrong questions--or at least questions that make assumptions the Scriptures do not share. I don't know about you, but I am finding the more and more I read the Scriptures together with other disciples, the more I find them teaching me which kinds of questions they intend to answer. That's the Bible for you--not merely giving answers to questions (but only sometimes, to be truthful--God doesn't tell us everything we might want to know), but more often teaching us how to ask the right kinds of questions, and so to become wise.

This passage is a good illustration. Quite often, Christians (and maybe especially Protestant Christians like Lutherans and others) have come to the Bible asking questions about bare minimums. "What is the bare minimum required for a person to be saved?" "What is the least often we can celebrate Holy Communion and still be in good standing?" "What are the essential, non-negotiable requirements for a baptism to be valid?" We often ask things in terms of leasts, in terms of requirements, and in terms of what does the most stripped down, basic version look like? And I think it's because we misunderstand what it means to be people who are saved by grace. Follow me for a moment: we Christians, and especially Lutherans among them, will live and die on the hill of "justificiation by grace through faith apart from works of the law." We insist that we cannot be right with God by our achievements or by earning or by rule-keeping--instead, we are saved by grace through faith, we say. But that leads us to ask strange follow-up questions, like: "What counts as faith?" or "How much do I have to believe, and how hard must I believe it, in order for my faith to be saving faith?" Or then we ask things like, "Since I do not get into God's good graces by works of love toward others, is there any kind of bare minimum requirement of love to stay in the club, or what?" There was a time when Lutherans celebrated Holy Communion very infrequently because they had gotten some number in their heads about what the bare minimum should have been, and they took it to be the single right answer for sharing the Meal. We tried to strip down as much as we could from our worship life that we thought smacked of religious ritual and--dared we say it, Catholicism--because we didn't want people thinking that you had to do those things to be right with God. We got into a whole line of thinking that saw everything in terms of lowest-common-denominators and bare-minimums, and we thought it all flowed out of being saved by grace through faith. And to be truthful, the answers that Lutherans came up with--having infrequent Communion, paring down song and celebration and such out of worship, and insisting that we didn't have to do good works--all made sense because the questions we were asking were always put in terms of "What is the bare minimum I have to do for God to love me?" Because if you ask the question that way, you had better come up with an answer something like: you don't have to do anything to get God to love you!

But maybe that way of phrasing the question is wrongheaded. Maybe we are distorting the truth to begin with by asking loaded, or convoluted questions that make assumptions just in the way they are phrased. Maybe, in fact, we should get outside the "bare minimum" question and start asking questions about fullness. Instead of saying, "How often do I have to have Communion to still be in right standing with God?" maybe the question really is, "If I am a beloved part of the Body of Christ, why would I miss any opportunity to share the Meal Jesus gave us?" Instead of saying, "We don't have to have these extra elements to our worship, because they are not required for salvation," it may be worth asking, "What would make our exposure to the Word and to the Sacraments as full as possible?" Instead of saying, "You can't tell me I have to do good works toward my neighbor because I'm justified by faith apart from works," it might be worth asking, "What happens to a person when the love of God grabs a hold of them--and how does that love find fullest expression." See how the question we ask makes a big difference in the kind of answers we get?

So why the extended sidebar here into church denominations and worship practices? Because the questions of bare-minimums versus the questions of fullness make a big difference in how we make sense of today's verses. If we come to the text today asking only questions of "How much am I required to do in order to get in (or stay in) God's good graces?" then Paul's words will make no sense. Paul is telling his Christian friends that they already know to love one another--and yet he teaches them to love more and more all the time. If we are thinking only in terms of bare-minimums that get us "saved," we will have painted ourselves into a corner, and we will have to say things like, "You can't make me show love to anybody, because I'm saved by grace and I can be as big a stinker and a jerk as I like--I have God's love, darn it!" You are forced to say odd things like "Love people or not, it doesn't matter--all that God cares about is that you believe the right things about God." Well, there you've just turned faith into your accomplishment (believing the right things about God) and you've clearly missed the point if Jesus himself things that loving others is non-negotiable. So how can Paul tell these Christians in good standing that they are supposed to love more and more? Haven't they already met the bare minimum? Aren't they already "in" by faith in Christ? Doesn't being saved by grace mean that you don't have to worry about doing anything any longer?

See how we've gotten ourselves painted into that corner? But what happens if we ask a different set of questions? What happens if, rather than asking, "How much love do you have to show in order to meet the quota?" we asked instead, "If you knew you were already beloved of God as a free gift, how would you let it overflow from you?" Now it's no longer a question of what the bare-minimum is that is allowable to "get in," it is instead a question of how to live as fully as possible within God's love, knowing we are there already? See, the moment you set the bar with some kind of requirement, however low the bar is, there is still something that you have to do to earn your place. But the moment you turn the question around and ask about fullness, then grace can really be grace. We can say, "You are already accepted, justified, and saved as a gift of God--that's a done deal, not up for debate or discussion. So what will you do to live in that gift as fully as possible now?" That makes Paul's question understandable. This is not the spokesperson for being saved-by-grace now changing his story and demanding that the Thessalonians love each other more and more in a never-ending quest to win God's favor. It is the champion of grace saying that grace is never the ending--it is also always the beginning of something. It is, in other words, the beginning of a growing love that radiates out to friend, neighbor, stranger, and enemy. That is what the fullness question is all about.

Asking the right question makes a big difference with the Scriptures. Thank God for the Spirit of wisdom who enables us even to hear and read and ask rightly.

Lord God, give us your Spirit and give us wisdom to engage your Word faithfully. And lead us to be done with bare minimums, so that we can strive for the fullness you offer.