Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay, we’re going to get started, and when we get started here in just a moment, we’ll be picking up in St. Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians 4:1. We don’t have a ton of catch-up to do. I think we’ll get some of it in stream, because St. Paul here is going to, in his… We’re getting to sort of his closing; this is the beginning of the end, as you can see, verse one of chapter four begins with, “Finally, then…” [Laughter] But much like “Let us complete our prayer unto the Lord…” there’s still a couple chapters! [Laughter] There’s still some time left here, but it’s the beginning of the end. So he’s going to refer back to some of the things he’s been talking about, but most of what we’ve seen St. Paul talking about so far…

This has been one of St. Paul’s more positive letters to the Christian community in Thessalonica. We’ve seen St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians didn’t go quite this well. This is more like his epistle to the Philippians where good things are happening there, so it’s a more positive report. He’s gotten a report back from Timothy. He’s talked about how he’s wanted to go visit Thessalonica again but he hadn’t been able to be back there. As we talked about, St. Paul is writing this around 50 AD from Corinth, back to Thessalonica, but he hasn’t been there since he first visited, though he has sent Timothy who’s given him this good report.

And the quick summary beyond that has been that he’s been sort of encouraging them to continue to walk in the way that he showed them when he was there, not just in what he taught them but in how he lived his life while he was there, how they’ve seen Timothy living: sort of continue on that same path that they’re on. Sort of a “keep up the good work.” [Laughter] “Things are going well. Keep it up. Don’t get distracted. Don’t go off the course.” And he’s sort of still talking about that here, as we’ll see as we begin in chapter four.

So unless anybody has any questions or comments or abbreviations or clever acronyms that they’ve come up with that they’d like to share, we’ll go ahead and pick up in St. Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians 4:1.

“Finally, then, brethren, we urge and exhort in the Lord Jesus that you should abound more and more, just as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God…” So he’s sort of summarizing what he’s just been talking about in the past chapter and a half or so. So just as you’ve been doing, that you would continue to abound more and more. More of this! [Laughter] More of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff.

Verse two: “For you know what commandments we gave you through the Lord Jesus.” Note: St. Paul gave them commandments. This is another connection to what we saw in the gospels. Remember, St. Matthew’s gospel ends when Christ says, “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that I have commanded you.” Commandments. As Christ says elsewhere, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

This is just sort of a last note. We’re past the epistles where St. Paul is mainly talking about the law, but just to hammer that point home some more, when St. Paul goes to a church that’s full of Gentiles—these are former pagans who are now Christians—he teaches them commandments. He doesn’t just tell them, “Here are the things you need to believe and then you’ll be fine.” He’s teaching them commandments. And we’re going to get more detail on that here in a minute, some specific commandments that he has taught them.

Verse three: “For”—which is really “because”: so that “because” means he’s expanding on what he was just talking about; so the commandments he’s talking about—“this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality.” So the will of God, what God desires, what God is working toward in them, is their sanctification, meaning them becoming holy, them being holy and set apart, meaning different from their neighbors in Thessalonica who are still pagans. They need to be holy and set apart.

And the particular area that St. Paul is focusing on here… Remember, a big part of the problems in Corinth was on the idolatry side. There was some sexual immorality, too; I mean, Corinth had everything going on, but we talked about then how sort of the two paradigmatic sins that were going on out in the nations, as Judeans saw it, were—the two top-of-the-heap sins—sexual immorality and idolatry. And all through the Old Testament, those two things are closely connected, and they’re very closely connected in pagan life because, for example, pagan worship and pagan festivals often involved sexual immorality. These were connected.

So we have—as we’ve seen in so many ways, we have as modern people compartmentalized our lives to this great degree, where people have their “sex life” that is this private thing off in a corner, has nothing to do with church—good, right? That’s what St. Paul was trying to tell them in Corinth: it shouldn’t have anything to do with church. But it has nothing to do with any of these other things: we have it all sort of blocked off. So a lot of modern people then: “Why is the Church telling people…? Why are they obsessed with sex? Why are they telling people about their sex lives?” So in the ancient world, life was not so compartmentalized. This was not like this private thing that was between you and some romantic partner whom you were in love with and making mix-tapes for.

This was part of the public… So this is taking place in public festivals. This is taking place in religious rituals. Marriages and these things were public. Prostitution was completely legal. This was not seen as this sort of other compartmentalized thing. People were in arranged marriages. People—men; I shouldn’t say “people”—men were not particularly faithful to those arranged marriages. If the women weren’t faithful, they would often have dire consequences if the husband found out about it. Although, with the Romans, sometimes the men knew about it and just didn’t care, because they were off doing their own thing or things, too. [Laughter]

This is part of why it’s sort of a paradigmatic sin the way idolatry is. Once you go down the road of sexual immorality or idolatry, all the other things are going to come with it. So if you’re sexually immoral and you don’t have any control over your sexual appetites, you’re probably also going to be a glutton. You’re probably also going to be drinking too much alcohol. These things kind of go together. You’re not going to have: “Well, I have all of these things under perfect control about my physical appetites, except this one.” That’s not going to happen much. And the same thing with idolatry. Once you start engaging in these pagan festivals and doing these [things], these other things are going to come along with it. These other things are going to come along with it.

So when St. Paul singles out sexual immorality or idolatry, it’s not because “Well, these are the really bad ones, so if you’re doing other stuff, that’s not as bad.” Like, “I just gossip a little; I’m not, like, sexually immoral!” [Laughter] Or “I just gossip a little bit; I’m not worshiping idols!” That’s not how it works, because we’ve seen… When St. Paul gives lists of sins, like “Refrain from all these things,” he mixes those together. He says sexual immorality, gossip, slander, brawling… He lumps them all together, so he’s not saying these sins are worse; they’re paradigmatic because they sort of lead to and exhibit all the others. And they were particularly entrenched in the Greco-Roman pagan world, to which St. Paul is writing and from which his pagan converts are coming—hopefully coming all the way out of.

As we saw with the Corinthians, a lot of the problem was that they were still entangled with the public feasts, eating at idol temples, doing these things. We talked I think last time about how becoming a Christian and leaving all of that idolatry and everything behind meant leaving your trade guild, leaving your family associations: how much of a disjunction that was.

But Christianity was also teaching a very peculiar sexual morality for the ancient world. For the ancient world, because in the ancient world—how to put this delicately? The Latin word that the Romans used for a man having sexual gratification is the same word as used for going to the bathroom, meaning they just saw it as a bodily function. So you have to go to the bathroom: they didn’t have indoor plumbing in the ancient world—you have to go to the bathroom, you go and find a receptacle. You go and find a place to go to the bathroom. For men, they viewed sexuality the same way. Man wants to relieve his sexual appetite, he goes and finds a receptacle. That might be a prostitute, that might be a slave. In the Greek world, pederasty was a social institution, so that might be a young person as young as eight years old. There was no concept of consent for the other party. And this was just common. They didn’t think about this. No one thought this was odd. No one thought this was horrible.

And then Christians came along and said, “None of that. None of that, not even polygamy. It’s you and your spouse and that’s it, and we don’t care that you didn’t get to choose your spouse.” And so that was bizarre. That was difficult for these early pagan converts to wrap their head around. That was a massive shift for them, morally. Later on, when you get into the second and third centuries, you find Roman writers who think that Christians are super-human because of this. They think Christian men must be super-human to practice this sexual morality, because they just can’t imagine not just gratifying themselves whenever they wanted to. So the Stoics were like: “The self-control is amazing!”

But at this stage, when we’re talking about 50 AD, it’s just a bunch of weirdos. [Laughter]

Q1: They inherited this from the Jews, right?

Fr. Stephen: Not necessarily. I mean, obviously the sexual was connected with idolatry, but the Judeans at this time were still practicing polygamy and very easy divorce. Divorce was: I write a writ of divorce and hand it to my wife and she’s not my wife any more, and I can go marry someone else, who’s maybe younger and whatever, and then do the same to her in a few years. So, yeah. Christianity even tightened that, even tightened that a great deal, compared to what had gone before. Once you get to the end of the first and beginning of the second century, Christianity is even holding out virginity and preserving it, not just for women but for men—bizarro-world, right?—as an ideal, which, yeah, again, bizarro-world, if you’re a pagan.

So this is, then, because of the way the culture was just entrenched in sexual immorality in Thessalonica, this is going to be one of the big ways that they’re going to need to… Again, we’re talking about sanctification, being holy, being set apart. This is one of the major ways they’re going to have to differentiate themselves from their neighbors in how they live their life. This is one of the ways in which their walk is going to be radically different than… It’s not just: “Well, that guy still prays to Zeus and now I pray to Jesus, and otherwise it’s pretty much the same.” It’s not the same. This is a radical thing.

Verse four: “That each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor.” “Possess his own vessel” is a little euphemistic. [Laughter] But anyway, the idea is this is talking about self-control. This is talking about self-control and of course is primarily aimed at men, because at this point it’s only adult men who are able to make these choices. It is good now that in our culture women have more agency and have a right to consent and that we don’t allow… and we have an age of consent, and these things are all good. That also means, though, that now that women have equal say, women also have equal responsibility to the commandments regarding morality. So the reason they’re directed at men, especially in the Old Testament but even in the New Testament, is because men were still the ones making the decisions.

And so what happened a lot in the ancient world is that even though women weren’t allowed to make any of these decisions, they would then be blamed for the behavior. So there’s some examples of this in the Bible. The story of Susanna, which is the first chapter of Daniel in the Greek Old Testament tradition, is about this Jewish woman who… some of the elders of the people try to seduce her in private; she refuses, and they say, “Well, okay, we’re going to tell everybody that you slept with us then, and you’re going to be stoned to death for being a prostitute.” And Daniel has to kind of step in, and it ends up being those elders who are condemned for it, but their attempt is: “Our behavior, but we’re going to blame them.”

And of course probably the most well-known example is the story of the woman caught in adultery that traditionally gets put into the middle of St. John’s gospel where… “Oh, we caught this woman committing adultery, so we’re going to stone her to death!” Was she committing adultery by herself? [Laughter] Where’s the guy? And if you read the commandments about that in Deuteronomy, the guy gets stoned to death no matter what; the woman may or may not, depending on the circumstances, but the man is always punished for it, because, again, in the Torah, since men are the ones making the decisions, they have the primary responsibility.

But what we find and what Jesus has to step in to correct is that, even though it was some man making the decision to commit adultery with her, she’s the one they’re trying to punish. So that’s why the commandments are phrased the way they are. Sometimes modern people read especially the Old Testament and they’re like: “Well, this is talking about women like they’re children and can’t make their own decisions.” And it’s like: That’s not the Bible doing that to them! That’s the culture did that to them. Their fathers and brothers and sons did that to them, and God is stepping into that and saying, “Well, okay, if you’re not going to let them make their own decisions, if you’re going to make all the decisions, then you’re going to be held completely responsible for those decisions, and not them. You’re not going to not let them make decisions and then blame them for what happens. It’s not going to work that way.”

But so that’s why… I mean, I’m not going to go into details about why controlling his own vessel…

C1: One can guess.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, possessing your own vessel, you can guess. [Laughter]

“In sanctification and honor”: in holiness and honor, being set apart, and showing honor to the person with whom you do use that vessel. And that’s opposed to… So “sanctification and honor” is opposed to, in verse five, “not in passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God,” like the nations who do not know God. And this is a theme St. Paul’s picking up, remember, all the way back in chapter one he was talking about them coming to now know God. They know God and God knows them, so St. Paul was saying: Yeah, your neighbors who don’t know God, who haven’t come to know God in Christ? Yeah, they’re still following around their passions, following around their lust, just trying to gratify their desires. You can’t be like that, because now you do know God, and so now you need to be holy and set apart.

Verse six: “That no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also forewarned you and testified.” So this, if you don’t take it in context, could be hard to interpret, but notice he said, “defraud in this matter,” so he’s still talking about sexual morality. So what’s he talking about? How would you defraud your brother in sexual immorality? Sleeping with his daughter; sleeping with his wife. And notice we’re still using the masculine terms, because it’s the men making the decisions.

So the use of “defraud” here means… What’s “fraud” in terms of the Old Testament is—usually it refers to false measures. Somebody comes to you to buy a certain amount of grain, and you give them less than that. You have something that’s a little light on the scale to put on the other side to be like: “Oh, yeah, here’s your…” Right? And you cheat them. You’re either taking something that you aren’t entitled to from them or you’re giving them less than what they’re entitled to.

If we take that into the area of sexual morality, if no one defrauds his brother, what St. Paul is saying is you’re not going to be taking anything that you don’t have rights to; you’re not going to be going and taking anything from anyone. So this would include children, slaves, women who aren’t your wife, etc., etc. And you’re also—see, the flip-side of that then is you’re also not going to be giving someone, namely, your wife, less than what she is entitled to, which is faithfulness, honor, etc.

And why? Because “the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also forewarned you and testified.” So this is St. Paul. He qualified this as “commandments.” This is coming straight from the Torah. This is where the laws about sexual morality are: Leviticus 18. And he’s even drawing the language from the Torah of why. Because if you take advantage of someone, if you abuse someone who’s in this weaker or socially powerless position, someone who has no one to stick up for them, Yahweh the God of Israel is going to stick up for them. That’s not going to go well for you. You think if you go and take some woman’s virginity, her dad’s going to be mad at you; if she doesn’t have a dad and it’s God… [Laughter] You’re not going to have a good time!

And this is an important aspect that we forget about in terms of the way justice is talked about in the Torah, that God isn’t actually impartial. God takes sides. He takes the side of the weak, the poor, the powerless, the people who have no one to defend them—he’s on their side. He’s not just even-handed; he’s on their side. And so this warning comes again and again in the Torah, and St. Paul refers to it here and says, “This is what I taught you before, while I was there.”

So we just read these two paragraphs. St. Paul is teaching pagans who convert, pagans who become Christians, that they need to follow the commandments of the Torah about sexual morality. So St. Paul, when he defends himself in the book of Acts, as we saw again and again, the Jewish accusation: “Oh, you’re teaching people not to follow the law; you’re blaspheming against Moses,” all that that he got over and over again, it’s not just him trying to do some tricks like: “Oh, no no! I don’t get rid of the law; I establish it, but I really kind of get rid of it…” [Laughter] That’s not just sophistry. He actually is. He actually is. He’s not going to these Greeks in Thessalonica and saying, “Oh yeah, just stop worshiping those gods and start worshiping Jesus and you’re good.” That’s not at all what he’s teaching them. He’s teaching them a radical holiness that’s based on the commandments from the Torah, specifically the holiness code. He’s telling them how to be holy is to follow the holiness code in Leviticus.

Verse seven: “But God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore, he who rejects this does not reject man, but God, who has also given us his Holy Spirit.” So again, he uses—notice what he contrasts with “holiness” is “uncleanness.” So this is Torah-Leviticus language again. He’s still using this language even though he’s talking to former pagans. God didn’t call us to stay unclean, to just keep living the way we were living, but change who in our head we think about when we pray; but called us to holiness. And so if you reject this idea, he’s saying, “Ah, nah, it doesn’t matter. Just like going to the bathroom,” then you’re not just rejecting some rules St. Paul tried to make you follow. You’re not rejecting somebody’s idea of morality from some philosopher; you’re rejecting God himself. You’re rejecting the Holy Spirit that he gave you and put inside of you, because you can’t have the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of you and be unclean. Doesn’t work.

Because what happens with the Holy Spirit… What happened to Ananias and Sapphira when they came and lied to the Holy Spirit, when the Holy Spirit was around and they were unclean? They fell over dead. Happens all the time in the Old Testament. Somebody is doing something unclean, somebody unclean comes up and touches the ark of the covenant, or goes into the tabernacle—they fall over dead. You’ve got that option or, when all of Judah became unclean, God got up from the Temple and left. So if you have the Holy Spirit dwelling within you, St. Paul is saying, and you’re going to go be unclean, either, like he warned the Corinthians at the Eucharist, you’re going to die, or he’s going to leave, because he’s holy, and so if you’re not, he can’t dwell inside of you.

Verse nine— So that was sort of the negative, “don’t do this”; now this is going to be the positive. “But concerning brotherly love, you have no need that I should write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another, and indeed you do so toward all the brethren who are in all Macedonia. But we urge you, brethren, that you increase more and more.” So he’s saying the positives of this, the opposite of you trying to take advantage of each other and to gratify your desires, that kind of lust and sexuality, is actual love, which is giving rather than taking, which is caring. Rather than trying to gratify yourself, you’re trying to gratify someone else.

And he says, “I don’t have to explain this to you; you’re already doing this.” And remember that Thessalonica is the metropolis; it’s the capital of the province of Macedonia. So he’s saying the whole province of Macedonia knows that you’re there in the capital; they know about you and how your community is. He says, “But I want you to not just keep it up, but more and more and more.” More of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff.

“That you also aspire to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands as we commanded you.” So this is… St. Paul right here—again, this is the positive, not just the negative “don’t do” commandments—“Don’t do this. Thou shalt not”—but here’s the positive. This is not the good life, as we modern Americans conceive it. Our society does not tell you that you should aspire to have a quiet life in which you mind your own business and work with your own hands.

C1: No, it doesn’t!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? Everybody wants to avoid, well, working as much as possible… [Laughter] Especially working with your own hands! If you can get out of that, if you can get to the point where you just shove numbers on a spreadsheet in a cubicle, then that’s an improvement over working with your hands. And who wants to live a quiet life? I want to be famous and I want to get rich, right?

C1: We want to make as much noise as we possibly can.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, more and more and more! This is the Greek pleonexia. It used to be considered a vice for most of Christian history, but in our modern culture, it’s considered a virtue: wanting more. “I want more.” So to anyone, which is probably everyone, if we’re honest—probably everyone in this room and probably everyone who will listen to this recording later, who thinks to themselves, “My life would be better or happier or even perfect if I just had like ten percent more than I’ve got now. Then everything would be boom.” I have good news and I have bad news for you. The bad news is: It wouldn’t! If you had ten percent more than what you have now, you would think, “If I just had ten percent more than this, then…” [Laughter] And that would continue forever. So that’s the bad news; the good news is you can be just as happy with what you have now as you could with ten percent more, because the problem isn’t that we don’t have quite enough; the problem is that we always want more. That’s the problem.

That’s the problem, and while there have been greedy people and stuff in all ages of humanity, and people who wanted more, this is a particular—this should be a particularly counter-cultural thing for us as modern/post-modern people in Western capitalist democracies, where while our whole culture constantly—I mean, how much of our culture is advertising now? Just about everything is an advertisement—is constantly aimed at telling us, “No, you just need a little more, just a little more,” we as Christians should be the counter-cultural ones who are saying, “No, I’ve got enough. I’ve got more than enough! I’m thankful for all this that I’ve got. In fact, I could probably get rid of some of this and be just as happy with a little less.”

This is the place where we as Christians could be sending a powerful message to our friends and neighbors about the difference between the Christian way of life and the world’s way of life. Fortunately, after 2,000 years of Christianity, as I was just talking about, we view women differently and we view children differently and we view slavery differently and we view sexuality differently. And those are all good, and so that means, although our society’s not moving in a great direction on any of that either, at least for the nonce, that may be less of a temptation than it was for the people St. Paul was writing to in Thessalonica, where it would be very easy to fall into that kind of… into a kind of sexual immorality that we would find disgusting now—even an atheist would think was disgusting now, but was commonplace and wouldn’t have batted an eye at in Thessalonica. So we’ve got less temptation there, but I think we’ve got more temptation to the “quiet and peaceful life.” Work with my hands!? Aspire to that!? That might be where you start out, but you want to get out of it as fast as you can, right?

This is a place where I think we’re called to be more counter-cultural. And the working with our hands part is important, because I don’t know anybody who sits around and fantasizes and says, “Wow, I can really hone a craft and become really good at it, and gradually, over time, by selling the things that I craft, I could have a quiet and decent life.” Right? Usually people are scheming about “Well, here’s how I can get a lot of money really fast.” And people are out there to tell you, “Oh, hey, I have the way you can get a lot of money really fast,” and so people fall prey to those people and end up getting defrauded over and over again, because that’s what’s attractive to us. “I want to win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. I don’t want to work hard and have a nice life. I want instant gratification.” [Laughter] And that’s what St. Paul means by “working with your hands.” He means, no, you find a decent, honest, honorable way to support yourself and your family, and you work hard at it, and you have a nice life, and you follow Christ.

I think the older you get, the better it sounds. I’m a very elderly man at heart, so it sounds good to me, too, but when you’re in your 20s, this definitely does not sound like fun! [Laughter] Once you get to a certain age, you’ve seen enough of the world and you don’t want any more excitement. At a certain age you kind of do want the excitement. But so, yeah, this is the vision, the positive vision that St. Paul puts forward, of quiet, decency, hard work, holiness, honor. That’s what he’s setting forth, over against chasing after gratifying your desires, whether it’s pride, wanting to be well known and loved by people, whether it’s envy and wanting more and more and more and more, or greed, or whether it’s lust, gluttony, all of those things. There’s this. This is what St. Paul was setting before them.

Verse twelve: “That you may walk properly toward those who are outside, and that you may lack nothing.” So that “toward those who are outside,” that’s again the point, is that you’re holy in that you’re set apart and that you’re different. You’re different. Because if the people outside the Church look at the people who are in the Church and they seem pretty much the same, there’s not a lot motivating them to come to Christ.

C1: I’ve heard them say that.

Fr. Stephen: Right? I can… If we’re both going to live the same way and have the same problems and have the same everything, then I’ll stay home Sunday and watch football in my underpants, right? Like, save myself some time and effort! Right?

It’s to be different. And why is this such a big issue? Well, what was the purpose of Israel in the Old Testament. Israel wasn’t chosen because God loved them and he hated all the other nations and was going to send them all to hell and Israel was all going to go to heaven. If you think that, you haven’t read much of the Old Testament! [Laughter] The whole point was that God was going to save all the nations through Israel. City on a hill, light to the world, all of that stuff. Well, Christ says all of that stuff about the Church. So it isn’t that, and people get this wrong, and a lot of times when we talk to our friends who are Christians but aren’t Orthodox Christians, who aren’t part of the Orthodox Church, and they hear us say, for example, that the Orthodox Church is the true Church—this is the one, true Church—they don’t like that, because what they’re hearing is, “Well, God loves you guys, and you guys are all going to heaven, and the rest of us he’s all going to send to hell,” which of course isn’t what we’re saying either.

What St. Paul is saying to these Orthodox Christians in Thessalonica in AD 50 is: You are the means by which God wants to save the people of Thessalonica. God loves your pagan neighbor just as much as he loves you. Because you’re in the Church, because you’re in the community, you have this responsibility. You’re going to be the one through whom God shows his love to that pagan. You’re going to be the one through whom he calls that pagan to change his life to repent and come and join the Church. And for that to happen, you’ve got to be on the right path. You’ve got to be on the right path.

So what St. Paul is saying here is that even when it comes to salvation we can’t be selfish. St. Paul is telling them: You need to walk the right path, you need to find salvation, because there are all these people whom God wants to save through you. You need to do it for their sake, not for your own. So even there it’s not about: “Hey, you don’t want to go to hell, do you?” [Laughter] That’s—no, God’s called you and given you this mission and this purpose, and you need to succeed at it, because, again, if you’ve read the Old Testament, you see what happens to people whom God calls to do that and they fail. They’re not any better off than those pagans. In fact, they’re kind of worse off: they’re more responsible.