Worthy

2 Thessalonians 1:1-12

A man reached out to me this past week to make a request. He had heard me “preach” at a wedding and was “fascinated by my words and prayers,” as he put it. “Long story short, my brother is dying and he needs to make things right with God before it’s too late.” This captures an anxiety that I believe all human beings feel: existential angst, worrying that we’re not good enough; believing that we’ve got to do something in order to get right with God; feeling responsible for our own salvation but fearing that it’s too late for us; we’re just not worthy.

Well, I’ve done what I do best, which is to read enough theology to get myself into trouble...but perhaps not quite enough to get myself back out of it. I’d like to start with my thesis, then see if I can use what I’ve read to make arguments to back it up. So let me just put this out there, quoting from 2 Thessalonians 1:11: “God will make you worthy of God’s calling and accomplish every desire and faithful work by God’s power.” Did you catch that? “God will make you worthy.”

So, let’s start by unpacking this Scripture. It’s pushing back against our angst with a reminder that redemption, righteousness, and salvation are out of our power. Wait...I’m not in control of my salvation? That ends up making me feel more anxious. I want to be able to do something. John Calvin wrote that understanding, or misunderstanding, that we are justified by faith and not by works is “the main hinge on which religion turns (Calvin, 726).”

The author of 2 Thessalonians writes to praise these people for their faithfulness in the presence of persecution. “We have been bragging about you to all of the churches,” the author writes, “because you have been faithful despite all of the harassments you’ve had to put up with.” The letter goes on, “This shows that God’s judgment is right, and that you will be considered worthy of God’s kingdom for which you are suffering.” So...does this mean that misery is a precursor to worthiness? There have certainly been eras in the life of the church where suffering was believed to be a necessary part of true repentance. If you don’t recognize yourself as a sinner and feel absolutely miserable about it, then you’re not ready to receive salvation. This is true, but can also be easily misinterpreted to lead folks to think that God wants us to suffer to encourage us to repent. It’s like this: sin leads to misery, which is why God wants us to be rescued from sin. God does not want us to be miserable.

Theologian Paul Tillich writes of sin as a state “estrangement” from God, but also a state of possible reunion. When we seek to take that reunion into our own hands, “attempts to overcome estrangement within the power of one’s own estranged existence lead to hard toil and tragic failure (Tillich, 80).” Our own attempts to reconcile our sinful nature are what Tillich calls “self-salvation” which he sees as “the tragedy of religion (Tillich, 80).” Attempts at self-salvation do not reconcile us with God, but merely justify our sin in the presence of another, usually self-crafted god, a god within our own control who we design to bring us comfort in the midst of our existential angst, but not a god who can rescue us from it.

The other tragedy of self-salvation is its tendency to bring me a sense of comfort and peace at the expense of someone else’s. Which is not true peace or salvation. The “kingdom of God for which we are suffering” is described as a banqueting table to which all are invited, from which no one is estranged. Jesus tells parables about folks declining the invitation, but that was their own choice, not God’s. See, when we think we are in control of our own salvation that also means we think ourselves capable of judging ourselves and others worthy, and our inclination is to let ourselves off the hook while judging “others” harshly. Hence our attempts at self-salvation, our attempts to overcome estrangement, often lead us to estrange ourselves from others, and if it is our actions that have led to this estrangement, than it is we who have refused God’s invitation. We cannot sit at God’s banqueting table while choosing to estrange ourselves from others. We don’t get to pick and choose who is worthy.

“Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and processed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate a blamelessness and purity of life (Calvin, 725-26).” In this statement, John Calvin describes the gift of God of which we partake in communion: grace. Through grace, God accomplishes what we cannot do on our own. “No sinner can find favor in God’s eyes,” writes Calvin, “wherever there is sin there is wrath and judgment. [But] justified by faith is the person who...grasps the righteousness of Christ through faith, and clothed in it, appears in God’s sight not as a sinner but as righteous (Calvin, 726-27).” “Grasping the righteousness of Christ through faith,” is another way of saying: trusting grace.

Tillich puts it simply when he says this, “sin is estrangement; grace is reconciliation” (Tillich, 57). Grace, he says, is the infusion of God’s love into our state, and the only power capable of overcoming our estrangement from God. So long as we seek to earn our own salvation, we refuse grace and remain stuck in sin. The suffering we experience as a result of this our stubborness is the result of the self-destructive nature of sin, which Tillich describes as our experience of evil in this world. I bring this up, because I feel that the experience of evil, of suffering, tends to be the thing that causes folks not to trust God’s grace. How could a loving and almighty God allow evil to exist in this world? Am I really supposed to trust the grace of a God who oversees so much misery? Here is how Paul Tillich confronts that question:

“If one is asked how a loving and almighty God can permit evil, one cannot answer in terms of the question as it was asked. One must first insist on an answer to the question How could God permit sin?--a question which is answered the moment it is asked. Not permitting sin would mean not permitting freedom; this would deny the very nature of humankind, our infinite freedom. Only after this answer can one describe evil as the structure of self-destruction which is implicit in the nature of universal estrangement (Tillich, 61).”

To restate that, it is not God who is responsible for evil. God is responsible for our freedom, and when we, in our freedom, choose sin we create consequences. And here’s where things get tricky, if we play our cards right, collaborate with the powers that be, work our way into positions of power in this world of sin, we can actually live in sin in ways that create consequences we don’t have to suffer, but others do. This is when sin becomes especially tempting and entrapping. Sin lures us into a place where we can find both comfort and control in our lives, and from that vantage point, reconciliation with God seems threatening. “You want me to let go of control, God? But that’s what’s keeping me safe...see those people over there who are suffering?” “Yes, says God...they are suffering because you won’t let go of your sin. Just because you aren’t feeling the consequences, doesn’t mean there aren’t any. Trust me, I don’t want you to suffer...but I don’t want them to suffer, either. Let me save you.”

Grace does not destroy our freedom, it does what our freedom under the conditions of existence cannot do: it reunites the estranged, reconciles us to God and to one another. We, the entirety of humankind, have abused our freedom, become trapped in sin, and suffer the consequences of those in power who refuse to confess or confront their own privilege. We are bent, and burdened, and broken by the system of sin, that tempts us to remain trapped by offering us things that we can do to feel more in control of our lives, to make ourselves feel worthy of this world. We work so hard at, and we’re so proud of what we accomplish that we feel insulted when someone comes along and tells us we must die to this life and this world so that we may receive new life in the redeemed world God has, and is, and will always be creating.

Can you see the trap? More importantly, can you recognize grace as your source of salvation from it? We are called to live in this world as if the Kingdom of God is already here, but not yet fully realized. To shake and rattle the cages, and to extend grace to our neighbors, love to our enemies, show compassion to the ones who have faced the consequences of sin, to cry out for justice.

A quick word about justice: it might feel like punishment to those who have trusted the tempter and created very comfortable cages for themselves, lavish, luxurious, in-control. But it doesn’t have to feel like punishment. Because God is not punishing us, God is saving us. In 2 Thessalonians, the author writes about “God’s judgment being revealed through the worthiness of all who suffer for God’s kingdom.” Justice means that those who have suffered under sin will be relieved of that burden, and those who have exploited others for the sake of their own comfort will have a lot to let go of. Justice isn’t easy, often times the cries of the persecuted get spun by those in positions of power as “complaining” or “whining” or “weakness,” they mask their own manipulation of others by blaming those who suffer for their own condition, they hide their own greed by accusing those who ask for a fair share, a living wage, of being selfish.

Justice is the theme of the Advent season, during which we read from texts that say things like “every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain shall be made low,” or “the crooked paths shall be straightened out and the rough places shall be made smooth,” or “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” They will abandon those things that they thought gave them power and control, they will stop fighting amongst themselves, nation will not lift up sword against nation, but they will come together...and together they will see the salvation of God. This is our calling. You might not feel worthy of it...I know I don’t. But when we don’t feel worthy, we want to do something about it, to take things into our own hands...and when we take things into our own hands, well…

God took things into God’s own hands and has accomplished our redemption and reconciliation. This is central to the mission of the Church, as we claim in the Presbyterian Confession of 1967, “To be reconciled to God is to be sent into the world as his reconciling community. This community, the church universal, is entrusted with God’s message of reconciliation and shares his labor of healing the enmities which separate people from God and from each other. Christ has called the church to this mission and given it the gift of the Holy Spirit. The church maintains continuity with the apostles and with Israel by faithful obedience to his call.”

“God will make us worthy of this calling and accomplish every good desire and faithful work by God’s power.” Jesus demonstrates God’s power at work in humankind to accomplish God’s good desire and faithful work. Having been baptized by the Holy Spirit Jesus was led into the wilderness where he was tempted to abandon the power of God for the sake of being in control of his own destiny, he could have chosen wealth and popularity, he could have avoided the cross and death, but he didn’t, and he left the wilderness and returned to Galilee in the power of the Holy Spirit where he entered the synagogue, unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and proclaimed:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Release to the prisoners is paired with sight to the blind...freedom from the cage of sin is paired with the ability to see and recognize it. Liberation of the oppressed is paired with God’s favor...our salvation is paired with the ability to recognize and respond to grace.

We don’t have to “get right with God,” God has already gotten right with us. We just have to trust that, trust grace, trust that God has made us worthy of living a new life as stewards of a reconciled creation. Listen to the voice of God that proclaims “I have made you worthy”, trusting that voice is your salvation, any voice that tells you “You must make yourself worthy” is just temptation.

Gaventa, Beverly. “First and Second Thessalonians”, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. (1995,

John Knox Press, Louisville, KY).

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1. Ed. John T. McNeill. (1960, Westminster Press, Louisville, KY).

Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Vol. 2, Part III Existence and the Christ. (1957, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL).

“The Presbyterian Confession of 1967”, Book of Confessions: The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part 1.

(2014, PCUSA, Louisville, KY).