Text: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-12
Speaker: Mark Rupp

This is the final Sunday of the Ours is a Story… worship series where we have been exploring and reflecting on our Membership Commitment, so I thought it would be good to focus on the final line of the statement. “By God’s grace, may we be a sanctuary, where we welcome, protect, and challenge one another.” Now there is a lot in that one line that could be unpacked, and I’m grateful for the ways Bethany helped us last week to think about how we may be a sanctuary by committing to the importance of our Keeping CMC Safe from Abuse policies. 

But what really stands out to me in this final line are those three verbs, those three actions we commit to in order to fully become a sanctuary for one another. In particular, I’m struck by the final one: challenge. How do we challenge one another? Or perhaps more importantly, how do we challenge one another without relying on structures of dominance and power-over that can so easily become controlling and toxic, especially when these challenges are tied to spiritual matters which are often about the core of who we are. 

This final Sunday of this series also overlaps with the first Sunday of Pride month, so as I think about this question of how we challenge one another, I can’t help but think about how my own faith and life journeys have been marked by challenges to my identity as a gay man. So before we circle back to these hard questions about what it means to challenge, I want to detour for a moment, but a detour that I think will help us see these questions in a new way. 

I think it has actually been a long time since I told my coming out story, so here on this first Sunday of Pride Month, I invite you to gather ‘round, and listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight tale, of how Mark became queer…

No, it’s nothing that dramatic. But still a tale worth telling. Picture it: it’s early 2011. Obama was about halfway through his first term and we were beginning to see the rise of the Tea Party and the emergence of populist politics. Lady Gaga had recently confounded the world with her infamous meat dress. The TV show Glee was at the height of its popularity, pushing the glitz of showchoir and musical theater into the mainstream alongside conversations about identity. Instagram had barely started to take off (Yes, young’uns, there was a time before Instagram if you can imagine it), and the most important YouTube video of my generation–a man’s candid reaction to seeing a double rainbow–was just going viral. 

Amid all these super important cultural touchstones there was me, a 25-year-old in his second year with Mennonite Voluntary Service, living in Hutchinson, Kansas, doing my best to figure out who I was and what was going to be my life’s metaphorical “double rainbow.” During this time with MVS, I was also part of a program for young people considering ministry that encouraged us to find a mentor to help us sort through some of these questions, to walk with us through our year of service, making connections between our work and our faith, and exploring our unique calls to ministry. I had approached the Associate Pastor of one of the churches that supported our service unit because I appreciated his gentle, thoughtful demeanor, and he had agreed to step into this mentor role for me. 

Over many hours of coffee chats, we talked about lots of things: my work with the Boys and Girls Club, my journey of faith, the thermostat wars I engaged in with my housemates, my hopes and dreams for my future. In all of these chats, however, I never revealed how much I was struggling to figure out how to reconcile my faith with my sexuality. By that time, I had accepted I was gay but assumed I could suppress that part of me enough to focus on service to the Church and the world. 

And that seemed to be working fine, until it wasn’t. Until I started to realize that that part of who I am wasn’t just going to be tucked away in a nice little box and stuffed in a back corner of my mind. It was Ash Wednesday of 2011 that I finally decided I couldn’t carry these questions on my own any longer. So, after the Ash Wednesday service that evening, I asked my mentor if we could chat. With the ashes still smudged on my forehead, I sat in his office and said the words out loud to another person for the first time. And he listened. And he let me cry. And he let me ramble on for a bit as the dam had burst and lots of questions and confessions and stories came rushing out of me. He listened deeply to all this, but at some point he stopped me. He raised a hand to cut me off, and then he said something to me that I’ll never forget. He said, “Mark, there is not a single part of me that doesn’t believe God loves you because of who you are.” 

It wasn’t “in spite of who you are” but “because of…” I think he could tell that my coming out was less about me saying “I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it” and much more “I’m here, I’m queer, and I’m really confused and scared about what this means.” I walked into that office that night not really knowing what my mentor might say to me, but knowing that based on our many conversations and interactions that he cared enough about me to want the best for my life. There was risk in this, but we had built enough of a foundation of trust and love that I was prepared to hear whatever wisdom he had to speak into my life. And in the end, it was that wisdom that God loves me not “in spite of” but “because of” who I am that has helped shape me into who I am today. 

And that is the same level of foundational relationship building that I think we find in the passage today from Paul to the Thessalonians. Now, I’m sure some of you out there are thinking, “How dare you quote Paul at me, right in front of my Pride Month.” I know Paul wrote (or had attributed to him) some pretty problematic things, or at least some tough passages to wrestle through, but here in this passage I think we find a bit of a softer Paul, a spiritual mentor who knows the necessity of deep relationships and the wisdom of balance in terms of approaching discipleship. 

Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians is widely thought to be the earliest Christian writing we have in the Bible. It’s a letter to a small, embattled community of believers in Thessalonica, likely written around 50 CE. This community is almost as new to following Christ as the movement is itself. They’re surrounded by Roman culture and life, economic pressures, and religious pluralism. And amid all this, they’re trying to figure out what it means to live a life faithful to Christ. This letter is not Paul’s first contact with the community but a check-in from afar, an opportunity for updates, for affirmations, encouragement, and yes maybe even a little challenge. 

But here in chapter 2, Paul takes time to remind them not just of WHAT he preached, but how he lived among them. This passage is as much about the posture of leadership and community life as it is about doctrine. Paul doesn’t appeal to power and authority, but instead reminds them of his love for them. He doesn’t demand allegiance or stand over them; he builds trust and leans into the foundation he has laid among them through the sharing of his life with them. 

This is, perhaps, a different picture than the Paul we might often have in mind when we read other letters to other communities. And indeed, if we continue to read on in the letters to the Thessalonians, we do get to the parts that might sound more familiar: the exhortations against sexual immorality, the urging to not become idle, the warnings against false teachers. And these exhortations must be read in the specific contexts of these specific communities, doing the hard theological work of figuring out what wisdom exists within them for us today. 

But in each of his letters, there is often a section like our passage today where Paul reminds the community of his deep love for them before he gets around to anything resembling challenges to their attempts to follow Christ. Verse 8 of our passage is one of my favorites: “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.”

One biblical commentator notes about our passage for today, “Paul does not approach the people using hierarchy and power, but rather persuasion. This says a lot about how Paul understands the church and its hierarchical structure; he models a form of discipleship that should be employed today…a picture of discipleship where all are equal and important.” This is the kind of mutual, accountable love that the early church was learning to live out. And I think it’s the kind of community we still strive for today.

On this first Sunday of Pride, I think it’s also interesting to point out how Paul plays with gender in this passage. He leans more into a gendered essentialism than we would likely feel comfortable with today, but as he is writing about his love for the community he describes himself through the lens of both a loving mother tenderly nursing her children and a wise father offering teaching and discipline toward righteousness. Placing biology and gender aside, I think we can recognize that there is value in the balance between building relationships from a place of both tender care and thoughtful encouragement. 

“By God’s grace, may we be a sanctuary, where we welcome, protect, and challenge one another.”

When I was teaching the HS Sunday School class about Anabaptist History, one of the most surprising things for the class to learn about was the practice of the Ban, which was a form of Church discipline where members could essentially be excommunicated if they continued in behaviors that were deemed unfit by those in authority. There were certainly different approaches to this practice among Anabaptists, some more lenient and focused on banning from church fellowship, others were more strict, requiring a full shunning of a person from most if not all activities of communal life. In both instances, the intent of the ban was supposedly focused on restoring relationships, yet sometimes the purity of the faith community seems to have become more the driving force. 

During our discussions in class, I brought up the last line in our membership commitment, pointing out the idea that we commit to challenge one another and asked how the class thinks we at CMC do that. I promise I’m not here to advocate for bringing back the Ban, but I do think it’s important for us to consider how we do want to commit to challenging one another. 

How do we challenge one another in ways that align with our values of peace and justice? How do we hold one another accountable without becoming domineering or controlling? 

There is no one answer to these questions, but I think Paul’s example can be helpful to us. He practiced a form of relational accountability. He challenged these early communities of faith not rooted in power but in presence. He didn’t just preach at them but shared his life with them. He had enough wisdom and connection to know when they needed to be nursed and when they needed to be encouraged toward a life worthy of God’s call. Just like we have our three verbs, Paul uses three verbs to describe this work: urging, encouraging, and pleading. He doesn’t force, judge, and manipulate, but he is willing to speak hard truths when necessary. 

Challenge without love is spiritual violence. Challenge without consent is coercion. Challenge without humility becomes abuse.

So, my non-answer to these questions about how we challenge one another in healthy, loving ways is that we only do so commensurate with the strength of the relational foundation we have already laid. And in doing so, we create relationships where we, too, are willing to be challenged in return. A relationship strong enough to hold challenges must be one where there is mutual accountability.

When I walked into my mentor’s office on that Ash Wednesday back in 2011, I did not consciously know exactly how he would respond to me coming out to him. But subconsciously, I think I knew that he had the wisdom I needed to hear because I had already heard that wisdom spoken to me in so many other expressions of love and care. 

Now that I am a little older and perhaps a little wiser, I’ve grown to think of this less as a “coming out” and more of a “letting in.” It was an invitation into a deeper level of intimacy with someone that I trusted enough to let in. And over time that circle of trust has slowly widened, and with it has come an ever growing sense of who I am and who God is calling me to become. This is the kind of communal salvation that I believe God is calling us toward, finding ourselves more fully alive as we meet one another with welcome, protection, and challenge. This Pride Month, I hope we can all–regardless of our gender or sexual identities–consider how we are building relationships of trust and mutual accountability that don’t force us to come out but that let one another in.