Proper 28C | 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15
Note on Adding vv. 14-15
The Revised Common Lectionary assigns 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13. Yet the topic of faithful waiting in community actually extends to v. 15. Reading through verse 15, we see that the letter offers two reasons for avoiding a community member who is idle: the rationale in verse 6 has to do with the harmful effect such association may have on the hearers of the letter. The rationale in v. 14 is that avoiding such a one may serve as a “wake-up call” to that one and, it is implied at least, result in changed behavior and the return of the shunned into the community. Verse 15 also makes it clear that the undisciplined are not enemies of the community; rather, they are brothers and sisters.
From the text as a whole (with vv. 14-15 added), one gets the sense that separation from the idle and busybodies is an interim gesture. While relationships in the community are strained in the near term by this behavior, the text offers an alternative both to “just living with it,” and to dismissing the undisciplined. The response urged on the Thessalonians aims not so much at purifying the community from such influences as at holding each other accountable in a way that makes an authentic common life possible for everyone.1
Life in a Small Group
I often assign group work in the seminary classes I teach. I do it to foster the kind of collaboration that people working in the church will eventually practice in ministry as they work with committees in a congregation, staff members, and other community leaders. I do it also because almost any project worth doing requires help from lots of different kind of people, so why not incorporate that kind of working together into learning?
For the most part, this group work goes pretty well. A group of people almost always has more resources to draw on for an assignment than any one person alone. People learn to trust a little of their grade to others, and they learn that their fellow students are often smarter and more interesting than they thought.
But it is not all roses. Every class has at least a couple of slackers. A few people each year just coast along. They miss group meetings; they hang back while others volunteer; they promise work and then fail to deliver. People who are working steadily start to feel as if the slackers are just taking advantage of them.
Once in a while, a group will have the opposite problem. A micromanager emerges. This person is always emailing reminders to others about what they are supposed to be doing, always editing the group’s written work, always posting messages on discussion threads that imply others could or should be doing more for the team. People on the receiving end of this kind of attention start to feel as if the micromanager has no confidence at all in them.
Imagine what a mess you could have if this kind of group process went on throughout a whole semester.
Waiting and Working
Now imagine what a mess this could be if it were not happening in a semester-long class, but in a congregation of Christians in a life together whose end was nowhere in sight. Something like this seems to be happening in Thessalonica. In his first letter to the church there, Paul had described a remarkable end to the present age, complete with an archangel, a trumpet, the appearance of the Lord Jesus on the clouds, and the resurrection of those who had died before the end (cf. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).
Different people in the church seem to have responded to this news in different ways. Some in the group pasted those “Jesus is coming soon. Look busy!” bumper stickers onto their cars, and began getting busily into everyone else’s business.
Others saw no point in work at all. Like a second-semester senior in school, they could not see how, in light of the future that awaited them, the work in front of them mattered. If this present world is passing away, what difference does daily work make?
In a new letter to the Thessalonians, Paul, or someone writing in his name, brings up the topic of the end again. He reassures everyone that God chose them from the beginning and called them through the gospel, and he urges them to hold on to the traditions they learned from him while they wait for an end that has not yet come (cf. 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17).
One of those traditions has to do with not freeloading in the community. If you are part of a small group (like a family, or a church, or a seminar in graduate school) you show up for work. It’s that simple.
Counting on Each Other
A few years ago, after the first day of a course, a student approached me to say that he was dropping the class. The requirement of group work was a deal breaker for him. “I just will not trust a third of my grade to other people,” he said to me. Whether that student was right to assume that his grade would be better, or at least safer, if he worked alone, his decision not to risk it illustrates the problem. We usually think we have two choices where relationships with other people are concerned: (1) we can do our best to ignore and/or pick up after people who make our work harder, or (2) we can go it alone.
Paul imagines a third way: he describes relationships in which people hold themselves and one another accountable to each other’s good. Before we dismiss this as some big, utopian dream of the new community only possible at the End, notice its context. Paul is articulating an interim ethic. He is talking to a bunch of people who know they are waiting for something better and who are, like the rest of us, muddling through in the meantime. What to do when problems arise? We could start by being truthful about the consequences that actions have and calling one another to something better. People who are “not doing their own work and meddling in the work of others” (2 Thessalonians 3:11, NET) should “work quietly and so provide their own food to eat” (v. 12, NET).
Some Christian churches get enthralled with all this holding each other to account. They call for public repentance of public sins and they make much of the holiness and purity of their community.
Lutherans tend to slide into the opposite ditch. With our emphasis on the way Christians never stop being simultaneously justified and sinners, and our emphasis on the unmerited grace of God for sinners, Lutherans are particularly susceptible to the heresy that it is unchristian to have any rules at all. But “no rules” (or antinomianism) leaves us not with authentic, grace-filled Christian community but just a lot of unspoken resentment about how some of us are working harder than others and it just isn’t fair. Pretty soon “authentic Christian community” is too big a dream, and we find ourselves back to the two choices of that student who dropped the class. We can either ignore or pick up after people who make our lives harder, or we can go it alone.
Muddling Through
At some point in classrooms, families, and congregations, it becomes clear that we will only have authentic common work and life together if we can count on each other. 2 Thessalonians equips us in two ways for such common work and life. First, the opening chapters of this letter testify to God’s power for good as greater than all sorts of evil. The future we wait for belongs to God, so we wait not with anxiety or inactivity, but just by doing what needs to be done in the present.
In the context of community life whose future belongs to God, the text also tells us that being Christian does not mean never saying a hard word to a brother or sister in Christ, nor does it mean never hearing such a word directed to us. We will only have authentic common work and life together if we can count on each other, and one of the things we count on each other for is this kind of truth-telling. It will not be perfect. We will muddle through in this work as justified sinners muddle whenever we attempt to do what is right (cf. 2 Thessalonians 3:13). Nonetheless, part of our commitment to each other is a commitment to speak as honestly as possible about everyday things, things like working and food. As we do, we will find that there is enough of each for everyone.
1As Judy Skeen, “Not as Enemies, but Kin: Discipline in the Family of God--2 Thessalonians 3:6-10," Review & Expositor 96/2 (1999): 287-94, writes, “This distance created is intended to bring the rebellious family members back to the disciplined way of life” (293). BACK TO POST
