Sermon: Guard the Good Treasure

A sermon based on 2 Timothy 1:1-14

I have a confession to make.  OK, to be clear, there are a lot of things I could confess to, but even though confession in the early churches was required to be public in character, you all will not get to learn about my numerous transgressions…Alright, fine.  I will give you two confessions, the first that I was already planning to reveal and first one more, just because I like you all.  I confess this with some trepidation, as I know that some of you will consider this a sin at least against nature, if not also against God.  I…like pineapple on pizza.  It all happened so suddenly.  I was at a block party, someone had brought pepperoni and pineapple pizza, and before anyone could explain to me that all right-thinking Americans would consider this a gastronomic abomination, I tried a slice, and I was instantly hooked.  I confess also that I am not really apologetic about this at all.  In the words of Martin Luther, I too must reply, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

And now for the original confession: I do not care much for the so-called pastoral epistles.  Today’s reading comes from Second Timothy, one of the three pastoral epistles.  This letter, along with First Timothy and Titus, are thought by biblical scholars to come from a common source.  Although tradition has claimed that the Apostle Paul is that source, there are numerous reasons to think that this is not the case.  For starters, the grammar and vocabulary are very different from those found in the letters we are confident Paul wrote.  Most writers do not dramatically change their writing style from year to year, especially when they are writing in a format – in this case a letter to a congregation – that they have written in many times before.  Second, the concerns of these letters are very different from the concerns Paul has in letters like Romans, Galatians, and 1 and 2 Corinthians.  In the pastoral epistles, concerns about church offices like bishop and deacon emerge, but we have no reason to think that these were things Paul cared about.  They are, at the very least, concerns of churches that are making long-term plans, plans for what an established institution should look like.  The real Paul thought Jesus was coming back at any moment.  The last thing he would have cared about is how to appoint a bishop.  Finally, although women do get some recognition in the pastoral epistles, for example, in today’s scripture Timothy is reminded of the “sincere faith” that first appeared in his grandmother Lois and then in his mother Eunice, the pastoral epistles have some of the most oppressive words regarding women in the entire Bible.  In 1 Timothy 2:11-12 we read “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission.  I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over man.”  In Titus 2:5 we read that women are to be “submissive to their husbands.”  These claims are, to be blunt, just bonkers and completely wrong.  Moreover, they come from an entirely anonymous source.  We literally have no idea who wrote them.  The writers of the pastoral epistles present these letters as if they are indeed describing events in life of the apostle Paul, and in doing so they seek to steal the mantle of Paul’s authority for the teachings and exhortations present in the pastoral epistles.  No doubt they were included in the biblical canon to assist those who sought to suppress the role of women in the early churches, and, for this reason alone, we should declare that they have no business being labeled as holy scripture.  So why did I pick this scripture from the multiple scriptures available to me from this week’s lectionary readings?

I did so for two reasons.  First, like the supposed author of this letter, I have been feeling lately that I am in a kind of prison, a state of affairs from which I cannot escape.  I want to reflect a little bit with you on what it might mean to be a Christian so imprisoned.  Second, and more importantly, I had honestly never before noticed the phrase “guard the good treasure” in scripture.  It is clearly connected to the idea of fighting the good fight, an exhortation we find in both First and Second Timothy, but I found myself wondering what exactly a Christian today should consider to be the good treasure and how they should go about guarding it.  This good treasure should clearly be understood to be the core message of the Christian gospel, the Christian good news, and I found myself wondering what exactly I think that core message is.

As usual, everything that I am about to say needs to be understood in the context of someone who is in so many ways NOT imprisoned.  I am obviously not literally imprisoned, and I am not imprisoned by realities that so many other people face such as poverty, unemployment, chronic illness, homelessness, loneliness, or oppression on account of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or nationality.  I am in so many ways a free white man.  But, nonetheless, I feel imprisoned.  I feel imprisoned by the division and hatred that prevails in our country.  I feel imprisoned by a government that is pursuing policies where meanness and retribution seem to be the entire point of what is being done.  I feel the guardrails might be coming off the admittedly very flawed, but nonetheless inspiring, democratic experiment that has been the United States.  I feel imprisoned because I genuinely feel like there is nothing I can do to change the course of events.  Now, I know there are many, perhaps some in this congregation, who endorse the actions taken by the current leadership.  If you are such a person, I want to be clear that I do not feel imprisoned by you.  I may not understand your position, and I might really want to argue with you about it, but I am not here to deny the reality of your Christian faith simply because we disagree on the present state of our country.  Doing so, I think, would make the bars of my own cage even stronger, even more difficult to escape from.

Nonetheless, I really do feel imprisoned, and today’s scripture got me wondering about how a Christian should be a Christian when they are imprisoned.  Two connections from today’s scripture provide some guidance.  First, as “Paul” reminds Timothy of the faith of Lois and Eunice, I remind myself of the faith of those who have come before me.  I remember Abraham Lincoln, who, in his First Inaugural Address, appealed to the “better angels of our nature.”  Lincoln keeps me looking for what I can love and reach out to in even those I think are pursuing and endorsing inhuman and destructive policies.  Yet, with Fredrick Douglas, who wrote in his speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” that “what is inhuman cannot be divine” I know that God is not indifferent what is happening in our country.  With Douglas, I affirm that “a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble…tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man.”  And, while I would certainly use more inclusive language today than was the norm for Douglas, the idea of the family of humanity means a great deal to me.  The children being dragged in their underwear and zip-tied in the middle of the night from Chicago apartments are, at least in my heart, my own children.  The person arrested and deported on their way to their final interview for a green card is a member of my family.  There are many other injustices in the United States that in so many ways trample what I think is God’s desire for us to live in communities of support rather than of separation.  I may feel locked in a prison of paralysis regarding how to go about changing present realities, but I can at least remember the lessons of my forebears in faith who made clear that justice is always something that God cares about.

The second lesson that I learn from today’s scripture is that while a prison can make a person feel that they are alone that person needs only to reach out to others to realize that they can still make a difference.  Paul reaches out to Timothy to guard and proclaim the faith and asks Timothy himself then to reach out to yet others to do the same.  In other words, we can get a lot done when we work together.  These last few months here at Christian Temple have made clear to me the importance of reaching out to others in the church when things started to feel crazy and, more importantly, to find ways that we could work together to steady matters and start moving the congregation in the right direction.  There is still a lot of work to be done in this regard.  As long as none of us feels like we are confronting this challenge alone, I am confident that we will work things out.

I want to turn now to the “good treasure” of faith.  What is it?  Why does it need to be guarded and how do we guard it?  As I noted at the beginning of this sermon, I somehow had never heard this phrase from scripture before, or at least I never took special notice of it.  Yet, it strikes me as a great idea since it requires one to distill the heart Christian faith.  I found myself wondering what exactly the heart of faith is.  It seems I should know that, that each one of us should know that.  It is also something Christians have been disagreeing about at least since the day Jesus died and probably even before that.  I also know that within the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, the denomination of which this church is a part, there is a tradition of allowing for different answers to this question while maintaining church unity.  So let me be clear that the identification of the good treasure that I am about to provide is my answer.  I think it is perfectly acceptable for you to have a different answer.  However, I do think each one of us should try to answer the question.  What is the heart of Christianity?  What is its core message?  How do we guard that message?

My preliminary effort to identify what is meant by the good treasure in 2 Timothy led me to the source that everyone is going to for answers these days – ChatGPT.  When I asked ChatGPT what the good treasure was I was told that the Greek phrase literally means “the good deposit or the noble trust.  It comes from a banking or legal metaphor – something valuable entrusted to another for safekeeping.”  ChatGPT went on to clarify that this good deposit or noble trust might be understood in two senses.  First, it is the “sound teaching that Paul had handed down to Timothy – the message about Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection, and the pattern of Christian truth and life that accompanies it.”  Not surprisingly, I found this answer to be unsatisfactory.  It commits what philosophers call the fallacy of “repeating the question.”  That is, it doesn’t answer the question but instead raises it anew using different words.  What is the good treasure found in the death and resurrection of Jesus?  What is the good treasure found in “the pattern of Christian truth and life?”  Second, according to ChatGPT, the good treasure can be understood as the gift of faith imparted by the Holy Spirit which supports both Timothy and, presumably, every Christian.  This interpretation was apparently given by the 5th century writer John Chrysostom.  This second answer seems less a matter of the content of faith than of a commitment to the life of faith, a commitment made possible by the Holy Spirit.  I like this answer if only because my life of faith can often be described as dedicated and doubtful at the same time.  I know that I want to be a Christian, even if I sometimes have a hard time explaining what that means.

First, let me dispose of what I take to be incorrect answers, and I remind you that if you happen to think these are actually correct answers that such disagreement is both tolerated and welcomed in this church.  I do not think the good treasure is that Jesus died for my sins.  My sins are my sins, not his.  I need to atone for those sins, seek forgiveness, and at least hope for God’s mercy.  I do not think the death of Jesus on the Cross wiped away the stain of original sin because I do not think this stain was ever actually a thing.  It certainly did not originate with Adam and Eve since there never was an Adam and Eve.  Even if these two individuals did exist, we are told that they did not know good and evil.  Thus, I fail to see how they could be held responsible, either in their own lives, or in the lives of every human who would be born after them, for a single action taken in ignorance of moral truth.  I do not think believing this or that proposition about Jesus is my ticket to eternal life.  I do not really care about whether I live eternally.  What I do care about is whether I do what God wants me to do with the life that I have right now.  If the lesson of Matthew 25 provides any guidance, God wants me to care for the vulnerable and my ability to get to heaven is imperiled not by what I fail to believe but by what I fail to do.

This brings me to my answer.  I think the good treasure of faith is that each of us has the ability at every moment of our lives to care for others.  I think that this is what God wants.  This care includes not only meeting the immediate needs of the vulnerable around us, but it also includes building societies and passing laws that decrease the number of vulnerable people until no one is vulnerable.  It includes identifying and responding to the many ways that we create more and more vulnerable people unnecessarily simply so that a few more people can have more and more money and power.  I realize that just caring for others does not sound especially Christian if being a Christian includes affirming the many propositions of the various Christian creeds that have been produced through the centuries.  I am interested in those creeds only if their content helps me better care for vulnerable people.  If they are just Christian jargon, they are not good treasure.

This good treasure needs to be guarded for the simple reason that it is so easy to forget, and it is so easy to abandon it in pursuit of the many false treasures that the world lays before us.  The history of Christian thought has focused on the latter problem.  For example, it has reminded us that we cannot love God and money at the same time.  It has urged us not to worship idols.  In the present context, I take this to mean not only that we can fail to care for others when we worry about things like becoming rich, but also that we can do uncaring things in that pursuit.  It reminds us that it is just as easy to be uncaring as it is to be caring, and often more likely.  However, I would like to emphasize just how easy it is to forget that we can care for others in any situation.  We get distracted by the details of the moment and forget that care is always an option.  If you remember one thing from this sermon, don’t remember that the good treasure we must guard is the importance of caring for others and especially the vulnerable, rather, remember that it is so very easy to forget to be caring.  One more time for good measure: it is so easy to forget to be caring.

The ability to care for others, sometimes best expressed in simple kindness, is a genuine superpower.  We all possess it, and I challenge you to think of anything more important.  Seriously, what exactly is it that is more important than cultivating the ability to care for others?  To be sure, our culture will tell us that fancy possessions and professional successes are more important, but our culture is wrong.  We are told that the approval of others is more important, but this too is wrong.  I know many people young and old who are unhappy with their lives because they feel like they are failures, but I have yet to meet a single person who thinks they are a failure because they have failed to care for others.  I don’t think it would even occur to them to evaluate their lives in terms of how well they have cared for other people, especially those most vulnerable.  Some of the blame no doubt falls on those of us who are parents and who have failed to remind our children both of the importance of caring for others and of how easy it is to forget that we always have a chance to care.  Of course, we have also failed to remind our children to care for themselves, in part because we adults forget to care for ourselves.  Instead, we judge both others and ourselves.  No doubt, many actions taken by each of us and by others deserve to be judged, and sometimes harshly.  But we may nonetheless commit to caring, at least caring about the dignity of every person, even when we are disagreeing with their actions and their choices.

Some will properly object at this point that one need not believe in God or call oneself a Christian to be a caring person.  This is certainly true.  Some of the most caring people I know consider themselves to be atheists.  Of course, I think a lot of them are atheists because of the ridiculous things Christians ask them to believe about God.  Likewise, there are many caring people within the many different religions of the world.  What I share in common with this latter group and what differentiates me from the atheists is that I think caring for others is an imperative grounded in the Heart of reality itself and not merely a personal preference.  It is not something I can properly just stop doing when I don’t feel like it anymore.  Moreover, when I commit to caring I feel like I belong not just to a community but to the entire universe.  My world suddenly seems much bigger, much grander, much more wonderful.

Ultimately, I think caring is what God is all about.  God cared enough to create the world and cares enough to hold it in existence at every moment.  Despite the fact they we are on a tiny ball of rock in a massive universe I think God cares about each one of us.  You have heard me say this many times, and I recognize both that it can get old and that sometimes it is just hard to feel.  I know that I do not walk around all the time flush with the feeling that God cares about me.  But what I do know is that when I commit to caring for others it gets much easier to feel the grace of care everywhere I go.  When I try to remember to care rather than forget to care, I can feel something in the world that I often do not notice: a sense of being held by the very deepest part of all that is.  This feeling is a blessing.  It really helps me get through my day, and it makes me feel like the bars of the prison growing around me will not last forever.  I hope that you too can feel this sense of being held by God.  If you do not yet feel it, just look for ways to care, ways both small and large.  Caring is something each of us can get better at, but also something each of us can already do.  It is a superpower.  It is good treasure of Christian life.  It is a treasure guarded when it is being given, so don’t forget to give it.