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Today is the Fourth Sunday in Lent.
As was the case last week, I’m on the road again. This weekend, I’ve been at Chapman University in Orange, California, for their Founders Day celebration.
The lectionary text for this day is from John 3, the passage that includes the verse, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
But today’s musing isn’t on that passage. Instead, I’m sharing the sermon I preached at Chapman for their worship service yesterday. The theme for the event was gratitude — and the text I chose to preach on is below, 1 Thessalonians 5:12-18.
I’ve posted the audio of the sermon — Being Thankful at the End of the World — and a transcript.
1 Thessalonians 5:12-18
But we appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect those who labor among you, and have charge of you in the Lord and admonish you; esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers, encourage the faint hearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all.
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Transcription of sermon, Being Thankful at the End of the World. Preached at Chapman University’s Founders Day, March 9, 2024. It was the second presentation in a day-long event focused on the practice of gratitude.
This is an AI-generated transcription from spoken delivery, not a written manuscript.
* * * * *
My question today has been: Grateful? What has that got to do with now? How do we live in times like these? What does gratitude have to do with it?
The text that I chose is the text from 1 Thessalonians 5:12-18 that was just read, “be at peace among yourselves.” A very familiar text that ends with these famous words, “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
One of my main memories of this text is from years ago, I wish I could remember the exact time that this episode happened. But I was visiting my friend Teresa, who was then a Masters of Divinity student at Fuller Theological Seminary and I was a student on the East Coast.
We were old friends from Arizona and had gone to college together, but we were now on two different sides of the country for seminary.
I got sick. I got really sick when I was visiting her. I don't know if I ate something bad or if I had just come down with some bug. But I remember running in the middle of the night into the bathroom, opening up the toilet — you don't hear many sermons that start like this — and heaving. When I got done doing this horrible business that I had to do, I looked up. And right in front of me there was a poster above the toilet with a picture of a waterfall that read, “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.”
I said, oh Lord, that's the last thing I want to do right now.
It's funny because I think we've all been there. This is a verse that is often used just like that. I sometimes see that poster or a similar poster like it hung right next to the Live, Laugh, Love posters in some friend’s house.
Those are what I’d call innocent abuses of this text. The funny poster above the bathroom toilet or hanging beside the Live, Laugh, Love poster.
But there are more dangerous applications of it as well.
I certainly have heard well-meaning people in churches say, when a friend of theirs was diagnosed with cancer, “oh, make sure you say thank you for this because God is going to teach you something out of it.” Thank God for cancer?
Indeed, I think that this text is one of the most abused texts in the New Testament.
Phyllis Tribble once wrote about texts of terror. I'm not entirely sure that this would belong to that category, but it certainly deserves to be called a text that has occasionally terrorized me — and many others, I suppose.
What is it about a demand to give thanks that winds up being abuse?
I'd like to just walk us through this. My sermon today is an invitation to take a few minutes and put this abused text back into its appropriate context. And then, once we have a sense of that context, we can see that this call to give thanks in all circumstances is surprisingly relevant to our own days. It might not be abusive, but important.
Now, some simple background giving context:
First Thessalonians is the oldest book in the New Testament. I remember learning that and being surprised. The oldest book is not a gospel. It's not Paul's long book to the Romans. It's not the book of Revelation.
It's this odd letter. First Thessalonians.
It was written around the year 50 following one of Paul's missionary journeys, and it establishes his format, which will appear over and over again in all of his epistles, and the epistles that are written in his name in the New Testament.
First, there's the sender. Paul tells you who he's sending it to, and he gives them a greeting. That is followed with thanks and appreciation. And then comes the body of the letter addressing the main issue, and finally a closing.
And what is interesting about the book of 1 Thessalonians — its closing includes those words, “in everything give thanks.” But it opens in a very similar way, indeed almost exactly the same way.
In 1 Thessalonians 1:2, Paul writes, “We always give thanks to God for all of you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith, labor of love, and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
If we read this thanks — and we knew about Paul's style: sender, greeting, thanks and appreciation, body of letter, and closing – we recognize Paul's form or format or template for writing one of his letters. And there it is: thanks.
“We always give thanks to God for all of you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father, your work of faith, labor of love, and steadfastness of hope. “
Maybe it sound a bit formulaic now, but it wasn't a formula then because this is his very first letter.
Indeed, Paul actually violates what becomes the Pauline formula because he goes on and on with thanks. That brief verse is not all of the appreciation in 1 Thessalonians.
He says: I praise your faith, love, and hope.
But I also am really appreciative that God chose you, that you received the good news and power and conviction, that you're engaged in good works, that you imitate Jesus, that you have stood strong under persecution, that your lives are full of joy.
He continues: You are an exceptional example of the kind of community that is founded in Jesus' name, and you have served God with great fervor.
That's all in the first chapter of 1 Thessalonians. The entire chapter is all thanks to the Thessalonians for all of these things.
And the bridge into the body of the letter continues into chapter 2 where Paul keeps piling on his lavish praises, recites their witness, talks about their character.
He continues on and finally ends his extended thanks with this verse: “We are constantly giving thanks to God for this. Always, constantly for you, dear siblings.”
In other words, the first chapter and a half, Paul is tells them over and over and over again how incredibly grateful he is, listing specific appreciations for them. It's like the longest thank you note that anybody has ever written in Christian history.
Then he moves into the body of the letter. And this is where it gets really interesting. Because the body of the letter is about two things.
One is this community that Paul loves so much that he refers to them as his siblings, to whom he said, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. You're like the very best people I've ever known.
But they're suffering persecution. We don't really know the nature of it, but we do know that it was there. That somehow all this stuff that they have been doing so well that Paul is praising them for it has also gotten them in trouble in the local community with authorities, with other Jews perhaps, because this is a time when the Jewish and Christian communities were completely interwoven. Yet tensions were developing.
We don't really understand it, but we do understand that they were in pain, that they had lost something, and there was some threat and pressure against them. Paul urges them to continue to stand up. You've done it so well so far. Don't let go, he says. Continue on with your steadfastness.
Then comes the really odd part, the second issue. The part that you might think about related to 1 Thessalonians. The part about the end of the world.
Paul addresses the hope of the early Christian community that Jesus was going to return shortly. And it's something that Paul himself still seems to be holding onto throughout this letter.
He says, “I want you to know that there is a promise here. The promise is that Jesus will return. The promise is you are not left alone. And what I want you to do as you're waiting for this great fulfillment is to continue to follow, continue to grow, continue to live.”
This is where he establishes that formula that will later show up in 1 Corinthians: Faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love.
That formula is present in 1 Thessalonians. He tells them to continue to live in faith, hope, and love. That the struggle they are going through is only a sign of the end times. We all know that we live in the end times and those end times are soon coming to an end, when Jesus finally returns.
Indeed he continues his discussion of the end times in chapter four. That's where the classic passage that so many of us who might be a little bit older (and indeed some of us who are younger may have heard in churches or maybe revival meetings, but you certainly did if you hung around evangelicalism in the 1970s) you knew it. The Lord is going to return in the clouds and take away his children in a single, surprising moment.
We will call the Rapture. The word rapture, of course, doesn't occur in the Bible. Paul is just talking about how Jesus is going to return, that it's going to be sudden. It's going to be from the sky. And from there, God is going to snatch up the people who have continued to live this faithful life of faith, hope, and love and take them home to their eternal reward.
In other words, chapters three and four pretty much talk about what we consider to be the apocalypse, death, the ending, and this real ending of history where Jesus will come back and the kingdom of God will be established.
In other words, the body of this letter is about the question, a predicament of early Christians: how do you live at the end of the world?
The end of the world. Christians have struggled with this through our whole history. There have been groups of Christians who thought, well, how you live at the end of the world is that you run away. You form some separate isolated community. You flee to the mountains. You judge everyone who is all around you. You tell people to convert. You act in ways that are completely at odds with how you would act otherwise.
How do you live at the end of the world? Well, Paul insists to his beloved friends that to live at the end of the world, one must live with faith, hope, and love.
I think that I hear that question almost every day of my life right about now. I regularly get email from people who say, hey, I don't know how to live now. I don't understand what’s going on all around me. What am I supposed to say to my children? How are we supposed to act amid this chaos?
There's so much talk of doom and despair. We're coming to the end of democracy. Is this the end of the era of human rights? Is this the end of women being able to take care of their own bodies? Is this the end of the planet itself? Is this the end of everything we have ever known?
A good friend of mine is currently writing a book called Life after Doom. I think it's going to sell a lot of copies!
We all feel this cloud hanging around us. Even some of the stuff that's going on right now where you see younger adults who are so active about what's going on in Gaza. I remember when there were Vietnam protests. We didn't actually think that Vietnam was the end of the world or a genocide. It was a bad and illegal war. We believed that political protest could actually change our government, that we could get out there and make things different.
The Gaza protest has some different element to it, a kind of an undertow of will anybody listen? Does anybody care? Look at this, an entire people might be coming to an end and the world doesn't seem to be responding. There's an element of doom that's even attached to the most optimistic of justice pursuits among young adults, the protest in the streets — about doom, like the Extinction Rebellion, too — about doom.
How do you live at the end of the world?
Paul addresses that directly in this letter. He says, “since we belong to this day, the day at the end of the world, let us be sober and put on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet, the hope of salvation, hope of healing. You live in faith, hope, and love at the end of the world.”
That's Paul's very serious discussion. It's been misinterpreted. It's been misused.
In the 19th century, those passages were used to create out of almost whole cloth a doctrine called dispensational premillennialism, the idea that God was going to come and pull us out of a troubled world, pull believers out of our problems, and leave everybody else to suffer until the very end as a kind of divine punishment.
That was a development of these verses. It was not, I think, what Paul intended at all.
So he talks about end of the world. But he gives rather encouraging instructions. Live in faith, hope, and love. Persist. Be steadfast.
And then he wraps it up in his conclusion — That the conclusion includes the words that were read today. Be at peace among yourselves.
How do you live at the end of the world? Be at peace among yourselves.
“And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers.” In other words, those people who want to run away and bury their heads in the sand, don't let them do that. Make them face the reality of these days.
“Encourage the faint-hearted.” Don't let people give in to despair. Instead, lift those people up. Give them strength. Help them to be able to live with some sort of joy and courage even now. “Help the weak and be patient with them all. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all.”
Those are the instructions for the end of the world.
Rejoice always.
Pray without ceasing.
Give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God for you.
The difficult verse, give thanks in all circumstances — in the King James it says in every thing — is a verse that comes as the final directive in Paul’s guidance about living at the end of the world.
You can't just pull it out and put it on a poster. It doesn't have a thing to do with live, laugh, love. It isn’t a Hallmark card. It isn’t trite. And it isn’t a demand.
It has to do with how to keep on in dark days. In days where you don't know what's going to happen next. In days when you feel like the clouds are gathered so heavily on the horizon that you cannot see the future.
Give thanks in every circumstance.
And that calls us toward real depth in understanding those specific words — including the Most Misunderstood Word in a Misunderstood Verse in this Misunderstood Book.
And that single word is in.
The big sort of aha moment of this text comes when you realize that this teeny tiny word, en in Greek. We translate that little en as in, in English.
En does not mean for.
The verse does not read give thanks for all things.
That little word, that tiny little Greek word means with, through, or within.
So, when you come to that verse — whether it's hanging on the poster or somebody recites it to you saying you must be thankful for that cancer. You must be thankful that your spouse died. You must be thankful for this horrible set of events that you are going through.
You say no.
The Bible does not say to be grateful for anything that is against the will, the love, the mercy, and the justice of God.
What the verse says is give thanks through, with, and within every circumstance, even the end of the world.
So when you come to a circumstance of injustice, when you come to a circumstance of oppression, when you come to a circumstance of sickness or illness or some other problem that seems insurmountable, you can still give thanks through it and not for it.
That is such an important distinction for Christians because if we say give thanks for every circumstance, that's the doorway to complicity and quietude. That says to us you accept these things, these are just the will of God, you can't change things.
You can't stop a war on the other side of the world.
You can't fix the climate crisis.
You can't make that cancer go away.
This is just the way of the world.
And we're supposed to be grateful anyway. Smile. Say thanks.
But God is not grateful.
God is not grateful for any of those things.
That is not the dream of God. God dreams of a world that will flourish with human creativity, with peace, with joy, with equality and liberation for all people.
God's heart breaks with any of those circumstances.
We're coming up to Good Friday. The broken body of Christ on the cross is a sign of God's own broken heart, the way that the violence of the Roman Empire came in and destroyed, tried to destroy, the very son of God.
Because he preached love.
Because he preached the kingdom of God.
Because he challenged the powers that be, the Romans, who were saying to their own people, you should be thankful we've given you bread.
Be thankful you're still alive. Too bad you're slaves, but you're alive. We've done all this for you, repay our thanks.
The earliest Christians knew that that was wrong.
But to be thankful through it was a way of rebellion, resistance, and even revolution. Because true gratitude reminded them that they were still the recipients of all of the good gifts of God and that every human being deserves all of those good gifts, too. And that they had power, and like Paul himself will say in that letter just a few pages before, I want you to put on these things: faith, hope, and love. That's how you live, even when the empire counts you as dead.
Give thanks.
Continue in the struggle.
Empower the weak.
Stand up for the faint-hearted.
You can live at the end of the world.
Now, of course, Paul was wrong about something here — I love saying that, actually — Paul was wrong about a lot of things and this was one of the things Paul was wrong about. It wasn't the end of the world. The world would keep rolling on and there would be more empires and there would be more tyrants and there would be more people who would kill people of God and there would be more people who would do injustice.
Yet, all through all of those things a voice of thanksgiving can grow around a table in new communities as a song of empowerment, as a song about seizing one's own dignity in God over and against all the powers that try to defeat us.
Paul was wrong about the end of the world, but he wasn't wrong about giving thanks with and through all challenging and painful circumstances.
And that leads me to wonder, are we wrong too?
Somehow we feel like our days are uniquely doomed. And I think that there's a whole lot of chronological privilege when we act that way. Because maybe the human race has always thought our own generation was uniquely doomed.
But maybe, just maybe, we have a long time to go.
We do have great struggles right now. We do have profound suffering right now. And we do have deep and painful challenges right now.
The last thing we can do is to give in. Because if we give in, maybe then we help usher in the end of the world.
But if we stand up and we say no, if we insist upon living in faith, hope, and love no matter how much doom surrounds us, no matter how awful this circumstance looks, maybe we change things.
No matter the threat, we continue to give thanks for our lives, for the lives of our friends and neighbors, for the creativity and all of the gifts that we can bring to this moment and make the human future better.
This does not have to be the end of the world, because we can pick up the same tools that our ancestors picked up — faith, hope, and love — and live differently. And as we deploy them in the midst of the challenges of our own day, we can give thanks as we move through these difficult moments.
So now I love it. Now I love this verse. “In all circumstances, give thanks.”
I don't want it anymore on a poster above the toilet.
What I want it for is a protest sign on the streets.
Thank you is a rallying cry to a better, more loving world.
Amen.
INSPIRATION
I am struck by how gratitude involves some radical satisfaction with life, with oneself, and with the world. By this I mean something qualitatively different from smug self-satisfaction or cultural contentment. I mean the awareness that one has already been given the most fundamental necessity, the gift of life. When we stop taking this first gift for granted then we can begin to experience the radical liberation of gratitude.
— Mary Jo Leddy, Radical Gratitude
There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world. It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you're grateful, you're not fearful, and if you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live.
―Br. David Steindl-Rast
You can read more about the radical nature of gratitude in this interview with Br. David.
Tonight it’s his willowy body I miss,
the way it fit so easily into my arms,
the way he’d find me on the couch
and slip in beside me and loan me
for a time the full weight of his loneliness.
I miss how sometimes we’d say nothing
and let the quiet crests of our breath
be the only thing that need be said.
I miss how sometimes we’d talk for hours,
our thoughts unspooling like ink-dark yarn.
I miss nuzzling my face in his hair.
I miss being with him everywhere—
in the kitchen, in the car, in the yard,
on a plane, in town, on the pond,
in the store, by his desk. But most of all,
tonight, I miss him in my arms,
here in my too empty arms,
this place where so many years I held him,
this place where the memory of his beauty
still leans full weight against my chest.
— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Grateful for Those Years. This poem is about how gratitude manifests itself even with life’s deepest griefs — like the death of a child.
Thank you!!! AMEN.
I am a feminist theologian and I was at the Beecher lectures at Yale when Phyllis Tribble first shared her Texts of Terror. They are about individual women, usually unnamed, raped tortured and cut into pieces and sent to the corners of Israel, or daughters promised as bait for revenging visitors intent on rape, etc. Tribble redeems the passages by the stark adminishion “and by her stripes we are healed.” The response of the congregation was not rejoicing but utter devastation as we all wept. As you would notice your brief suggestion of an equivalency in texts of terror hermeneutic should not be used, I suggest, in your sermon here without doing the seeing the exegetical work . I think if you read her book you will see what I mean. I say this as a sister in the journey of trying as you do to see if we can redeem the faith “as we know it” from its patriarchal roots and utter pervasive nature. Otherwise, good for you for attempting to wrest our faith for the hands of the premillennialists and its current incarnations. Thank you for all you do. Gail Unterberger, PhD