2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Proper 28 (33) - Year C
Examples to imitate can be transformative (also painful for the model when folks aren't ready to take up the challenge to follow).
The examples I am looking for these days are those that don't whine. My sense is that we have developed a culture that is quite digital. The 0's and 1's in this case are accusation and whining. As soon as one is caught in one position or the other there is a switch that is thrown and the opposite comes into play.
Winners and losers all whine. It has become a technique as pervasive as perpetual war was to the folks of "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength" 1984 .
Simply doing one's work, listening and following the promptings of expansive love and earning a living that allows one to intentionally give most of it away are models worth investing in and showing forth to a world intent on getting its own way, even if it has to throw a tantrum or injure itself.
Be not weary in simply doing, earning, being, giving.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/november2004.html
Paul writes of one part of a rubber-band cycle. He commands us not to be stretched in regard to holding together a body of believers. If there are "lazy" believers satisfied with their cultural accommodation to a radical faith willing to be crucified, right here, right now, they ought to have the tie that binds us slipped off them.
Unfortunately it is exactly that stretching that enlivens those who have decided that they are truer to Paul than others. With the relaxation of said rubber-band, there is an separation that will bring out the excesses/weakness of their pride at being Paul's Jesus People. You may see some of that going on around you as "true Republicans" control the power in the administrative, legislative, and judicial branches and decide to slip the connection with those "idle Democrats". You may also see it in various family abuse situations where connections with the wider world are loosened.
The flip side is to find additional rubber-bands in other areas than explicit faith to stretch around one another that we might have a closer connection with one another. The value here is found in a quote from today's email from Wordsmith— "The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter." -Joshua Reynolds, painter (1723-1792)
Not only a mind, but a faith, needs the kind of fertilization that comes from intentional connection. A graphic example of this is found at one or two election map sites that don't look at the past American election through the eyes of the electoral college, winner takes all, but on the basis of percentage of voters for the two top candidates.
While we are tempted by Paul's red and blue approach to faith development, and it does have its place, as a general rule, Jesus' more inclusive understanding, picked up by Paul in their being no longer any male/female/Gentile/Jew/Master/Slave/etc. distinctions that pull us apart, does a more consistent job of bringing a faith to fruitful expression and joy.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/november2004.html
Here is where having loose boundaries comes in handy. The language being used here is that of "idleness". Given a focus on thanksgiving we might see idleness as a being without thanks or joy. We just don't have the energy, given all we need to do, to spend any more on such frivolities.
We might reflect on the classic sin of sloth or sadness. In this case idleness is lack of thankful joy. Spiritual apathy that discourages us from our holy work of appreciating beauty and expressing thanks is another way to talk about sloth and to see how what is being warned against here is not relaxing, but a choice against life.
Likewise, we can retranslate, "anyone not willing to work" into "anyone not willing to give thanks and do the work of worship isn't worth any more than the result of the mechanics of eating".
And yet again, "do not be weary in doing what is right" is less about morality and more about thanksgiving (a focus of this passage).
- - -
sometimes we learn
from opposites
better than models
our models come loaded
with literalism and creeds
narrowing our options
comparison brings choice
play and mystery
bearing greater fruit
idling is not staying in place
it is actively refusing
to move ahead
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html
Jesus who once was heard to say, "Go into all the world", now is commanding that we stay away from fellow followers of Jesus who are of a different class or follow a different Jesus tradition. No longer are they to imitate a Jesus they have experienced, but the Jesus someone else has experienced.
Or we could say that the community of real Jesus followers takes place in a location where there are sufficient jobs for everyone to have one or two or more and that everyone has been healed so they are able to work hours on end. The Church, here, requires a healthy economy or there can only be a few leaders who can command the rest to do Jesus as they do (no, there are not multiple ways of reading that).
We have moved from the feeding of 5,000 at a time a shared meal to feeding one at a time their individually earned meal. In such a short time as it is from the stories of Luke to a letter to Thessalonica, a dramatic difference has happened - moving from an egalitarian, socialist call to have G*D's presence enfleshed in a sharing community, all the way over to a class-based, individualism that has everyone pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps (as if that could happen without cultural and communal rules and securities to protect what has been individually gathered!).
Yes, Advent is needed and is on the horizon. We have moved far away from the early Acts of the Apostles, it is but a dim memory this far along the Church Year. We are much closer to the desolation requiring the birth of a new imagination, a new word. (Don't tell anyone, but more than Church culture rises and falls.) In this brave new world of desperation there are no excuses, no arguments - everyone's on their own. To remember a hope for life to be otherwise seems so distant, so quaint. How might it mysteriously appear this time?
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2010/11/2-thessalonians-36-13.html