Concluding the Pastoral Letters | Pastor Talk

Hey, everybody.
Welcome back.
If you’re joining us afterwards or if you’re joining us live,
Becky, Carolyn, there may be others.
Thanks for being with us.
We kind of wanted to use today as a
wrap-up.
We’ve been in these two letters called the pastoral,
two of the three letters.
We did not go through
Titus, which I would encourage you to do,
though if you do that,
I think you will see
that in many ways it reads a lot like 1 and 2 Timothy,
different recipient,
slightly different issues, but many of the same themes.
And then at the end of this very short discussion,
we’ll also give a little bit of a preview of what may be happening in the future as we continue with the
Bible study.
We’re going to be on hold for a little while and then pick up with another study
as we move on.
But, Michael, as we bring these two books,
I think I said this as we opened this
study months ago, weeks ago,
I really appreciate it.
When you read the words of a mentor to a
younger worker in the church,
as a person who works in a church,
I think it gives you an
wisdom that Paul displays.
I think
there’s a comfort in these letters for me because they
seem familiar.
There’s crazy stuff happening.
There’s people who are unhappy.
There’s people who are doing good things.
There’s people who are saying something that Timothy needs to go put in check.
It feels like real life.
And I think maybe that’s what some people don’t like about these
letters is that they’re a little bit messy.
But as a person who regularly bumps into the humanness
of this thing we call church,
for me, it feels a little bit like home.
It feels familiar.
And to watch Paul try to help Timothy navigate it is instructive,
I think.
I don’t know how devotional
these are, but to me, from my vantage point,
they’re really interesting.
Yeah, I do think they are familiar.
That’s maybe a good word,
Clint.
I think that the pastoral
letters find a way of speaking the gospel in the common,
which is a really helpful place to live.
It may not surprise you,
now that we’ve come to the end of 1 and 2 Timothy, that actually,
for a number of reasons,
these letters have generally not been raised very high by Bible scholars.
One of those reasons is the providence,
or in other words, who wrote it.
There’s some debate about the vocabulary that’s in these books as it relates to Paul’s other letters,
and there’s a very ancient tradition of writing letters in the name of a very influential or famous person.
So there’s some argument as to that.
There’s also some argument as to the
theological weightiness of this,
certainly if you put 1 and 2 Timothy next to Romans,
and you’re looking for theological content,
you’re going to find more in Romans than you’re going to find here.
So for those, and many other reasons,
these letters have often found themselves
at the cross-section of the scholarly conversation,
sort of being pushed down a little bit.
And to whatever extent that’s true,
I think it’s unfortunate.
It’s maybe a reflection of when
academics study the Scriptures,
they bring their own frame,
naturally, we all do, and then they would bring the academic frame to the text.
Their questions are going to be more academic, their
theological inquiries are going to be more heady just by nature of the things that they do every day.
But to the point,
along a side here,
to get to your point,
I think when pastors read these letters,
when lay people in the church read these letters,
I think it’s very,
very easy to get connected to Paul’s engine.
It’s easy for us to understand why this matters, because
for people in the church,
we know how quick and easy relationships can turn,
how quick
misunderstandings happen,
how many times we find ourselves wrestling with how do we address this
circumstance, or where do we find ourselves on this particular issue.
Those are the things that
dominate the attention for those in that area of the kingdom.
And I just think Paul’s letters here reminds us, Clint,
that it’s not getting it right every time.
It’s not being theologically
powerhouses as a church.
It’s rather being faithful to the gospel that we’ve received,
and faithful to the people who were called to love.
And that looks like very practical works
of service and compassion.
And it’s amazing how Paul can shift between beautiful sort of prayers.
He can switch between devotional meditation,
and then he switches right into,
“And you need to be
quiet,” and he names a person.
That’s the kind of work of church,
and I think, to your point, it’s very relatable to our experience.
You didn’t say it exactly this way,
Michael, but I do think these letters suffer to some extent from their specificity in that
as Paul deals with very particular issues,
some of which are unknown to us culturally and historically,
and others, to be quite honest,
are a little offensive to us
in our modern, you know, the conversation about women and being silent.
That rankles us,
ruffles our feathers a little bit.
And so I think these letters,
as whole works, are not particularly celebrated.
You know,
I think you’re gonna find very few people who are just normal,
everyday church folks who say,
“Oh, my favorite letter,
1 or 2 Timothy.” Having said that,
I think most people who have been in church for a while are going to recognize verses like,
“Let no one despise your youth.” And as for you,
man of God, shun these things,
and
people suffer from itching ears,
and some of those beautiful descriptive
verses that Paul gives us along the way.
I do think these letters are instructive
in a different way.
They’re helpful as we look back on the history of the church.
I think they’re,
you know,
depending where you land on the issue of authorship,
I think they’re insightful
in regard to Paul and his take on things,
his approach to things.
Though, if you don’t think
he wrote these letters,
that probably doesn’t hold a lot of weight.
But I’m glad we continue
to interact with them.
I do think there’s wisdom in them,
particularly for the challenge of how
we live together as church and how we maintain some theological unity in the midst of
differences of opinion and differences of perspective.
I think there’s good.
These are not problem-free books.
There’s some difficult interpretation that they call for.
I’d be cautious with people who
take these books as
rubber stamps.
I don’t think they’re intended—well,
I don’t think they should
be used that way.
I can’t speak for how they’re intended.
I don’t think that’s a good way to read them.
But I do think if you listen to them patiently,
I think they can speak to you.
And, you know,
I don’t know.
If,
in fact, they are Paul,
they’re not Paul at his absolute best,
but there’s moments where Paul is really,
really good in them.
And I think that’s worth something.
I’m just going to completely admit to you,
right from the start here,
I’m shoehorning something in here.
I think it fits,
but it’s pretty shoehorned.
By way of thinking in conclusion,
you know, a thing that I have been thinking recently,
Clint,
is in some ways how sitting down in a process like
this and studying 1 and 2 Timothy,
taking months to do that.
On one hand, it gives you the
opportunity to slow down,
to hear the words both spoken,
and also some of that deeper theology and
life that lives behind the Scriptures.
That’s a beautiful invitation.
On the other hand,
what’s striking to me as I look at sort of the analytics of people who join us in the conversation, it’s interesting,
you can see as we went through Genesis,
we gained numbers.
And as we went to 1 and 2 Timothy,
people, you know, we came to summer and that kind of thing too,
but people sort of
dropped out of those conversations.
And I was reflecting on that,
and it strikes me,
you know,
the commonness of the gospel presented in 1 and 2 Timothy is really not as interesting as some of
the other more flamboyant stories or teachings in the Bible.
It looks like the living of everyday
faith, the kind of persevering one step after the other.
And I’m not suggesting that’s not
attractive.
I think the gospel gives us a way of living that’s very attractive.
But there’s a
very commonness, that’s the word I keep landing on,
to texts like this that I think is important.
It’s important as Christians to know that faith lived on the normal day in normal seasons is as
much faith as you have at the mountaintop or you have at the place of deepest,
darkest sort of deconstruction.
I mean,
it is good to live your faith with the simple.
And that is in many ways,
I mean, we pull out some things,
you mentioned that the words to women and things like this,
I mean, we certainly find occasions in both of these letters to see our cultural differences
with the original first generation church.
But by and large, Clint,
I think what I see in these
texts is just a kind of groundedness that is worth admiring and living into,
because that’s where the
majority of our life is spent.
And that’s a good thing.
Yeah, this…
Yeah,
hmm.
So I’m kind of creating this off the top of my head, Michael.
But
when I think of a book like Genesis,
I think the draw of a book like Genesis is that you
read stories that don’t seem like they’re about you,
and yet you find yourself in them.
Sure.
They start off strange,
and then as you understand them,
and as you live with them,
and as you enter them, they seem familiar.
Families with jealousy and making mistakes
and trying to make amends and being unsure of where to go next and what to do next.
That’s not the case.
When you get to a First and Second Timothy,
that story never really feels…
It’s names of people you don’t know,
it’s issues you don’t really resonate with,
some things you might not even agree with.
It’s a different…
It’s not narrative,
and it’s, I think, a more difficult literature to enter.
And I think there’s a sense in which it
more naturally holds us at arm’s length,
and we have to make an effort to get past that barrier
and really try to get in and dig around in the story.
I think Genesis does that for us more naturally,
and these letters,
it’s a little tougher to get there,
’cause we don’t even know
those people.
There’s just less.
It’s odd, ’cause it’s a much more modern text,
but in some ways,
it feels more dated,
even then the very first book about the very first people,
somehow feels strangely more familiar to us than some of our glances back at the early church.
I don’t wanna oversell this,
’cause there are certainly…
It’s clear that Paul
is making doctrinal or theological arguments against some of these challengers.
So there are things that Paul is saying,
“This is inside the faith of the church,
this is outside the
faith of the church.” So that granted.
On the other hand,
what’s remarkable is the few
books that we have that really speak to what the first generation Christian,
the early church, looked like,
what they cared about,
what they fought over,
like the really nitty-gritty of the church.
It’s not extensive literature.
There’s not a lot written.
And when you look at the history
of the church now reaching into thousands of years,
and you see all of the different conflicts
and fights and our predisposition to theological bickering and our theological gatekeeping,
when you look at how robust our literature is in the stuff you should and shouldn’t believe,
but then you look at these letters and see how much time Paul was dealing with.
Yes,
there are doctrinal issues.
I said that and I mean that,
but how much of these letters, by percentage,
are spent in the communal stuff,
the living it out,
the what do you do with the
person, and how do we navigate this collection stuff?
And all of those things don’t let people
look down on you, Timothy.
In leadership, you’ve got to assert yourself,
even though it’s just
those things strike me.
They struck me in this reading that we were easy,
I think, to glorify the stuff that we can get our hands on, the ideas.
But what we find in these letters is both those
ideas paired with the reality of living together,
something that reminds me of Bonhoeffer’s life
together, that book study we did a while back.
Definitely, if you didn’t join us for that,
make sure you take a listen.
But the gospel is practical.
And to my previous point,
that is helpful to get into it,
but it’s maybe less interesting than our compulsion to always
be right and control what we know.
And I think that’s where maybe these books push against us.
Yeah, it’s also an interesting matter of perspective,
again, to bounce this off a book
like Genesis or even the Gospels,
where they’re sort of told looking back,
recapturing a story.
And these letters are written with how do we move forward?
Where do we go from here?
So it’s very, a very different take,
even chronologically, I think,
in terms of trying to understand the past
versus trying to sort out messy stuff and messy moments in the present and the near future.
So, yeah, different.
I hope there was something in it that people enjoyed.
I think there is
very challenging and very thoughtful spiritual guiding words in there.
I think maybe you have
to look a little harder for them in some cases and hope you found some,
hope that there were some
that landed on you as we went through this.
So that then leads us to the question,
that’s natural, and that’s what’s next.
And we actually have a few things to share on that.
We are going to continue through a good portion of the summer with a new series that’s kicking off every Thursday,
that weekly discussion series.
We’re going to be tackling a series in
which we’re going to be sharing books that we have found meaningful.
They’re not going to be
really one genre, but they’re all going to be Christian,
but things that we found have impacted our life.
And the idea is lots of people like to read in the summer and there might be a
difference for us that you might enjoy as well.
And so our first one is going to release Clint tomorrow,
and that’s going to be going for five,
six weeks,
something like that.
And that’s going to happen every Thursday.
But in terms of the Bible study,
we’re kind of looking ahead of ways
before we kick that off again.
Yeah, we’ll be taking a break for a while.
We come back together.
We think we’re going to try to recapture that idea of being in the Old Testament,
being in some narrative.
And there were suggestions as we finish Genesis to just
move forward with Exodus.
The timing on that was a little tougher.
So we’re going to circle back
and this fall, commit ourselves or late summer, early fall,
commit ourselves to Exodus.
And we’ll tell you more about that as we get to it.
In fact,
we may even release what you’re hearing right now
in a sort of condensed video about the future.
But the next time we gather and we’ll let you
know when that is,
we plan to make our way through the book of Exodus.
Yeah, I think there’s some exciting conversations.
And I had not thought of,
I’m actually going to be given some thought to
your previous point there.
I’m still wrestling with that actually.
The idea that the pastoral
letters point us forward is an incredibly important insight as the church seeks to be
faithful to our ministry today because so much of the church has built our life together on the idea
of capitalizing on what was.
So we’ve thought of tradition as a very reliable guide.
And tradition as Reformed people matters deeply.
But I think to capture the idea that faith is always lived in
real bodies, in real time, in real context, that matters a lot.
And so I’m excited for some of the
thought that’s being put into some of the conversations that are going to be had next
fall and maybe even into next spring,
which I think it’s going to take very seriously those
questions about what does it look like to embody the concerns we’ve seen in these pastoral letters
in a real life living contemporary church?
How do we continue to seek to be faithful to the timeless
truth of Jesus Christ lived out in an incarnational or enfleshed reality in our present
moment?
I think that’s really helpful.
So Exodus will help us there when we get there,
but I think there’s some exciting stuff to come next fall.
So hope you’ll join us for it.
Yeah, we’ll keep you posted.
And thanks for being a part of it with us.