Sermons
July 20, 2025 (Proper 11)
“Let them eat cake.”
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
In 1607, a group from England came to North America and established a colony in what is now the state of Virginia. They named it after their king: Jamestown. When they got there, the area was a wilderness, and if they were going to be able to live there, a lot of work needed to be done.
It turns out that a great many of those folks who settled Jamestown really didn’t intend to settle there. They were, in a lot of cases, the second sons of noblemen—in those days only the eldest son would inherit a nobleman’s estate. And these young men were used to having servants to do any manual labor they needed done.
They had no idea whatsoever how to clear land, how to grow crops, how to build houses to live in; and they didn’t especially want to learn. They were used to someone else doing the work while they did something else, maybe shooting or riding horses, or whatever noblemen did in those days. And their plan was to find gold and silver in North America, gather it up, and return to England wealthy.
So a lot of the work that needed to be done in order to live in this new place with new vegetation, not to mention Indigenous people already living there who weren’t particularly thrilled to see a bunch of wealthy Englishmen show up in their space, just didn’t get done.[1] The situation got so dire that the leader of the group, Captain John Smith, had to issue an order that quoted part of today’s reading. In the English of the day—King James Bible English, since that version of the Bible was published four years after Smith and his company arrived in Virginia—it said, “If any would not work, neither should he eat.” In the New World, the old social distinctions were irrelevant. Everybody was going to have to work hard, just to survive.
When Mike and I lived in Oregon, we used to go once or twice a year and stay at a resort sort of place called the Edgefield, east of Portland in the Columbia River Gorge.[2] It had been built in 1911 as the Multnomah County Poor Farm.
At one point the farm had hundreds of acres, and they grew all kinds of crops, as well as raising livestock for meat and milk. They produced enough to feed everyone who lived there, as well as everybody at the county’s other institutions, like the jail.
In the literature you get about the place’s history if you go visit there, you get the impression that it was a wonderful, happy place, where all the people smiled as they worked the land, where everyone was taken care of with the abundance they grew. But the records show a little bit different story.
This place operated on the same philosophy as Captain John Smith ordered at Jamestown: “If any would not work, neither should he eat.” So those who worked the land were fed very well—they had meat at their meals, biscuits and gravy for breakfast, all the good stuff. Those who worked les hard might get meat only once a day, and those who because of age or disability weren’t able to work at all pretty much ate gruel.
“If any would not work, neither should he eat.”
This verse from 2 Thessalonians has been used to justify treatment like the disabled or elderly people at the Multnomah County Poor Farm received—being given very little to eat because they were not able to work. It has been used to excuse lack of concern for the poor among us: if they want to have the things the rest of us have, then they should get to work, and it’s too bad if some of them are not able to work for one reason or another.
But like a lot of things, language changes over time, and so we’ve lost the real meaning of this verse. It gets paraphrased as, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” which is not what it says.
In the time of the King James Bible, which I’ve been quoting from up to this point, and which was published only a few years after Jamestown was established, the word “would” didn’t mean the same thing as it does now. So the New Revised Standard Bible, what we have in our pews today, published in 1989, the verse says what the King James Bible meant 400 years ago: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.
Remember the wealthy nobles’ sons in Jamestown? They could have worked, but they were unwilling. Some of the people at the poor farm were undoubtedly quite willing to work, and they would have, if they had been able.
Our Scripture reading for today is addressed not to the general population, not to people who were in need of some help meeting their basic needs. It’s addressed to the Christian community, most particularly the church at Thessalonica. It’s not meant to provide an answer to what our responsibility should be to the poor and those who aren’t able to provide for themselves. There are plenty of other places in the Bible where it’s made quite clear that God expects God’s people to look after those who cannot take care of themselves.
It seems that some of the Thessalonian Christians had decided they didn’t need to work, even though they could. It might have been because they were expecting the Parousia—that’s the Greek word for the Second Coming of Christ—to happen right away, something that had caused quite a little bit of consternation which Paul had had to address in 1 Thessalonians, as we heard a few weeks ago.
Thinking Jesus was going to come soon and put an end to the mundane realities of everyday life, like working for a living, it’s possible they just…quit. They expected that “someone else” would take care of them and provide for their basic needs, things they could have provided for themselves if they were working.
Worse yet, the time they should have been spending at work was being devoted to other activities.
At the beginning of the passage, Paul (or whoever it was who wrote this letter; there’s some disagreement about whether or not it was actually Paul) says he’s heard some people are living in idleness. Now, that word that’s translated “idleness” there means something more like “disorder”—they’re undisciplined, not good citizens, and their lack of orderly management of their lives is destructive to the community. Further down he says, in the words of one of the other modern translations: “They are not busy; they are busybodies”—which sort of helps re-create the play on words that we lose in translation from the original Greek. They’re not taking care of what they need to take care of; instead, they’re spending their time gossiping and poking their noses into other people’s affairs.
In other words, Paul (or whoever) isn’t proclaiming some kind of hard-and-fast rule that you only get fed if you work; and if you’re not able to work for whatever reason, you just get gruel for every meal—or you get nothing at all. He’s addressing people who, instead of working and minding their own business, are pot-stirrers, spending their time minding other people’s business.
In my sister’s first-grade classroom, there was an interesting decoration on the wall behind the teacher’s desk. It was a long, brown tail, like a cow’s tail, made out of paper. On it were the words “Tattle Tail.” (I doubt very much that this teaching method would be allowed today, but keep in mind this was in the mid-1970s.) This paper tail didn’t come down off the wall very often; just hanging there, it served as a constant reminder that tattling—the first-grade equivalent of gossip—was not acceptable.
There’s always one or two kids in a class who seem to derive pleasure from watching for their classmates to do something wrong, then running to the teacher to make sure they got into trouble for it. So every now and then, someone in the class would have to wear that tattle tail for awhile, to remind them—as my mom used to have to remind me from time to time—that they had a full-time job minding their own business.
This sort of thing is what Paul (or whoever) is talking about in today’s text. He felt the need to wade in and address people who were causing trouble in the community because they had too much time on their hands and were spending it gossiping, complaining, badmouthing other people, generally stirring the pot and creating disorder and dissension. They weren’t busy with the work of the kingdom, or the necessary things everyone who was able needed to be doing to ensure everyone in the community was cared for and to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Instead, they were busybodies, and like busybodies in every time and place, they were doing damage.
Carrie and I once got into a huge amount of trouble because of a busybody. Our parents had gone out of town overnight, and the two of us were left home alone. We were both teenagers—I was in college—and since it was only for one night, they figured we’d be okay.
But when our folks came home, someone immediately called them to say they’d seen a strange car parked in front of our house all night.
We got yelled at something terrible. They said we’d betrayed their trust, and there was no way we would ever regain it. I can’t remember if they grounded us, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
The problem with all this is that we had not had any overnight guests—as a matter of fact, we didn’t even know about the strange car parked in front of our house. We tried to tell our parents that, but they were too mad to listen to us.
Eventually, and I don’t remember exactly how it came about, they learned that one of our neighbors had had company, and that company had for some reason parked on the street in front of our house. And yes, our parents did apologize for yelling at us. But the point is, had some neighborhood busybody not jumped to the wrong conclusion about the car and called them, we wouldn’t have gotten into this trouble that we didn’t deserve.
In Coffeyville when I was growing up, there were a number of elementary schools in town. Everybody went to the one in whose district we lived, and then when we hit seventh grade we came together for junior high and high school.
There was a girl I hadn’t known until we all got to seventh grade who was pretty much the designated “outcast” in our grade. People made fun of her. She didn’t have the social skills she should have had, so she said and did things that weren’t always appropriate. Her clothes weren’t always clean. And she was still being shunned because of something embarrassing she had unintentionally done clear back in kindergarten or first grade.
I have to confess that I didn’t really do the right thing myself; I didn’t make friends with her so she would have at least someone on her side. I didn’t join in when anybody taunted her, but I didn’t exactly stand up for her, either.
I learned later that she was the way she was, largely because of abuse at home. I also learned she was a very talented artist. But nobody bothered to find that out—they just made her the butt of all their unkind taunts and jokes.
Paul (or whoever), in this text is not dealing with the question of what our responsibility ought to be to the poor in our midst. He is also not teaching an early form of what has come to be known as the “Protestant work ethic”—in which our hard work and self-sufficiency are seen as evidence that God favors us over those who can’t work hard and must depend on others. Instead, he’s taking a strong stand against destructive talk and behavior that results from a refusal to work when we can and should, instead having idle hands which become, as the old saying goes, “the devil’s workshop.”
He’s saying that such behaviors as gossip, pot-stirring, minding everybody else’s business, complaining, and badmouthing others have no place in a Christian community. They didn’t then, and they don’t now. We would do well to occupy ourselves with constructive activities, whether that means working at a job, doing volunteer work, or whatever might build up our homes and our communities.
If we can’t do that, it’s one thing, and the whole witness of Scripture tells us God expects God’s people to help folks who are in need for whatever reason, who are temporarily or permanently walking a difficult path. But if we can work, but are unwilling, then our assignment is to work as we’re able, to earn our own living, to help those who can’t help themselves, and not to grow weary of doing what’s right.
[1] In addition to these wealthy noblemen, some of the Jamestown settlers were from the urban poor—people who had perhaps once lived on and worked some land, but had lost it and been driven to cities, where they were not able to do much more than beg. They, too, did not know how to do the work that was needed to create a settlement in the New World.
[2] https://www.mcmenamins.com/edgefield