You only get one chance to make a first impression. First impressions form lasting images. The first words and first actions we present to another person resound and resonate throughout the duration of that relationship.
It is not that we are intentionally standoffish and skittish when presented with a new face. It is more about the unconscious gurgling up of the instinctual “fight-flight-freeze-fawn” response all of us possess. Whether we experience a “first impression” as engaging or annoying, easy-going or energetic, kind-hearted or kind of weird, we default to a “fight-flight-freeze-fawn” mode. We decide whether this encounter is something we choose to face, outface, redface, or, whether we suddenly feel the call of a cup of coffee from across the room.
Things like books as well as people make “first impressions” too. The “first impression” made by the New Testament is, frankly, not all that great. Understandably the gospels come first, and the first gospel we read is Matthew. The first seventeen verses of his opening chapter, his “first impression,” is an endless list of everlasting “begats.” Matthew had good theological reasons for opening with a genealogy, but for most of us it is a bit like being forced to watch a video of someone else’s family reunion, or walking into a room where everyone is hugging and kissing and you know no-one.
But if the New Testament were arranged chronologically, the first “book,” the first written communication, would be Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, dated around 45 CE. Can you imagine what a different New Testament it would be if the books were in their chronological order of being written, rather than the biographical account of Jesus’ life?
First Thessalonians is the “first impression” of the written testimony of the apostle Paul, whose writings predate those of the gospels. Paul’s first message is written to a community he had helped nudge and nurture into existence. First Thessalonians is the first and oldest voice of Christian faith put into writing.
And what a great “first impression” it is. For one thing, it is far more “pastoral” than it is “preachy.” It is preoccupied less with theological issues and more about communal concerns. Paul is writing to a new family he helped birth, a community of people who have chosen to believe in and follow the person of Jesus the Christ. It was a community who welcomed and embraced the message of the messiah that Paul and Silvanus and Timothy proclaimed to them. To this community he founded and favored Paul writes a “love letter,” a missive offering all the encouragement and support he can muster.
The first “words,” the first impression, that Paul makes in the first messages we have from him are not even about “words” but about the momentum of faith in action. Paul’s witness to the people of Thessalonica, both Jews and Gentiles, was not about words. His testimony was that “our message of the gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction” (v.5).
Just as first impressions are less about what people say than what we “feel” about what they are saying, Paul made his first apostolic message less about words and more about actions. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard began one of his essays in a similar fashion: “These are Christian reflections. Therefore we will not talk about love, but about the works of love.” Paul’s “first impression” is a critique of the rectitude of political correctitude. Or as 1 John 3:18 puts it, “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and actions.” We spend so much time and energy loving with our language, telling what we’re thinking and believing about love, that we have little time and energy left to love “in truth and actions.”
Paul’s “first impression” is a talk walk, a witness that becomes a withness, a position that became a posture, an attitude that became an action. These actions took three forms: 1) The focused power of faith; 2) the moving presence of the Holy Spirit; 3) the passion of conviction, living and working out of a foundation of a faith that is unshakeable even when shaken. These three “P’s” of Power, Presence, and Passion were the “first impressions” of a follower of Jesus as expressed in the first letter, the first written reminder, which the first generation of Jesus’ first followers heard.
Paul’s first “words” were about three “P’s,” three distinct gifts that a faith in Christ could instill in believers.
1) The “power” of Christ’s living presence.
2) The personal and communal “presence” of the Holy Spirit.
3) The passion of “conviction.”
It is through divine “power,” as expressed in the “presence” of the Holy Spirit, and the “passion” of faith, that “the word of the Lord has sounded forth” (vs.8) from this first small community in Thessalonica throughout two millennia. In 45 CE this population of Jesus followers was a tiny drop in a sea of religious choices. Thessalonica was a large port of entry, a crossroads for commerce, a favored independent city politically coddled by Rome. In the first century, the variety of gods to worship and cults to join were larger than a “Google” search for good shoe buys in the twenty-first century. The chance of a small group of Gentiles and a few Jews who professed faith in a Roman-executed convict making any kind of a local impact seemed absolutely nil.
And yet.
Paul’s first written messages to this small community in Thessalonica were about what only actions, not words could convey. They were about a presence of such mesmeric power and passion that it could not be buried in a tomb, a presence that could not be denied by those in power.
1) Power.
The gospel’s first impression was “power.” The “word” of truth came to the Thessalonians through “power,” a power outside of themselves.
Power exists in just four forms, but all of them overlap:
territorial, economic, religious and ideological. These are the four constants of history, and not even the constant of change changes these fundamentals. But in all these fundamental forms of “power,” to exercise the power of force is ultimately a farce, while to exercise the power of love is ultimately fierce. Love is the divine life force.
Power is a fierce life force. The incarnation of divine love in the person of Jesus gave the story of God’s love a powerful “life force.” Jesus really sat and ate and spoke with people about what they were facing in their lives. Jesus’ “first impression” was not of offering a distant God, but of offering a helping hand and listening ear. Over and over again the “power” that Jesus offered to those he encountered, his “first impression,” was an action, an outreach, a climax chapter of hope and healing in a long, long story of struggle. Jesus’ “power” was the power love, the power of the divine life force transforming and transcending.
In Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the power act of faith that Charlie must perform is to push a button in a crazy glass elevator that is labeled as “up and out.” Charlie finally summons up the nerve to “hit the button,” and it does indeed send him “up and out” — “up” into a new world of possibilities and forever “out” of the life he had been living. The power that Paul declared the Thessalonian Christians now had was that same kind of story-changing power.
2. Presence.
Paul desired his Thessalonian brothers and sisters to embrace their new-found status as people who were living in the presence of “the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit continues Christ’s mission in the world. Or as one of the greatest writers in Christian history on missiology, Lesslie Newbigin, puts it: “It is not that the church has a mission, and the Spirit helps us in fulfilling it. It is rather that the Spirit is the active missionary, and the church (when it is faithful) is the place where the Spirit is enabled to complete the Spirit’s work.” (Mission in Christ’s Way [1987], 30.)
Living a missional life in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit is not a predictable event. It’s a wonder insurance adjusters even insure Christians. For if we are being faithful to the power and presence of the Spirit we should all be way too unpredictable to insure. The Holy Spirit does not adhere to actuarial tables.
Paul’s first pastoral writing to a community he loves praises the ongoing palpable presence of the Holy Spirit in their midst. That is not a communication about calm or comfort, but an invocation of interruptions and an invitation to irruptions. That divine call that resonates in our souls, urging us to DO what we know we must do, that is the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Sometimes living in the Spirit will mean the gravity of suffering. Taking a risk, trusting someone, giving more than you really can. Sometimes living in the Spirit will mean the levity of surfing. You get the gift of unexpected joy, ambushing love and amazing grace. You never know. You will be “wind-blown” your whole life. You may even be “blown” in directions you never wished to go.
And then, you may not. You never will be able to predict the trajectory of trust. Whether you’ve been living a life of faith for twenty minutes or twenty years, trusting in the Holy Spirit is the most adventuresome, ever-changing way of life you can live.
3) Passion.
“With full conviction” means “passion.” Passion was Paul’s third “first impression.” Christians need to live passionate lives that care deeply about life and the world.
The Thessalonian Christians were bombarded with the religious cultures of both emperor worship and a bucket-load of cultic gods and goddesses. Monotheism to worship just one God and to trust and obey one God was really hard and really weird for the first century. Yet these Thessalonian Christians, whose spiritual founder had moved on and was far away, managed to stay faithful.
The “conviction” of faith that Paul applauded among the Thessalonians was a praise of their refusal to be “namby-pamby” followers of Jesus. Those who had accepted Christ in Thessolonica offered up no mealy-mouthed faith, but were rousing enthusiasts for Jesus. It’s not that they had no doubts or despair. But they had “full conviction” and full confidence in the power of their faith. They had what such passion gives —- hope for the future and the dare to enact dreams about that future.
You never know when first impressions’ 3 P’s power, presence and passion — might need to kick in.
Trisha Sommers got bad news as a 45 year old cancer patient. Her liver cancer was progressive and terminal. Worse news, she was a single parent with an eight year old son, Wesley. Then one day she met a nurse, a nurse whom Trisha immediately identified as feeling like a “warm blanket.” She felt nurtured and comforted just by the presence of this nurse. As she was preparing to check out, Trisha Sommers suddenly asked her nurse, also a Trisha (Trisha Siemans): “Can you take my son. Will you raise him if I die?”
It was the question of a mom who had no other family and only knew she felt a bond with this person who had been nursing her.
Trisha Sieman, the nurse, not only agreed to take care of Wesley. They went beyond the request for care of a child. She and her husband and their four children welcomed both Wesley and his mom Trisha into their home. The whole family took care of both mom and son during mom’s final months.
An eight-year old who would have been put into foster care; a mother who would have been put into some kind of nursing home facility for her final months: instead of being apart, both were together, in a loving home, the final months of the mother’s life.
This is the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is the true “first impressions” of faith: the “power” that tells the story of love and sacrifice, the crazy unpredictability of the Holy Spirit that takes us in surprising directions, and the passion of hope and love that makes decisions to dream God’s dream for the world, no matter how ridiculous it might appear to everyone else.