I Thessalonians 5:12-28 "In the End, Thankful" Scott Hoezee

"Be joyful always. Pray continually. Give thanks in all circumstances." We hear these words and maybe feel tempted to despair. Who among us would dare to assert that he or she has always been joyful? Who among us could not confess that not only do we fail to pray continually, there have even been times when, as our head hit the pillow at bedtime, we realized we had gone the whole day without praying once? And on this Thanksgiving Day, probably many of us could search our minds to discover any number of circumstances when we did not give thanks but instead complained quite loudly, even to God's own face.

Incessant joy, ongoing prayers, non-stop thanksgiving--a life like that, we think, is the provenance of super saints but not of us. In reality, however, even those hailed as saints may not always find it easy to live joyfully thankful and prayerful lives. Last month, in conjunction with Pope John Paul II's twenty-fifth anniversary, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was formally beatified, the first major step toward her being declared a saint. Few have been surprised that this happened--even the usual five-year waiting period was waived in this case so as to get Mother Teresa declared a saint as soon as possible.

The reason is obvious: out of all the saints on the books in the Catholic Church, few were as famous in their lives as Mother Teresa. She became the very emblem of charity and Christian compassion. This diminutive woman traveled the world with her message of ministering to the poor and she had the pluck to wag her small finger in the faces of world leaders, telling them they had to change their nations' laws on abortion.

So, as Carol Zaleski pointed out in a recent article in First Things magazine, in the popular imagination Mother Teresa was the epitome of faith. We imagine she lived her every moment in a kind of ecstatic union with Christ and that it was out of the fullness of the divine light within her that she took joy at wiping away the pus from the weeping sores of Calcutta's lepers. But it's not true. As the Catholic Church has investigated Mother Teresa's life, they have discovered a cache of letters and journals that indicate that she spent most of her ministry longing for a sense of God's presence but generally not finding it!

During the years 1946-1947, when Mother Teresa first received her divine call from Jesus to work with the poor of Calcutta, she did feel then a keen union with Christ and felt full of the Holy Spirit. It was a kind of spiritual high. But after that, from 1947 until her death 50 years later, Mother Teresa confessed in private to feeling abandoned by God, yearning for signs of his presence in her heart but often doubting that very reality. She had faith and, as Zaleski points out, she turned her feeling of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God, trusting herself to his indwelling presence, to his love, to the reality of Jesus' grace whether or not she particularly sensed it all at any given moment.

I don't know about you, but I find all of that deeply remarkable and, at the same time, deeply reassuring. It also helps me to understand Paul's words in the chapter before us this morning. We Christians know that although Thanksgiving Day is a fine thing to have on our national calendar, being grateful today alone hardly suffices in terms of what it means to be thankful Christians. In our Reformed tradition, we have made gratitude the keynote of sanctified living. The entire third section of our landmark Heidelberg Catechism is titled "Gratitude." In that section we ponder the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer as reminders that in the light of Jesus' grand work for us, we will never be finished with the task of finding creative ways to say "Thank you, Jesus!"

So we know full well that for us Christians it should be the turkey dinner, and not the act of thanksgiving, that makes this day different from the other 364 days a year. If today you find yourself casting about for things to be thankful for in ways that never happen otherwise, then you've got a real spiritual problem. But even so, even for those of us who do routinely utter thankful prayers to God, that is still different from saying that Paul's soaring rhetoric in verses 16-17 describes our lives to a T. If any one of us were to look back over the last year, surely we could identify trough periods, valleys in our lives, low points, and maybe even some plain old misery.

Some of us in these past twelve months have seen our fondest hopes dashed. Special occasions we had looked forward to for a very long time were postponed, delayed, or canceled. Something came up, someone died, a disease struck, a romance fizzled, and suddenly we found ourselves weeping instead of having a great time. Some of us have lost beloved jobs these past months, and a few of us have not yet found meaningful work to replace it. We've watched children and grandchildren suffer rejection at school or other disappointments in their young lives, and it has frankly torn our hearts out. Our nation went to war some months back and as if that were not dreadful enough, things seem to remain so very frightening in our world as troops in flag-draped coffins are coming home every week.

In a world like this, in a time such as the one we are living through, given the realities of this broken, evil world, how can Paul even think to tell us that joy, prayer, and thanksgiving need to form the bright undercurrent of our lives? Doesn't lament have a proper place, too? Don't the Old Testament psalms show us that sometimes it is fitting to complain to God? Doesn't our desire for peace and shalom mean that sometimes the only loving thing to do is to sorrow over war, disease, and the loss of life?

Yes, that all seems right, too. So when Paul tells us what he does in this passage, was he trying to paste one of those yellow smiley face stickers overtop of the harsher realities of life? No. Paul knew as well as anyone that the world, and even our Christian lives within this world, often fights against joy and thanksgiving. That's why the end of verse 17 is the key: "for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." It is God's will for us. This is what God wants for us. This is God's dearest desire for us as his children.

To put it mildly, that's a nice thing to know. Because most of us discover even in our own limited, finite lives that what we want for some other person whom we love is also what we try to make possible for them. Those of us who are parents look at a child and we say to him or her, "Honey, I so want you to be happy! I so want you to feel fulfilled!" That feeling begins the very moment a child is born. This slippery, blood-slicked, naked and bawling little creature emerges from the mother, gets laid on her chest for the first time, and through your parental tears of joy as you look at this newborn, every fiber of your being begins to scream, "Thrive! Flourish! Be well, my child, be well for a long, long time to come!" This is our will for the child.

And God's will is the same for us, Paul says. Paul does not tell us to be joyful, prayerful, and thankful because of some namby-pamby optimism the likes of which you could detect in that popular song from some years ago, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Paul believes that joy is what God wants for us. Thus Paul believes God will bring us joy, too. And so Paul invites us to realize that any joy we do in fact have, anything for which we can be thankful, and the ways by which we can express our joy and gratitude in prayer, are all gifts from the God whose dearest desire for us is that we flourish. If it happens at all, it happens because of God. It's not good luck, it's not blind fate, it's not chance--instead it is all God's doing as he realizes his will for you.

But as every parent knows, wishing doesn't make it so in the lives of our children, and it doesn't always make it so for God's children, either. How many times haven't parents had to say to a son or daughter, "I just want you to be happy" but have had to say that through tears? Sometimes we express our desire for a child's flourishing sorrowfully because as a matter of fact the kid is not doing very well at a given moment. It must be the same for God. Sometimes he expresses his will for us through his own tears.

We have to remember that I Thessalonians is probably the oldest book in the New Testament. Paul wrote this letter early in his apostolic career to a fledgling congregation that had recently been thrown into a tizzy when some of its members died. Apparently there was a belief in the early church that Jesus would come again before anyone in the church died. But then people started dying, funerals needed to be held, tears were shed yet without there being any sign of the Lord's appearing. It was a crisis moment.

One of the responses to the crisis appears to have been an effort on the part of some Thessalonians to calculate when Jesus would return. Some turned their grief into an eschatological obsession as they drew charts and concocted timelines to predict the day and hour of Jesus' return. The early part of I Thessalonians 5 has Paul telling them to stop. "Put your charts away," he writes, "and stop treating the return of Jesus like a math problem to be solved. I know you are hurting. I know you have shed many tears. I know the deaths of Millie and Agnes, of Gerald and Henry have hurt you and made you wonder if Jesus really loves you. He does love you and will keep on loving you whether you live or die."

In short, the words we read this morning are nestled in the context of the real world. Just look at the words that come right before verses 16-17. Paul admits that there are members of the church who tax our patience, who are weak, who are timid, who are lazy. When he says, "Don't repay wrong with wrong," he admits that there is wrong. The only reason to tell your child not to eat too much candy is if there is candy available. So also the only reason to say "Do not repay wrong with wrong" is because there were wrongs present in the first place. Even in the church, things are not always rosy.

As even so godly a woman as Mother Teresa knew, in this world, hanging on to a sense of God's presence is not easy. Ongoing joy, incessant prayers and thanksgiving will not happen automatically but are goals to be pursued. But as with most goals, there are times when we reach them and times when we fall short. But because we are told that these are God's goals for us, God's own dearest desire for us, we never stop looking for joy, we never stop realizing there may well be things for which to be thankful even in the midst of disappointments, and so we never stop praying to the God who is pulling for us.

To have hope as Christians means that we pray with eyes wide open. We cannot pray realistically for each other and for this world unless we are able to see the jagged edges to reality. If we think that the only way to attain joy is by denying pain, then the joy we end up with is false. Christians cannot get to Easter without Good Friday, and those who try to blot out the cross in the name of being hap-hap-happy all the time end up with heresy.

So today I cannot tell any one of you to be thankful without also recognizing and validating the reasons why some of us feel a bit muted on this Thanksgiving Day. In another place Paul says that we Christians talk about hope precisely because we do not yet have the full reality of God's kingdom. If we did have all that lush and lavish joy right now, we wouldn't have to hope for it, we'd see it.

Hope endures while the longed-for reality is not yet here. Faith is the tether, the bridge, that makes us grab onto God's will for us even when we can't see it. Mother Teresa used to tell her community of missionaries, "Keep smiling!" but given who she was, her saying that was not trite (the way it might be if Katie Couric or Oprah were to say it at the end of each show). Given her own dark night of the soul, Mother Teresa spoke those words as signs of hope in a still-dim world.

Last summer I read the wonderful youth novel Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. In the story an 11-year-old named Jess spends his days hoping for nothing more than to be the fastest sprinter in 5^th Grade even as he tries to avoid the annoyances provided by his pesky and nosy little sister May Belle. One day Jess meets Leslie, a new neighbor just down the road and a new member of his 5^th Grade class at school. Leslie is a charming, Tomboy of a girl with a wonderful imagination. One day she and Jess make a ropeswing across a creek and, on the far side of that creek, create a fantasy kingdom called Terabithia. In this kingdom of make-believe, Leslie is Queen and Jess is King. They read the Chronicles of Narnia and think spiritual thoughts in honor of the divine spirits that populate the Terabithian firmament. Leslie's imagination helped Jess to imagine a new world, too.

But then one terrible day the ropeswing breaks, Leslie falls, and is swept away by the creek's current to her death. Jess's young world is shattered by an event his mind cannot fully absorb. Leslie is gone. Terabithia has lost its queen. But somehow Jess finds it in himself not to let the dream die along with Leslie. So he builds a bridge to Terabithia, laying some old planks across the creek. As he completes the bridge, suddenly that annoying little May Belle is there again, spying on him and being nosy as usual. "Whatcha doing, Jess?" she asks. But this time, rather than shoo her away, Jess says, "It's a secret, May Belle. But I'll tell you it when I finish."

And so after the bridge is complete, Jess places some flowers in May Belle's hair and leads her across the bridge. To someone with no magic in them, the bridge would have looked like no more than a few silly boards across a gully, leading nowhere. But imagination makes the difference and so as Jess leads his annoying sibling across he says, "Look! Can't you see 'um? All the Terabithians standing on tiptoes to see you." "Me?" May Belle exclaims. "Shhh, yes," Jess replies. "There's a rumor going around that the beautiful girl arriving today might be the queen they've been waiting for."

I was 39-years-old before I read this book meant for adolescents, and I wept at this conclusion. Because Katherine Paterson is showing us the nature of Christian faith, of Christian imagination, of hope itself. In an article some years ago, Paterson said that someone wrote her to say he liked Bridge to Terabithia because "you stuck to reality and you also stuck to a dream." And that's hope. This novel does not have a "happy ending" by any means. In this world we don't always find happy endings. But the book has a hopeful ending, and we Christians of all people should understand the difference.

Sunday we begin Advent, pondering all over again the way that God brought to us the dream of a better world precisely by bringing his only Son down into the tawdry reality of this difficult world. In Bethlehem's stark and smelly manger we see swaddled there the Creator of all things who entered our reality to realize the dream of a New Creation. Christian people aim for joy, keep on praying, and look for reasons to be thankful precisely because we have the hope that God's will for us is joy at the last.

Death and suffering come to us for now. There is no sense in denying that on Thanksgiving Day or any other day. Seasons of lament descend upon us unlooked for, and the joy seems to drain right out of us. Gratitude dries up even as our prayers stick in our throats. Yet because there is a God who is pulling for us, I dare urge you this morning to be thankful even so. Whether it is easy to see at this precise moment or not, look for joy, seek reasons to be thankful, and croak out your prayers of thanksgiving as best you can. In faith, hold onto the dream because I can guarantee you that the Dream Maker is holding on to you. Be thankful because the one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it. Amen.