Authority or Relationship?

We were not looking for praise from people, not from you or anyone else, even though as apostles of Christ we could have asserted our authority. Instead, we were like young children among you. Just as a nursing mother cares for her children, so we cared for you. Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well. Surely you remember, brothers and sisters, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you. You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed. For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory. (1 Thessalonians 2:6-12) We can get the sense from some evangelical sources that what really matters in the grand scheme of things is authority and obedience: the authority of a leader or group of leaders to lay down a law or statement, and the necessity of followers to get in line with said teaching.  This can become a rather cold, unfeeling machine of rules and expectations that steamroll a complex web of human idiosyncrasies into a flat plain of submissive uniformity.  This kind of system does offer the benefit of clarity and feeling like you're part of a group that's going somewhere with purpose, but it also, as Pastor Michael noted yesterday, can leave room for unhealthy, impersonal dynamics to grow.   Paul, you will notice here, takes a different tack.  "We could have asserted our authority," he says.  But he and his companions didn't do that.  Instead, they offered their lives and vitality in deeply personal ways for the sake of loving the Thessalonians well.  In a string of three homey family metaphors, Paul describes the apostles' ministry among the Thessalonians in relational terms.  They were innocent as young children, loving and self-giving as nursing mothers, and caringly invested in the Thessalonians growth to maturity just as fathers.  Instead of asserting their authority with a "because I said so," "I'm the apostle here" kind of aura, the apostles instead stooped down to get their hands dirty in the daily rough and tumble of family life with the Thessalonians, building a relationship of trust and respect with them through which the Gospel could be caught and imitated. There is an important tension here.  One that flows throughout the scriptures and its interpretation.  It's this: is this faith primarily about submission to authority, or is it primarily about restoration of relationship?  These two roads diverge already in Genesis 1-2, before sin and the Fall.  In God's good Creation, something is "not good:" the fact that the man is alone.  But why is this alone-ness a problem?  Is it because Adam's alone-ness renders him unable to procreate and therefore unable to submit to the command of "fill the earth"?  Or is this alone-ness of Adam a problem because we are created to be in relationship ("Let us make mankind in our image… in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.")?  The story does not say.  But the tension between these two possibilities plays out throughout the rest of the scriptures and even still in the church today. My sense?  It's probably both, such that whenever we exclude either of these options, we contort the faith.  However, it's also true that the emphasis finally falls not on the "authority/submission" dynamic, but the "relationship" one.  The scriptures end not with the judgement hall, but with the wedding feast.  Both are there, but one eventually outshines the other—the relationship.  The bride and bridegroom, Christ and his church, finally joined forever in relationship.   This, I think, is what Paul is getting at and what these pictures of authority flowing through the personal, self-giving love and care of family roles points to.  And this is right.  Fear of authority only works to a point, when we are still immature.  At some point, we need to have grown to maturity such that we live what is right simply because it is right—out of a the formation of our character.  Only people whose character has been formed can enter fully into a healthy relationship.  The love and care of our family is the space where this learning and growing to maturity happens.   Of course, families are often more complicated than that and we as people are often far less mature than we might hope.  Nevertheless, this is the picture Paul draws on—not "asserting authority," but rather, calling the Thessalonians to remember the personal bonds of relationship through which they have witnessed for themselves the mature character of the apostles, have imitated it, and have grown to up into this Christian character themselves. As you journey on, go with the blessing of God: May God himself, the God who makes everything holy and whole, make you holy and whole, put you together—spirit, soul, and body—and keep you fit for the coming of our Master, Jesus Christ. The One who called you is completely dependable. If he said it, he'll do it! The amazing grace of Jesus Christ be with you! (1 Thessalonians 5:23,24,28 The Message).