Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 3, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

“Guard the good treasure entrusted to you!” “Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me!” Paul, or whoever wrote the letter we know as 2 Timothy, seems not to trust Timothy, who was a disciple of his in Ephesus in Asia Minor. He seems to be afraid that Timothy is going to change the “standard of sound teaching” that the author had given him. Paul was always afraid that people were going to come along after him and tell the people of the churches Paul had founded something different from what Paul had taught them. Whether Paul wrote this letter or not—he probably didn’t—this author expresses that same fear. Or maybe he’s just afraid that Timothy is becoming weak in the faith. He tells him to “rekindle the gift of God that is in you,” as though that gift were a fire that was dying out. Clearly our author is worried about Timothy’s commitment to the Gospel as the author had given it to him. He’s worried that it might get changed, and heaven knows we can’t have the Gospel changing on us, now can we.

Well, yes and no. We do guard the treasure entrusted to us. Today we celebrate World Communion Sunday. We celebrate the way we share the treasure of Jesus Christ with Christians all over the world. Every time we celebrate Communion we guard the treasure, we unite ourselves with the Christian tradition that has celebrated the holy Sacrament in an unbroken line stretching all the way back to Jesus himself. So we do what 2 Timothy tells us to do, but you see, I think there is a danger in this text’s instruction to guard the treasure. There’s a danger in most every Biblical text, and this one is no exception. Here the danger is the danger of stagnation. It is the danger of making the Gospel of Jesus Christ irrelevant by locking it up an ancient culture, an ancient worldview. By having it deal only with ancient problems, like the problem of whether or not one had first to be Jewish before one could be Christian that so exercised Paul. I can hear conservative Christians citing the lines “hold fast to the standard of sound teaching that you heard from me” and “guard the treasure that has been entrusted to you” as proof that Christians must take the Bible literally, must teach the faith exactly the same way it is taught in the New Testament—never mind, of course, that it is taught in many different ways in the New Testament, something our hypothetical conservative Christian would probably not acknowledge. The danger in these lines is that we take them to mean that there is one literal truth that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and that our task as Christians today is only to repeat that truth over and over, insisting that it is the truth, the only truth, that never changes.

And you may well ask: Why is that a danger? Isn’t that how it is? Well, yes and no. There certainly is a core of truth in the Gospel of Jesus Christ that is eternal and unchanging. That core truth is that in Christ Jesus we know that God loves us, saves us, and stands in unshakable solidarity with us in whatever happens to us in this life and beyond this life. But here’s the thing about truth, and about documents that may contain truth: A truth, and a document that may contain truth, must be allowed to speak to different people of different times, places, and cultures in ways that they can hear and understand, in ways that are relevant to them, that, in the case of the Gospel, are Good News to them. What the Good News was to ancient Greeks living in the Roman Empire might be something very different from what is Good News for us; and what is Good News for us may be something very different from what is Good News to the impoverished people of a South American base community. The word from God that people need to hear may be different in all of the different circumstances in which people live and have lived over the centuries. For example, as the great Christian writer Eric Law stresses, it isn’t appropriate to preach only resurrection to the haves and only the cross to the have-nots of the world. Those who live in dire poverty need the hope of resurrection. Those who have never known poverty and never will need to hear that God is on the cross and calls them to be there too. The Gospel and how we are to preach it changes with different cultures and different places.

But here we have the New Testament saying that we are to “guard the treasure” that has been entrusted to us, and that sure sounds like we’re supposed to preserve that treasure unchanged. But of course our text doesn’t say only guard the treasure. It says guard the treasure entrusted to us “with the help of the Holy Spirit living within us.” So somehow the Holy Spirit is involved in our guarding the treasure of the Gospel, and the thing about the Holy Spirit is that we can’t possibly lock it up in a box. The Holy Spirit blows where it will, as we read in the third chapter of John. God the Holy Spirit is God active in the world, leading and pushing us in new directions as the Spirit sees fit. Anything that we guard with the help of the Holy Spirit is not going to be static. It’s going to be alive, dynamic, ever seeking new ways of reaching people with that core truth of the Gospel, the truth of God’s unfailing love and universal grace.

So: Guard the treasure? Yes. Today we share that treasure with Christians all over the world. Lock the treasure up in a box, in the limited understanding of the people of the ancient world? No. Locking a truth up in a box and insisting that it never change is actually not a way to guard it, for a truth that is locked up and considered to be unchanging quickly becomes irrelevant as the conditions of people’s existence change. A truth guarded that way becomes irrelevant, shrivels up, and dies. A truth that goes out to engage the world, to engage people wherever they are, however they live, that truth stays alive. So we may we guard the treasure that has been entrusted to us, but let us do it a way that is really guarding it, that keeps it alive, that keeps it relevant. If we can do that we will indeed have guarded the treasure entrusted to us. Amen.