"Wrangling Over Words"

"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.