1 Thessalonians 5:12-28

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Today is week 26 of our livestream Sunday services, so today we reach the six month mark. Few of us could have imagined that restrictions on public gatherings, church gatherings, even personal gatherings would last this long. For a half-year we have been unable to gather physically as a church. This has been hard because the church is a gathered community. We are fortunate that modern technology allows us to gather virtually, to livestream services, to hold Zoom sessions. But this is not the same as gathering in person. We look forward to the day when we can safely come together as a gathered community. Meanwhile we persevere, we seek to be safe and keep others safe, and we seek to maintain a sense of community.

I began this series on 1 Thessalonians on March 22, just a few days after the Shelter-in-Place order went into effect. Today we finish the series with restrictions still in place. Preaching this series has been very different from what I had anticipated. I have found this little letter remarkably relevant to our unusual situation in these last six months.

Paul wrote this letter “To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:1). Some months earlier, on his second missionary journey, Paul had preached the gospel in Thessalonica. In the Jewish synagogue he proclaimed Jesus as Israel’s Messiah, that he was risen from the dead, and that he is now Lord, sharing an identity with God. To the Gentiles in the city he had proclaimed that there is another king, Jesus. Caesar is not king. Caesar is not lord. Some believed: Jews, God-fearing Gentiles who attended the synagogue, and Gentiles. Together they formed the church in Thessalonica. The Greek word ekklēsia means “assembly.” Our English word “church” derives from the Greek word kuriakos, meaning “pertaining to the Lord (kurios).” The church is the gathering of the Lord’s people in a particular place, in this case Thessalonica.

Christians are not just individual followers of Jesus. We belong to a community. The NT focus is that we belong to a local community, a local gathering of Jesus people. The NT has no conception of a believer isolated from community. Being a Jesus follower entails being part of the local community of Jesus followers, and part of the family of God in Christ. In our individualistic age it is important to hear this. When we follow Jesus, giving him our allegiance, we join God’s family, God’s household. We also join the local assembly of God’s people.

We are Peninsula Bible Church Cupertino, an assembly of Christ-followers that normally gathers in this building on Blaney Avenue in Cupertino. It is indeed sad that we cannot gather physically, for gathering is foundational to being church. But we continue to seek to function as a community, gathering online as we are doing now.

Fourteen times in this short letter, Paul addresses the Thessalonian Christians as “brothers and sisters.” They don’t belong together naturally but now they are family. They are gathered into a new family, a family that cuts across all previous dividing lines of ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status. A family of Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Barbarians, men and women, slave and free, rich and poor, high status and low status. They are what Scot McKnight calls “a fellowship of differents.”[1] These different people are learning how to be a family gathered together with one new common identity that binds them together. They are “in Christ.” A couple of years ago I spent some time with the pastors of Oakland City Church. This understanding of the church as “a fellowship of differents” is well reflected in how that particular church perceives itself and presents itself: “We are people who don’t belong together gathered around Jesus for the sake of those who don’t belong.” We are learning how to belong together.

In the final section of his letter before the closing