Imitation Christianity
Commentary
Object:
So much of what we human beings learn to do, we learn to do by imitation. In some areas of life that is how we have become proficient. In other areas, it is how we have become dysfunctional.
The young child will begin to make sounds that resemble his mom and dad's words before that child really knows what those words mean. The baby is simply imitating what he hears most commonly around him.
When that child grows up, he will learn to write, swing a bat, and do multiplication and division by having someone say, "Here, watch me. Do it like this." He will learn how to do things around the house and in the yard by observing his mom and his dad.
This, of course, is the basis for the practical concern that a child's parents have about what he watches on television and with what kinds of friends he spends his time. We know that child will imitate what he sees. If what he sees is disrespectful or irresponsible, violent or crude, he will begin to adopt some of those attitudes and behaviors himself. The phenomenon is not limited to children or even teenagers; even as adults we continue to live by imitation.
An old friend from childhood called to tell me that he was going to be in my part of the country to attend a professional conference and he wondered if we could get together while he was in the area. As we worked out the details, I agreed to pick him up at the airport and take him to his hotel before going out to eat together. As we arrived at the hotel, the lobby was swarming with other people from around the country who were attending the same conference. As I stood among these people, who were all part of the same profession, I was struck by how very similarly they were all dressed. There were prevailing hairstyles among the men and women as well.
This was not a conspiracy, of course. They had not all received the same memo about some dress code. It was simply a striking display of our human tendency to imitate what we see around us.
What is true of our sense of fashion, our hairstyles, and our home décor is also true of Christian lives. For better or for worse, we imitate what we see around us and that phenomenon stands at the heart of our scripture readings for this week.
Joshua 3:7-17
How do you replace a legend?
In my part of the country that question prompts people to think about Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre. Favre was the iconic quarterback of the Green Bay Packers for sixteen seasons. He took the Packers to two Super Bowls, winning one. He also won three league MVP awards with Green Bay and became known as the NFL's "iron man" because of his unprecedented streak of consecutive games started.
Then in 2008, 25-year-old Aaron Rodgers became the first starting Packer quarterback other than Brett Favre since 1992. What a task! How do you replace a legend?
That was something of the plight of Joshua.
Moses had been Israel's leader for forty years. He had been the agent of God's miraculous deliverance from Egypt. He had been the courier of God's law at Mount Sinai. He had been the point man for God's guidance through the wilderness. As the people prepared to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land, you could count on one hand the number of Israelites who could remember a time when Moses was not the leader.
But now Moses was gone. And the task fell to Joshua to replace the legend.
When our scene opens, we see God's practical concern for Joshua's plight. "This day," God promised him, "I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel." In order for the people to follow Joshua, he would need a divine endorsement. And that would come at the Jordan River.
The Israelites' exit from Egypt a generation earlier, you recall, had been climaxed by the crossing of the Red Sea. The crossing was a miraculous one, of course, as God parted the sea so that the children of Israel could cross over on dry land. When the Egyptians tried to pursue, meanwhile, the Lord released the waters that he had held back, drowning the enemy and putting an end to their threat.
Now, at the other end of their pilgrimage, another body of water marks a boundary to be crossed. This time it is the Jordan River and this crossing represents the long-awaited entry into the Promised Land. In an act of symbolic symmetry, the Lord parts the waters again and the people cross on dry ground. It is a new generation of Israelites, under a new leader, crossing a new border, but they are led and protected by the same God. The miracle, which was so much a part of Mosaic lore, is now a part of Joshua's resume too.
And Aaron Rodgers won the Super Bowl.
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
The apostle Paul and his companions first went to Thessalonica during his second missionary journey. This was the moment when he left behind the familiar territory of Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor for the western provinces of Macedonia and Achaia. And the metropolis of Thessalonica came early in that Greek itinerary.
The mission in Thessalonica is one that most of us can only envision in our imaginations. It does not bear any resemblance to any experience from our own personal history. The scene is of a community where not only is there no church, there are few or no people who have even heard of Jesus. It is into such a spiritual frontier that Paul ventured and his high ambition was to bring the people there to a saving knowledge of Christ, form them into a congregation of fellow believers, and then move on to the next place while they persisted and grew together in their newfound faith.
We don't know how long Paul was able to stay and work in Thessalonica. The book of Acts' account of his mission there (Acts 17:1-10) suggests that it was a rather brief time before he was run out of town by his opponents. What Paul left behind in Thessalonica, therefore, must have seemed incredibly fragile. So he sought an early opportunity to write to the nascent church there and give them the necessary encouragement and instruction.
Interestingly that encouragement and instruction was predicated heavily on Paul's own example. In other words, absent a great deal of time for actual teaching when he had been with them, the apostle selected the object lesson of his own life from the time when he had been with them. "You remember," "you are witnesses," and "as you know" are Paul's starting places. In other words, they had seen with their own eyes what they now needed to know. Then he directs their attention to "our labor and toil," "our conduct," and how "we dealt with each of you." In short, Paul reminded the people of his own example.
The old bromide says that faith is better caught than taught. That's a dangerous sentiment, of course, if it causes us to abdicate our responsibility to teach (e.g., Deuteronomy 11:19; Matthew 28:20; 2 Timothy 2:2). But it does get at the truth that there is a certain contagion to genuine Christian faith and so mere contact or exposure can be most effective.
So it is that the Thessalonians had been exposed to Paul and his companions. Those new believers had had that impactful contact. And in seeing how those men lived and worked in their midst, the Thessalonians had received memorable instruction in how they themselves should live and work.
Commentators infer from Paul's instructions and reminders what some of the particular needs and issues in Thessalonica might have been. Those specifics are not our concern here, however. For us, the emphasis is not the historical question of the Thessalonians situation but rather the practical question of our situation. In other words, what examples of Christian living have we seen, are we imitating, and will we be?
Matthew 23:1-12
Every sports fan is acquainted with the "bust." This is the player who should have been better than he turned out to be. He is the guy who did not live up to expectations, whose performance did not match his hype, and whose production was not commensurate with his contract. If you are a fan of some particular sports franchise, you can probably come up with the name of one or two busts in your team's history.
Enter the scribes and Pharisees.
These are the guys who by all rights should have become all-stars. They're the ones who started with the most promise and the greatest potential. And so they are the ones who, by their underachieving, become the greatest disappointments.
The scribes were the resident experts in scripture. No one had devoted more hours to the reading and studying of God's word than the scribes. Some English translations of the Bible even use the phrase "experts in the law" or "teachers of the law" to capture the significant role of these men in the life ancient Israel.
The word "Pharisee," meanwhile, has suffered a great demotion since the time of Jesus. Because our only real contemporary knowledge of the Pharisees is what we read that Jesus said about them, the term has come to connote for us a misguided legalism and religious hypocrisy. In fact, the contemporary reputation of the Pharisees was that of supreme human righteousness. William Barclay reports that their name meant "The Separated Ones (for they) were the men who had separated themselves from all the ordinary activities of life to keep all these rules and regulations."1 That is why the greatest credential Paul could claim with reference to the law was the simple fact that he was a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5).
The scribes and Pharisees, therefore, were the highly drafted players coming out of college: the stars that you really expected to shine. But they did not shine. In the several references Jesus makes to either group in the gospels, you can hear God's disappointment with them. The scribes and Pharisees were spiritual busts.
Our passage from Matthew 23 comes during Jesus' eventful final week in Jerusalem. And in this teaching moment, he uses the disappointing example of the scribes and Pharisees as a way of illustrating how we are not meant to be: that is to say, what our motivations and behaviors should not resemble.
Jesus' first critique is a metaphorical one and it deserves a meditation all its own. He paints a picture of putting heavy burdens onto other people's backs and lending no aid to the chore. Of course, this was not literally the practice of these religious leaders but it was the effect of their influence. We might do well to contemplate the ugly evolution that begins in earnestness, grows into thorough application, mutates into legalism, and then ultimately develops into an oppressive and judgmental system that becomes a great burden to others.
Jesus' several other critiques, meanwhile, are all of a kind. The conspicuous accoutrements of religiosity, the deferential titles, the preferential treatment -- all of these were symbols of an addiction to self-importance. In truth, the scribes and Pharisees were little better than the notorious Hophni and Phineas (1 Samuel 2:12-17), for they misused their position for personal gratification and abused God's people in the process.
Jesus told his audience that they ought to be different and that they should function differently together. His first-vs.-last paradigm is a consistent theme in his teaching. As we watch him -- from his incarnation (Philippians 2:5-7) to the foot-washing (John 13:12-17) to the cross (1 Peter 2:21-23) -- we see that paradigm embodied by his own example.
Application
"Do whatever they teach you and follow it," Jesus says of the scribes and Pharisees, "but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach."
As far as the scribes and Pharisees are concerned, of course, that candid teaching is a harsh indictment. The disconnection between words and actions strikes at the very heart of personal integrity. To be a bold and unapologetic sinner is not as bad as being a hypocrite, for the latter is so much more likely to compound evil by deceiving both himself and others. And deceit, we recall, is the chief technique of the one who "disguises himself as an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14).
Jesus' critique of those so-called religious leaders deserves a moment's reflection by you and me. The scribes and Pharisees were only capable of being such a disappointment and doing so much damage because of the position they held: they "sit on Moses' seat." Well, you and I do not sit on a particular seat but we do stand in a pulpit and that is a comparable position to theirs. We do well, therefore, to consider the cause and effect of how disappointing they were to God.
Meanwhile, our chief concern for preaching this Sunday is the principle of imitation. Imitation is how we learn to do so much of what we do, including being Christians. That imitation may prove, however, to be either enabling or handicapping, depending upon whom we imitate. So it is in our three selected passages that we meet explicit and implicit encouragement to be discerning about that choice.
In the Matthew excerpt, Jesus is pointed about whom not to imitate. "Do not do as they do," he says matter-of-factly in reference to the scribes and Pharisees. It was a startling instruction inasmuch as those were the people that conventional wisdom called the role models of that time and place.
Meanwhile, though the episode from Joshua does not deal explicitly with this theme of imitation, the issue is there as a motif in the background. God promises to "drive out from before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites." We know from Moses' earlier instructions that a part of the rationale for driving out those peoples was a concern that Israel "must not learn to imitate the abhorrent practices of those nations" (Deuteronomy 18:9).
Conversely, the apostle Paul reminds the Thessalonians of what his example had been when he was in their midst. Just as Jesus' audience was instructed to be deliberate about not imitating the example of the scribes and Pharisees and just as Joshua's contemporaries were commanded not to imitate the peoples whose land they would inherit, the Christians in Thessalonica were also taught about the influence of imitation. In their case, however, their attention was directed to the examples of Paul, Silas, and Timothy. Those were role models worth imitating. Those people were patterns for how the Thessalonians themselves should live and work.
At first blush, the expression "imitation Christianity" sounds like an undesirable thing. We think of "imitation" as the unhappy alternative to "genuine," as with leather, gems, or fine wood. Indeed, when it comes to Christian faith and life, you and I are encouraged to be discerning about what is the genuine article and what is counterfeit. Yet once we have found an example of the real thing, that's where the imitation kicks in. While imitation leather will never become genuine leather, the Christian life is quite different. Imitation is precisely the key to becoming all that God wants for us to be.
As we observed above, imitation is how we learn to do so many things in life. It is how we become proficient in one area and how we become dysfunctional in another. That difference lies in the models we choose to imitate. So this week's lections invite us to choose wisely the people we imitate as we learn the Christian life.
Alternative Application
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13. "Knowing What You're Hearing." I have in my congregation a woman who is the music teacher at a local elementary school. She loves music, she loves kids, and she loves teaching so she is extraordinary at her job. One of her annual achievements is to teach the fourth and fifth graders how to identify different styles of music. From hearing just a few bars, these children are able to discern whether the music is baroque, classical, or romantic or whether it is jazz, folk, or rock. Their peers from other schools might hear the same music but they wouldn't recognize so clearly what they were listening to.
Recognizing and understanding what you're hearing is fundamental to communication and to comprehension. If you are traveling in a foreign country, for example, you are at a great disadvantage if you do not understand what you hear around you. Likewise, the patient in a hospital feels that much more anxious and intimidated if he does not recognize the things that he hears the doctors and nurses saying.
The apostle Paul, therefore, congratulated the Christians in Thessalonica because they recognized what they had heard. Specifically, they had heard Paul and his companions preach and teach the word of God. They had "accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God's word."
I wonder if we are as astute as those young Christians in Thessalonica. Do we recognize God's word as what it is or do we misunderstand it as something less?
Between you and me, a large part of the responsibility for whether an audience recognizes what they are hearing depends upon the attitude of the one presenting it. Certainly Paul and company communicated to people an elevated view of what they were proclaiming (see, for example, Galatians 1:8-9). But if you and I mistake our pulpits for editorial columns or if we present the scriptures as a word rather than the word, then we must not be surprised when our people think lightly of preaching and teaching. We will be partly to blame when they do not recognize what they are hearing.
________________________________
1. William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible Series: The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), p. 129.
The young child will begin to make sounds that resemble his mom and dad's words before that child really knows what those words mean. The baby is simply imitating what he hears most commonly around him.
When that child grows up, he will learn to write, swing a bat, and do multiplication and division by having someone say, "Here, watch me. Do it like this." He will learn how to do things around the house and in the yard by observing his mom and his dad.
This, of course, is the basis for the practical concern that a child's parents have about what he watches on television and with what kinds of friends he spends his time. We know that child will imitate what he sees. If what he sees is disrespectful or irresponsible, violent or crude, he will begin to adopt some of those attitudes and behaviors himself. The phenomenon is not limited to children or even teenagers; even as adults we continue to live by imitation.
An old friend from childhood called to tell me that he was going to be in my part of the country to attend a professional conference and he wondered if we could get together while he was in the area. As we worked out the details, I agreed to pick him up at the airport and take him to his hotel before going out to eat together. As we arrived at the hotel, the lobby was swarming with other people from around the country who were attending the same conference. As I stood among these people, who were all part of the same profession, I was struck by how very similarly they were all dressed. There were prevailing hairstyles among the men and women as well.
This was not a conspiracy, of course. They had not all received the same memo about some dress code. It was simply a striking display of our human tendency to imitate what we see around us.
What is true of our sense of fashion, our hairstyles, and our home décor is also true of Christian lives. For better or for worse, we imitate what we see around us and that phenomenon stands at the heart of our scripture readings for this week.
Joshua 3:7-17
How do you replace a legend?
In my part of the country that question prompts people to think about Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre. Favre was the iconic quarterback of the Green Bay Packers for sixteen seasons. He took the Packers to two Super Bowls, winning one. He also won three league MVP awards with Green Bay and became known as the NFL's "iron man" because of his unprecedented streak of consecutive games started.
Then in 2008, 25-year-old Aaron Rodgers became the first starting Packer quarterback other than Brett Favre since 1992. What a task! How do you replace a legend?
That was something of the plight of Joshua.
Moses had been Israel's leader for forty years. He had been the agent of God's miraculous deliverance from Egypt. He had been the courier of God's law at Mount Sinai. He had been the point man for God's guidance through the wilderness. As the people prepared to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land, you could count on one hand the number of Israelites who could remember a time when Moses was not the leader.
But now Moses was gone. And the task fell to Joshua to replace the legend.
When our scene opens, we see God's practical concern for Joshua's plight. "This day," God promised him, "I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel." In order for the people to follow Joshua, he would need a divine endorsement. And that would come at the Jordan River.
The Israelites' exit from Egypt a generation earlier, you recall, had been climaxed by the crossing of the Red Sea. The crossing was a miraculous one, of course, as God parted the sea so that the children of Israel could cross over on dry land. When the Egyptians tried to pursue, meanwhile, the Lord released the waters that he had held back, drowning the enemy and putting an end to their threat.
Now, at the other end of their pilgrimage, another body of water marks a boundary to be crossed. This time it is the Jordan River and this crossing represents the long-awaited entry into the Promised Land. In an act of symbolic symmetry, the Lord parts the waters again and the people cross on dry ground. It is a new generation of Israelites, under a new leader, crossing a new border, but they are led and protected by the same God. The miracle, which was so much a part of Mosaic lore, is now a part of Joshua's resume too.
And Aaron Rodgers won the Super Bowl.
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
The apostle Paul and his companions first went to Thessalonica during his second missionary journey. This was the moment when he left behind the familiar territory of Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor for the western provinces of Macedonia and Achaia. And the metropolis of Thessalonica came early in that Greek itinerary.
The mission in Thessalonica is one that most of us can only envision in our imaginations. It does not bear any resemblance to any experience from our own personal history. The scene is of a community where not only is there no church, there are few or no people who have even heard of Jesus. It is into such a spiritual frontier that Paul ventured and his high ambition was to bring the people there to a saving knowledge of Christ, form them into a congregation of fellow believers, and then move on to the next place while they persisted and grew together in their newfound faith.
We don't know how long Paul was able to stay and work in Thessalonica. The book of Acts' account of his mission there (Acts 17:1-10) suggests that it was a rather brief time before he was run out of town by his opponents. What Paul left behind in Thessalonica, therefore, must have seemed incredibly fragile. So he sought an early opportunity to write to the nascent church there and give them the necessary encouragement and instruction.
Interestingly that encouragement and instruction was predicated heavily on Paul's own example. In other words, absent a great deal of time for actual teaching when he had been with them, the apostle selected the object lesson of his own life from the time when he had been with them. "You remember," "you are witnesses," and "as you know" are Paul's starting places. In other words, they had seen with their own eyes what they now needed to know. Then he directs their attention to "our labor and toil," "our conduct," and how "we dealt with each of you." In short, Paul reminded the people of his own example.
The old bromide says that faith is better caught than taught. That's a dangerous sentiment, of course, if it causes us to abdicate our responsibility to teach (e.g., Deuteronomy 11:19; Matthew 28:20; 2 Timothy 2:2). But it does get at the truth that there is a certain contagion to genuine Christian faith and so mere contact or exposure can be most effective.
So it is that the Thessalonians had been exposed to Paul and his companions. Those new believers had had that impactful contact. And in seeing how those men lived and worked in their midst, the Thessalonians had received memorable instruction in how they themselves should live and work.
Commentators infer from Paul's instructions and reminders what some of the particular needs and issues in Thessalonica might have been. Those specifics are not our concern here, however. For us, the emphasis is not the historical question of the Thessalonians situation but rather the practical question of our situation. In other words, what examples of Christian living have we seen, are we imitating, and will we be?
Matthew 23:1-12
Every sports fan is acquainted with the "bust." This is the player who should have been better than he turned out to be. He is the guy who did not live up to expectations, whose performance did not match his hype, and whose production was not commensurate with his contract. If you are a fan of some particular sports franchise, you can probably come up with the name of one or two busts in your team's history.
Enter the scribes and Pharisees.
These are the guys who by all rights should have become all-stars. They're the ones who started with the most promise and the greatest potential. And so they are the ones who, by their underachieving, become the greatest disappointments.
The scribes were the resident experts in scripture. No one had devoted more hours to the reading and studying of God's word than the scribes. Some English translations of the Bible even use the phrase "experts in the law" or "teachers of the law" to capture the significant role of these men in the life ancient Israel.
The word "Pharisee," meanwhile, has suffered a great demotion since the time of Jesus. Because our only real contemporary knowledge of the Pharisees is what we read that Jesus said about them, the term has come to connote for us a misguided legalism and religious hypocrisy. In fact, the contemporary reputation of the Pharisees was that of supreme human righteousness. William Barclay reports that their name meant "The Separated Ones (for they) were the men who had separated themselves from all the ordinary activities of life to keep all these rules and regulations."1 That is why the greatest credential Paul could claim with reference to the law was the simple fact that he was a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5).
The scribes and Pharisees, therefore, were the highly drafted players coming out of college: the stars that you really expected to shine. But they did not shine. In the several references Jesus makes to either group in the gospels, you can hear God's disappointment with them. The scribes and Pharisees were spiritual busts.
Our passage from Matthew 23 comes during Jesus' eventful final week in Jerusalem. And in this teaching moment, he uses the disappointing example of the scribes and Pharisees as a way of illustrating how we are not meant to be: that is to say, what our motivations and behaviors should not resemble.
Jesus' first critique is a metaphorical one and it deserves a meditation all its own. He paints a picture of putting heavy burdens onto other people's backs and lending no aid to the chore. Of course, this was not literally the practice of these religious leaders but it was the effect of their influence. We might do well to contemplate the ugly evolution that begins in earnestness, grows into thorough application, mutates into legalism, and then ultimately develops into an oppressive and judgmental system that becomes a great burden to others.
Jesus' several other critiques, meanwhile, are all of a kind. The conspicuous accoutrements of religiosity, the deferential titles, the preferential treatment -- all of these were symbols of an addiction to self-importance. In truth, the scribes and Pharisees were little better than the notorious Hophni and Phineas (1 Samuel 2:12-17), for they misused their position for personal gratification and abused God's people in the process.
Jesus told his audience that they ought to be different and that they should function differently together. His first-vs.-last paradigm is a consistent theme in his teaching. As we watch him -- from his incarnation (Philippians 2:5-7) to the foot-washing (John 13:12-17) to the cross (1 Peter 2:21-23) -- we see that paradigm embodied by his own example.
Application
"Do whatever they teach you and follow it," Jesus says of the scribes and Pharisees, "but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach."
As far as the scribes and Pharisees are concerned, of course, that candid teaching is a harsh indictment. The disconnection between words and actions strikes at the very heart of personal integrity. To be a bold and unapologetic sinner is not as bad as being a hypocrite, for the latter is so much more likely to compound evil by deceiving both himself and others. And deceit, we recall, is the chief technique of the one who "disguises himself as an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14).
Jesus' critique of those so-called religious leaders deserves a moment's reflection by you and me. The scribes and Pharisees were only capable of being such a disappointment and doing so much damage because of the position they held: they "sit on Moses' seat." Well, you and I do not sit on a particular seat but we do stand in a pulpit and that is a comparable position to theirs. We do well, therefore, to consider the cause and effect of how disappointing they were to God.
Meanwhile, our chief concern for preaching this Sunday is the principle of imitation. Imitation is how we learn to do so much of what we do, including being Christians. That imitation may prove, however, to be either enabling or handicapping, depending upon whom we imitate. So it is in our three selected passages that we meet explicit and implicit encouragement to be discerning about that choice.
In the Matthew excerpt, Jesus is pointed about whom not to imitate. "Do not do as they do," he says matter-of-factly in reference to the scribes and Pharisees. It was a startling instruction inasmuch as those were the people that conventional wisdom called the role models of that time and place.
Meanwhile, though the episode from Joshua does not deal explicitly with this theme of imitation, the issue is there as a motif in the background. God promises to "drive out from before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites." We know from Moses' earlier instructions that a part of the rationale for driving out those peoples was a concern that Israel "must not learn to imitate the abhorrent practices of those nations" (Deuteronomy 18:9).
Conversely, the apostle Paul reminds the Thessalonians of what his example had been when he was in their midst. Just as Jesus' audience was instructed to be deliberate about not imitating the example of the scribes and Pharisees and just as Joshua's contemporaries were commanded not to imitate the peoples whose land they would inherit, the Christians in Thessalonica were also taught about the influence of imitation. In their case, however, their attention was directed to the examples of Paul, Silas, and Timothy. Those were role models worth imitating. Those people were patterns for how the Thessalonians themselves should live and work.
At first blush, the expression "imitation Christianity" sounds like an undesirable thing. We think of "imitation" as the unhappy alternative to "genuine," as with leather, gems, or fine wood. Indeed, when it comes to Christian faith and life, you and I are encouraged to be discerning about what is the genuine article and what is counterfeit. Yet once we have found an example of the real thing, that's where the imitation kicks in. While imitation leather will never become genuine leather, the Christian life is quite different. Imitation is precisely the key to becoming all that God wants for us to be.
As we observed above, imitation is how we learn to do so many things in life. It is how we become proficient in one area and how we become dysfunctional in another. That difference lies in the models we choose to imitate. So this week's lections invite us to choose wisely the people we imitate as we learn the Christian life.
Alternative Application
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13. "Knowing What You're Hearing." I have in my congregation a woman who is the music teacher at a local elementary school. She loves music, she loves kids, and she loves teaching so she is extraordinary at her job. One of her annual achievements is to teach the fourth and fifth graders how to identify different styles of music. From hearing just a few bars, these children are able to discern whether the music is baroque, classical, or romantic or whether it is jazz, folk, or rock. Their peers from other schools might hear the same music but they wouldn't recognize so clearly what they were listening to.
Recognizing and understanding what you're hearing is fundamental to communication and to comprehension. If you are traveling in a foreign country, for example, you are at a great disadvantage if you do not understand what you hear around you. Likewise, the patient in a hospital feels that much more anxious and intimidated if he does not recognize the things that he hears the doctors and nurses saying.
The apostle Paul, therefore, congratulated the Christians in Thessalonica because they recognized what they had heard. Specifically, they had heard Paul and his companions preach and teach the word of God. They had "accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God's word."
I wonder if we are as astute as those young Christians in Thessalonica. Do we recognize God's word as what it is or do we misunderstand it as something less?
Between you and me, a large part of the responsibility for whether an audience recognizes what they are hearing depends upon the attitude of the one presenting it. Certainly Paul and company communicated to people an elevated view of what they were proclaiming (see, for example, Galatians 1:8-9). But if you and I mistake our pulpits for editorial columns or if we present the scriptures as a word rather than the word, then we must not be surprised when our people think lightly of preaching and teaching. We will be partly to blame when they do not recognize what they are hearing.
________________________________
1. William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible Series: The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), p. 129.
