First Presbyterian Church , Saginaw, Michigan

Sermon from Sunday, October 7, 2007 by Dr. Robert L. Emrich...

“2nd Timothy 1: 1-14  “The Good Treasure”

Second Timothy is written from a prison setting. In it the apostle Paul or possibly someone using the pseudonym of Paul writes to Timothy, Paul’s young companion and friend. Timothy appears to have been at Paul’s disposal for a period of about 17 years from the time of their meeting at Lystra in modern day Turkey to the time of Paul’s death in Rome. Timothy was Paul’s messenger and closest companion. The letter was written as one of encouragement and instruction not just to Timothy but also to the new church that was emerging in the first century. That church was changing from a house-based church to one with a more formal organization and structure. It was a church that now faced persecution from without and heresy and false doctrines from within both of which  threatened the message and mission of Christ. This was especially true as that message was carried to the gentile world through Paul’s missionary journeys. Paul refers to Timothy as his brother and fellow worker. He also calls him his dear son.

I read Paul’s words and I think about the relationship I had with me mentor and dear friend the Rev. John Walter Purnell. It was my good fortune to after graduating from seminary to have been hired by John and the session of the First Presbyterian Church of Greensburg as an assistant pastor. Back in those days it was the pastor who selected his assistant. John had heard about me from his nephew who had graduated from seminary a year before I had. John invited me come to Greensburg to visit him and see the church. It was a delightful experience to say the least. John was a robust person who displayed a tremendous sense of humor. He seemed to be delightfully self-deprecating about himself. He was serious about the gospel but took himself and many other things in stride and with the proverbial grain of salt.

I had a bad experience in my search with another pastor from Maryland. He had come to seminary to interview candidates and wanted me to come to Baltimore to see the church and visit with the Session.  I drove down in my 1969 red VW beetle to visit with him. Things seemed to be going well. At dinner he asked me how I felt about the Viet Nam war.  I said that at first I had followed the logic then present of stopping communism and thus accepted the containment policy that started under Sec of State John Foster Dulles and continued under President Johnson. I then said that over the years I had changed my mind. Viet Nam was a civil war and we had no business continuing our involvement. Upon hearing this he became enraged at my honesty and literally dismissed me from the table. I drove back to Pittsburgh, the first 100 or so miles in shock and with tears running down my checks. Looking back it was a good thing. That experience did however make me a little gun shy, so when John Purnell asked me after visiting him for a while if I had any questions or concerns, I said: that “I did.” 

It was apparent that the war wasn’t going to be a matter of conflict. John, decorated for bravery in Combat with the 10Th Mountain division in the Italian Campaign, had made it clear to me that war was hell. I can remember him saying with an authority of someone who had experienced war that in war men are asked to bear the sins of the world. “Viet Nam for him was just plain wrong,” he said. So the war and how one felt about it was not going to be a problem for either of us. .

In seminary I had enjoyed my friends and going to a local tavern with them or gathering at one of our apartments on a Friday night and having a few beers. I was concerned about this enjoyment and how John and members of the congregation might view it. So I bravely asked: “John how would it be viewed if I were seen by you or some member of the congregation carrying a case of Budweiser into my apartment?”  Without hesitation he with a serious look and tone in his voice said: “Oh they wouldn’t like that and neither would I.” My heart sank a bit and I asked why hoping to get some acceptable explanation. John said: “We wouldn’t like that because we drink Iron City Beer up here not Budweiser.”  We laughed and I knew that I had found a place to learn to become a minister. For 15 years John was my mentor and friend. He taught me more about being a minister than anyone I know. He taught me about the faith as well. He taught me by the way he spoke, the stands he took on various issues. I listened to him preach the gospel and loved to hear what he had to say. He was a brilliant writer and a caring and thoughtful man. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about something he did or said that doesn’t resonate with something I am doing or attempting to do.  I wish I had a letter from him like Paul sent Timothy. It is good to be encouraged most especially by those who love and care about you.

I know this to be true and you know the same thing as well. In fact John did encourage me beyond my years with him. I treasure every contact we had after my leaving and coming to Saginaw. I especially remember the visit Buff and I made to see him and his wonderful wife Bernice shortly before he died.

We do well to think about being encouragers of others, especially our children. By encouragement I don’t mean dotting on our children. Some parents do this and some children get a swelled head about themselves that is not helpful. Every Christmas we receive letters from various individuals. The letters tell about the family’s yearly activities.  Some are quite wonderful letters others are just too much. In some of them we hear about how their children have made another million dollars, and we read about tremendous achievements, which make us wonder what is wrong with our own children. “What no Nobel or Pulitzer prizes this year what’s wrong with you kids?” And then there are those who rarely say anything about their children. Or if they do it is in measured tones of modesty. Braggadocio it’s just not their style.

I grew up in such a family. I was expected like all the kids in Garrison Keillor’s imaginary Lake Wobegon to be above average and to do well. So if you did well no big deal. My mother struggled to make me a student, which she eventually did. She and a handful of English teachers worked on my writing. I can remember one day talking to her on the phone and I had written a “Happenings” article about Letting Things Go. She said to me and her words are as clear and strong as when she first said this: “You know son you really have become a quite competent writer.” I was impressed and most appreciative because they came from her and she had been one of my most effective teachers and critics.

Paul mentions the sincere faith that Timothy has and then mentions his grandmother, Lois and mother, Eunice. You have that faith because they passed it on to you. Faith is never ours alone. It is a gift of God but the gift doesn’t so much fall out of the heavens as it is made real to us by people. I grew up in a family where I went to Sunday school and church. You were baptized into the faith and then you grew up in it and your parents were a part of a faith community that helped you grow in faith and hope and love.

 I grew up in good churches. They weren’t perfect ones. Along with the saints of the church there were the hypocrites and the people who were there for the wrong reasons. I was there because that’s what my parents wanted and saw as their responsibility. They took seriously the promise they had made to raise their boys in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. It was in my home that I learned how to be a good person but it was in my church that I learned about Jesus Christ and about God having a will for me and a way that I was supposed to live my life. It was in a faith community that I learned that life was not just a matter of being a good person but also a blessed, kind and faithful person as well. My guess is that I didn’t really know where faith started and ended for me.  I read that line about Timothy’s faith coming from others and I wonder what will be the future of the faith.

I think about my own children. None go to church except when they come home on a holiday. Carol and I are not alone in that fact. I know many of my colleagues and friends whose children see the church and a faith community as an unnecessary relic. I think it started with the baby boomers and to some extent the generation x’ers that followed. To be sure there are exceptions but the demise of mainline Christianity in America, the UK and Western Europe seems to parallel the growth of affluence and increased secularization of society. I lament this and I know many of you do as well. I preach this morning’s message as a note to all the grand and wonderful children who I have known and yet find what we do here on Sunday and throughout the week as peripheral to their lives.

I want to say to them:  “If you at some point don’t get involved in the life of the faith communities that many of you grew up in something important is going to be lost.The church was, is and ever shall be a generation or two from extinction.”  I say that not as a threat or to cause a guilt trip or to trick and cajole a generation or two so that the church will last another decade or so. I say it because the kind of faith community that I grew up in taught me to be tolerant and accepting of others. It taught us to rely upon God as a source of power as we dealt with the trials and tribulations of being a teenager or a young parent. It taught us how to deal with adversity and with the loss of loved ones like our parents or God forbid our children. 

The church that Timothy was a part of was experiencing changes that were momentous. The old leadership of the apostles was giving way to a new generation of leaders as the apostles grew older or were martyred. The church had to face the fact that the early-expected return of Christ was not going to happen within a generation. How was the church going to deal with persecution from outside itself on the one hand and theologies that corrupted the welcoming message of Jesus Christ on the other? We face similar challenges today.

Mainline Christianity is being attacked. In some places the attack is blatant and open. Part of the attack comes from the forces of a secular culture that has little use for any religious restraint on sensual pleasures. It’s goal seems to be one of producing the “Good Life” where the goal of living as the acquiring of a certain amount of goods and material wealth. This is contrasted with another phenomenon. That phenomenon is the rise of religious fundamentalism. It sees faith as being attacked by secular humanism and its response is the desire to create a religious theocracy where every one is forced to toe the official line that it wants to define. Many see in this religious fundamentalism a threat and their response is to reject religious sensibilities as irrelevant in some cases and just plain dangerous in others.

Meanwhile the great consensus of Western mainline Protestantism has been counted as immaterial and a part of some distant past. I lament such a change. I think we loose something precious if the message of tolerance, justice and social responsibility that I was raised on in a Presbyterian Church and taught about in a Presbyterian Seminary is left to die because of indifference and benign neglect.

Part of the problem is that so many are distracted. Affluence allows us to have so many of these distractions. And we work harder than ever. We see families with two people working and in many cases working harder than ever just to keep up. Now throw in a child or two and soccer practice and early morning ice hockey time and along comes Sunday morning and one is dead tired and so why not take a day off or maybe get some things done that need to be done?  And so the Sabbath day is a special day but not the day to gather with a faith community and be challenged about one’s assumptions about what really matters. 

Some say what we need is another depression or some great threat or calamity to bring our young sons and daughters back to the church. God I hope that’s not so. Maybe what we need is to call, or write or telephone or e-mail or text message or just sit down and talk with our children and remind them of how they became who and what they are. And remind them that this was not all by accident but rather because of those who went on before them and gave of the time and treasury to create the kind of church that would create the kind of persons they became. .

I plan to do that with my own children. I encourage you to do it with yours as well. I do have hope. There are in our midst young people and families that do get it and we are enriched by their presence. Their children will also be blessed because it is as a family of faith that we gather here today. Around this table we gather with Christians around the world. We gather to say to God: “Thanks be to you for your saving love made real to us in Jesus Christ. Thanks be for the community of faith that went before us and pray God by the power of the Holy Spirit for that church which we follow after us.” For we do in Paul’s words: “Hold firm to that which we have been taught and through the power of the Holy Spirit who lives in us keep the good things that have been entrusted to us.” For to God alone be the glory now and forever.  Amen.

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