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?
Well, we must remember the circumstances behind these pastoral letters, in general, and 1st Timothy in particular.
Recall that the pastorals are credited to Paul, but most likely not written by him … we’ve seen, over the past two weeks, how the style and the life-situations cited point to another author, in a later time … a time of an institutionalizing church, most likely, in the early 2nd century, long after Paul’s death.
Remember that 1st Timothy was written to a young pastor or pastors who were being sent to serve these congregations … congregations, perhaps established by Paul, in Greek-speaking and Greek-lifestyle-living areas of the Roman Empire … congregations of people who, like Paul, had expected Jesus to return to earth by now – “now” being the late first or early second century – and, when he did not, they found themselves having to make provisions for living in and among a potentially hostile culture, for some time … they needed to “fit in” so they wouldn’t be imprisoned or killed as “subversives to the state;” they had to set up some structures and institutions that would last and work toward the spread of the infant church for many years to come.
We’ve seen in the first four chapters what these provisions looked like … fitting in culturally (women being told to “keep their place” in the man’s world, both inside and outside the church)… establishing the offices of bishop (episkopos) and deacon (diakonos) so that the work of the church would continue to the next generation, and spread.
And now, this week, as we conclude this pastoral epistle … we get lots of advice.  
Chapter 5 has advice about widows and elders of the faith communities.
Widows in the early church were a special class of people … women who had lost their husbands through death and, thus, any sense of financial security … these widows were to be taken care of by the church … following in the Jewish tradition of special care for the “widow, the orphan, the sojourner and alien in your midst” … as the words of Deuteronomy so clearly states God’s intention that the disenfranchised would be given special treatment by God’s people.
Here, again, however, we see the creeping institutionalism of the infant church at work.  Older widows were to be given preference because, we can infer from what is written here, the author must have believed it would easier for the more mature women to live out the life of total dedication to the care of the Church … the vow that they took in order to be publicly enrolled as a widow … one could think of a nun, or a member of a Roman Catholic religious order today, in the same way.  
Younger widows, however, were to be encouraged to marry again, because that fulfilled God’s plan for them (and, we might also infer, they could leave the support from the church to those older widows who really needed it.)
It’s a tough word, yes, to be sure, but we cannot forget that this is a word of its time … a first or early second century church that in many ways, bore little resemblance to the church in which we live and worship today.
The words about elders which follow, however, do us well to hear and carry out, still, today.  Honoring the elders of our society and of our church is an honorable thing … then, and now.  We should take this advice to heart, and live it out in our faith communities and families.
As we move into Chapter 6, though, there are some words which could well be tossed.  Those words which uphold the institution of slavery … in those days, slavery was usually entered into because of debt owed … not in the way Africans were captured into slavery in the history of this country.
That’s why … upholding that institution of “indentured servitude,” at that time, would have been important for the church.  To be subversive here could have meant disaster for the infant church and the Christian faith.  Paul in another letter, to Philemon, speaks to a runaway slave and his owner; for the runaway to return to his slaveowner, and for the slaveowner to not be harsh in welcoming back his slave.
Of course words like these are extremely distasteful to us today.  Especially with our besmirched American history of mistreatment of African and Asian Americans … we do well to recognize these words, but also recognize them as words which we will not heed, because there is no Gospel for us in them.
It is after all, not gospel but advice which is given in these two chapters… good and bad … some to be kept, some to be thrown out.
But then we come to the capstone of the book.  
It goes by very fast, so you might have missed it.
Chapter 6, verse 6 …
“Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment.”
The heart of this sentence is two Greek words, steeped in the Greek concept of Stoicism … of which we spoke a little last week … the concept of the morally righteous, self-made, independent, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps-man.
Indeed, this is still one of our American icons, as we celebrate Independence Day.
Godliness … the word references a Greek moral virtue of the upstanding civic man … one who is reverent, pious, religious, in a good civic way … think the Scout Law, which says “A Scout is Reverent.”
Contentment … this word means “self sufficient.”  Not needing anyone or anything, all is available for life in and of the inner store of strength that is the good Stoic Greek man of his time.
Ah, how we have latched onto the combination of those words, this phrase, that image, as an ideal for us, over the ages, even today.   Through the repetition of pious sounding fictions like “God helps those who help themselves,” we’ve done our best to make sure that needing help, asking for help, dependence on others … is, at least, labeled as weakness, and therefore, to be avoided at all costs … and worst, some kind of a failure of one’s own self-hood.
But that is not what is being said here at all, folks.  It’s so far off the mark.
Read the verses which follow.
“We brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it.”
“If we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.”
“The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”
“As for you, man of God, pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.”
“As for those who in the present age are rich … they are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share.”
“Keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ” … and what is THE commandment … that which speaks to true godliness … to “love the Lord your God with all your soul and strength and mind … and to love neighbor as self.”
So the “self-made man” is, truly, a myth … we are not created to be totally independent and self-sufficient, having no need for anyone or anything … unaffected, impervious to the pain and suffering of others, and disregarding our own  … no, we are made by God and called by God from the various life situations we find ourselves in … widowed, orphaned, slave or free, ordained or lay, man, woman, child … we are called to be interdependent, conscious of the needs of others and sharing out of our treasury of time and talent, the blessings God has given us … and, conversely, when we are in need, to receive from others as from God.
Now, that’s a tough word for us to hear … as Americans, most certainly … as Lutheran Christians of Northern European descent, our ancestors, the modern equivalent of those Greek Stoics, coming from Scandinavia or Germany, settling in the wilds of the Northern US Great Plains, wanting nothing more than to “just take care of themselves.”
But God calls us to something different … full, rich, and deep … a connected, community based way of life … with the Word of Salvation in Jesus Christ as our foundation … and rooted and grown in a posture of living that word out, sharing it in our own words and actions in each of the various communities in which we “live and move and have our being” every day.  Job … home … school … clubs … sports teams … with friends … family … yes, and church, too.
That is the life that really is life.
May we take hold of that life this week … and just as important, may it flow through us, to others, so that others will see Jesus Christ through us, and come to know and love him, too … for their own sake, yes, and also, for the sake of others … others … in our neighborhood, our city, our county, our state in this nation, and all through this world … God’s world.
Amen.