Sermon Proper 24. 2 Timothy 3.14-4.5; Luke 18.1-8; Genesis 32.22-31
“Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it.”
In today’s reading from the Second Letter to Timothy, Paul reminds us that our faith is hereditary. We learned it from someone who learned it from someone, who eventually learned it from Jesus. Isn’t that both obvious and astonishing? It’s obvious because it couldn’t be any other way, yet it’s astonishing because it doesn’t seem very real to us unless we think about it pretty hard. Maybe that’s just me – maybe I’m a bear of little brain. But sometimes we have flashes, though, moments of sudden insight.
One such moment came for me the week before last. I was on holiday in Rome at the invitation of a very generous friend and we visited the catacombs. These, as I’m sure you know, are the burial places of the early Roman Christian community, some dating back to the 2nd century, the one we visited to the 4th. They are underground warrens that spread for miles and miles, dug out of the friable tufa rock. They are outside the city, and the tunnels are dark and damp. There are hundreds of thousands of tombs, shelves lining the walls, like those Japanese airport sleeping pods but with rather more long-term occupancy. They’re mostly open and empty now, having been exhumed – but not all of them. They are surprisingly small, which reminds you how far back in time you’re looking. We’ve grown a lot in nearly two millennia. These little spaces in the crumbling rock, underground in the dark outside the city, made me think how fragile the heredity of the Christian faith is. How can it be that it has lasted, been handed on, down through so many centuries, to us? It made me think of how Julian of Norwich puts it in her famous literal nutshell: “It lasts, and always will, because God loves it.” And then it happened. I put out my hand and touched the wall of a tomb that was still sealed. As my fingers met the brick I felt an acute sense of living kinship with a Christian from 1700 years ago. We were practically shaking hands. With the kinship came gratitude. “Thank you,” I wanted to whisper, “thank you handing on your faith to me. I want you to know, what you did, we’re still doing it. Because of you, we know Jesus.” It’s obvious – and it was astonishing.
“Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed,” says Paul, “knowing from whom you learned it.” What we learn from our Christian forebears isn’t just information, or even just ideas or beliefs – it’s them. It’s who they were, and who they knew in turn. It’s relationships that we receive down the line – life stories. On the days when our faith is wavering – and by that I mean most days – we turn not just to our theology but to our friends, and to Christians who inspire us. I remember in my late twenties and thirties, once my theology degree was a few years behind me and I was running around the country messing about in theatres, and it was sometimes rather hard to maintain a Christian faith, often thinking to myself, “The Resurrection must have happened or Rowan Williams couldn’t have happened.” It’s a useful thought, try it. As we receive the lives of our forerunners, we receive their skills. Paul hands onto Timothy the Scriptures and how to use them, and also the example of his life. Special tools and living evidence of what they do. “They will teach you”, he says, “they will reprove you, correct you and train you in righteousness, as they do me. As you master them, you must hand them on to others. You must teach, preach, convince, rebuke and encourage.” Notice I say, “As you master them,” not, “Once you have mastered them.” We will never fully master the Scriptures. In fact our task is more to let them master us. Paul urges Timothy to “exercise the utmost patience in teaching.” This doesn’t just mean wait while your student takes their time to learn, although it does include that. To be patient means to be passive, be receptive. As you teach the Scriptures you must continue to be taught by them, and you must be taught by your student as well. As they get to grips with these special tools they will begin to work them in new ways, ways you couldn’t have predicted, and they will show them back to you in a new light.
Learning to use the scriptures is difficult. Simone Weill, the formidable twentieth century philosopher, religious seeker and political activist, suffered excruciating headaches throughout her life. In one of her famous aphorisms, she once said, “Thinking hurts. Do it anyway.” It’s not just the Scriptures that are difficult, it’s us. We’re confused, full of errors and recalcitrant. Any teacher will tell you that about their students, and any student will tell you that about their teachers. And we live in confusing times. So Paul counsels Timothy to be persistent – to do it anyway – “whether the time is favourable or unfavourable,” he says. It’s a messy business, this learning to be human. I remember a conversation once with an atheist friend who thought that any God worth his salt should have made things clearer. He couldn’t accept Scriptures that needed interpreting, and that could be misinterpreted, that weren’t a straightforward and clear instruction manual. Seemingly, he couldn’t accept a God who communicates with humans through humans. He suddenly burst out, “We can’t be trusted with this stuff!” That sounded like a prayer to me. We can’t be trusted, and yet God trusts us. The message from Jesus on the cross is, “Trusting hurts – I’ll do it anyway.” He hands us the responsibility, as he handed it to Peter directly after his denial, and so down through the generations. Unreliable as we are, we must undertake the work. We must wrestle with our forebears, our followers and ourselves. We must wrestle with the Scriptures. We must wrestle with God, not because he is difficult but because we are. As today’s Gospel reading tells us, it isn’t God who needs haranguing to act justly, it’s the unjust judge in each of us. So we must wrestle with God like Jacob, in the story we heard at Mattins. We must let God wound us. We must make him make us yield, so we can receive his blessing. So much of learning any new skill is about letting go of resistance. This takes work, because our resistance is habitual. We work hard to learn to let go, to learn new ways of working which at first make us feel out of control. We wrestle to get ourselves out of the way of revelation. Those moments of sudden insight, like the hand on the tomb in the catacombs, don’t happen unless we put in the preparation. We have to go out, climb down, learn the history. But if we do the work, if we wrestle, if we sustain some injuries to our pride, our possessiveness, our cherished limited beliefs, then, like Jacob, we might just catch a glimpse of the face of God. Discipleship hurts – let’s do it anyway. AMEN.