Sometimes when I am preparing a sermon I go and read Biblical commentaries in hopes that they will help unlock some deep secret in the text. I often emerge disappointed because these commentaries often spend entire paragraphs on verb tenses and sort of forget the whole meaning of the scripture bits. It can kind of like reading a biography of someone only to have most of the book focus on the person’s digestive system – sure it is part of who they are, but kind of misses the point. In today’s reading from Thessalonians, I was curious about the line, “For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.” There seemed to be something deeper going on in this passage. Why does Paul bring up trickery – had he been accused of it or were there others who were using it. Well, as you might have guessed I learned nothing from the commentaries that I looked at and so what follows is the Phil version of what I think is going on and let’s hope that it won’t be heretical.
So Paul contrasts two different ways of delivering a message. The first as mentioned involved impure motives and trickery while the second method he describes as having been approved by God. I think there are two different possibilities as to what motivated such a statement. The first is that Paul and his companions have been accused of trickery and impure motives and so he is tackling that accusation head on, saying that it was no such thing but rather they did what God had instructed him to do. The second possibility seems to be that he was contrasting the way he and his companions did things with some other group. In other words, there was some group conveying a message through trickery and impure motives, but Paul and his companions were doing what God had ordained. I don’t know that it makes a huge difference but I am inclined to go with the second explanation partly because he continues by saying, “As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed; nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ.” In this Paul is calling on those who witnessed him and his companions to verify that he did nothing nefarious. But all of this points to a larger question, which has to do with how does one proselytize? Paul is saying that some used trickery while he did not, but where is the line? How much “sales job” does one need to put into the effort of proclaiming the Gospel?
Now fortunately for most Episcopalians this is not an issue because of our belief that proselytizing is tacky and that it’s why God invented the Baptists. It is hard to be nefarious about something that you do not actually do. But let’s say we actually decided to talk about the Gospel and actively sought to convert someone. The question that Paul is raising has to do with how we actually go about that – are we honest or do we do whatever it takes to make the sale? And when you put it like this the answer is pretty obvious, at least I hope that it is. But there is a spectrum to this question because while we certainly would not promote deceitfulness, Churches quite often participate in things that are not directly related to the Gospel in order to bring people in. I did a quick look on the interweb at various churches and how they promote their high school age youth groups. In reading a description from a particular website I saw that they did talk about growing ones faith, however they also talked a lot about games and gym time. One even boasted of the amount of snacks provided. Now I am not picking on them and saying that if youth group is fun you are headed for perdition, but rather to ask the question of what does snack time have to do with the Kingdom of God. On one level it could be seen as a trick to lure people in. So what are we supposed to do? Do we ban all activities that are not strictly related to the Gospel message?
Well, here is where it is good to be Anglican. Please stick with me for a moment because I do get back to a point. During the Reformation there was some tension over how the Bible influenced what we did in worship. Some took the tack that if the Bible didn’t expressly say you could do something then you were not to do that particular thing in Church. A good example of this is the Church of Christ, which does not use musical instruments in their worship because there is no record of musical instruments being used in New Testament worship. Anglicans (and others) took a different approach to this by saying essentially that if the Bible does not ban it and it does not seem contrary to God’s will then we can do it. Since the Bible does not say that you can’t use musical instruments and there does not seem to be anything that runs contrary to God’s will then we can use musical instruments, even though I have my doubts about the accordion. And so employing this thinking in terms of spreading the Gospel we can use other things to bring people in as long as they are not contradictory to the will of God. And I would add one thing to that which is that they cannot be more important than God. In other words music is fine, but if worship becomes a concert then it is not fine, just as a fun youth group is fine as long as the fun is in service of the mission of drawing closer to God.
But now let’s return to the original question about spreading the Gospel and the way we should do it. The first thing is obviously that we should do it. And I know this makes many people squirm, including myself, but if we truly believe that Jesus is the way the truth and the life then we should probably pass that message on. Secondly and I think this is a question for those of us at St. John Chrysostom and that is what are we doing about it? Who are we talking to? Have any of us invited someone to church lately or checked in with someone that we have not seen in a while? We have probably all seen really bad proselytizing, we have also probably all seen bad Christian sales jobs where the message was lost in the medium but none of that is an excuse for us not doing it. And I think this is something for us to reflect on. Are we doing anything to bring more people to Christ? All of us are supposed to be ambassadors for the Kingdom of God. So I think the question for us, myself included is what are we doing? Can we say like Paul that, “our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.” We need to speak a message that is pleasing to God so that we may be a participant in the expansion of his kingdom both now and forevermore.