1 Thessalonians 5:12-22
May 13, 2012
But we appeal to you, brothers and
sisters, to respect those who labor among you, and have charge of you in the
Lord and admonish you; esteem them very highly in love because of their work.
Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers,
encourage the faint hearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. See
that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one
another and to all.
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing,
give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus
for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but
test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.
I
want to start by talking about one of my spiritual heroes. My hero is Corrie ten Boom. I’ve talked about Corrie many times before
because so much of her life is an inspiration.
She lived the kind of life I believe that God calls us to live—a life of
faith, hope, and love no matter what happens.
Corrie ten Boom grew up in the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. When she was in her mid-50s the Nazis invaded
and occupied the Netherlands, subjecting everyone to their cruel rule. She and her family were watchmakers, and
Corrie filled her days with selling and repairing watches. She was a humble and spiritual woman, focused
mainly on serving God in her everyday life.
When
the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Corrie and her family were asked by some people
they knew if they would be willing to hide Jews. The family prayed about it and sensed God
calling them to do so, and so they did.
They had a fake brick wall built on the second floor of their cramped
row house, and behind it twelve people could hide for a short time if the
Gestapo came around until they could be spirited out of the city and into the
country.
They
hid Jews for about a year until they were discovered and arrested by the
Gestapo. From there, Corrie lived the
nightmare of imprisonment, solitary confinement, and eventual assignment to the
Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. Life in
the camp, as you can imagine, was awful.
Hundreds of women were cramped together in dormitories, sleeping on hard
wooden palates covered with straw, shoveled in from local horse farms. The straw was filled with urine and
fleas.
Corrie
and her sister, Betsie, felt a calling to make life as good for others as they
could. Miraculously, they were able to
smuggle in a Bible (it was verboten by the Nazis, and if found with the Bible
they could be killed). Each day, using
the Bible, they conducted large worship services in which they would read
passages in Dutch, and other women would translate the sentences in French,
German, Russian, Polish, English, and the other languages of the prisoners. There was one thing that mystified them. They couldn’t figure out why the Nazis were
letting them do this. They must of have
known, yet they did nothing.
One
particular day Corrie was really struggling with their situation. She had had it, and tearfully complained to
her sister that she couldn’t take it anymore.
Betsie tried to console her by quoting the scripture they had read
during worship this morning, which was our passage for this morning. Betsie said to Corrie, “Remember what the
passage said this morning: ‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give
thanks in all circumstances…”?
Corrie replied, “Yes, but I can’t rejoice and give thanks for the fleas,
Betsie. That’s too much.” Betsie responded, “God didn’t say to rejoice
and give thanks only for certain things.
God said to rejoice always, and
to give thanks in all
circumstances.” Corrie said, “But
how can I give thanks for the fleas?”
Betsie responded that God knew what God was doing, and to trust and give
thanks, even for the fleas.
It
was a struggle, but Corrie tried.
Several months later they discovered how God had used the fleas. A trustee from the camp overheard a
conversation among the guards. She found
out that the reason the guards left them alone in their barracks was that they
were afraid of getting fleas. So the
fleas were keeping the guards both from abusing them even more, and allowing
them to worship and pray in the midst of the terrible conditions. When Betsie heard this, she said to Corrie,
“See Corrie, it’s what scripture says.
Give thanks even for the fleas.”
Corrie’s
story shows the power of what I call the holy “triple pray:” rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in
all circumstances. Corrie’s and Betsie’s
ability to hold onto God in prayer and gratitude laid the groundwork for a
constant joy that they both demonstrated in the concentration camps, and Corrie
demonstrated throughout her life. She
went through experiences that made many survivors bitter and cynical. Corrie never held onto that pain, and, in
fact, she spent the rest of her life trying to relieve the pain of both
concentration camp survivors and the former Nazis. She lived a life of joy, prayer,
thankfulness, and forgiveness. People
who knew her said that Corrie had an incredible joy for the rest of her life,
and nothing could diminish it.
I’ve
seen this in others. Adrian van Kaam,
whom I studied with at Duquesne University, and a former Dutch resistance
member himself during World War II, had this same kind of joy. He was a Catholic priest who lived his life
teaching and counseling others. A friend
of mine saw him about a year before he died, when he was beginning to struggle
with some form of dementia, and she mentioned to him that she couldn’t believe
how positive and joyful he was, even in the face of dementia. It is hard to see such a brilliant man
struggle with the loss of his memory and thinking. He said to her, “Yes, but just because the
mind goes doesn’t mean the heart has to follow.” He understood that we can keep a joyful heart
no matter what we face.
I’ve
seen this same kind of joy in members of Calvin Church—people who have gone
through very difficult times, but seem to keep a sense of joy. These are people who do pray constantly, give
thanks in all circumstances, and find a way to rejoice no matter what.
We
are called to be a people of joy—to be a people who rejoice. The word “rejoice” literally means to “joy
again.” Rejoicing means to continually
return to joy no matter what happens in our lives. To be these kinds of people requires that we
lay a foundation. We can’t rejoice
unless we also lay at our foundation another set of threes—what I call the
“holy triad,” which is found in 1st Corinthians 13: faith, hope, and love. Paul says, “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of
these is love.”
This
holy triad is foundational to the holy triple pray. When we have a deep faith, we go beyond just
believing in God. We put our trust in
God. We surrender ourselves to God. And that’s the foundation of hope. Because we trust in God that much, we know in
our hearts that the future will work out and that things will be good in the
end. We hope because we have faith. And because we have faith and hope, it gives
us the openness to love. We become open
to God’s love working in and through us.
This becomes the foundation for unceasing prayer, gratitude, and joy.
I
saw this holy triad leading to rejoicing in my uncle Peter. He died about four years ago. A few years before he died, we spent time
with him and my aunt, Mary Gaines, on vacation on Cape Cod, where they lived. One night at dinner, while Diane had the
girls outside playing with flashlights Peter, Mary-Gaines, and I had an
inspiring conversation (at least it was for me). I had asked both how they had gotten through
all of their difficulties with their faith intact.
You
see, they both had gone through difficult times. My uncle Peter’s first wife had died when his
kids were 8, 6, and 3. It was hard on
him. He finally did put his life back
together, with the help of Mary Gaines, who he married about 8 years
later. Mary Gaines had gone through a
difficult marriage, and, as a committed Catholic, had to make the difficult
decision to divorce her husband.
The
more recent struggles all began about six years before we saw them on Cape Cod.
Peter’s voice had become horse, and the doctors weren’t sure what the problem
was. They explored his throat and found
some polyps and decided to excise them.
This left him unable to speak for several months. When he was finally able to speak again, the
hoarseness was still there. Further
exploration detected more polyps, and so more surgery was required. He recovered, but the problems
persisted. And they were getting
worse. I’m a bit sketchy on the exact
details, but in the end they had to do a permanent tracheotomy, which meant he
could no longer talk because of the hole in the front of his throat. Following the surgery he was unable to
eat. His meals consisted of pouring cans
of nutrients directly into his stomach through a tube. Can you imagine what this must have been like
for them? But he never let it get him
down. Speaking was also tough. He had a voice machine, but because the
radiation treatments left his neck hard and fibrous, he really couldn’t use it. So he spoke by mouthing words.
To
top it all off, Peter was continually struggled with skin cancer from years of
exposure to the sun as a shooting instructor in the Marines at Paris Island. The day after Diane, our children, and I got
to Cape Cod for that vacation, he had to have major skin surgery on his
nose. They had to remove the skin from
the top of his nose, and graft a piece of his forehead on top of it because of
cancer on his nose. Later, he kidded
about the surgery, saying that whenever he had an itch on his forehead, to take
care of it he had to scratch the tip of his nose.
The
thing that was amazing is that despite all of this, he and Mary-Gaines always remained
so positive. In response to my question
about how they had gotten through everything with their faith intact, they told
me that, first of all, every morning they got on their knees and prayed. Prayer was a foundation for them. They also were adamant that despite the difficulties,
they recognized how much God had blessed them.
They didn’t see what was wrong.
They saw what was right. They
looked around at their four children and ten grandchildren, the beauty of where
they lived, and so much more, and saw it all as good. And that led them to a sense of joy, despite
their struggles. In their conversation
with me, Peter also said something very profound. He said that at one point Mary-Gaines had
told him that she was having a hard time praying. He told her that the struggle to pray was the
ultimate prayer. It’s not important what
you say. It’s important that you
try. It’s when you pray to God in
desperation that you are truly coming to God.
It’s when you pray to God even when it’s tough to do so.
What
allowed both of them to rejoice was their ability to be hopeful, to trust God,
and to focus on love.
I want to close with another story, one another Nazi
concentration camp survivor, Elie Weisel, told in his book Souls on Fire. Weisel is
well known for his reflections on life in the concentration camps. His book, Night,
should be required reading for almost everyone. It is a brutal, but profound, book on what it
was like in the camps. Another of his
books, that’s also powerful, is the book Dawn,
which is about his return to normal life after being released from the
camps, and how much of a struggle it was to feel normal again. Souls
on Fire is a different kind of book.
It’s a book that chronicles stories of the faith of Hassidic Jews in
Poland and Russian throughout the 18th and 19th
centuries. The Hassidic faith is a
mystical sect of Judaism.
He tells a story about a new rabbi coming to town. This rabbi was succeeding the previous rabbi,
who had been in the community for thirty years.
That man had been a learned man, a scholar. He had gravitas. He rarely smiled, and he stooped from years
of studying the Scriptures and the Talmud.
People knew they could go to him for problems, and he would give them
deep answers to their questions. He was
respected, admired, and esteemed. Now
they were getting a young rabbi. Could
he measure up? What would he be
like? Would he also be austere and
severe like their holy rabbi? So many
questions. So much concern.
The day came when the rabbi appeared. They had a gathering for him so that he could
meet the townspeople, his flock. They
peppered him with questions: “How much
do you study the holy Scripture and Talmud each day? Are you a learned man, and how could you be
if you are so young? Can you help us
with our problems? Will you be like our
previous rabbi?”
The young rabbi listened to their questions, but didn’t
respond right away. Finally, he asked
them all to be quiet. In the hushed
silence, and with a sly smile, he began to hum.
As he hummed a tune, he began to tap his right foot. Then his left foot. Slowly he began to sway to the music, and as
he did, some of the other townspeople swayed with him. The tune was infectious, and it gained in
intensity. He began to dance, and as he
did, a few picked up the steps and began to dance with him. As his dance gained in intensity, he began to
swing his arms. He grabbed the hands of
those around him, and soon they were all dancing together. A few ran home, grabbed their instruments,
ran back and played along with the tune.
Eventually, all were caught up in the dance. Then he stopped, and they stopped. He looked at them with a smile, and said,
“Are there any more questions?”
He taught them the lesson of joy. He was going to be a rabbi who did all that
rabbis did, but he was also going to be a man of joy who would teach them to
rejoice in God.
We are called to be a joyful people, a people who radiate
joy. Are you this kind of person? do you have this kind of faith?
Amen.
