Hunger Shouldn't Be A Negotiating Tool

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

I wanna dig a little at that bit from Second Thessalonians, the bit that says, “anyone who is unwilling to work should not eat.” It’s tempting to think that means exactly what it sounds like: you don’t work, you don’t eat. It was true two thousand years ago; it must be true now. Maybe, but context matters. If I say “my batteries are dead,” you know what I mean, right? But do you? What does “my batteries are dead” mean if I’m up in the pulpit with my microphone, or standing in a field holding a power tool, or if I don’t want to fix the remote and get off the couch, or if I just woke up from a nap and still feel tired? Maybe it’s burnout, maybe it’s a shopping list, maybe it’s car trouble. See what I mean? Context matters.

So, this is the second letter to the church in Thessalonica, and back then, mostly you only got these kinds of letters if your church was doin’ something wrong. You really don’t want a book of the Bible named after your church. Something’s up in Thessalonica that isn’t up elsewhere. Somehow, for some reason, a rumor spread among the Thessalonians that the much-anticipated return of Jesus had already happened, and that was great! But since Jesus’s already come back (so they thought) that means the world’s saved and Jesus’s out there fixing what’s broken. And since Jesus was so capable, he didn’t need little ol’ humans gettin’ in his way. So, because Jesus had everything under control, some Thessalonians stayed with the church but quit doing the church’s work. And remember, according to the Book of Acts, Christians held all things in common. They pooled their resources, including their food. The whole Christian community shared the responsibilities and the benefits of being part of the Body of Christ. That’s who this letter’s addressed to, those who’d stopped doing the work of Christianity but kept on eating like they’d been busy. They would’ve known this was directed directly at them; it had their name on it. Your church needs to fix your church’s problem. And the best way to fix that problem is to return to the tradition of working in Christian service.

But Christianity grew, and as it did local practice faced a standardizing cohesiveness. Early church writers had to figure out how to make contextual texts more widely relevant while also emphasizing the importance of compassion. So, we see folks like the impeccably named Ambrosiaster argue in the 300s that it’d be better to understand the passage in reverse: “if someone refuses to eat then he does not have to work because no one can live without food.” That changes the meaning, but that’s the point; don’t use this letter to get out of helping. In support of Ambrosiaster, in the 400s Augustine of Hippo encouraged readers to be careful “lest they interpret [this phrase] with a view against Paul’s charity.” Also in the 400s, John Chrysostom said (and this one’s kinda long), “many are often overly intrusive in their investigation of the needy. They examine their lineage, life, habits, vocation, and the vigor of their body. They make complaints and demand immense public scrutiny for their health. … During the frost and the cold, for someone to become such a savage and inhuman judge and not impart any forgiveness to the unemployed, does this not involve extreme cruelty? … We criticize them for their laziness. However, we too often do things which are more grievous than any laziness. … This is indeed a thing especially proper for a Christian, not to seek his own welfare, but the welfare of others. As, then, the bee travels across the meadows that she may prepare a banquet for another, so also you do likewise. And if you have accumulated wealth, spend it on others.”

It’s wild to me that whether or not hungry people should have access to food is a debate, but here we are. And it’s wild we have to debate the importance of context in reading scripture. Some Bible readers understand the importance of things like context or genre for other things but refuse to grant that importance to scripture. But come on, really, how much damage could generalizing a piece of scripture outside of its context really do? How much, indeed. A couple of examples ought to make exactly how much clear. “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Sound familiar? With the exception of a slight difference in translation, that’s Thessalonians pulled out of context. And that particular wording (in Russian, mind you) was an explicit tenet of Leninism. Initially it was aimed at the fat cats who lived off the work of the poor, but that flipped around soon enough, and in time, the same verse was deployed with particularly harsh consequences in the middle of a famine and then got codified in the Soviet Union’s constitution under Stalin. That’s the kind of savage and inhuman cruelty we’re talking about. Lest you get the impression that the Soviets were the only ones generalizing that concept to detestable effect, there’s a similar line that probably rings a few more bells. In a mishmash of this verse from Second Thessalonians and a perversion of John 8, the Nazis used the phrase “Work will set you free,” and that phrase framed the entrances to Auschwitz, Dachau, and several other concentration camps -- savage and inhuman cruelty justified by an out of context jumble of Christ’s own words.

Apropos of nothing, did y’all know that the rate of fraud for SNAP benefits is a whopping one-third of one percent? That’s 99.7% of folks doing it right. In a room with a hundred SNAP recipients, less than one person would be the problem. Also apropos of nothing, immigrants are roughly half as likely to be on any kind of welfare. For what it’s worth, if the specter of the dreaded Welfare Queen’s hovering over this conversation, I encourage y’all to look up where that story came from. Suffice it to say that the entire myth of widespread abuses of aid structures was based on a single person’s wrongdoing. One. Anyway, my apologies for the totally, 100%, completely unrelated tangent there.

I know this is going to sound crazy, but when it comes to feeding people, I kinda think we should feed people, no questions asked. That’s what we do on Monday nights. That’s what we do after church on Sundays. That’s what we do when people come looking for help with groceries. I know there’s a slim chance someone might get to eat that doesn’t really need it, but I don’t care. I don’t. If you’re hungry, you oughtta be able to count on Christians to feed you. It’s not about what you’ve earned. It’s about me showing you that I care if you survive to tomorrow. Y’all, I’m weary. Maybe you are, too? I’m weary of trying to convince people that compassion is a Christian virtue. But take heart. When we feed the hungry, when we clothe the poor, when we care for the sick, visit the imprisoned, welcome the foreigner, when we do these things, we do them to the entirety of the Body of Christ, serving him through each other.

All that to say, I’m beginning to understand why the Thessalonians needed this corrective: they’d gotten so complacent that some of them stopped feeding those who needed it; why should Christians eat while others starved? Every Christian church, St. Thomas’ included, needs to remember this. We don’t judge the poor. We work for them. If we’re not working for them, we aren’t working for Christ. And if we’re not working for Christ, what right do we have to call ourselves Christian? We don’t get to judge those in need. And it’s not their work that sets them free. It’s truth. Truth will set them free, and that truth means that we will have compassion, that we will work for them, that we will feed them, love them, and support them. We don’t help the poor simply because they get us closer to Christ. And we really shouldn’t help simply because our scriptures tell us to. We should help because the person standing in front of us is a human being, and the loss of any soul we could’ve given aid to is a loss of a human life. I don’t care what they’ve earned. “Earned,” as you’ve heard me say before, “earned” isn’t really on Jesus’ mind. Need is. Humanity is. Compassion is. And that’s not just Christian. That’s basic human decency.