Traveling Light--November 8, 2023

Traveling Light--November 8, 2023

"But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing." [1 Thessalonians 5:8-11]

When you know how the story will end, it gives you courage to make it through the rest of the pages.  Especially when it's your own story.

I know in my own life, the most frightening moments have been the times when I was staring down a situation whose ending I couldn't yet see.  It's the unknown that gets us, the thought that we don't know how things will turn out but that we still have to head into them like a fog.  It's the thought that the things you are currently taking for granted as solid and fixed will get shaky or turn out to have been mirages all along.  

Those times come to us in all sorts of ways: the diagnosis that turns your world upside down... the unexpected loss of a job you were counting on to get you to retirement... the spouse who comes to you seemingly out of the blue and says, "I don't think I love you anymore"... the severe sickness of a child or sudden reversal of roles where you become the caregiver for someone who had given you care, or when you have to suddenly become the recipient of help after being used to being the one helping others.  And, of course, at this very moment, while you and I are comfortably (at least relatively, I'm assuming) reading and writing words on a screen, hostages sequestered away in tunnels somewhere are trembling with fear over whether they'll ever be free to see their families again, and little Palestinian children are sobbing to have seen their parents killed before their eyes and do not know what the rest of the day will bring.  We all know those moments when we are afraid and just waiting for the other shoe to drop--or how many shoes will keep falling.

And of course, our ancestors in faith in the first generations of Christianity lived through their own deep crises of uncertainty.  There was the constant looming background fear of whether the Empire would start rounding them up or putting them to death.  There was the fear that a lynch-mob would all of a sudden decide those Christians were dangerous troublemakers and run them out of the town or stoning them to death because, as the book of Acts puts it, they saw us as "turning the world upside down."  And on top of those fears specific to the Christian community, there were all the universal fears that everybody would have had in the first century within the Roman Empire:  would there be an imperial crackdown on conquered peoples, leading to arrests, torture, or even crucifixion of their neighbors (or themselves?) just as a show of Caesar's power?  Would a wave of pestilence lead to sickness or famine in their community?  Would money get tight and someone in the family have to be sold into slavery--and then separated from their families?  Any of those situations might have happened, and so I suppose there was just a certain unavoidable level of anxiety about what might happen next, and how your story might go, if you were one of Paul's original readers of this passage.

So, given all those scary and precarious possibilities, Paul's response fascinates me. Basically, he reminds his friends in Thessalonica that they know the end of the story.  "God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation," Paul says. And while that isn't any sort of blanket promise that nothing will happen in the rest of the book's pages, it does tell them that their story is not a tragedy but a divine comedy.  They can count on God's love enduring for them all the way to the end of the story, and that gives them at least a certain kind of confidence to make it through the scary things and uncertainty coming at them from everywhere else in their lives.  Paul never says, "Because God loves us, we'll never face suffering," but he does say, "We know that God's love will not let go of us--God has destined us for salvation, not for destruction."  God's love, in other words, never ends, even to the last word at the end of the last sentence on the last page.

And so, interestingly enough, Paul tells his readers that their trust (faith) in God's love and their hope in God's promised rescue (salvation) are all the protection they will need for facing a world full of ominous dangers.  He doesn't tell those early Christians, "It's a dangerous world out there, so lock and load!"  He doesn't say, "Have your swords and spears ready for whatever hostile forces might come our way--and make 'em wish they weren't born!"  Just the opposite, actually: "Your helmet will be your hope.  Your bulletproof vest will be your trust in God's unending love.  The world will think we're crazy because we aren't carrying a heavy arsenal to fight off the boogeymen.  But it's all you'll really need."  

I suppose that's always the posture of Jesus' followers in the world: we will look vulnerable and foolish to everybody else because we aren't driven by fear to be hostile and combative all the time, paranoid that we need to be ready to strike back (or first, preemptively!) at any moment.  But to us it's not naive to have only hope, faith, and love as our protection--that's the freedom you have when you are confident of how the story will end.  When you know that God's love wins at the last and will not let go, you can travel light.

May we travel light today, then, with trust in God's love and hope in God's promised salvation as all the protection we need for the day.  May it free us then, with open hands, to serve and love the people around us.

Lord God, give us the confidence of knowing we your love will carry us to the end, so that we can face the day with courage to share that same love all around.