1 Timothy 1:12-17; Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Luke 15:1-10
Timothy enjoyed a special relationship with the apostle Paul. Of all of Paul’s correspondence, the Timothy letters are the only personal ones. I am sure that Paul wrote more letters than we have. He didn’t keep carbon copies or PDF files of his letters. And most of the people who received letters from him didn’t file them away. A couple of reads and into the trash basket. Perhaps Timothy valued Paul’s words so much that he hung onto everything he ever received from the apostle. We are fortunate to have these letters. While they were written to Timothy, the letters contain much that any disciple of Christ could benefit from.
Paul and Timothy were close, like father and son, not unlike the spiritual relationships that Paul had with Philemon and Onesimus whom we talked about last week. While Paul had collegial relationships with Barnabas, Epaphras, Silas, Priscilla, Aquila, and others, there is a sense that Paul had raised Timothy into the ministry.
The call to gospel ministry often has been extended through the wisdom and counsel of a pastor who perceived gifts for ministry and the working of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. Perhaps some of my retired colleagues have had the experience of being an agent of God to direct a person towards ministry. Several people were directly and indirectly key in my own call to ministry.
Paul sensed the deep work of the Spirit in Timothy and prodded him to do more than attend church services. Today many young people who were raised in the church’s teaching head off after college into careers full of a sense that faith is expressed through social action and intellectual curiosity. They have learned to think for themselves and to tease out their beliefs in personal reflection.
That’s one of the reasons there are increasing numbers of “nones” – the people who are spiritual but not religious, who have a strong belief in God but aren’t interested in the institutional church. As a popular motto floating around the internet says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” They believe deeply in acceptance and inclusion of all people in the social, economic, and political spheres of life, regardless of ages, genders, races, sexual orientations, and abilities. They are caught in a tension of being both passionate about changing their world and paralyzed with anger and fear about the world they are inheriting from their parents and grandparents.
I don’t know if Timothy’s thinking two millennia ago resonates with any of today’s hopes and angst. What I do know is that Paul took him under his spiritual wing and coached and counseled him about faith and life. Nearly thirty years ago theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willamon wrote their landmark work, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Hauerwas and Willamon unapologetically called for the church to be “a colony of heaven” comprised of Christians who are resident aliens in a strange land. With the disenfranchisement of Protestant Christianity in particular, the church has a rare opportunity for a new, truer Christian faithfulness.
About the same time Alban Institute director Loren Meade said that Christendom was no longer a viable model for the church. Christendom – where church and world were the same thing – had been the church model ever since Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official state religion over 1,500 years ago. The empire devolved into feudal fiefdoms and tribal societies, which in turn gave way to nation states, to superpowers, and to political and economic blocs of nations. Travel and mass communication, now nearly instantaneous, have brought the reality home to every population that religions are no longer regional but global. That means that regions are no longer all one kind of religion. The world has returned to the dynamics of the apostolic age where Christianity is one among many completing religions and faith expressions.
While Waverly may be something of a cultural backwater, the increasingly urbanized world is full of people who rub shoulders and who are searching for living relationships with a deity. They may recognize that god through the eyes and faith of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Mormonism, Wicca, or New Age, not to mention the huge variety of Christian expressions ranging from ancient Orthodoxy, to Catholicism, to Protestantism which runs from high-church Anglican to traditional mainline to evangelical to charismatic and pentecostal. The reality of our 2016 world is that it is much more similar to Timothy’s world than it is different.
Paul self-discloses intimate revelations and confessions about his faith. We wonder how Timothy received them and how he responded in his own faith and his day to day living.
There are Pauls and Timothys in today’s church world. Can the Pauls of our time be as open as the first Paul was? Can those people who are fathers and mothers in faith to younger believers share intimately with the Timothys of today, who may be female, non-Caucasian, and for whom English may not be their first language? Can today’s Pauls be vulnerable enough to share their confessions of faith, their personal relationships with God, their questions and doubts, as well as affirmations and celebrations? Leaders need to communicate the gospel to today’s future church through honest, raw sharing. Warmed-over platitudes and stale theological language will never bridge the generations. Today’s Timothys want to know if there is substance behind the ancient language of the church.
Friends, we are the Pauls of this day. Our Timothys may be fifty- and sixty-somethings rather than twenty-somethings. That doesn’t matter. Each of us is being invited to reexamine our language of Christian faith. We aren’t being asked to get rid of it. Rather we are being asked to make it alive and to frame it for twenty-first-century ears. If you think that is hard for you, imagine how hard it is for those of us trained to use traditional theological language.
For example, after a discussion of the parables of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast in Matthew, a young man asked his pastor to explain the kingdom/realm of God in “plain language” and not in “church words.” Pausing and catching her breath, the pastor began describing the organic unfolding of creation and all that is in it, including human beings, as a part of the Divine, as a revelation of the Divine, as the continuing work of the Divine. “Oh,” he replied, “The Oneness of all things. The way we are all connected energetically. I get it.” We all know that the subject is really a lot more complicated than that, but she had opened a door and gained his attention. Pushing the door open further will be the work of many more discussions and a lot of faithful imagining.
Colleague Thom Shuman writes that he heard the account of how a pastor in Indonesia (where there are no sheep) read Jesus’ parable as “Which of you, having a hundred ducks, if one is lost, does not leave the 99 in the rice fields and go searching for the one which is lost.” The pastor put the ancient parable into words that the people would relate to, just as Jesus did.(1)
Twenty-first-century Timothys won’t take the logic that was handed to us when we were their age. I’m sure you remember it: “Because I said so, that’s why.” Today’s Timothys don’t want to be treated like toddlers. They long for personal experiences of the mystery of life and the animating force that they hope lies behind the workings of the creation. They want us to set aside our stony facades of impassiveness and to share with them the joys and the agonies of our faith journeys. They want to hear our doubts as well as our affirmations.
If you and I can offer them this openness, if you and I can welcome them into our faith experiences, today’s Timothys may decide that “church” is the right institution for their world and not a relic from Christianity’s bygone glory days. These Timothys search for wholeness of body, mind, and soul and wholeness of creation which they equate with real salvation. They understand sin as disconnection from wholeness, from the Oneness of the universe, for it means disconnection from their very selves. They have been raised to understand the web of life as it is seen in family systems, ecological systems, and quantum physics. Sin is tearing the web and denying its existence. While they reverence the connectivity of the universe in all its forms, they get caught up in and are wounded by its brokenness just as easily as older generations. They seek ways to be part of the healing process.
You and I are twenty-first-century Pauls. The first Paul challenges us to mentor our Timothys rather than complain about them. Our charge is to listen carefully to them so that together we can participate in experiencing God in Christ Jesus. Our Timothys invite us onto unknown paths of faithful, worshipful living, allowing the Spirit to help us change our “churchy” language into idioms that are recognizable today.
We live in a connected world. Every Facebook post, every web-blog, every social media post, has a “Share” button. Pre-internet Paul would nevertheless have known what to do with a “Share” button. Use it. That’s what he did, long before it became fashionable. He shared Jesus Christ gladly, honestly, lovingly with everyone he met. And he especially did it with Timothy. That’s our calling as well. As today’s Pauls we are called to hit the “Share” button on our faith.
General Sources:
Jane Anne Ferguson, “1 Timothy 1:12-17 - Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, vol. 4, 62-66.
Robert P. Jones, The Death of White Christian America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016).
Loren B. Meade, The Once and Future Church (Washington DC: The Alban Institute, 1991).
Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willamon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition (Nashville: Abindgon Press, 2014)
(1) Thom Shuman, “Re: [Midrash] Opening Comments for Sunday September 11 2016 which is the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 19. Year C,” Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 12:00 PM.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011
www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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