Pilgrim Preaching

Prayers and Peace

Proper 20 | Pentecost 17C
(also the text for Thanksgiving B)

1 Timothy 2:1-7

Compromises in Paul's Later Letters?

One of the common criticisms of the pastoral epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus) is that they domesticate the gospel we know from Paul’s earlier letters. Paul had preached that a whole new age had begun in Jesus Christ and as a result, not just humanity’s relationship with God, but also the most basic relationships among human beings—those between slaves and free people, between men and women, between Jews and everyone else—had been reconfigured. Standard ways of imagining human beings to be ranked or separated from each other were no longer valid. While Galatians 3:27-29 is the Pauline text most quoted to demonstrate how Paul’s message wiped out the usual “us/them” categories, one can find language throughout the letters about how God’s impartiality and God’s grace for all have eliminated distinctions previously taken for granted.

With that news in mind, it is possible to read the pastoral epistles and come to the conclusion that someone—either an older Paul or one of his disciples—has given up on the gospel Paul preached. In place of a whole new way of understanding ourselves in relation to our neighbors, the pastorals seem to give us back many of the old rules: they commend hierarchy as a way to order life within the Christian fellowship; they call for men and women to have separate, tightly circumscribed roles within the community of faith; they give advice to slaves and masters that leaves completely unchallenged the ownership of one Christian by another (not to mention the ownership of one human by another). In crucial ways, the argument goes, the later Pauline letters abandon the grand, alternative, egalitarian present and future that Paul had previously associated so closely with the work of God in Christ. In place of Paul’s former vision is a picture of the church well on its way to making a habit of compromising with its surrounding culture. 

Prayers for Everyone

Is 1 Timothy 2:1-7 an example of that kind of compromise? Here the author urges that “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Timothy 2:1-2, NRSV). Do we have here the beginning of the ‘Go along to get along’ accommodation to culture that has plagued the Christian church for centuries? Does this letter encourage us to trade speaking truth to power for living in peace and quiet?

If we stopped at verse 2, these conclusions might fit with the text. When we read on through verse 7, a different picture emerges. It turns out that “a quiet and peaceable life” is only one of two reasons to pray for everyone, and alongside the second reason, “quiet and peaceable” looks less accommodating than we might have thought.

From the remaining verses of the text, we find out that we pray for everyone because God welcomes such prayer, and God welcomes such prayer because God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4 NRSV). 

Really, Everyone

“Everyone” is a lot of people, some of whom could hurt us, some of whom may even want to destroy our way of life. (Often I really want God to be more discerning.) 

Remember how Ananias, a follower of Jesus, heard in prayer that he was supposed to go to Saul, who had traveled to Damascus for the express purpose of arresting followers of Jesus? In prayer, Ananias updates Jesus, “‘Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.’ But the Lord said to him, ‘Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name’” (Acts 9:13-16, NRSV).

Is what Ananias went through the kind of peace and quiet God has in mind for us?

In 1 Timothy 1, when Paul (or a later writer describing Paul’s experience) had spoken of being saved, he described the experience in terms of his having been changed from a persecutor of the church to one strengthened by Christ for ministry. Elsewhere I have likened this re-purposing—this salvation—to the work of fashioning swords into plowshares. 1 Timothy testifies that God wants that kind of transformation to take place not just in Paul’s life, not just in the lives of other Christians, but in everyone’s life.

By mentioning “kings and others in authority,” the author makes it clear that “everyone” for whom we offer “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings” includes people powerful enough to hurt us and those we love. Imagine offering an intercession for the Taliban next Sunday. What might people say after church? Could you give thanks for the current president of the United States? For those in the Tea Party movement? What would happen if you offered supplication for drug dealers in your town? You don’t have to pray that God prospers their work, but you do have to pray for them. What would you say? And if you cannot pray for all these people, out loud, in church, why not?

Sometimes “everyone” is even harder as it moves closer to home: the guy who fired you, the friend who dumped you, the lover who, you see now, never cared about you at all. Intercede for that boss whose true, double-dealing colors no one else seems able to see. Pray for all of them. Pray any way you like, knowing that the One to whom you are praying desires them (even them) “to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”

From a text in one of the pastoral epistles, a risky, subversive way of being Christian starts to come into focus: we do not pray for the powerful in order to be left alone by them. We pray so that our paths may cross with these people—in Christ. If our prayers for them result in God’s deepest desire, the distinction between “we” who are saved and “they” who are not saved will disappear. 

Peace and Quiet Remixed

And what of that first reason the lesson gives for why we pray, “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Timothy 2:2)? This particular quiet and peaceable life is not a life in which Christians blend so well into the surrounding culture that our lives threaten none of its values. God’s desire is (and has been for some time) bigger than that. In Hebrew, the quiet, peaceable life about which 1 Timothy speaks is called shalom. It is peace, and also safety, wholeness, even friendship—for everyone. In our world this sort of thing often appears to be a long way off. That is, of course, all the more reason to pray.

On Christ Saving Sinners

Proper 19 | Pentecost 16C
1 Timothy 1:12-17

Making Friends with Paul

In 1 Timothy, at that place in a letter where we would expect thanksgiving for the letter’s recipients, we get something else. In this letter, thanksgiving is offered for the way that Christ has called Paul and made his own ministry possible. To those of us who are pretty sure that a follower of Paul, rather than the apostle himself, wrote 1 Timothy, this beginning brings a smile. One of Paul’s students sets out to construct a letter in the apostle’s voice. How shall he begin? Why not begin with content that can be heard as arrogant and self-absorbed? That’s it! Of course. I imagine the disciple reviewing his first paragraph and saying to himself, “Nailed it!”

(Most of us have had remarkable teachers who were like Paul in at least this respect: they were odd combinations of brilliance, arrogance, self-doubt, and foolishness. It may help when we spend time with Paul’s letters to offer Paul the same level of charity that we would give to the great, flawed, beloved teachers we have known.)

Mercy

So Paul, or someone trying to get Paul’s voice right, begins with thanksgiving for the mercy shown to him. Mercy is getting something good just at a time when it would make more sense if you got nothing, or getting something good at a time when you should have received punishment. To understand the gift of mercy that Paul talks about, we have to have at least a sketch of what Paul was doing when he got what he did not deserve. So Paul fills in some back story: in short, he was “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” (1 Timothy 1:13).

For more detail, one can look at the story of a mob-killing of Stephen in Acts. Luke reports that witnesses to the stoning “laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul” (Acts 7:58), also known as Paul. A couple of chapters later in Acts, Saul is “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9:1a). He requests letters from the high priest to the synagogues at Damascus, “so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:2). Paul himself describes his former life by saying, “I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it” (Galatians 1:13).

This is the one who receives mercy: one who was so sure of himself that he could claim to practice violence in defense of justice. In 1 Timothy, Paul says he acted in ignorance, as if he imagines that ignorance offers an excuse. It doesn’t, but Paul is not the only one to marvel at the contrast between the good we thought our actions would have and the harm we actually did. “I didn’t know it would turn out that way.” “I was trying to help.” “I didn’t think anyone would get hurt.” No matter what we intended, still, there we are, standing in the need of mercy.

Salvation: Swords to Plowshares

Having described his past, Paul goes on, “This saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15). Paul’s claim to be “chief of sinners” may strike many hearers as one more bit of evidence of his life-long arrogance. Yet it would be a mistake to get stuck in analyzing the flaws in a personality here. The thanksgiving emphasizes Paul’s sinfulness only insofar as it demonstrates the surpassing greatness of Christ’s work to save Paul, to strengthen him, and to call him to something better (cf. 1 Timothy 1:12). The words point beyond Paul, and beyond sinfulness, to the work of Christ to exercise “the utmost patience” in order to save blasphemers, persecutors, people of violence, and other sinners. Christ makes Paul an example to show that if Paul can be saved, anyone can be saved.

To figure out what it means for Christ to “save sinners,” we have to look back to the first verse of this lesson. There, we see that Christ strengthened Paul, judged him faithful and appointed Paul to Christ’s service. “Saving,” as Paul describes what happens to him, is not moving a name from one column to another. Saving is certainly not ignoring sin and the harm it does. Saving is re-commissioning someone for new work. It is taking a persecutor of the church and turning him into an ambassador of Christ. Saving is the human equivalent of fashioning swords into plowshares. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Paul should know. He is Exhibit A.

The fact that Paul is Exhibit A tells us one more thing about salvation in Christ. From Galatians 1-2, we know that before his experience of the risen Jesus, Paul was bright, zealous, ambitious, and quite sure he was right about things. From the rest of his letters as well as the testimony of Luke in the book of Acts, we know that after his experience of the risen Jesus, Paul was bright, zealous, ambitious, and quite sure he was right about things.

In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called, “Tapestry,” Captain Picard has an experience of seeing what his life would have been like if one particularly embarrassing chapter had been removed from it. Afterward, he confides to his first officer, "There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of. There were... loose threads—untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads, I unraveled the tapestry of my life."

Paul is genuinely remorseful about having persecuted the church, yet he cannot remove that thread and still tell the story of his life and his new life in Christ. In the end he comes to see Christ as having re-commissioned even this chapter along with all of the elements of his character that led him to do such a thing. At least part of the miracle of salvation in Jesus Christ, as testified to by the apostle Paul’s life, is that Christ does not unravel the tapestry of those whose lives he saves. He does not unravel anything, but out of that mess of threads and stitching, he creates something for the neighbor’s good.