Remembering to Remember

19th Sunday after Pentecost

Ruskin Heights Lutheran Church

2nd Timothy 1:1-14

St. Luke 17:5-10

October 3, 2010

We learn many things this morning from St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy.

We learn first is this is St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Obviously, there is a first.

In this second letter Paul takes up themes different than his first letter.

The first letter is pretty practical. It is as if Paul is writing to a new pastor taking his first parish. That’s exactly how it reads, and maybe, that exactly is how it was.

Paul says first, stay away from false teaching; it just introduces controversy and it does not build up the church.

Did you catch that?

Right there, first chapter, first Timothy: it is false teaching that ignites controversy, not correct doctrine.

There’s something to keep in mind these days.

The rest of first Timothy is practical parish work in the first century:

- how to conduct worship and what prayers to offer and for whom

- how to find and appoint deacons

- how to be respectful to the elderly

- how to organize a women’s group (St. Paul is a little nuts, if he thinks a pastor should do that)

- Paul even includes a little self-care for pastors: “stop drinking just water,” he tells Timothy in the first letter, “and take some wine for your stomach.”

- there is some pastoral ethical advice too: don’t love money, and here’s how you talk to the rich.

When Paul wrote the first letter he was still a free man and he expected to see Timothy again.

When we come to the second letter, today’s reading, Paul is in prison in Rome and his hope of again seeing Timothy is swiftly fading.

The second letter is more sobering and in places, melancholic.

In the second letter, Paul seeks reassurance that his work – Paul’s work - will not end with his death.

He seeks this reassurance by reminding Timothy to remember.

- remember you are remembered in prayer

- remember the faith of your grandmother, your mother

- remember the faith that lives in you

- remember and rekindle that faith, that gift of God you received in ordination

- remember to hold to the standard of sound teaching

- remember to guard the good treasure entrusted to you.

We learn many things from Paul’s two letters to Timothy.

We learn quite a bit about the so-called “primitive” church; we learn it wasn’t quite as primitive as some might think.

We learn that congregations are pretty much congregations wherever and whenever they exist. They need leadership, and organization, and pastors.

We learn too that the ministry, the Holy Ministry, the laying on of hands now called ordination is a gift of God for the church.

We learn too there is already - within a bare 30-40 years after the Resurrection - a standard of “sound teaching.”

We learn that without this standard of teaching, the teaching becomes something less than reliable.

St. Paul spent a lot of time talking about “sound teaching.”

Understandably so.

In his life he had to deal with both extremes of bad teaching.

In Corinth it was sexual license, the Gospel being misunderstood as freedom from God’s Law.

In Galatia it was super rigidity that put Law above Gospel.

He had seen firsthand what unsound teaching could do to the church of God.

St. Paul talks more about that next week when the reading in Second Timothy continues. Next week Paul will tell Timothy to “do your best to present yourself to God as a worker rightly explaining the word of the truth.”

With expectations like that laid on him, no wonder St. Timothy needs to “rekindle the gift of God within you.”

Of course it isn’t just St. Timothy who needs reminding, either.

It is every pastor, time to time, who has to decide exactly what that means – for himself, for the church, for the congregation.

Sometimes it is over something silly – like the couple who wanted their dog to be a ring-bearer at their wedding.

I didn’t have much say in that; I was conducting the wedding as an invited guest pastor. I didn’t know about the dog until about three days before the wedding. (They had the names of the wedding party in the bulletin, including Bow-Bows’ but not the names of the pastors.)

Did a dog imperil the preaching the Gospel. No. The dog never barked once during the sermon, and didn’t do anything else either.

So if the deacons in that congregation could put up with a dog, so could I.

Sometimes decisions and choices get made over something a bit more serious.

I had to once tell a congregational president to go pound sand when she objected to me conducting a grave side funeral for a gay man who had died of AIDS. His mother was a member of my congregation; the funeral itself was held at St. Mark’s Lutheran on Troost in Kansas City. The grave side was held in central Missouri at the congregation there. The congregational president thought it was wrong of me to speak the Gospel for this mother and her dead son, because of who he was.

Would the Gospel have been imperiled had I refused pastoral care?

Yeah. You bet.

I would not have been a pastor if I had listened to that church president.

I don’t like those moments - when I’m told by St. Paul or anybody else to remember the standard of sound teaching.

Because I do know when the teaching is unsound, that’s when controversy erupts, and people are asked to choose, and churches split, and tears are shed.

But it all goes back to St. Paul and St. Timothy.

Me, trust me, I’d rather be out moving mulberry trees with faith no bigger than a mustard seed, like Jesus says in St. Luke this morning.

But mostly, like the slaves talks about at the end of St. Luke I pray, and pray again, that I have done only what I ought to have done.

And then trust the master to give me a place at the table.