Sermon - The Rev. Leah D. Schade
Reformation Lutheran Church, Media, PA
Lenten Mid-week Service, March 15, 2006
“Tender Caring”
Text: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-16

If you missed last Wednesday evening’s service, we began with the first Chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians.  Each week we’ll be reading a portion of the letter in succession, so that by the end of Lent, we will have covered the entire book of 1 Thessalonians.

Whenever a preacher has a text in front of her like this, she has to make decisions about what she will address, and what she will leave out.  This passage from 1 Thessalonians has quite a bit of material in it.  So I want to begin with what I’m going to leave out. 

Verses 14 - 16 have these words, “the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out.”  It goes on to say that the Jews displeased God and that God’s wrath has overtaken them completely.  There are two reasons I’m going to leave this out of our focus today.  One is because there is some debate about the authenticity of this passage.  Some scholars argue that these verses are a later insertion because of their severe language about Jewish persecution of Christians in Judea.  It’s odd, because Paul is a Jew.  And while he might have simply been describing the tense situation at that time, it is a very problematic passage. 

This is the second reason why I’m not going to leave this out of consideration - it’s because the passage has been used to justify anti-Semitism many times throughout history.  I want to be very clear that the Jews did not kill Jesus.  The Romans killed Jesus.  There was collusion on the part of the religious hierarchy of the Jewish establishment. But to lay the blame for Jesus’ death at the feet of the Jews is very problematic, and was an excuse for everything from the Spanish Inquisition to the Holocaust in WWII.

So I want to set aside those verses and focus instead on the first part of Chapter Two, which talks primarily about Paul’s ministry in Thessalonica, and the example he set for them while he was with them. 

Paul uses two metaphors to describe his care for these newborn Christians.  One is “nurse” and the other is “father.”  Interesting that he would choose both the feminine and masculine images of parenting within four verses of each other.  In verse 11, he says, “As you know, we dealt with each one of you like a father with his children, urging and encouraging you and pleading that you lead a life worthy of God.” And in verse 7, he says, “We were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.”  Other translations read, “But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother cherishes her own children.”  or “like a woman caring for her little ones.”  It’s the word “care” that I want to focus on. 

The word in Greek is “thalpo”, which means to brood over, to foster, to cherish.  And this is what parents do, both fathers and mothers.  He goes on to say, in Verse 8, that they were so drawn to these new believers that they weren’t content just to share the Gospel.  They wanted to share themselves.  They wanted a relationship with these people.  They wanted to give them their hearts, as well as the Word of God.

As a parent, I can relate to this.  Sure, there is a part of my job as Rachel’s mother that involves teaching, encouraging, disciplining, and modeling good behavior.  But as she’s getting older, I’m finding that a new aspect of our relationship is emerging.  It’s when we simply are together, in each other’s presence, talking one-to-one, with no particular goal or objective.  We’re simply being with each other and paying attention to each other, enjoying each other’s presence.  And these are the times that I look forward to the most!

I’m glad that Paul uses this kind of family imagery, because it is something we can all relate to on a very intimate level.  I was reading an article by Elizabeth Green called, “The Power of Attending:  Family Life as a Spiritual Practice,” in which she talks about this discipline of being with another person, giving them “a rare gift of presence that feeds the soul.”  It’s when you give someone your undivided attention, accompanying them along life’s journey.  It’s not characterized by offering advice or solutions, or even reassurance or consolation.

This kind of caring involves putting aside your own agenda and truly being present to another.  You get the sense here that Paul and Silas and Timothy came to Thessalonica with their mission clearly in their minds - to convert people to Christianity, change lives, and win souls for God through Jesus Christ.  But then something happened where, in fact, they were changed by being in the presence of these people.

Understand that the missionaries had just come from an awful experience in Phillipi, where they were jailed, beaten, and severely mistreated.  Then they come to this port city along the sea and find just the opposite - a warm welcome and an openness to their message. 

There is a mutual exchange that goes on here.  Paul and the apostles enter into a relationship with these people, and, as is the case with deep and caring relationships, both are affected and made more complete by what is shared. That’s the way it is between two people who share a deep and abiding love with each other.  It’s what happens between a parent and child.  And even when the child becomes the caregiver of the parent, the relationship enters a new phase of caring and affection.

And yet it is this kind of caring that is also one of the most difficult spiritual disciplines to maintain.  As Green says, “Even when we think we have a handle on [caring], something changes.  A child enters a new stage, a parent becomes disabled, a sibling gets married, a spouse is restless at work or itchy to realize an old dream.  As the circumstances of our lives evolve, old ways of holding each other no longer serve.  We are humbled and honed by the practice of attending because even as we adjust to such changes in others, we are changing too.” (Green, p. 9).

I think that’s why Paul emphasized that there was more than just their own words and ministry that allowed this kind of caring to take place.  He says in verse 13, “. . . you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.” If this kind of deep caring were all up to us, it would be an effort doomed to failure.  We are too easily distracted by the daily business of life.  We are too easily gotten off course by the viscisitudes of our emotions and our need to be needed and to have influence, if not power, over another.  The deeper and longer-running our relationships are, the more we are susceptible to superficiality, just going through the motions, and taking each other for granted.

Author Polly Berends says that family life gives us “an unprecedented opportunity to discover the real parent of both ourselves and our children, to become conscious children of God.”  And I think, in a sense, that’s what happened with Paul and the Thessalonians.  As he and the other missionaries parented these new Christians, their faith increased as well.  “Held in that loving embrace,” says Green, we can hold each other and hold the tensions, relying not on our own resources but on ‘the presence of a ceaselessly generous life-giving, life-sustaining force,’ where both the delights and the heartbreaks of our lives together can point.” (Green, 11).

And it is precisely that life-giving, life-sustaining force that helped their relationship endure, even after Paul was separated from his newfound church.  The end of Chapter 2 talks about how much he longs to see them again, but that circumstances blocked his being able to come.  Yet the power of that caring to endure, even in the face of separation, even when blocked by death itself, is amazing. 

I find this enduring love, given by the Source of love, very helpful when I realize I’ve come up short with the people I love.  When I find it hard to summon the energy needed to give the kind of attentive care I want to give.  When I feel that gap in my relationships with my family or friends, either because of too great distance,or because of too little time.  Daily I must ask for forgiveness and trust in the grace of God to fill in the gaps, allow the connection to endure, and point the way to the spiritual practice of caring that will allow us to truly find each other again.

Let us pray:  Holy Source of Love, we ask that you seek us out and find us.  Find us in the hurry to the next scheduled appointment.  Find us in the bit of conversation that begs for our undivided attention.  Find us in the long stretches of time and space that separate us from the spiritual union with those for whom we care.  Find us as we make our way along this Lenten journey, and lead us back to you.  Amen.



Source:
Green, Elizabeth, “The Power of Attending:  Family Life as a Spiritual Practice,” Weavings:  A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. 20, No. 5, Sept./Oct. 2005