In Returning and Rest We Shall Be Saved
TranscriptioN
I remember telling some of you that during my ordination, I got to swing the thurible, and it was a funny experience because we swung the thurible to the procession song Oceans by Hillsong. And today I have just done a gospel reading under a disco ball. Thanks be to God.
Yeah, these are the moments. This is church planting right here. I'm so grateful. What a joyous weekend we've gotten to share together. I am so grateful that we've gotten to spend all this good time together sharing meals, a long hike, and other things. And it was a joy to have Reverend Summer Gross with us for the last few days. Grateful for her ministry among us.
And the theme for this weekend has been creating space for God, and part of beginning that desire is coming out here for a whole weekend to Front Royal—to set everything down for an entire weekend, which is very countercultural in the NOVA area. And this is such a great start to honoring such a desire for space for the Lord. And so I hope you'll take some of the material that you've had from the weekend.
I hope you take some time to reflect on the experiences that you've shared with one another this weekend and to utilize that to frame your life by prayer. Because what often I am tempted to do is to frame prayer in the context of my life—so that life happens and prayer is some subsection of it—but rather making prayer the frame for where life happens.
And so, in line with several of the themes this weekend, I wanted to look at our passage today—this exhortation from St. Paul in the Second Epistle of Timothy—to Timothy, I should say. So he is calling Timothy to remain in the tradition that's been handed down to him and that’s shaped him. And that tradition includes scripture—not as a body of proof texts, but as something, a tool of discovery, a tool of training, something to be lived, something to be preached and lived out and modeled for others.
Timothy's call is to fulfill his ministry. I've heard another translation say, "discharge the duties of your ministry," and I love that too. The point is, he's sort of at a swan song here. If you had some last words to give to somebody, what would you tell them? And these are St. Paul’s words to this young bishop, overseer.
It reminds me a bit of the prayer that the bishop prays over us when we're confirmed or received or renew our baptism vows. He'll pray:
"Almighty and ever-living God, let your fatherly hand be upon these your servants. Let your Holy Spirit ever be with them, and so lead them in the knowledge and obedience of your holy Word, that they may faithfully serve you in this life and joyfully dwell with you in the life to come, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
And so you and I have this call on us as those who are in the Church, living out life with Jesus—to follow Jesus and walk with the Holy Spirit, to grow in the knowledge and obedience of God's Word, to grow in what that even means for us as unique servants of God—to serve God faithfully, to discharge all the duties of our ministry, whatever God’s called us into. And fulfilling the duties of our ministry is hard. It’s really hard. It’s hard because we face daily derailments—maybe hourly derailments—endless crashing waves of unmet and upset expectations. "Lord, I thought things were gonna be this way. Where are you? Why haven’t you shown up yet?" We talked about that last week or two weeks ago.
And so this weekend, one of my hopes is that this weekend would be a reminder to us that you and I require rest, silence, and solitude at various points to experience the salvation of God—that if we're immersed in chaos, we will not experience this transference from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of the Beloved Son—but it requires intentionality. No matter how small, right? I know that silent time with young children is prime real estate, but the point is that there is an intentionality built into our lives of experiencing the salvation of God in silence, solitude, and rest.
So we have to know the sweetness of the gospel, the goodness of it, before it paints a compelling picture of the kingdom of God for others to experience. If we want them to experience it—if that’s our desire—then it has to be sweet and good for us first. And so Timothy is struggling here, and he needs encouragement. It’s why the letter is written. And I don’t know about you, but I can relate to him, and maybe you can this morning as well as you think about the struggles that Timothy is facing.
So as we look at 2nd Timothy this morning, let me pray for us.
“In the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and Redeemer. Amen.”
Well, first we have to create space for understanding the tradition that's been handed down to us. St. Paul has spent time in his letter mentioning how things around Timothy are gonna go from bad to worse with regards to persecution—the level of apostasy around him as people turn from the faith. He shouldn’t be surprised when those things happen because they're going to. But he's called, in the midst of that, to deeply root himself in the tradition in which he was discipled. And what tradition was that?
We know from earlier in the letter that Timothy grew up with a faithful mother and grandmother. So Lois, his grandmother, and Eunice, his mother, had raised him up in the faith—these two godly women that he was to learn from. He was also shaped by the community that he'd been baptized in. What lessons were there for him as he thought about the people that he knew? And then Paul himself, who was being an example of carrying on a life of faith—what was he supposed to learn from Paul as Paul had dealt with persecutions and sufferings? Timothy was certainly no better; he would go through similar things.
So take time to consider what shaped you. It’s really important to make space for that. Who has invested in the deposit of faith in your life? And if you can’t think of people in your biological family background, I can tell you that people in this church are part of that family who are depositing that in you. Every meal that you’ve shared, the conversations as they go deeper—these are deposits of the faith as people are investing themselves in you and vice versa. I actually care for your well-being, and I know that you care for mine, and this is true in the Church. We care for one another.
And so, what’s the nature of the faith that's in us? The answer, St. Paul says, is found in Holy Scripture. And in that time when he talked about Scripture, there was no New Testament yet. He’s talking about what we would refer to as the Old Testament. Most of the New Testament books hadn’t yet been written by the time he’s writing this, or they hadn’t all been yet recognized as Scripture by this time.
So he’d been taught the Scriptures—the Old Testament—as a young man. And Scripture, this Scripture that he knew of, was pointing him to the Jesus that the Church is following. And so he’s supposed to examine people who are causing opposition, potentially heretical ideas, by the standards of the Scriptures which he has been trained in, that he’s been discipled in. Again, the point is to understand Jesus in the Scriptures, but we need the Scriptures to understand this Jesus whom we follow.
And so, note the Scripture’s purpose: it’s not just a handbook of proof texts for the refutation of ideas, although it can do that. But according to verse 16, it says, “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God might be proficient and equipped for every good work.” There’s a proficiency and an equipping involved in understanding the Scripture.
And so within a hundred years of this time—in St. Timothy’s day, St. Paul’s day—within a few hundred years, the Church would discern through the Spirit which writings had the mark of the Holy Spirit, as the process of the formation of the New Testament canon would take place. But note that Scripture is both inspired and profitable—two things. It’s inspired, and maybe because of that, it is profitable.
Many of you took the opportunity to hike yesterday, and what an incredible hike it was. Various groups made it various distances. I was really impressed with the five-year-olds who climbed a thousand feet up switchbacks yesterday and hiked almost four miles. Ten would have been—I would have been super, super impressed. I would be impressed with adults who did that too! But yeah, I mean, wow. It was a stunning time on the Appalachian Trail.
And if you think about the Appalachian Trail, you can read books about it, right? There are books written about people taking a year to go hike this thing, and those stories are incredible. But reading about going on the Appalachian Trail is a fundamentally different experience than actually going out there and seeing beyond what’s just on Google Maps or Apple Maps, right? It was a beautiful 75-degree day. Some leaves were falling as the wind was blowing. There were steep inclines; you felt those switchbacks in your calves, and we were surrounded by beautiful fall colors. And doing it with friends is a whole different experience.
So Scripture, similarly, is not a book just to be read and comprehended like some other book to understand something about something. It’s something to be experienced. Scripture is something to be prayed, something to be sung, something to be meditated on in the quiet—for the Holy Spirit to read us through it. It’s something to be read multiple times, something to take in, something to experience and be trained in. It’s formative. It’s useful.
So we've got to create time to abide with God in His Word—as a tool to invite us into the life of the kingdom of God that He wants to bring us into.
Spending time with the Scriptures—reading it with the Church—is so helpful. One of the things I find really helpful is reading the Bible with the Church—finding some ancient writers. It could be a hundred years old, could be fifteen hundred years old—read with other people outside modern American whatever—and that can be a really helpful discipline: to read with the Church across time and geography. Note the holiness, the examples of people who have placed Scripture so central to their lives and have had to live it out in different contexts. But make space for that, because that’s the time we need to be grounded in the Word of God and to become the person that God is shaping us into. It frames our formation; it frames our life when we create the space to abide in God's presence with His Word.
And then next, we need to create space to name the story that God is telling. What story is God telling in your life, and how does your story fit into the greater cosmic story that He’s telling? St. Paul gives Timothy this charge: to proclaim the message—or preach the Word, in some translations—in any season, to convince, to rebuke, to encourage. And the first two of those, when I say “convince” and “rebuke,” sound a little harsh, right? It sounds strict. But the third one, “encourage”—we’re kind of like, okay, I can breathe easy. Encourage, got it, yeah.
But all three are necessary, I think. Encouragement helps us understand that the aim of those things is healing. Timothy is not rebuking in order to be right, to prop up his own ego, to show his own theological training. His care is for the salvation of someone’s soul. It is for the healing of somebody in their brokenness and their sin.
So these things are necessary—the reproofs, the rebukes, the exhortations, and the encouragement—all at various times. And we all have to name this distortion in the brokenness of sin in our own lives and our own unique and distorted loves and brokennesses—to discover the ways that God's grace comes to meet us and heal us in our own uniqueness. Because each of us have different stories, different proclivities—like, you know, a priest who overfunctions and decides at 6 a.m. to try and set up most of the altar stuff when we have an altar team. We all have our own unique proclivities.
People don’t want to do that today, right? They don’t want to name their own unique brokennesses. And they didn’t want to in Timothy’s day either—so it’s not new. It’s easier to blame-shift, to excuse ourselves, to bypass brokenness than it is to hold on to that little feeling of humiliation that we get when we have to admit that something might be wrong, or that we need help, or that we did the wrong thing this morning at 7 a.m. You know that little feeling of humiliation, right?
It’s easier to bypass those things, smooth them over, and walk away from them than it is to own it and to be curious and invite the Holy Spirit into those moments. But it’s sort of the scandalous part of the kingdom of God that it comes through admitting that our little fiefdoms—our broken fiefdoms—don’t measure up to the goodness of the bigness of the kingdom of God, where Jesus is Lord and we are not.
It’s easier to settle in my brokenness than it is to accept what I don’t understand about what God wants to do in His grace. And so the reason why Paul has this charge to Timothy is that there’s going to come a time where people are not going to want to hear what’s true. That must have only happened back then.
They’re going to believe whatever they want—what makes them feel good and comfortable—and then they’re going to make sure to surround themselves with people who think just like they do. That doesn’t sound familiar, right? Nothing is new under the sun.
And so Timothy is called to keep on preaching tirelessly, to hold out the gospel for people, to do the work of an evangelist—which isn’t just proclaiming the Four Spiritual Laws; it’s holding out the compelling nature of the goodness of the kingdom of God for people who don’t want to hear it—and to carry out the fullness of his ministry. And that call is not different for each one of us.
And so when people say they want to get back to doing things like the early Church, I often wonder what they mean—because don’t they realize that this was the early Church? The same problems then, the same problems now.
If you read Galatians, St. Paul has to correct Peter and say, “Hey, you really blew it. Your theology is great, but your table fellowship is not following in line with your theology.” Right? And he has to call him out publicly in a letter that is now in Scripture.
And so St. Paul has to undergo persecution by different schismatic groups. Later on in this chapter, he’s going to talk about Alexander the coppersmith, who caused him a lot of trouble. And this is not new.
And so it’s not like after the Apostles died, heresy stopped and—great, we got the deposit of the apostolic faith, there are no problems anymore! When did the early Church not have problems? Each successive generation had to deal with innovations of heresies, how people misunderstood Jesus, how they denied the fundamental goodness of creation—whether that’s people denying that Jesus was physically resurrected, or just spiritually, or that the spirit of the Christ came on Jesus at a certain point and left Him.
This denial of the fundamental goodness of the created body—that God wants to bring that body into His kingdom—is not new. All sorts of errors crop up over time.
So the task of the Church leaders like Timothy was to hold forth the goodness of the truth of the gospel without wavering, to do the hard work of examining the good deposit that had been placed in him in the face of all the opposition around him, to be grounded in it, to remind his people of the cosmic story of salvation that God is telling in Christ.
And that’s our call too—to this story that the world is broken, that it’s bound to the kingdom of darkness, that God in His love came to humanity in real flesh—not an apparition—to raise up what was broken and bound by sin in each of our lives by His death and resurrection, to raise it up—our lives, our whole selves—to the life that is found in God.
And that all creation, what we experience together in our lives, is a foretaste of what the cosmos are going to experience—that there is hope for the world around us because of what each one of us undergoes in this cosmic story of salvation—and that life is available to all who look to Jesus for their salvation.
This One was really crucified. He was really risen, and He was really ascended. And so in the midst of the kingdom of darkness, those who follow this Christ are like little lights of the kingdom of heaven right now. And as we live out the gospel, the transformation that’s brought about in our lives is a foretaste of what God is doing in the rest of creation.
It’s good to create space to think about that while you’re in creation. So go enjoy some fall foliage and think about the death and the resurrection in the context of colorful trees.
The story that God was bringing about in Timothy is the story that He’s bringing about in our healing and our salvation—as this foretaste of the greater narrative that He is doing in heaven and on earth.
And so Timothy reminds us that our call, our work, our call takes adequate retreat time—space. We need to be intentional about this. I was thinking, like, we need to create functionally—not ontologically—little monastic cells through the Daily Office, times of prayer. We talked about breath prayers—those are really helpful. Visio divina, lectio divina... I don’t mean like really create a monastic cell (unless you really want to, and then tell us how you did it), but create a monastic cell in your heart. Think of your household as a monastic cell where you retreat to carry on the rhythms of attuning yourself to the grace of God—where God attunes to you, where you listen to what He’s doing.
We need to create space for those times and those rhythms. We can’t fully discharge the duties of our ministry without the stillness and the silence that are so necessary for our rescue and our salvation from the kingdom of darkness, which is a daily experience.
And so I want to encourage us this weekend to hold fast to the deposit that's been invested in us. All of us are a part of this redemption plan that God is telling—the story that He’s telling—and in our uniqueness, God has gifted us and placed us where He has, both individually and as a Church.
And so, know the scripture not as a book to assent to a body of knowledge, but as an experience to taste and see that the Lord is good. Take time to name and be grateful for the people that have placed a deposit in you and are investing in you. In this deposit of faith in your life and who have done so with integrity. And as you go from the retreat, this weekend may encourage you to examine your own rhythms and insert the stillness and the silence that you so desperately need. The things that are going to carry you through the turbulent waves of this troublesome world, which is what our baptism liturgy talks about.
So I want to take a minute here to just pray in silence before I close us with a final collect. So I'm giving you a little bit of stillness and silence this morning, relative, of course. But take like a minute to just pray in silence and I'll close us with a collect.
“God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength; By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.
