2
Timothy 3:10-4:5
Ordinary
31
November
3, 2019
William G. Carter
Now you have observed my teaching, my conduct,
my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my
persecutions and suffering the things that happened to me in Antioch, Iconium,
and Lystra. What persecutions I endured! Yet the Lord rescued me from all of
them. Indeed, all who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be
persecuted. But wicked people and impostors will go from bad to worse,
deceiving others and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you
have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and
how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct
you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired
by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for
training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be
proficient, equipped for every good work.
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus,
who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his
kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether
the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the
utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not
put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for
themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from
listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be
sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry
fully.
A
good friend tells how he learned the Bible. It wasn’t in church or Sunday
School; no, by the time he was old enough to sit still for all of that, he
already knew the scriptures. It began on his mother’s lap. From the time he
could remember anything, his mother used to read to him a chapter from the King
James Bible, a chapter a day. If he wiggled, she said, “Be still. You need
Jesus.” He later discovered that’s how she was raised, too.
She
was no fundamentalist, but she had been raised to take scripture seriously. It
is a gift from those who came before us, offered to keep our lives rooted in
the love and justice of God, so that we are able to withstand whatever life
throws at us.
And
when my friend’s mother was dying, he sat beside her bed to read her a chapter out
of that same, well-worn King James Bible. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not
want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the
still waters. He restoreth my soul.”
So
old Paul says to young Timothy, “As for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly
believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you
have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation
through faith in Christ Jesus.”
What
is the first Bible passage that you learned? When did you learn it? Think back
for a minute and see if you recall.
That
favorite psalm, Psalm 23, is one of the first engraved on my memory. I don’t
know if it came first from church or at home, but it’s never left me. As the
English translations of scripture change and evolve, that old version from 1611
is the one that sticks with me. I don’t spend enough time in green pastures.
Nor do I sit sufficiently beside the still waters. But my soul has been
restored over and over again. The One who restores it is the Creator of the green
pastures and still waters. The Bible names it, even before I believe it.
When
Paul speaks of scripture, he is thinking of his Jewish Bible. Not the Christian
Bible, because that was far from finished; this letter would not be declared
authoritative to the church for another three hundred years. Paul was referring
to the Torah, to the foundational stories. God created the heavens and the
earth, God created you and me and declared us “good.” When we went bad, God
wiped out the world with a flood, saving only Noah’s families and the animals;
then God realized that punishment was a big mistake and put the rainbow in the
sky as a perpetual Post-It note: “Don’t do that again.”
Then
God said to Abram and Sarai, “I choose you to be a blessing to all the families
on the earth, with descendants as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashore.”
That’s when the story got interesting. And Paul says, “Everything we need to
know is there in the book.” Do you want to know who you are? Where you come
from? It’s in the book.
Someone
in one of our Bible reading groups was grumbling about the book. Specifically,
she and her group were reading through the prophets. I could sympathize. The
prophetic books are full of unpunctuated sermons, mostly written as free-verse
poetry. You can’t tell who is doing the speaking – is it God? The prophet? Or
the people? Can’t always tell.
It’s
also difficult to tell the context. God was speaking through the prophets over
hundreds of years. A lot of things can happen over eight hundred years. But if
your country is coming unraveled, and your leaders are lying to you every day,
and the very few at the top of the food chain are getting exponentially richer
while everybody else is struggling, suddenly the biblical prophets make a lot
of sense especially when they speak of justice and righteousness and truth.
When
I was growing up during the Civil Rights era, we didn’t hear anything about the
Bible’s prophets. They were not mentioned in our Sunday School material. We
never heard any of them speak, unless it was the week before Christmas, and old
Isaiah would say, “The Messiah is coming!” That was how it was in the white
church where I was raised.
Meanwhile
in the African American churches, they heard from the prophets every week.
Martin Luther King Jr. loves to preach sermons on texts from the prophet Amos.
His “I have a dream” speech was inspired by the dreams of the prophet Isaiah.
When they tried to get King to quiet down, he could quote the prophet Jeremiah,
how the good news burned within like a “fire in his bones.” In response, he was
treated like a prophet. Somebody tried to silence him as they tried to silence
all the prophets – yet his voice rings out. He found his voice in the Book.
The
prophets of God speak of the holy day of judgment that cast out the evildoers
and establish God’s justice. If we didn’t have the scriptures, we would be
misled to think the evildoers will always win. But we know better. We have been
shown the mind of God.
We
have the Torah, God’s instruction; we have the Prophets, God’s light in every
season of darkness. In between, we have proverbs, the love poetry of Solomon,
the wisecracking cynic of Ecclesiastes, and we have the Psalms. It has been
said – and I now believe – that everything we need to know about God is in the Psalms.
The
overarching theme of the Psalms is that God rules over all things. Take note
that it doesn’t say that “God is in charge;” that is a distortion by those who
have control issues, but rather it says God rules over all things. “The Lord is
in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence.” Of course, the people of earth
ignore that and chatter away. If we spent more time in silence, we might
discover that God inhabits silence.
The
Psalms declares our help is not in the mountains. The mountains are where the
fake minor league deities of the Canaanites hang out. They can’t save you. They
merely invite you to consume more and waste what you have. God is so much
bigger than that – for God created the mountains, and created the storms, and
created the sun and the moon and the stars. So who are we? We are the children
that God created a “little less than the angels.” It’s in the book. That’s why
we have the book.
Keep
thumbing through the Psalms, and you find the deep questions and paradoxes that
beguile us. Why do the wicked prosper? How long will selfishness and perversity
persist? Why does God linger when we are
in trouble? The Bible is honest enough to ask what we are afraid to ask. As
surely as we read the Bible in our search for wisdom, we discover that the
Bible reads us. God knows who we are – because God rules over all things.
So
when the Bible announces how God so loves the world to enter the world through
Jesus and rescue us, that’s good news! And when the Bible calls us to join in
the work of Jesus, we know who we are, we know what we’re up against, and we know
who is ultimately going to win – for God rules over all.
I
suppose people come to church for all kinds of reasons. Some people come
because they like to sing, others because they like to eat. Some come because
they are seeking something important to do.
There’s
that story of the Jewish man who asked his father, “Why do you go to synagogue?”
“There are many reasons why a person would go to synagogue,” replied his
father. “Take Silverberg. He goes to synagogue to talk to God. Me? I go to
synagogue to talk to Silverberg.”[1]
There
is no shortage of reasons why we are here. At the heart of them all is the
central act of opening the Bible and releasing it into the air. This is the
book that contains the Breath of God. As one poet says so well,
I open the Bible and a wind comes out of
the book.
I close the Bible and the wind keeps
blowing.[2]
That’s
the true meaning of “inspiration” – the Spirit of God blows this Book alive and
“we are equipped for every good work.”
Without
the scriptures, and the preachers and teachers who open it, we are prone to a
lot of opinions. As in the days of Paul and Timothy, there is no shortage of
crazy ideas and looney tune notions.
One
so-called “spirit store” sells high-priced quartz crystals, professing if you
hold them a certain way, they will reveal the mysteries of the universe. Wow,
the mysteries of the universe, you say? You still need to pick up a quart of
milk on the way home.
Somebody
else declares she is true-blue guru and invites you to the mystic waterfall of
a South Seas island. The price tag for the trip is $12,000. Before you go, ask
her: how did you get to become a true-blue guru? “I paid somebody else, took
the trip myself, and there the earth called out to me.” Really? Well, you still
need a ride home from the airport.
“Put
your hands on the television set and you will be healed,” says the preacher with
the white shoes and the hair that defies gravity. Wow! Does this mean that I can
get along without medical insurance? Hmm… did you ever notice those
faith-healers don’t work in hospitals?
So
we come together, open the Bible together, and wait for God to speak. Sometimes
the Voice is immediate. Other times the Voice is mediated through human words
and deeds. Most of the time the Voice seeps in secretly, sinks down deeply, to
be brought alive when the time is right.
Old
Paul says to young Timothy - and old Timothy says to us - “As for you, continue in what you have learned
and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from
childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” The scriptures are the meeting
place for God and God’s people. And they are sufficient “to equip us for every
good work.”
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] Quoted by Thomas G. Long, “Why Are
We Here?” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Vol. 10, issue 1, p. 52
[2] From Tom Troeger, 2001 meeting of
the Homiletical Feast.
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