“He’s a nice guy, but a little boring.” Those were the words spoken about me to a friend of mine twenty years ago. My friend was a housemate whom I had only known for less than a week after his relocation to the United States from another country, but we had become fast friends. And we obviously shared a lot with each other, which is how I found out that I had been deemed boring.
It’s a testament to the human struggle to forget hurtful words that decades later, those words still haunt me, just as they were hurtful to me when I first heard them. They haunt me because I see that words like that retain a certain relentless power. If I still find hurt in them, then they somehow have found a home within my soul. And they have found a home within my own soul because I have inadvertently fallen prey to the spirit of our age, where individualism reigns, novelty is king, and standing out is how you survive. To be boring means to fly under the radar and resist the temptation to be radically individualistic.
By this standard, we might categorize the first-century church in Thessalonica, Greece, as boring. Consider the primary characteristics of that church as expressed by the apostle Paul in a letter to them. They have been faithful in their work and labored in love with a steadfastness of hope. They have imitated the self-emptying behavior of Christ. They have persevered despite trials. They have turned from idols to serve the true and living God. They have waited patiently for Christ’s second coming. They are bor- ing.
Now, hold on a minute, you might say. St. Paul is writing this letter because he has heard about the exemplary behavior of the Thessalonians. Indeed, others have learned of their behavior, too. Something about the Thessalonians must have stood out. How can the Thessalonians be boring if they have made such an impression on others?
True, but can we honestly say that a group of people behaving like the Thessalonians today would gain such recognition? To say the Thessalonians would be seen as boring judges them by modern standards. Faithful work, labors of love, and steadfast hope rarely make the news in our day. Imitation of others, especially good people, is hardly spectacular and terribly uncreative. You’re supposed to innovate not imitate. Turning from idols makes it very difficult to survive in the modern world. And waiting patiently on the second coming of Christ when centuries of people have promised it to no avail is nothing short of foolish in the eyes of many.
Practical theologian Andrew Root has suggested that the governing spirit of our own age is that of exceptionality, at least in much of modern Western culture.[1] It’s all about the individual, and the individual needs to be exceptional. Look at our schools, where getting a 4.0 grade point average isn’t enough and taking only a few AP classes is just boring and unexceptional. Look at the workforce, where there’s an incessant expectation of unparalleled creativity rather than consistent, faithful work. Look even at our churches, where it seems that to survive, you must stand out, not necessarily in good works and example, but in novelty. You must be doing things that no other churches are doing. Andrew Root would claim that this drive for radical originality in churches is just the backflow from a secular culture that is all about the creative, uniquely innovative, exceptional self.
And like many, I, too, am a product of such a culture, which is why it stung to be labeled as boring. It means that I long for self-recognition or affirmation. I long to stand out, because to be successful, you need to be unique. You need to have not just a good idea, but the best idea. You need to be gifted at not just one thing but many things. And the clencher to inhabiting a world built around “I” is that it knows nothing about “we.” In the world of “me,” the greatest fulfillment is usually found in the self, rather than in community.
So, yes, by contemporary standards, the early church in Thessalonica is boring. It’s not exciting or even exceptional to be merely faithful in your work. To labor in love hardly earns you recognition unless your labor is tied up with the latest fad. And to be steadfastly hopeful that God can bring something good out of bad smells of antiquated ignorance, because God becomes the actor and we become, well, boring. The Thessalonians are boring precisely because they are unlike the other churches to which Paul writes. Who wants to quote from Thessalonians when you can secretly relish the juicy immorality of the Corinthians or Romans?
The behavior of the Thessalonians might seem boring by modern standards, but that says more about our own skewed judgment than about them. It speaks to the relentless anxiety of our age, which explains why people act out or need to assert their individuality.
We’re all so very anxious, and if you don’t feel particularly anxious right now, I would bet that you know the anxiety of which I’m speaking. We’re anxious that what we do and who we are is not enough. We’re anxious that if we’re not recognized as exceptional, we’re losers. We’re anxious that if someone calls us boring, then others will also think we are. We’re anxious that if we trust God too much, we’ll be disappointed. We’re anxious that if we’re hopeful that God can bring good out of the worst situations then when we keep experiencing bad things, we’ll lose our faith in God. Ultimately, we’re anxious because we’re very afraid, and we’re afraid that in God’s eyes we’re not exceptional. We’re afraid that if we’re not exceptional, then we’re not really loved by God.
But any fear of being too much like those boring Thessalonians is more than just a fear of seeming unexceptional. It’s also a fear of giving up the things that have begun to rule our lives like the lives of the Thessalonians were ruled before they turned from idols. To be boring by modern standards is to turn from the idols of our own day, which feed our desire to be exceptional and falsely promise us security and worth. To be boring by modern standards is to sacrifice our self-consumed identity to our true identity found in Christ, where no one stands out because we’re all chosen and loved by God. And by that account, we are truly exceptional.[2]
The early church described by Paul, a church that was within spitting distance of Jesus’s death and resurrection, was a church so very different from the modern church. Our current anxieties of decline and relevance are nothing compared to the anxieties of imminent death for being a Christian and of sustaining a radically new movement with no roadmap. Maybe we struggle with faith, hope, and love because we receive so many messages that we aren’t worthy of love or that we’re not loved. And that makes it just too hard to trust in a God who supposedly loves us unconditionally and beyond our ability to imagine.
And this is why those early Thessalonians were indeed exceptional. By the standards of God’s kingdom, they were radically innovative because they upended a world centered on the self, much like ours is. They weren’t exceptional in our modern kind of way. Paradoxically, they were exceptional precisely because they are boring by modern standards. We don’t remember the Thessalonians for employing the latest fads in evangelism. We don’t even know anything about individuals in that particular community. We hear nothing of magnetic personalities or charismatic leaders. We only hear from St. Paul’s words that this collection of motley individuals found their deepest identity by being grafted into the living Body of Christ. By hiding themselves in Christ and sacrificing their individual identities for a larger corporate identity, their ordinariness was exceptional, and it changed the world.
This faithful, constant, hopeful, and loving ordinariness was so exceptional that it resounded beyond their own community. It didn’t resound because the Thessalonians were loud talkers or theatrical in their behavior; it resounded because the only thing that seemed to matter to the Thessalonians was trusting the Gospel. They trusted the power of the Gospel enough to know that once the bell of the Gospel was rung, all they needed to do was let its vibrations resound in their own lives and out to the ends of the earth.
And here’s the good news. The Gospel doesn’t need our exceptionality or our personality to make it work. Its voice alone is exceptional. The living Gospel of Christ is the most powerful thing alive if we can dare to risk being called boring, so boring that our work and our play and our speech become sympathetic vibrations of that beautiful Gospel that is nothing short of exceptional.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
October 22, 2023
[1] Andrew Root, The Church after Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022).
[2] See Andrew Root, p. 176.