We have probably heard the lyric for a month now in store background music:
“He’s making a list and checking it twice,Lists need to be checked twice (or more). Even after I have checked the shopping list twice, I will forget something on it. And those of you who read the bulletin closely will know how frequently some wrong word or misspelling gets into print. Don’t blame Barbara, blame me.
Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice,
Santa Claus is comin’ to town.”
The cardinal rule for carpenters is measure twice and cut once. You can shorten a board cut too long, but you can’t lengthen a board cut too short. An extended family in my previous congregation ran a printing shop. They would hire a teenager after school to clean up and do odd jobs. Frequently the new hire would be initiated by being sent down the street to the hardware store to get a paper stretcher. The rule remains, measure twice, cut once.
Lots of us make lists. Lists are useful. A management tip I saw recently said that the last thing a person ought to do before leaving work at the end of the day is to make a to do list for the next day while the thoughts of unfinished work or new projects are fresh in the mind. Years ago a New Yorker cartoon showed an executive conversing with an employee. He said, “Let me make a little list of those things.” The huge executive desk was covered with little pieces of paper bearing lists.
Paul is famous for his lists. They are scattered throughout his letters. There is the list of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, the list of situations which he has survived in 2 Corinthians 11, the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, and the equipment list of the armor of God in Ephesians 6, just to name a few. Some readers think that Paul’s lists are closed, when in fact most are open-ended. They are not exhaustive but illustrative. There ought to be an “e.g.” at the beginning, or an “etc.” after the last entry.
All this points out is that Paul’s lists are made according to the particular context. We have one of Paul’s lists in today’s reading from the first Thessalonian letter. Paul is addressing the new community or assembly meeting in Thessalonica. The Greek word he uses eventually becomes the word we associate with church – ekklesia.
Lee Bowman points out the important aspect of that context. The significance of the community, assembly, or church is not derived from its location in a particular piece of geography, but “from its ‘location’ in a particular god, namely the one God of Jews and Christians—known to both traditions as the Creator and Father of all.”(1) The community of faith is not the Thessalonians’ church of God, but God’s church in Thessalonica. That’s the context for which Paul makes his list.
The Thessalonian context includes a tension between ardor and order, between members who are sparked by the Spirit which results in a free-wheeling, prophetic, and messy church life and members who are trying to keep everything in order which results in a buttoned-down, constricted, institutional church life. Already in the earliest years of the church the clash of evolutionary and emerging versus settled and atrophied has begun. They didn’t use those terms, but that is the gist of the tension between the faction which threw caution to the wind with the expectation that Jesus would return any day and the faction which thought that the church might be in it for the long haul.
Advent is like the San Andreas Fault, where the North American and the Pacific tectonic plates rub against each other, causing a major earthquake every so often. Advent is like that because the first and the second coming a Jesus rub against each other in ways that create theology-quakes. Is Christ here manifested in the body of Christ called Church or isn’t he? Will he come again? Does he really need to return? Why hasn’t he returned?
Paul lists one of the gifts of the Spirit as prophetic utterance. Sermons as we know them hadn’t developed yet. And most of the scriptures which we read today from the New Testament hadn’t yet been written. So often the focus of a gathering of the Christ followers was around a Spirit inspired, impromptu, unrehearsed utterance by someone whose spiritual gift was prophecy. Now just because these folks weren’t seminary-trained and didn’t have bound commentaries and internet Bible websites, didn’t mean that they had nothing to offer their hearers. Their words could give guidance, reveal teachings, or deepen the faith of people who were having trouble living their newly-gained faith in the culture of the community or who were beset with persecution.
In some ways, the early church may have functioned something like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in that every one pitched in to help each other live the new life, the clean life, the life built on Christ and free from the addiction of false gods and idols.
Of course the prophecies could not be taken untested. The dynamic of “I saw it on the Internet, so it has to be true” operated the same when everything came by word of mouth. Fact-checkers and truthers are needed in every age. Yet without the manifestations of the Spirit the church becomes dull, ingrown, and atrophied.
The church – including you and me in the church today – has this tension of the Spirit pushing us to see beyond touch and sight and good solid people saying, “Not so fast.” Urgency is one thing, rushing headlong, leaping before looking is another. The tension is between knowing that Christ could come at any time, and yet living as if our Lord is depending on the church indefinitely. Culturally we live this out with children asking if Christmas is here yet and adults advising patience. The Spirit will not be patient and the staid institution will not get excited.
How do we allow the Spirit of God to be active in our midst without quenching it? If we quench the Spirit in worship, it becomes mere ritual, rote words devoid of feeling. If we quench the Spirit in teaching, then thinking becomes as occluded as blood vessels clogged by cholesterol. If we quench the Spirit in mission, the church becomes a destination rather than embarkation place. If we quench the Spirit in relating to the world around us, we further demean and devalue the very individuals and classes of people who desperately need highways in the deserts of life, filled-in valleys and smoothed-out rough places, who have broken hearts yearning for binding up, who are imprisoned by bars not just made with iron, but also with penniless dollars and untrained learning, who mourn not only their own mistakes but also the negligence and disdain of others.
John the Baptist, channeling Elijah, prepared the way for the Messiah’s coming. He turned hearts with prophetic fire and ordered words so that the curse might be lifted from the land. When John’s father, Zechariah, learned that his elderly wife Elizabeth would bear a son, he was stricken with dumbness for not believing. Only when he wrote the child’s angel-given name on the tablet, was his tongue loosed and his proclamation heard.
Hear again Paul’s list, this time transcribed by Eugene Peterson in The Message:
- Be cheerful no matter what;
- Pray all the time;
- Thank God no matter what happens. (This is the way God wants you who belong to Christ Jesus to live. )
- Don’t suppress the Spirit,
- Don’t stifle those who have a word from the Master.
- On the other hand, don’t be gullible.
- Check out everything, and keep only what’s good.
- Throw out anything tainted with
With assured hope expect the future but live faithfully as if the future were already here. That’s the list. For Advent, Christmas, every day. Check it twice.
(1) Lee Bowman, “1 Thessalonians 5:15-24; Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, p. 64.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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