October 10, 2010
The Hard Word of Faith - 1 Timothy 4:1-11
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI took my first foreign language when I was nine years old: Latin. I took Latin from the fourth through the eighth grades. Then I took French through the eleventh grade. Then I took Spanish my Freshman year in college. Then I took Hebrew my first year in seminary. Then I took Greek. After all that, the only language that I speak fairly fluently (although not perfectly) is English. I say none of that to brag. In fact, I am honestly ashamed that I can only speak my native tongue. That’s an embarrassment. The only one of those languages that has somewhat stuck is Greek. I read the New Testament in Greek when I prepare for sermons. For some reason, I got hooked on it and put in the time for it. I am obviously not an expert at learning foreign languages, but one thing I have learned is that there’s no short cut. You have to show up to class. You have show up outside of class, too. You have to study, hard. You have to learn the verb declensions and the noun endings and genders and participles and infinitives and perfects and pluperfects, and on and on it goes. There is absolutely no short cut. Anybody with a brain can learn another language, even multiple languages. The question that you have to ask, though is this: is it worth the work? For me, Greek was, obviously. And Latin, French, Spanish, and Hebrew were not, obviously.
Paul tells us here that faith is similar. Faith is a foreign language. It is. They don’t speak it out there, you know. It is not our native tongue. We have to work at it. Anybody can be faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Anybody can speak the language of faith, but very few people actually do. The reason, I believe, is simple. It’s just too hard. We may believe the Gospel on a nominal level, but anything more is too hard. So we end up believing in ourselves, or in our opinions, or in the latest fad, or the latest opportunities for success. In a way, we don’t believe in anything at all. And yet, in another way, we end up believing in everything. So we end up doing what we think we’re not even capable of doing, and that is deceiving ourselves. It can happen to anybody, Paul suggests, so we have to work at it.
Like learning a foreign language, Paul suggests that we often try to take shortcuts. Paul seems to mention two of them. The first shortcut is that faith doesn’t mean all that much. It does, of course, in theory. It means a lot to our eternal destiny, but it does not mean anything right now. We believe and we call ourselves Christian and we may even show up to Church on occasion (if the weather’s not too bad, or too good, or if the Panthers aren’t in town), so we’re good to go. If that really did make us “good to go,” then I could claim to speak six languages. I did show up to class, but I just never studied much outside of class. We may come to Church on Sunday mornings on occasion, but Monday morning is a different subject. Saturday night is a different subject. For the Corinthians, who was sleeping beside them in bed was a different subject. They thought that it was just fine for them to fool around with each other. It was purely a private matter, they thought. Well Paul told them that it was not just private. In fact, since the Gospel of Jesus Christ is all-encompassing, then there really cannot be anything that’s just solely private. If you are my brother or sister in Christ, and if together we are the Body of Christ, then it matters very much what you do outside of the official life of the Church, even if it’s behind closed doors. Faith touches everything, even the sewer system. I’m serious.
John Calvin was the founder of sorts of what we know as the Presbyterian Church. Calvin was one of the most accomplished scholars (both theological and legal) in Western Europe. He was brilliant. He was so brilliant that his writing started a revolution that continues to this day. Calvin was solely a scholar, until he met a man named William Farel in Geneva, Switzerland. William Farel wanted Calvin to help him with this revolution, what Calvin called reform, in Geneva. Calvin told Farel that he was not interested, that he preferred a life of books, research, and academic pursuits. Farel shot back and told Calvin that if his books, research, and academic pursuits did not affect people’s lives where they were, then they were useless. Calvin got to thinking about that and decided that Farel was right. So one of the first things that this brilliant scholar did in Geneva was to fix the sewer system. People cannot grow in their faith if they’re constantly getting sick from raw sewage. Faith affects all of life, every last ounce of it. So much of Paul’s letter to Timothy is practical stuff, like leadership, or how men and women should relate to one another, or how to get along in a hostile world, or even how to settle your stomach. We sometimes take the short-cut of faith that says if you show up on Sunday, then you’re golden, but that faith doesn’t touch anything else. Well it does.
The other mistake that we make is the opposite. Sometimes we put too many boundaries and restrictions on faith. Sometimes, we condense faith into a set of rules. In fact, we Christians are known for that. There was a recent survey of young adults outside the Church. When asked what they thought of Christians, the responses were anti-homosexual (91%), judgmental (87%), and hypocritical (85%). Like it or not, that’s the message that we send to the world. Don’t dance, we say. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t wear short skirts, etc, etc, etc… Just follow these simple rules, and you’ll have it. Just become dark headed (balding on the top), blue eyed, southern accented, and you’ll get there. That’s a bad short-cut to faith. The big deal in Paul’s day was eating food that had been sacrificed to other idols. If you lived in the Roman empire, it was practically impossible not to eat that kind of food. Paul said that was ridiculous. If you can honestly give thanks to God for it, then it’s alright to eat it.
The interesting thing about that, though, is that Paul reverses course. In his letter to Rome, Paul tells us that if by eating certain foods we would create a stumbling block to others, then don’t do it. Yet Paul tells Timothy here that he’s free to eat whatever he wants, regardless of the stumbling block. So which is it? Is Roman’s right or 1st Timothy? Or is Paul practicing situational ethics? We don’t like situational ethics. If something is wrong here, then it’s wrong there. Right is right and wrong is wrong. Yet, it sounds to me like Paul is doing something very different here. The point is that the Gospel cannot be condensed to a set of rules. You can’t say that if you just follow these six easy steps, then you’ll be in. That’s too easy, yet Christians do it all the time.
Should I join facebook? I’m not on facebook right now and I have a number of valid reasons for that. But, there’s also a valid reason why I should. Is there a rule about that anywhere? I didn’t think so. Or what about this: Whom should I marry? What should I major in? What career should I pursue? What Church should I join? What kind of worship is the “right” kind of worship? There’s just no set of easy rules out there. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that the Gospel is a rule-book. That’s a shortcut, Paul says, and it’s contrary to the Gospel.
So how do we do it? If faith affects everything that we do, but there’s no easy rulebook, then how do we do it? Well, it’s hard. It’s kind of like learning a foreign language. It takes commitment and discipline. It takes a community. One of the ways that I learned Greek is because I had a great community at Austin Seminary and we learned it together. Otherwise, at least for me, it’s just not going to happen. It’s also like exercise, which Paul specifically mentions here. I was supposed to be running a marathon today, but I got hurt. So I started riding my bike. I don’t have a cycling community like I do a running community. So it’s much harder to get out of bed to ride my bike. In fact, most mornings, I sleep in. Will power is meaningless. So we need a community. Communities not only get us there, but we’re just better in community. I run faster with other people. I learn languages more efficiently with other people. If that’s true for exercise, and if it’s true for learning foreign languages, it’s even more true for faith.
When it comes to living the Gospel, there is no short cut. We cannot short circuit the system, either by replacing the Gospel with nothing but a Sunday morning on rare occasion, or by replacing it with a set of rules and regulations. We just have to be willing to put in the hard work of faith. Sometimes we’ll it wrong. Sometimes we’ll get it way wrong. We’ve got some freedom, you know, to make a few mistakes. God has already done for us what we could never have done for ourselves. Yet in order to fully appreciate that, we have to simply live it, which actually is not simple at all and it sure isn’t easy. It takes lots and lots of time and prayer and courage and, yes, work. It’s the hard, hard work of faith, which is not easy, but it is worth it.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
