Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns.” The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity. – Ps 96:10

Today we begin a series reflecting on 1 Thessalonians. As we get into it I want to talk a little about manuscripts, because we live in an age where the canon of scripture is being questioned and I think its useful for us to know how we get the bible. This was a letter written by Paul and Timothy and Silvanus that they ask be read aloud to everyone in Thessalonika and its kept by the Christians there, copies are made and brought to other churches and so God preserved this letter through this process of copying, because paper and leather and clay degenerate and lose readability over time, get burned, get destroyed. Paul’s ministry would have taken place between 40-67 AD. He is probably writing this letter later in his ministry. The earliest mostly complete copy of it we have is a Codex known as Papyrus 46 from the year 175. So a little over a century after Paul wrote the letter, it survives, tattered but what are you going to look like in two-thousand years? It was found in Egypt and is currently at a University in Michigan. What makes that copy unique is that it has page numbers which did not often happen. We have a copy of chapters one and two that survived for a long time from the early two-hundreds in a library in Florence. The next copies we have are from larger collections of scripture found in the Vatican, at a monastery in Mount Sinai, and the Codex Alexandrinus which was given as a gift to King Charles I from the Patriarch of Constantinople for his diplomatic help with the Ottoman government. The first two dating from the early 300s and the later from the mid 400s. It is in comparing all of these copies, giving some preference to consensus among the older copies, that we get the source of the letter we begin reading today.
My point is that we have four good sources from within three-hundred years of when the text was originally written. For none-biblical ancient sources that gap is often much larger and there are not as many sources to compare. For comparison the earliest copies of the Odyssey come from about 1100 years after it was written. The earliest manuscripts of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul come from about 1500 years after it was written. Often scholars will consider Josephus’s writings on Jesus and the history of Judah as more authoritative but the best manuscript we have of his is from 900 AD. German scholars in the 1700s thought that the more we learned about the sources of the bible the more and more doubt would be cast on its reliable transmission from antiquity to us today. On the contrary, God has provided for his people amid fire and flood, the changes and chances of this passing world to preserve his Words to us.  

This letter is written by Paul the Apostle who together with Silvanus/Silas – the difference there is just between the greek and the latin forms of his name. In Acts 15 Silas was a Jewish-Christian at the Council of Jerusalem who is chosen to go with Paul to communicate the decision of that council to the Gentiles who had come to believe in Christ. In sharing this message to them with Paul he becomes a co-worker with him in sharing the Good News of Christ resurrection to non-Jews throughout Anatolia and Greece. Silas was with Paul when they first brought this good news to the city of Thessalonika. We know that Silas also had a good relationship with Peter from 1 Peter 5. In addition to Paul and Silas, this letter is from Timothy. The three of them are together in Athens writing this letter.
This letter is written to the Christians in Thessalonika at a time when they are undergoing serious persecution. They had just sent Timothy up to encourage them, Paul has been trying to get out of Athens and get to them but he says later in the letter that Satan has prevented him. But because they are together concerned for what is happening in Thessalonika they feel its necessary to send this letter of encouragement to them. When Paul was in Thessalonika he and Silas had preached in the synagogue for the first three weeks they were there. Many of the Jews in Thessalonika came to believe that Christ was the Messiah, and most of the women. There were God-fearing gentiles, convinced by Plato and Aristotle that there must only be one God who were wondering about the Christian God who encountered Paul and Silas as well. They too came to a saving faith in Jesus. Some at the synagogue got angry at them for bringing gentiles among them and so instead of preaching at the synagogue Paul started teaching at a man named Jason’s house. The Jews complained to the city officials that calling Jesus king was an affront to the authority of Caesar so the city officials searched for Paul and Silas. They could not find them so they arrested Jason instead. After posting bond Jason was released and Paul and Silas continued on their missionary journey leaving the Thessalonians as  a people who gathered worshiping Jesus in Jason’s house.

In their letter they pray prayers of thanksgiving to God to this people he had gathered together at Jason’s house in Thessalonika. They give thanks to God for their faith and the work they do in love of each other and of God. They give thanks to God for the Thessalonians because they know that God has chosen them to believe. They give thanks to God for the Thessalonians because they received the gospel not as a human witness but as the promise of the living God. They give thanks to God for the Thessalonians because even while they are persecuted they have great joy and grow into maturity in that joy, and in confidence in the hope they have in Jesus. A lot of communities I have served in go through rotas of other churches that they pray for and it can feel meaningless because they just list them off, which is one reason this has not been a priority in how I have led you in prayer. But can you imagine if we prayed like this for other Christian we knew that were distant to us or near to us, if we gave thanks for their faithfulness and maturity and love? If we knew them well enough to praise God for what is praiseworthy in their witness? Would that not be a beautiful thing to the building up of the saints? 

Chiefly Paul gives thanks that by their great faith they have been empowered to turn away from idols and towards the living God. Now Paul is writing about Jews he met in a synagogue. Paul is writing about Gentiles who were searching for the Lord of creation before he and Silas came among them. Yet, living in the age they lived, their hearts were tempted by the idols of their age as our hearts so often become fixed to what is prized in the age we live in. We can not just turn away from idols unless we turn to the living God. We can not turn to the living God without faith in him working in us. And as they turned, they turned not to that which was unknown but he who made himself known in the witness of these evangelists. They knew Jesus as the Son who came down from heaven. They knew Jesus as the living God who had been risen from the grave. They knew Jesus will come again in the same way he ascended into heaven and that when he came he would judge the living and the dead, saving them from the wrath to come. May God give us this faith that we may turn from the idols of our age and towards Jesus who is to come. May the power of God that worked in Thessalonika work in us.

Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns.” The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity. – Ps 96:10