"SUDDEN SEASONS"
I Thessalonians 5: 1-11
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

Paul wrote to the Christians in Thessalonica, a major port city on the Aegean Sea. Thessalonica was a diverse and dynamic city in what would today be northern Greece.  It was the capital of the Roman Province of Macedonia, where rivers merged and flowed to the sea, where mystery heroes merged with gods of commerce and empire, and where the poor suffered.

Paul wrote the Thessalonians to encourage, comfort and challenge them. Founded by Paul just months earlier, this new house-church was part of a movement of followers of Christ.  Paul urged them to continue to build one another up with steadfast faith and love - despite hostility or outside threats, and despite their own instabilty.  He gave thanks for what they were already doing, and he responded to their questions.

In this morning’s text Paul responds to the question: When will the Day of the Lord come?  Paul writes: don’t worry about the specific times or seasons ... all you need to know you already know.  And that is that:  The Day of the Lord will come ... and it will come... suddenly!  

Paul uses two images:  the first is a thief in the night ... No matter how secure you think are, a thief in the night is unexpected and scary. The second image Paul uses is labor pains.  No matter how prepared you are, or how great your expectations, the first pangs of birth are sudden and painful.

I was with my sister when she gave birth to her daughter, over twenty years ago. I’ll never forget it because at one point, she grabbed my arms and said, “I’ve changed my mind.  I don’t want to do this. I’m not going to do this.” And then she tried to stand up and leave the room!

The day of the Lord will come suddenly. Inescapably. Denial will not delay or stop God’s sudden season of fulfillment.

When my friend Jesse was born, over sixty years ago, her mother, a powerful corporate executive, responded to her first birth pangs with frustration, and then by demanding drugs to bring about the birth immediately so that she could make it to a Board meeting. She said, “I can’t possibly give birth on Tuesday.”

We want to have birth ... and re-birth ... on our own terms. No prediction, expedition or protection is possible. If we live awake, not drugged to a stupor, alert, not seeking to control birth pangs of new creation ... we belong to the Day of the Lord, and we will discover a world of wonder and new lilfe.

In this complex and conflicted world, when we encourage and strengthen others in faith, when we resist injustice in every form it presents itself, when we rebuild community by loving one another ... we belong to the Day.

Jim Killen was Pastor of the United Methodist Church in Beaumont, Texas when he wrote about the town of Medjugorje in Central Europe. Medjugorje became a pilgrimage site in the early 1980s.  In June 1981, three teenagers walking in the hills of the town reported that Mary, the mother of Jesus, appeared to them, and gave them messages from Jesus. Two basic messages: “Return to your faith” and “Love one another...every one.”  

A friend of Killen told him how visiting Medjugorje transformed his life.  Killen didn’t get it.  Return to your faith.  Love one another... every one. Pretty basic stuff.  Messages you can find throughout the Bible. Why the urgency? Why the miracle? Why would pilgrims go there?

Then Killen realized what made the need for love so urgent ... and the call to extend the love to every one so extraordinary was the location of Medjugorje in time and space. 1981. Bosnia.
Our day and location challenges us to return to faith and to love....everyone. Yesterday, witnesses across the state and around the country insisted on the right of all persons to live in the loving commitment of marriage. Each was a witness to love.  If perfect love casts out fear ... then scapegoating and placing blame on Mormons, or Catholics, or Methodists, or the religious right enemies distorts the spirit, relies on a lesser vision.  And it is not love. We are ready for the sudden season of God’s Day when we live in that Day ... each day, each moment ... with all the suffering and anger and bold beauty and resistance and defiant joy, we live in the love and light of God.

The way to prepare for sudden seasons of destruction from storms of water, or wind, or hatred is to build in our lives and in our world infrastructures of justice, support practices of faith, and ever and always resolve to love.  

We can prepare for sudden seasons of new life, for the suddenness of Christ’s coming, by living in Christ in every moment – upbuilding one another in communities of justice, faith and love.

Last month at our Church Conference Dianne Rush Woods, reported on Epworth’s Vital Signs.  Several lay leaders had completed an inventory published in the book Vital Signs by Dan R. Dick. According to the results, Epworth was identified as “Growing and Unstable.”  That describes us. Growing, ... that’s good ... but “unstable” suggests a kind of vulnerability, unsustainability... living at the edge ... that can be scary as well as creative.

A word used for “growing and unstable” churches is “dystrophic.”  I had to look that one up.  The word “dystrophic” usually is used to describe a body of water that lacks the oxygen needed to support growing life because a build-up of excessive humus.  

Humus is good.  Soil needs humus to provide nutrients for growing things.  Humus is mature compost, organic material found in soil.  But ... and this is where the danger comes in.  When it is formed in ponds and swamps, when it accumulates and is not released, it blocks rather than nurtures new life.

A friend of mine, Ken, is fond of saying that church is like manure.  Pile it up in one place and it stinks up the neighborhood.  Spread it around and it helps things grow.

We must not let the creative things that give us life and energy turn only inward ... to accumulate without release into the world God so loves.

 
Epworth is not a new church.  We are a community of faith continually renewed. May Paul’s letter encourage, comfort and challenge the Epworthians.  May we prepare for sudden seasons by building an infrastructure of justice, practices of faith and love, alert and awake day by day until the Day Christ comes.  Amen.