In this week’s epistle text, Paul is remembering people he holds dear, and the people are church people, which ought to give us hope.
Understand who is writing. This is the man who argues in the synagogue until midnight and stares down magistrates without blinking, the one whose intellect is a house on fire. He has the resume and he knows it. Trained under Gamaliel. Knocked flat on the Damascus road and lifted up by the risen Christ himself. In his world, as in ours, power announced itself by volume. Rome ruled with the sword and the spectacle. Traveling teachers filled the marketplaces, performing their brilliance for coin. That is the backdrop.
Notice that when Paul remembers the church of Thessalonica, he lowers his voice: “We were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.”
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Dear meant costly. Expensive. Hard to come by. Something dear was priced high. Paul says you became dear to us, you got expensive, started costing us, and we paid in the only currency that matters, which is our own lives.
Think about the first game most of us ever played, a game with no score, no clock, no trophy, and no losers: tag. One player is It. Everybody else runs. It has to touch somebody, and the moment the touch lands, the roles reverse. The tagged one becomes It. The chase begins again from the other direction.
Becoming dear to each other might be as simple as a game of tag.
T is for time. Somebody told me a long time ago that love is spelled T-I-M-E, and I have never found a way around it.
A is for attention. Attention is the second question. Everybody asks the first one: How are you doing? Fine, and the conversation moves on, and two people stay strangers in each other’s company. The second question is where the door opens. How are you really doing? Why did that hurt you so much? What do you need?
G is for grace. Grace is knowing that you have never once seen the true weight of what another person is carrying, and you have never accurately measured how well they are holding up under it. You are always guessing. So, guess generously.
Time, attention, grace. Somebody is going to get tagged.
In Concord, North Carolina, there is a four-year-old boy named Roman who plays this game amazingly well. His mother, Anna, told CBS News that the boy wakes up wanting to say hi to somebody. That is the first thing on his agenda every morning, before breakfast, before anything. Trucks going by get a wave. Cars get a wave. Anybody walking past that house gets a hand up in the air and a “Hey” thrown after them like a ball Roman expects you to catch.
The neighbors got it every day. And after a while, they started catching it.
They began to stop to talk. And then, one afternoon, they began to race: an elderly woman on her mobility scooter and a four-year-old boy on his bicycle, going flat out down a residential street in North Carolina for absolutely no reason at all except that they were alive and it was a nice day.
I want you to hold that picture because I believe it is a photograph of the kingdom.
With his mother’s blessing, Roman started inviting his elderly neighbors to things. Soccer games, basketball, baseball. They came to his swimming lessons. They came to his preschool open house and sat in those little chairs. And when his birthday arrived, Anna knew there was no guest list to make because he had already made it. The senior citizens came, and they gathered around a table, which is where dearness has always liked to happen.
One of them reported that the boy ran up and hugged them. Another laughed and said that Roman has himself a lot of grandparents now. The refrigerator in that house is blanketed with their faces.
The waving spread. One of the neighbors said they all started waving at each other. Roman tagged them, and they turned around and tagged each other, and now a whole block in Concord, North Carolina, is playing a game a four-year-old started because he did not know you were not supposed to. Another neighbor said that if the world were like this child, what an awesome place it would be. That is not sentiment. That is the gospel, and a four-year-old is preaching it about as well as it can be preached.
