2 Thessalonians 1:5-10 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
Last Judgment Sunday, November 10, 2019 “Welcome Home: Where You Are Perfectly Safe”
This past Wednesday morning, I stopped in at the Home Depot in order to purchase a part I needed for a repair. I knew right where the part is located in the store, so I didn’t expect the stop to take long at all. When I turned into the parking lot, however, I noticed an unusual commotion. A fire truck was parked with lights flashing. I had actually followed a police vehicle into the lot, and found that there were several more already there. Officers had an area of the parking lot completely roped off, and were talking to several employees and customers. I went in to get the part I needed, and tried to make my way back to the car in short order, but I overheard enough to learn what had caused such a commotion: a man had been stabbed in the Home Depot parking lot. I came to find out later that this had happened perhaps only 15 minutes before I arrived. That’s what the news report that I read said. When you find out that something like that had happened, you feel a little surprised and uneasy. It makes you think about how there are dangerous things that go on in our world, and how close we sometimes are to those dangerous things happening. Maybe you have had some sort of similar experience that reminded you of what a dangerous world we live in. That stands in sharp contrast to the theme of our service today. We have over a couple weeks introduced the idea of church being a home for people. And specifically today, we hear that church welcomes us home to where we are perfectly safe. But there seems to be a problem with that theme. Church doesn’t always seem perfectly safe. Members of Grace or of any other Christian church are not automatically protected from accidents, injuries, or crimes that other people commit, that could hurt or harm us. Becoming a Christian doesn’t immediately take us away from the dangers of the world all around us. It doesn’t guarantee us a way of avoiding those dangers. And in some ways, it is almost the complete opposite. It seems that we might even face more dangers at times as members of Christ’s Church. That seems to be how the people from the church in Thessalonica might have felt. The book of 2 Thessalonians, from which our sermon text is taken, is the second letter that Paul had written to them, and both include a lot of information about the persecution that they were facing. They were suffering specifically because they were Christians, because they believed what Paul had preached to them. They had been enduring these difficulties. The church was actually thriving under the circumstances, but church in Thessalonica certainly didn’t seem to be a place that was perfectly safe. Church at Grace in Southern Arizona doesn’t seem to be perfectly safe either, does it? I don’t mean that we face the same sort of opposition that the Thessalonians once did, but we do at times actually face negative reactions to our Christianity. We are lumped in with other Christians by an unbelieving world and considered foolish or backward or old-fashioned or ignorant. We face hatred and we face ridicule. And of course, as I mentioned previously, just walking in the doors of this place on a Sunday morning doesn’t keep us away from the dangers that lurk outside and could just as easily follow us in as well. It is clear. There are dangers all around us, and on the surface, it seems as though being in the church can actually increase those dangers instead of alleviating them. And that is a reminder of an important truth. We live in a world that is full of danger because we live in a world that is full of sin. Only in the perfect original home of the perfect original human beings was there no danger at all. Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden without worrying about what could happen to them or what danger they might face. But they changed all that when they fell into sin. And we, like all other generations of their descendants have heaped our sins on top of theirs. We have made a mess of God’s good world in a way that means that now there are dangers and difficulties to contend with. Now there is opposition from sinful worldly people and ideas, opposition toward the godly and Christian realities. You are not perfectly safe at all in this world, at least not from an earthly perspective.