Sunday, 04 July 2010 12:30
Summer Series on the Pastoral Epistles
1st Timothy 5, 6
4 July 2010
I’m sure it’s happened to each of us … a time, a situation, when we were the victim of … advice. Perhaps unwanted, maybe unwelcome, someone … a family member, a friend, decided to “play Polonius” to us … Polonius, the father of Laertes and Ophelia in ‘Hamlet,’ who gives his son a ton of pompous self-impressed advice early on in that play, often causing the audience to chuckle at the realization that things haven’t changed much over the centuries.
There’s a musical group called the “Austin Lounge Lizards” who sing a favorite song of mine called “Old Blevins.” It’s a parody song, a sendup of old country music tunes … the story in the song has a guy, having fought with his woman, retreating to a bar called No Tomorrows where he drowns his sorrows … when along comes an old guy who looked like he had some wisdom to impart …
Ah, but this Polonius is Old Blevins … whose words flow in an endless torrent … which is captured in the song as “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah,” and only interrupted by the occasional “The Great Depression” or “Them crazy hippies” or “I don’t remember.” The song ends with the hero going home and making up to his woman, mostly out of fear that he’ll turn into that same kind of “loathsome toothless geezer” spouting words full of nothing.
Blah blah blah.
Perhaps that is what you heard this morning as we listened to the reading of the final two chapters of 1st Timothy.
We conclude our summer look at this first of the Pastoral Epistles with chapters five and six … lots of words, to be sure … but mostly, words of advice, given by the author to Timothy, the budding young pastor … and whoever else would read or hear his words … in the early second century churches to whom they were written.
There is much advice here.
Some of it is well known, if all too often misquoted: “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”
Some of it is lesser known, but appreciated … perhaps more by mainline Christians than our more-straightlaced Evangelical friends … “No longer drink only water, but take a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.”
And some of it is just plain blatantly offensive to our 21st century ears: “Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor.”
So why all this advice?
