Work of Faith, Labor of Love, Steadfastness of Hope

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, October 22, 2023
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10

    As I mentioned at the beginning of worship this morning, we will be focusing on our second reading from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians for the next few weeks.  This is one of my favorites of Paul’s letters partly because we believe it to be the earliest New Testament book of the Bible – written even earlier than any of the four gospels, maybe just a decade after Christ was crucified and risen.  With this letter, we get an insight here into what the very earliest of believers were thinking and dealing with as they built up the Christian Church.  Paul starts out his letter with a theme that will carry throughout the book of 1 Thessalonians, that despite hardship and persecution, the Holy Spirit gives us faith, hope and love – as he puts it today, “give thanks to God… for your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”  We are people of faith, hope and love.  God gives us faith, hope and love to sustain us ESPECIALLY in difficult times.
    Faith and love take work, Paul notes – and it’s our hope in Christ that keeps us going when keeping the faith and continuing to love is hard.  Faith, hope and love are all nouns, but faith, love and hope often leads to action. When we talk about what faith is, we use action words:  giving, serving, inviting, welcoming, sharing, praying, learning…there are so many ways that our faith in Christ inspires us to act – to live out the hope that is within us.  Paul identifies a few ways that we work to live out our faith:  we try to imitate the Lord and serve as an example to others. We receive the word with joy.  We welcome others in the name of the Lord. We strive to turn to God from idols to serve a living and true God.  We wait for God’s Son Jesus to come again.  In our waiting, in our welcome, in our receiving the word of God with joy we cling to Christ and each other with deep trust to keep the faith.
Love also takes work – the agape love we have from God is a “labor of love” Paul says today.  This weekend, we celebrated my daughter Erin’s 8th birthday, and she asked me to make a particular cake – a black cat cake, so I thought, ok, chocolate frosting but no! She wanted cinnamon cake, of all flavors; that wouldn’t taste so good with chocolate, so I had to figure out how to make black buttercream frosting with food coloring. I like to bake.  I grew up with my mom making our birthday cakes. She grew up with her mom making hers, so it’s a nice family tradition, but Friday I was definitely feeling this was a labor of love – baking a nice birthday cake with black frosting of all things is work!  When have you thrown yourself into something as a labor of love – something that take a lot of time and effort, but is totally worth it because the work is for that beloved person?  How have you dedicated your life as a labor of love for Christ – because serving the Lord can be work, but it’s totally worth it, too?  
Any of you who are parents, who are married, who have cared for your own parents as they age know what Paul is talking about when he talks about the labor of love.  Love takes work and commitment.  We love people even in times when we don’t like them.  It is not always easy to have faith or to love well, especially if our goal is to imitate Christ himself.  Sometimes we don’t love or trust as well as God. We aren’t God, after all.  Sometimes we are not the best examples.  But thanks be to God, Paul assures these young Christians in the early church in Thessalonica and us as well today that we are brothers and sisters in Christ beloved by God and the Lord has chosen us – not because of our hard work alone, but by the power of the Holy Spirit.  God’s Holy Spirit sustains us when we fail.  God’s Holy Spirit inspires us to keep steadfast faith, hope and love despite the daily challenges of being a Christian today.  God has sent Jesus to rescue us despite ourselves.
And so our hope is in the Lord, Paul assures us.  The hope we have in Christ remains constant when everything around us tempts us to despair or give up.  We worry about our children and grandchildren being safe in school or growing up without faith.  We see horrible images of the conflict in Gaza with innocent people being killed and suffering.  We wonder if peace is ever possible amongst Jews, Muslims and Christians in God’s Holy Land.  We may be concerned about our government’s inability to move forward with any sense of unity for the good of our country or we may have completely given up.  We may be discouraged by our loved ones’ health setbacks or our own failing health.  The world around us gives us plenty of reasons to lose hope.
Last year in my daughter’s second grade class, they talked about roses and thorns in life.  The roses are the good things that happen in life – in Christian terms we’d describe them as God’s blessings.  But as we know, roses have thorns.  Thorns are the tough things that happen in life – the lows, the challenges.  Roses wouldn’t survive without thorns to protect their beautiful flowers.  BUT! If all we see are thorns, we miss the beauty of the rose.  Looking for the beauty of the rose despite the pain of the thorns allows us to continue to hope.  And so Paul encourages us that our Lord and Savior wore a crown of thorns and died on the cross to take on despair and death itself.  But even in that lowest of lows, we do not lose hope because we see beyond the suffering of the crown of thorns and the tragedy of Christ’s death on the cross to the empty tomb – the hope we have in Christ’s resurrection and our own.
The Thessalonian Christians were living in a time of persecution that most of us cannot imagine as Christians in America.  Paul himself and some of his coworkers were forced to leave and return, Acts 17 tells us.  Coming together with the Christians in Thessalonica to together participate in the work of faith and labor of love keeps them united and steadfast in their hope in Christ.  May we, too, come together to support one another amidst the disappointing thorns we experience in life to be sustained by the rose of Christ and his promise of resurrection.  May the Holy Spirit strengthen our work of faith, labor of love, and give us steadfast hope in Christ Jesus, our Lord.  Amen.