Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost
2 Timothy 3, 414 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God[a] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: 2 Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. 3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 5 But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.
The internet is no substitute for proper medical advice.
No, no medical personnel present suggested I bring you this message, though I am certain they agree. Put plainly, you just can’t run to Google every time you have an ache or pain an expect to find the answer. In fact, you might need to tackle this problem head on. As soon as someone says “You know, I think I might have a dose of...” you need to be prepared to say “wait, have you been googling symptoms again?”
To be fair to Google, last year they began to partner with a handful of trusted sites to produce helpful information on some of the most commonly searched issues. Google “sore throat” it suggests the search “sore throat symptoms” (which seems a little redundant) and gives you a list. Underneath you see it comes from the Mayo Clinic, one of their trusted partners.
I share all this because I was struck by a turn-of-phrase found in the reading Shauna shared (“they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear”) and so I googled “itching ears.” I found pictures, I found phrases like “fungal infection” and I learned a new word: oto-rhino-laryn-gology. It turns out that if you have a bad case of itching ears, you might be referred to an otorhinolaryngologist. Use it the next time you see someone stick a finger in their ear: “Have you thought about seeing a otorhinolaryngologist?”
I want you to think of the author of 2 Timothy as your own otorhinolaryngologist, dealing head on with the itching ears among the early followers of Jesus, but before that, we need some context.
2 Timothy is one of three “pastoral epistles,” letters written specifically to support pastors, those in leadership in the early church. First and Second Timothy, along with Titus contain practical advice, encouragement and summary conclusions that are meant to help pastors as they travel about and build the church.
As such, it might seem that this is more practitioners’ material, meant more for me than you, but Luther (of course) would disagree, since we are all pastors (and priests) in the Protestant church. To use a medical metaphor, the health of the body of Christ (the church) depends on each member’s health, with itching ears just one symptom of ill-health. More on that in a moment.
The other thing we need to note about 2 Timothy is authorship. The scholarly consensus is that this material is in the spirit of Paul, rather than Paul, since it concerns the nature and health of the early church, matters that emerge as a concern after the death of Paul. My resident scholar would call it pseudepigrapha (she really talks that way) meaning something written in the style of someone noteworthy like Paul. This doesn’t undermine the words—it is still scripture—it simply places it later than Paul in the unfolding story of the church.
So what about these itching ears? Well, it’s a common enough image in the Bible, that ears have a role in the transmission of belief. Jesus is, after all, the Word Made Flesh, the Word being what we hear God saying through Jesus. Paul himself makes this point in Romans (10.17) when he says “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
Same for the time Paul visits the Areopagus in Athens, preaching about the “Unknown God” that he wants to introduce to them, and when he’s finished some say: “You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean."
So Paul and the author of 2 Timothy know that the ear is critical to teaching, both locating the transmission of faith in the ear. And just before the passage turns to the danger posed by ‘itching ears,’ there is a final reminder about the importance of the Word itself, saying “from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching,” he says, “rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” And just in case we didn’t hear it the first time, our short passage says it again: “Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.” Notice how ‘correct, rebuke and train’ becomes ‘correct, rebuke and encourage,’ but the lesson stands. Scripture is our defense against theological chaos, saving us from incorrect, rebuke-worthy and discouraging ideas.
Then some got itching ears. “For the time will come, he says, “when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”
So what’s an example. Well, if we begin at the beginning and look at some of the earliest controversies in the Christian church, we can get a sense of the problem. We can start with Gnosticism, the name itself pointing to a early problem in belief. Gnosis means “knowledge” but it came to mean “hidden knowledge” in the sense that people on the inside understood and people on the outside did not. This closed version of the church was sharply opposed by early thinkers, understood as a barrier to widely sharing this message of new life.
Gnostics also believed that the physical world (including the human body) is evil, and the next life is an opportunity to escape evil here below. And they were convinced that Jesus was merely God posing in some sort of Jesus suit, not really here among us, more in the Monopoly “Just Visiting” space in the corner. I think you can see some of the danger in these ideas: church teaching hidden from outsiders, the earth as evil, Jesus without humanity—but they are itchy ideas none the less.
How often have you heard someone express the idea that this is hell—meaning this life and the state of the world—and we long to escape. This is garden variety bad theology—gnosticism—that can do more harm than good. Imagine if everyone agreed that the physical world was somehow evil—what would that mean for he earth itself? Or our bodies are evil—how would we treat ourselves and others? I hope you see the problem bad theology poses.
And it continues. Three of the last four funerals I attended I have heard words like “we can’t know for certain where they are now” and it took every ounce of my strength to stay seated. The truth is we can know, and we do know, because scripture has the answer:
They shall hunger no more, neither thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat;
for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
(Rev 7)
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching,” it says, “rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”
It falls to us understand and use the scriptures in a way that brings life to our relationships and our community.
Imagine if everyone strived to “love their neighbour as yourself.” Or if everyone employed the biblical model of conflict resolution where you confront someone one-on-one and give them the chance to change their behaviour before telling everyone else. Or if everyone considered the needs of the most vulnerable in society (“the widow, the orphan and the stranger”) before worrying about the needs of taxpayers or consumers?
We can imagine because we work hard to know our Bibles, to put into practice the life-giving message found inside, and to live out the wish of the author of 2 Timothy “so that the servants of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” May it be so, now and always, Amen.
posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 7:47 AM
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