Proper 28 Year C 2025: 2 Thessalonians 3:6-18

In my mother’s hall closet there’s a heavy, bright red case. In it is her collection of vinyl records. I love to lug that case out from the closet to the record player and slowly flip through each one like I haven’t done so countless times and carefully consider which record I will drop the needle on first. One of my favorites received its first trip to the turntable simply because I thought the concept was hilarious: Willie Nelson sings Kris Kristofferson, with background vocals by Kris Kristofferson. But the words of one of those songs continue to speak to me. The title of the track is “Why Me,” sometimes also called, “Why Me, Lord.” And if you know anything about country music, you might make some assumptions about the direction in which the song will be going. Especially as the music starts slowly and you hear those first two lines: “why me, Lord what have I ever done/to deserve even one” and I was ready for a dramatic country recitation of troubles, but Kris Kristofferson is a better songwriter than I am and he finishes the thought with “of the pleasures I’ve known.”

Kris Kristofferson sings of the trap we can all fall into: the trap of deserving. We can fall into the trap of thinking that whatever is happening in our lives, good or bad - because I thought that song was going to be about troubles, not pleasures - is always a result of our own actions. That we must somehow deserve the way in which our lives have unfolded. Which tracks with the time in which the song was written - Kris Kristofferson wrote that song as part of his conversion experience in the 70s. He’s wondering what, since he had just come to Jesus, he did to deserve all of the good things that had happened to him before he knew Jesus.

When the Outreach Committee asked that I announce the increased need at St. Mark’s on-the-Campus food pantry, I began researching SNAP statistics. How many homes receiving benefits contained children, how many were disabled, how many were elderly. I fell into the trap of deserving. But we, as Christians, don’t feed the hungry because they’re children or because they’re on a fixed income or because they’re disabled. We don’t do so because of what demographical boxes they happen to fit into. We do so because they, like us, are beloved children of God, made in God’s image. We do so because we, at our baptisms, promised to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves and to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.

Paul appears to have welcomed us right into the trap of deserving by his statement to the church in Thessalonica that “anyone unwilling to work should not eat”. Modern Christians like to take that sentence from Paul, copy/paste it right out of ancient Thessalonica into our time with no considerations for context, and then use it as a “Biblical” authority to not feed people. There are two problems with doing biblical theology that way. First, it ignores all of the context. Paul’s contemporaries fed TONS of people who were not working. Paul was not doing the first century equivalent of putting work requirements on benefits. Part of why it was so important to visit people in prison in Paul’s time was to feed them, as that was not considered a responsibility of the state. There was no first century equivalent of WIC, of SNAP, of free and reduced lunches. And one of the things that made the early church such an anomaly is that it cared for people regardless of whether or not those people were a part of the church. They fed them because they were hungry. They nursed them because they were sick. Scholars believe that this statement from Paul, that those who are unwilling to work shouldn’t eat, comes not in response to a general laziness or selfishness, but in response to a belief in the church in Thessalonica that Jesus was coming back so soon that work would be superfluous. When reading Paul we always have to remember that Paul is problem solving. He is not writing a letter to us. He is writing to that particular church. If you have ever heard me teach on Paul, you’ve heard me say that we get in trouble when we try to systematize Paul - that is, when we take Paul’s teaching to whatever community and copy/paste it into ours without any consideration for the difference in situations and cultures.

The second problem in a copy/paste biblical theology is that, in doing so, we forget that our ultimate authority to whom we look for guidance is Jesus. While I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation - I meant it when I declared so at my ordination - I do not believe in the kind of biblical inerrancy that leads to us thinking it is somehow more in line with our faith to not feed people than to feed them, or to be more willing to not feed 100 people so that the one person who might not be in need can’t “take advantage” of the system.

During Evening Prayer on Wednesday evening, one of the lessons was from the Gospel of Matthew. It pointed me back toward the answer from Jesus. It reads, “Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, ‘I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to send them away hungry, for they might faint on the way.’” You might remember what happens next. Four thousand men, plus women and children, were fed from seven loaves of bread and a few small fish. Jesus doesn’t sort the people. He doesn’t ask them if they are his followers or not. He doesn’t check if they need the assistance. He simply has compassion on them - the word translated to “compassion” is an idiom which literally translates as “to have the bowels yearn”, meaning particularly the inward parts - the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. Those parts came to denote the seat of affection. So while compassion is right, it’s deeper than an emotional feeling, but a physical movement in response to the people - all of the people, through the entire story. There is no examination. Jesus cares for them all.

Being a Christian is not a lifetime exercise in goin’ and gettin’ what’s ours from God. Of showing how worthy we are, of how many points we’ve been able to accumulate toward the reward of our salvation. It is, rather, a lifetime exercise in gratitude for God freely giving us what’s God’s. It is not ours to earn or to steal. Thomas Merton writes of what he calls a “Promethean Theology”. Prometheus was, in Greek mythology, the Titan who stole fire from the gods to give it to humanity. In Merton’s writing, a Promethean Theology ultimately presumes that freedom must be won or taken. Merton explores this faulty notion by examining the myth of Prometheus alongside the struggle of modern Christians to accept the grace of God. In his examination, Merton’s goal is to wash out any attempt on our part to win God’s favor or to prove our own worthiness. Merton argues that the fire, which is our identity and our belonging to God, is a pure gift. He sees Prometheus’ theft of fire as more of an assertion of self than a gift to others. Merton asserts that the strong and true God wants to give spiritual fire as a gift. Therefore our exercise at being little Prometheuses, of trying to steal our salvation from God, is a fool’s errand because there is nothing to steal.

The answer God would offer to Kris Kristofferson, when asked what has been done to deserve his blessings, would be “nothing, I love you”. The answer Jesus would give when asked what the 4000 did to deserve being fed would be “nothing, I love them”. What is our answer were we to be asked what others have done to deserve our compassion?