Scripture: 2 Timothy 3: 14- 4: 5
I was between my second and third year of seminary, completing my term of Clinical Pastoral Education or CPE. We were on our wrap up retreat, a weekend at a Catholic retreat center in Youngstown Ohio. The place had a trail through the woods where they had statues and depictions of the stations of the cross along the way. Our assignment for one morning was to walk that trail, Bible in hand, reading through an entire book of the Bible. I picked 1 Timothy but by the end of the walk had ended up reading 2 Timothy as well. It was a simple thing really, a walk in the woods with pauses to read Scripture, it’s something I ought to do more often. I don’t think I had ever read these particular letters with such careful attention before and as I did, I often found the line blurred between the young minister to whom Paul was writing his letters and the young minister I was preparing to be. Timothy was raised in the church, one of the first generation of children born into the faith, who never knew anything else, who heard of Jesus from the cradle. Paul has high regard and high concern for Timothy as a sort of spiritual son. Paul writes at times as though he has hopes that Timothy will be, in many ways, able to surpass what he has done. But Timothy is going down a different path than his teacher and mentor. Paul was a traveling evangelist, moving from place to place planting the seeds of the gospel and founding churches. Timothy, it seems is going to become more of a pastor, settling in a place and living with the church for the long term.
It’s fairly obvious why I found a certain identification with Timothy, I too had grown up in the church, I knew and had been taught about the Scriptures from infancy and even though I wandered a bit in late adolescence, those things did not leave me. And I find in Paul’s advice to Timothy some great comfort and some great distress. The foundation of the ministry is the Word of God, the Scripture, “God breathed and useful for instruction.” Talented men like Paul and Timothy are quite capable of leading people simply by the force of their personality. I never felt myself in the category of such a personality so it was encouraging to me to find that Scripture should always be the motivating force behind all ministry. On those days when my head gets too big, this encouragement can also become a sobering check on my ego, if Michele doesn’t get there first. That all ministry should be grounded in the Word has been one of the guiding principles of preaching and teaching, it is both a help and burden. It helps me keep going when my own tank is empty but it keeps me grounded when I think too much of my own ideas.
Over the course of my early ministry I have kept in touch with Timothy, not so often in my sermons but certainly in my personal reading. I often examine the advice that the Apostle gave him, I often consider the description of the church that he served and his place in the history of that church. Timothy served in a time when the church was changing and the future was quite uncertain. The age of the Apostles was coming to an end. Paul and the Disciples were now facing their death, either through persecution or old age and the church was in need of direction for the future and that direction was uncertain. I am the youngest pastor in this presbytery, and there are not many within ten years of me, even in seminary I was in the small minority of students who started before age thirty. I suspect that as Timothy watched the elders of the church, the Apostles, cresting the ridge of their ministries and moving into the ranks of the church triumphant, he had some of the same feelings that I have, like who is in this with me? The statistics are not good and the reality seems to back them up, most of the people I see at meetings are Presbyterian in the sense of the Greek root, which means old. For the time being this is okay, as long as they’re still there, but the disturbing thing is that as they retire they are not being replaced.
In Timothy’s day, as the Apostles disappeared, the false teachers multiplied, those who used the foundations of the Christian faith but built twisted and Gnostic structures upon it and led many people astray. Religious consumerism, described by Paul as people having itching ears and gathering teachers who would tell them what they want to hear rather than the truth of the Word and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is perhaps the single greatest flaw in the 21st century American Church. Much of the church has already waltzed off down that primrose path. Pastors love to be loved, people love to be told that everything is going to be just fine and so there is a religious symbiosis that can sustain “churches” even “mega-churches.” But it doesn’t really have much to do with the Cross of Christ or the news of his resurrection. Apparently the tendency of people to turn aside to myths and false teaching is nothing new, even if Timothy wasn’t handicapped by an increasingly useless bureaucracy and dead institutionalism he certainly had to deal with the fact that people are fickle and self serving and that the world doesn’t easily see the truth that he has been given to speak and live out.
I am astounded at the way this sort of thing has been elevated to the point where it is accepted and even admired. I was watching a TV interview with the Pastor of a very large, nondenominational church, who preaches to thousands of people every Sunday, in a cavernous, arena sized church and then to tens of thousands of people on the television broadcast of his service. He said that he felt called to preach a “positive” message because people have enough to “weigh them down” in their lives. The interviewer positively gushed that he was so likeable and that his message “touched her.” The preacher was humble and self-effacing, he was likeable, he seemed like he really wanted to help people, the interviewer liked him, I liked him as a person, but there was something wrong here. Then it came, the question that began to shine the light into the darkness: “how do you come up with these messages?” I thought to myself, okay, now he’s going to talk about Scripture, right? The Word of God, the foundation of all our ministries, he has to, doesn’t he? Well apparently not, he said something to the effect, “I search inside myself and see what’s there and I just lift it up for the people.” There it was: nothing about Scripture, nothing about the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, just the feelings from deep down inside, to give people a positive message of hope. It didn’t make me mad, it just confirmed something I already suspected deep inside myself: we are in serious trouble.
This is nothing new. That thought is comforting and disturbing at the same time, it means that the church has always faced such falsehood and inconstancy and it has survived. But it also means that the false teachers are not likely to go away any time soon and those of us who are trying to hold onto sound doctrine and preach the Word are going to be competing with people who have more money, more television time and generally more acceptance from the powers of the world. I can accept the struggle, I hear Paul’s call to “keep my head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge the duties of my ministry.” I hear it, I believe it, I’m trying to live it but I feel like there are so many millions of people whose itching ears are leading them astray: what can I do? Well, what I hear Paul telling Timothy is: “live with it.” You don’t have to accept it, you certainly don’t have to like it but you have to understand that most of the people in the world are not going to hear what you are trying to tell them.
I hear the valuable words of a mentor to a student. Paul had been at the center of the heady days of the apostolic age, he had witnessed to hundreds of thousands of people and seen many of those people converted to the way of Jesus Christ. But Paul had also seen many of those young believers carried off into myths and false teaching, he had seen men whom he once trusted lose their way and forget the true message of Christ. He had seen too much to think, as perhaps he did when he was younger, that somehow the whole world was just going to become Christian. Whatever swelling of religious pride had occurred in Paul because of his many successes was weighted against the many failures and backslides he had seen. He still had the intense fiery zeal of his encounter on the Damascus road but he had seen it go wrong too many times, he had seen too many “christians” who acted like anything but. He had lost too many people to the false gods of prosperity and the occult. He knew that the future was in Timothy and those like him, whose ministry would not be measured by numbers but by quality.
Paul passes the torch, to a man who is not much like him. Timothy is going to serve the church over the long haul. Paul knew it, wanted it, prayed for it to be that way. It’s amazing to me how many times the church convinces itself that we are supposed to be like Paul but Paul was a rare bird, like a George Whitfield or a Billy Graham, Paul was a singular man even among the Apostles. He knew that the future of the Church did not lie primarily in reaching stadiums full of people but in reaching people one by one with the Word of God and that doesn’t come easy, it takes time and patience, it is vulnerable to many varieties of failure: failures of the pastor, failures of the people, failures of the churches where both are involved but it is never a failure of the Word. The only way we will truly fail is if we remove ourselves from the Word and cast the Word away from us. The only way we will lose Christ is if we simply refuse to look at the cross and see his resurrection. No it’s not always going to be pleasant, it’s not always going to be appealing but it will always be true. Truth does not change whether ten thousand people nod in assent and shout amen or whether one person mumbles under their breath, “Lord, I believe.”
