"Wrangling Over Words"
Sermon Preached at Benson Presbyterian Church, Omaha
October 13, 2013
2 Timothy 2:8-15
In case you’ve been in a
coma recently, the US Government has been shut down. I’ve lost track of the number of days and it
started out about stopping the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare as it has been
nicknamed. I’m certainly not going to
get into a discussion in this sermon over who is right or wrong in this whole
mess or how to fix it or anything like that.
But I am going to quote an authority on this, comedian and late night
host Jimmy Kimmel.
According to the Los
Angeles Times, “The late-night show host mocked this misinformed opposition by
having a camera crew ask several people on Hollywood Boulevard if they
preferred the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. Most of the respondents
signaled their skepticism of Obamacare while heaping praise on the Affordable
Care Act. One woman -- who apparently liked the ring of "Affordable Care
Act" -- warned that Obamacare is
just one step on the way to a national gun ban.” I worry about the state of our national
discourse when people don’t realize that an act of Congress by any other name
can smell as sweet or stink just as badly.
Timothy is told in this
second letter to warn his congregation before God that they are to avoid
wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. Unfortunately, Timothy’s congregation is not
the last congregation to have a problem with wrangling over words. The problem with wrangling over words is
that sometimes we can’t even agree with what those words mean.
Indeed, this wrangling
over words led to the controversy that led to the Council of Nicea and the
Nicene Creed. Christianity was rent
apart and literally came to blows by the controversy of whether Jesus Christ
was the same substance as God the Father or a similar substance of God the
Father. This little difference is
represented in Greek with just one vowel in one word which led my reformed
theology professor Dr. Ben Reist, to observe that Christians are those who will
fight to the death over diphthongs.
When the Emperor
Constantine converted not just himself but the entire Roman Empire to
Christianity it was this wrangling over words and other disagreements that led
Constantine to convene the Council of Nicea to codify what Christians should or
should not believe. The council came
down on the side of Jesus being the same substance of the Father and the Nicene
Creed is the one confession that all Christians Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant
and any other varieties all hold in common.
It’s good that we hold
Nicea in common because we don’t hold much else in common. We have been wrangling ever since. Should congregants be able to buy away their
sins with indulgences? Should the Bible
be available in churches not just in Latin, but in the language of the
congregation? Should priests be able to
marry? Should Christians be governed by
bishops or elected elders? Should
congregations be responsible to a bishop, to each other or should each
congregation just go its own way? I have
just it some of the highlights of what Christians have wrangled over down
through the centuries, but you get the idea.
In my own family, the idea of when people should be baptized is why we
are Presbyterians today. When my dad met
my mom he had been raised Presbyterian, she had been raised Baptist. Dad did the smart thing any young man should
do, he went to his girlfriend’s church.
They loved him! He sang in the
choir, he taught Sunday School, what church wouldn't want him! They did want him. But they told him he had to be immersed, that
the baptism he had as an infant Presbyterian didn't count! My dad believed that his infant baptism did
count and refused to be in his words, “re-baptized.” So my parents were married in Parkside
Baptist Church, but when they moved to Lincoln, they started attending and
joined a Presbyterian Church.
And speaking of the
Presbyterian Church, Presbyterians are excellent at wrangling over words. There is something in our tradition that
believes that if we just find the right words it will fix the problem. I always think of the English Civil War in
the seventeenth century. The Puritans
were waging war, rebelling against the English king and the Royalists. The war was over the King’s authority, but it
was also over what form the English Church would take. So the Royalists and the Puritans were
fighting a war and where were the English Presbyterians? They were gathered at Westminster Abbey,
trying to write the write the just the right confession. They wrote the Westminster Confession, it
didn’t stop the war and King Charles I ended up getting his head cut off. But, while it didn’t stop a war, the
Westminster Confession and its accompanying catechisms have provided religious
guidance and instruction to Presbyterians through the centuries right down to
you and to me.
This wrangling over words
can be and often is a good thing. It’s
how we advance in the church. It is how
we have opened ordained offices to women, to gay people. It is how I as a woman can preach for you
this morning. It is how we have English
Bibles everywhere easily available instead of worrying about being burned at
the stake for being in possession of one.
It is how we open our churches up, so they are easily accessible for
those with disabilities. It has led the
church to take brave stands against slavery, Fascism, apartheid and racial discrimination. But I think as we go forward, as we wrangle
over the issues that shape the future, that shape not just the future of this
congregation, this area, our Presbyterian tradition and our wider tradition, we
have to be careful how we wrangle.
We have to realize that we
now live in a different world than we were raised in. I spoke a minute ago about the Westminster
documents. Millions of children learned
the Westminster Shorter Catechism. My
father was one of them. We don’t seem to
teach our children catechisms anymore.
For good or for ill, that’s not how children learn anymore. We don’t live in a world where it is just
enough for a church to open its doors and to say “here we are” and expect
everyone to come. We are not in the
midst of a baby boom that leads to churches hip deep in Sunday School
kids. Churches that thrive in this world
are our in the world, holding services in school buildings, malls, public
squares, coffee shops. Churches that
thrive are fluent in new media, webpages, Facebook, Twitter. Churches that thrive spend their time tearing
down walls, rather than building them up.
And that’s where the real
tension comes in. When we wrangle, it
is always, always a tension between holding on the past and opening to the
future. We can never give up our tradition;
that is why we Presbyterians have a book of Confessions, going all the way back
to Nicea. That is also why we
Presbyterians are always writing new confessions, because while we all love
Nicea and because God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, our
understanding of God is always evolving.
Between the tension of the past and the future, we must live and love
and proclaim the Gospel of Christ. Maybe
it is my particular bent, but I believe our wrangling over words is right
thing, when it leads us to open more doors than we close, to tear down more
fences than we build. We have to
remember what it says in that letter to Timothy, that the word of God is not
chained. We cannot be the ones to chain
it up, like Bibles were chained to the pulpits in medieval times.
We also have to be careful
about the message we are sending out as Christians. I work part time at a call center here in
Omaha. For October our bosses have
relaxed the dress code and we can all wear our t-shirts and jeans. It’s not like people can see us over the
phone, after all. I’ve so far graced
them with my, “The Force is Strong With This One” shirt and my “B&G Home of
the Loose Meat Sandwich” shirt. Last
week, a young woman was wearing a shirt that said, “La Vie Est Belle.” When she walked past my station I looked up
at her and smiled and said, “Life is Beautiful!” She stopped short and turned to me and said,
“Is that what it means?” I was
appalled. “Yes, that’s what it
means! Didn’t you know? It could say anything!” She shrugged, “I just bought it the other
day.” She walked away.
When I posted this
incident on Facebook or when I told it to family and friends, I got a lot of
suggestions about what the shirt could have said, not one of which I can say in
church. What message are we walking
around proclaiming? Is it welcome in the
name of Christ? Is it you don’t quite
fit in here?
Remember, it says in that
letter to Timothy and to us, “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a
descendant of David—that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the
point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not
chained.” The Word of God is not
chained. Unless we chain it.
Amen.
