We live in highly anxious times. That might be something of an understatement for 2020. There is so much to be understandably anxious about right now in this year. Most recently, of course, was the election. I read a poll before the election that said 80% of American adults were anxious or highly anxious about the then upcoming election. There is a lot of anxiety to be had around the pandemic, especially now when we see case levels rising again here in Lane County. Something like 75 new cases were announced yesterday, and nearly 1000 in the state of Oregon. And we see that repeated all across the country. Case numbers rising, positivity rates rising, hospitilizations rising. The epidemioloists are warning us that it is going to get worse. They look to what is happening, they look at the measures we are or are not doing, they look at the winter with us going more inside, and they look at the holiday season and the travel people will be doing, getting together with friends and family for those great celebrations. They are warning us not to do that, and to limit it as much as we can. There is so much to be anxious about around that.
There is anxiety around injustice in our society. We who follow Jesus and take scripture seriously and hear the words from the Book of Amos today about God wanting justice to roll down like water. We want that. We desire that. We pray for that. We work for that. Yet we still see so much injustice in our society and it can cause so much anxiety for us.
Those feel like the big three this year, but there are many others, aren’t there? Wildfires. It was just a month and a half ago. Climate change. Murder hornets. There is so much, and that is just in the past 8 months of 2020. Yet we know many of these anxieties have been here much longer.
These are just the communal, corporate anxiety. What about the individual anxieties that so many of us hold? Perhaps it is an anxiety that comes from a medical diagnosis that is not the news we wanted to hear. Perhaps there is anxiety around a relationship that is not going the way it should. Maybe it is falling apart, maybe it is broken down. Anxiety about things going on in our work. Anxiety about things going on in our schools. There are so many individual anxieties that we might be holding.
One of the side affects or outcomes of anxiety can be hopelessness. It is easy to allow anxiety to sap us of our hope. “Hope, that thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” as Emily Dickinson so beautifully put it. Hope is important to us. We need hope to keep moving forward, especially when times are so difficult. We need hope, and anxiety is the enemy of that hope.
Hope is the main issue in Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. I have been preaching a lot on Paul’s letters lately. We have been covering various issues in them, but the core of Paul’s message is the issue of hope.
Let’s look at the beginning of Paul’s letter. “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope.” Faith, love, and hope. You’ve heard that trinity before. “Faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love,” as Paul puts it in I Corinthians 13. Faith, hope, and love are an important part of many of Paul’s letters, including I Thessalonians. At the beginning he is giving thanks for the Thessalonians, for their faith, for their love, and for their hope. This is a community that has all three in abundance. Paul goes on in the letter to talk about various issues. We’ve talked about those in other sermons in the last few weeks.
Then Paul talks about how he desires to see the people, but he is unable to, and so he sends his partner, Timothy, to go check in on them. Paul says, “But Timothy has just now come to us from you and has brought us the good news of your faith and love.” Timothy has returned from his journey and brings news of their faith and love. What is missing from there? The hope. Let’s fast forward farther into the letter. Paul says, “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” Paul is worried that they are losing hope, so he is writing them and trying to shore them up. Their anxieties that are trying to sap their hope are different than our anxieties. Their anxieties are particular to their time. Their anxiety is that people in their community, fellow saints, fellow Christians, other followers of Jesus, are beginning to die. Remember these are the very early days of the Christian community when Paul is writing this letter. The people understood that Christ would return again in that great Second Coming before any of them died. They were worried that the people who had died would not be with Christ. Paul says, no, no. That is a misunderstanding. What I meant is that they are with Christ. This is a very different anxiety than the one we have in this moment. Two thousand years later we are not so anxious about people dying and thinking they died too early since it was before the Second Coming. We now know the very message that Paul was giving to us is that they are with Christ. Those loved ones are with Christ. This is not our anxiety, but the message is still the same. In whatever anxieties we are facing, Paul points them and points us to Jesus Christ. Whatever is trying to take away our hope, Paul says look to Jesus and look to his resurrection. Remember that we have a God who is with us always. Remember that we have a God who loves us so much that God brings new life out of death. Remember that we have a God who is stronger than whatever the world can throw our way.
That is Paul’s message to the anxieties, to the hopelessness that we might feel. He reminds us to keep focused on hope. We have a God who not only reminds us that there is hope for us, but we have a God who invites us to be agents of that hope in this world. That is not to say those anxieties are illegimate or don’t really exist. God says that in a world so full of anxiety, so full of pain and suffering, God sends us to help bring about hope. To work for justice, to do what we can to love our neighbor, to try to reduce the spread of the pandemic. God calls us in all the anxieties of this world to try and bring hope. It might be something as small as calling someone on the phone who might be feeling anxious about the pandemic and their loneliness. I can promise you that a phone call makes such a difference. God has invited us to do those things to bring about that hope for people, to be agents of hope. There is a South African theologian I read a few years ago. I can’t remember his name at the moment, but he said we need hope and history to rhyme. That is our task, as followers of Jesus. To makes those hopes a reality in this world. How do we do that? By bringing new life out of death, by loving our neighbor, by caring for this world. That is how we make hope and history rhyme.
My friends in Christ, do not lose hope in the midst of all the anxieties that 2020 can throw our way. Do not lose hope, but be the agent of hope for the sake of Jesus Christ.
AMEN
