Preached at Holy Cross, Seend
2 Timothy 3.14 – 4.5; Luke 18.1–8
“Preach the word… in season, out of season”
Do you want to be a record breaker? For me, it all depends what sort of record I might be breaking. I wouldn’t to be like former Nottingham Forest manager Ange Postecoglou, sacked yesterday just 39 days after being appointed, and setting a new record for brevity of managerial tenure in the English Premier League.
Perhaps Mr Postecoglou might take comfort from the fact that he is probably the victim of forces well beyond his own control—a short-termist mentality that demands instant results, which has been produced by a culture that promises instant gratification, as long as we have the money to pay for it.
William Drost, Timothy With His Grandmother, Lois (early 1650s). hangs in the Hermitage, St Petersburg.
Today’s readings, although different in terms of form and style, both commend to us a different approach to life—one of constancy and persistence, especially when it comes to our Christian Faith.
Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy is written in the style of an old man, realising he is nearing the end of his life, giving advice to a younger protégé. Timothy has clearly been earmarked by Paul as a future Church leader, and his background contrasts dramatically with the first generation of Christian leaders, who all started following Christ as adults, many of them literally following Jesus Christ around the Holy Land while he walked the Earth. Timothy, in contrast, was born into a Christian family, and Paul seems to think His backbone needs a little stiffening.
We see another change—the earliest Christians expected Jesus to return and enact the Last Judgement very soon; in this passage, we get signs that they are starting to realise this Christianity business is for the long haul.
So Paul writes: “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season”. ‘Instant’ in the language of the Authorised Version means persistent; Timothy is to be persistent in preaching the Gospel even when it feels like he isn’t getting anywhere, and even when people who had been faithful Christians get distracted and drift into believing myths that seem to be Christian on the surface but lose the true essence of the Faith at their core.
In the ordinal, which is the order of service for ordaining priests in the Church of England, the bishop lists the jobs of a priest, one which is “to preach the word in season and out of season”, a phrase lifted directly from this passage. So we know that there will be times when the word is out of season.
At this time of the year, we’re very conscious that there is indeed a season for everything: since I last preached a week ago, we’ve lost nearly half an hour of daylight; the leaves are on the turn; the grass is growing much more slowly; nature is retrenching.
Our own lives can’t be an eternal springtime. And given that the Church has existed for around twenty-five times as long as a human lifetime, inevitably it has experienced the seasons repeatedly coming and going. We have lived through a long winter for Christianity in this country and across this continent, even as the Church has grown apace in other parts of the world. There are now some signs that this might be coming to an end—not any great revival, not yet anyway, but signs of a new openness to the possibility of Christian Faith, and a new curiosity about alternatives to a culture of short-termism and instant gratification. The intellectual dominance of the New Atheism, which seemed so entrenched 20 years ago, has almost entirely vanished. But we should remember how slowly the winter ends in our climate: when the snowdrops start to peep out at the end of January, harvest is still half a year away. When the first signs of Spring appear, it’s still mostly cold and barren—yet we are always cheered by these first signs that the season is on the turn.
And the Gospel remains the same regardless of the spiritual season. The trouble is that we, like the Christians of Paul’s time, sometimes want to preach another Gospel. We aren’t so different from people of earlier times. For example, we often have it presented to us that social media has created a problem of people living in ideological bubbles and only listening to people who already agree with them. Now, I have little doubt that technology amplifies this, but it’s hardly new behaviour. We always like to discover information that proves we were right all along, while it’s hard to find out you were wrong and have to change your mind. When Paul warns here how “after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers”—that people would look for teachers who told them what they wanted to hear, how different is it really from how people use YouTube?
The Church made a grave mistake in the latter part of the 20th Century as it de-emphasised what it taught about the world to come, fearing this was no longer credible in a materialistic age of scientific and social scientific experts, and started preaching a purely worldly Gospel, one which also seemed more credible to many clergy and bishops, bewitched by Freud and Heidegger.
Paul instead tells us the teaching we need to hold to is “salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus”. All we need to do to be saved is to have faith that Jesus Christ has already saved us. If that faith is sincerely held, it will change how we live in this world, and through that it will produce good works that change this world: but it clearly points us towards a destiny beyond this world.
Our Gospel reading comes towards the end of the very long section of Luke’s Gospel set on Jesus’ journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. It follows immediately on from a passage where Jesus talks to his followers about the future in apocalyptic terms; where he warns that those who try to save their lives in this world will lose them. Isn’t that a metaphor for the worldly Western Church of our lifetimes, which tried so hard to be relevant but emptied the churches in the process?
Having warned His followers of all this, Jesus then tells them that attractively off-beat parable about the widow and the judge which is telegraphed explicitly as being about being constant in prayer and not losing heart if it seems to be taking a long time for prayers to be answered. We are also encouraged by it to be persistent in seeking justice for ourselves even when we seem to be being ignored. There is much more that could be said about it but for this Sunday that message is enough.
So here are three things for the Church, and us as its members, to be persistent in as we wait hopefully for a change in the season – prayer, seeking justice, and proclaiming the unchanging Gospel.
You really have an eternal soul. There really is a great cosmic conflict for your eternal destiny and the destiny of the cosmos. Jesus Christ really did die on the Cross for us, really did open the way to eternal life for us by rising from the dead, and really will come again as our ruler and our judge.
This is as relevant to us as it was to Timothy, as relevant in Sudan or Samoa as it is in Seend. In a world where people are losing faith in the secular experts that once seemed so wise, and football managers can get sacked after a month in the job, preaching these eternal truths is the way to be a different kind of record-breaker: breakers of the scratched record that our tired, jaded, culture has become over the first part of this century, and thus heralds of a new Christian Spring.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top image: Snowdrops and Raindrops at Winterborne Kingston, © Gerry Lynch, 10 February 2018.
