We (Must) Take Scripture Seriously
THE TWENTY-THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Malachi 4:1-2a • 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 • Luke 21:5-19
One year when I was in middle school, our youth group went to Panama City Beach for Spring Break. That might sound like fun, but we didn’t actually go to the beach for more than a few minutes. Instead, we spent the whole time at a renewal conference with other youth groups, listening to overly enthusiastic preachers, amazingly confident small group leaders, and a really loud Christian rock band that none of us liked. Although I don’t remember a lot about that conference, two things stick with me all these years later: I remember feeling pressured to give my life to Jesus publicly because I was made to believe that my private devotions weren’t sufficient, and I remember being asked to use the Bible to solve the “welfare crisis” in this country.
The youth in our small group were split up into pairs, and each team was handed a Bible and a societal problem that they were supposed to solve using biblical values. I don’t remember any of the other topics, but I recall flipping through the pages of scripture, desperately looking for anything that had to do with welfare. We were stumped. When it was our turn to share, we acknowledged that we hadn’t found anything but offered our firm conviction that “God helps those who help themselves.” “That’s not in the Bible,” the small group leader snapped back at us disappointedly, mistakenly attributing our words to Shakespeare. “Second Thessalonians 3:10,” was all she said by way of correction, waiting for us to find and read the verse aloud: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics back then, but looking back and realizing that a certain former Arkansas Governor was in the White House and that the “Welfare to Work” bill was being debated in Congress, I’m not surprised that we were asked to use the Bible to find a simple answer to that complex problem. I’m not sure what the leaders would have done if we had cited Matthew 25:5—“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat”—or Proverbs 25:21—“If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat”—or Isaiah 58:6-7—“Is this not the fast that I choose:…to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house?”
But what are we supposed to do with today’s reading from 2 Thessalonians? Here, the apostle Paul seems to say unequivocally that those who are unwilling to work shall not eat. Does he mean that? He even gives it as a command, flexing all his apostolic muscle to get his point across. But the Bible rarely offers simple, unequivocal answers to difficult issues, and it might not surprise you to learn that Paul probably wasn’t attempting to winnow down the welfare rolls in Thessalonica.
It turns out that laziness or, as our translation puts it, “idleness,” wasn’t really the issue. The phrase (ἀτάκτως περιπατοῦντος) translated at the beginning of this passage as “living in idleness” more precisely means “walking in a disordered way,” as in a soldier who is “marching out of ranks.” Translators have a hard time knowing what Paul meant when he used that phrase because this is the only time it is found in the Bible. For a long time, English translations of the Bible kept the original idiom without attempting to explain it. For example, the 14th-century Wycliff Bible used “wandereth out of order,” and the 17th-century King James Version chose “walketh disorderly.”
By the middle of the twentieth century, however, things had begun to shift. Translators wanted to provide more context, perhaps to be sure that overly literal interpreters didn’t think the problem in Thessalonica was Christians who couldn’t walk in a straight line. For example, when the American Standard Version, originally published in 1901, was updated in 1971, the phrase went from “walketh disorderly” to “leads a disorderly life.” But other translations wanted to go even further in the name of contextualization, borrowing (perhaps unfairly) from the surrounding text, changing “disorderly walking” to “living in idleness,” and Christians have been confusing what Paul had in mind ever since.
It could be that the disorder or misconduct that Paul had in mind was sheer laziness, but reading the rest of the passage or, even better, the rest of First and Second Thessalonians is an important step to figuring it out. Whatever Paul wanted to convey, we see that he based his argument on the time he spent in that community: “For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not [disorderly] when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone's bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you.”
You’d be hard-pressed to call Paul lazy or idle, but you could say that he was too busy doing important things like preaching and teaching to earn a living. You could say that an apostle like Paul shouldn’t have to pay for his own meals but should be entitled to live off the generosity of others. But Paul didn’t want to set that sort of disorderly example. He didn’t want other would-be apostles to take advantage of their authority, so he always paid his own way.
If you took time to read the rest of First and Second Thessalonians, you’d discover that the overarching problem Paul was addressing in that community wasn’t lazy Christians, who expected others to feed them, but pretend-apostles, who expected the Christian community to treat them like royalty, hanging on their every word and providing for their every need. But you’d never know that if the only verse you ever read was 2 Thessalonians 3:10. Thankfully, we belong to a Christian tradition that takes the Bible more seriously than that.
“Blessed Lord, who has caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning…” We prayed those words in the collect for today, acknowledging the God-given gift of not only the scriptures we like to hear but of all the scriptures. When Thomas Cranmer, the author of the first Book of Common Prayer, wrote those words, he was implicitly criticizing the dominant religious institution of the day not only for insisting that worship be offered in a language that the people could not understand but also for breaking up the reading of scripture with so many feast days that most of the Bible went unread during worship. Today, the dominant Christian culture does much of the same, prioritizing translations that reinforce their opinions and proof-texting select verses to fit their arguments. But the Word of God will not be weaponized like that.
If you want to know what the Episcopal Church believes about something, the right place to look is in our prayers, and today’s collect tells us what we believe about the Bible. We believe that God caused all holy scriptures to be written, not as a literal, factual record of history but as a divinely inspired gift that was written for a particular purpose—for our learning. We believe that God helps us do more than memorize the words on the page. We believe that God enables us to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them until they become a part of who we are. We believe, as the Rite I version of the collect puts it, that it takes patience—time and repeated encounters with God’s Word—to receive the full benefit of the comfort that God’s Word provides. And we believe that immersing ourselves in the richness of that Word will help us embrace and hold onto the ultimate hope that God has given us, which is everlasting life. In short, we believe that the whole Bible is God’s gift to us and that, when we study it deeply, it helps us maintain our hope in what God has promised us.
But Cranmer’s vision of a rich, scripture-fueled hope wasn’t to be accomplished by coming to church once a week and paying attention when the lessons were read. He imagined a church in which all people—clergy and laity—were committed to reading the Bible every day. In the preface to the first Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer wrote that, by coming to church and hearing the scriptures read every day, “the people…should continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of [God’s] true religion.” Though it may sound like something you’d find in another denomination, there is nothing more Anglican or Episcopal than reading your Bible seven days a week. That’s why we offer Morning and Evening Prayer most days and encourage you to read the Daily Office on your own.
Throughout Christian history, isolated verses of scripture have been used to do terrible things—like defend slavery, perpetuate misogyny, dehumanize the poor, demonize individuals because of their sexuality, excuse abusive behavior, and justify genocide. But the whole canon of scripture tells a very different story—one of God’s persistent love for the world, preference for the poor, vindication of the oppressed, and redemption of the lost. We are a part of that story, and, if we want to tell that story that is good news for the world, we must take the Bible seriously—seriously enough to read the whole thing and to read it every day until it takes hold of our hearts and minds and shapes our lives into lives filled with hope.
© 2022 The Rev. Evan D. Garner
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas