Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost on September 25

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God who came to us in gentleness and in glory, who calls us to a faith both humble and bold.

Good morning, friends. When I read today’s portion of the letter to Timothy, I was struck by the shift in the middle of it. The writer is going along giving basic good advice, and then suddenly it’s an outburst of praise. We start with humble instructions on living well. Things like “be content if you have food and clothing” and “watch out for greed.” And then suddenly in the middle of that we get a glimpse of Christ in glory: Christ who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.

Even though I’ve read this before, I had to read it a few times to see if I’d missed something. What is this song to Christ’s glory doing here?

So today we’ll spend our time with just this one passage from the letter to Timothy, and the shift from ordinary to otherworldly that we see in it. We’ll think about why the letter was written this way at the time and what it might have to say to us now about who Jesus is and about how we are called to live as Jesus’ followers.

This is a letter addressed to a young church leader, Timothy. It has Paul’s name on it, but many scholars believe it was written by another Christian leader after Paul’s lifetime to offer pastoral teachings to the young church. The literary frame of Paul writing to Timothy may have helped that author to give mentoring and guidance to other leaders in the early church in this letter.

It was a time when the first churches were figuring out how to live, whom to trust, and what to make of the life and teachings and identity of Jesus. Early Christians were sorting out what the faith was going to be like, how to respond to Jesus.

Writing as Paul to Timothy may have allowed the author of this letter to reinforce the basics of the faith without seeming disrespectful to the readers. And we’re getting those basics in today’s reading (until we’re not). It’s humble advice about living a good life; things like managing your desires wisely, and not chasing after wealth instead of what matters. “There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment.” “The love of money is a root of all evil.”

The writer is advocating for virtues that already exist in Greco-Roman culture: virtues of temperance and self-sufficiency. Someone in this time and place wouldn’t even need to be a Christian to give the moral guidance in the first part of our passage. A stoic philosopher like Marcus Aurelius would approve of most of this teaching. It’s everyday wisdom that happens to fit in well with the author’s vision of Christian righteousness.

And in the context of an oppressive empire, some of the advice in this letter is tuned toward helping the early Christians survive by keeping their heads down and not making any trouble if they can help it.

But then things start to take a turn. After describing how dangerous it is to chase after wealth, the writer turns to the church leader and says what to do instead. “But you—you, human being who belongs to God—pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight. Grab onto eternal life even now.”

The call becomes more bold. Gentleness is paired with fighting the good fight. The leaders aren’t supposed to grasp after riches, but they are called to take hold of eternal life. We see now that the quiet, steady goodness of Christian living has a fierce side to it. The faith is more than it appears.

And then the writer starts talking about God, and suddenly it’s so much more. First, God the Creator, “who gives life to all things” is called in as a witness to the letter.

Then Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, comes in, and there’s so much going on here that the writer seems to lose the train of thought for a while. The writer tells the reader to “keep the commandment until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” So at first, it’s still about what the Christians are supposed to do—they’re supposed to keep holding the faith until Jesus returns.

But at the mention of Jesus Christ, it’s suddenly no longer just about the Christians and how they’re supposed to act anymore. The writer gets swept away into praise:

“Jesus Christ—the blessed and only ruler,

the king of kings, the lord of lords,

the only one holding immortality,

dwelling in light inaccessible,

whom no human has seen nor is able to see,

—to Christ be honor and power eternal. Amen.”

We’re lifted above what we can see in this world. We’re suddenly in a place of awe and wonder at Christ’s glory.

This song of praise might be a hymn or a text from the early church’s liturgy that the author is quoting once the topic shifts to Christ Jesus. In any case, as soon as the writer thinks deeply of Christ, we’re in a place of praise and glory.

It seems very different from the practical advice for good living where we started. There’s some creative dissonance, some fruitful tension, in the tone of this passage—we move from instructions on how to live a gentle, contented good life to a vision of grandeur with Christ in glory. It may feel jarring at first, but we can see how it comes together.

We see a picture of early Christianity here that is humble and bold at the same time. People who are just trying to live decent lives and take care of each other and find contentment in little things are the same people who share a wild hope in eternal life, a wild hope that Christ who holds immortality and dwells in light inaccessible loved us enough become human and walk among us and die and rise again.

After this outburst of praise to Christ, we get back to practical advice for living well again: Rich people need to share what they have. We need to trust in God and not in wealth; we take joy in what God gives us, and whenever we’re blessed with something good, we look for ways to lift others up too. This is the kind of approach to wealth that we cultivate as Christians. This is how we take hold of the life that is truly life, amid all the distractions.

And this down-to-earth instruction happens with the song of praise to Christ still echoing in the background. And it makes sense that it should. After all, this is a hymn to Christ, to the Son, to the Word, to that member of the Trinity who became human. And the incarnation is all about God deciding to show up in regular human realities. It’s God who sweated and bled; God who probably smelled bad sometimes; God who got hungry if he didn’t eat; God who had regular human needs and leaned on the generosity of people who had money to meet them.

And when we notice that, it’s not out of place to move back and forth between praise to God incarnate and instructions about what to do in regular, everyday life. This is how it is for us in the Christian faith. We believe that God became human, and that God chooses to show up among us.

We believe that when we share Christ’s body in the bread at communion, we become Christ’s body together. We believe that when we do good, when we give thanks, when we share what we have, our everyday lives become part of Christ’s reconciling, redeeming movement in the world.

This is mix of the miraculous and the mundane is how it is for us as Christians: The indescribably holy brushes against the ordinary. “Here is what we do” rubs shoulder to shoulder with “This is who God is.” At the food pantry, cans of ravioli bump up against the seraphim. Bank statements tangle with the unknowable Trinity. We’re just trying to go for a walk or answer our emails or prepare a meal, and the mystery of the incarnation manifests.

This liminal space where is where we live, because the incarnation forever blurred the boundary between things earthly and things heavenly. Because of that, we’re called to handle earthly things as people transformed by a heavenly vision. We don’t pretend material wealth doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter in the face of spiritual truths—instead, we use whatever we have to help our sisters and brothers and siblings.

Our calling to follow Jesus is both humble and glorious.

It’s humble: We find contentment in simple things, we tell the truth, we share with our neighbors. We follow in the steps of these early Christians addressed in Timothy. We learn to be gentle and kind and steady. We build a life that makes us ready to be generous. These things are sometimes hard to do, but they’re not so hard to understand. So we fight the good fight, we try our best to live with integrity and love.

We plod along, hoping to make our corner of this earth a little better. But then all the sudden, we turn a corner and there’s Christ, blazing in glory, beyond any goodness we could achieve, beyond any wisdom we could comprehend.

We are called to a life of bold witness, a life where we claim eternal glory, a life where we trust that Christ who alone holds immortality, Christ who dwells in light inaccessible, is the same Jesus who lived among us and loves us and cares for us. And we believe that the Christ who is God with us, who is both gentle and glorious, still shows up.

We share a moment of honest grief, and there’s Christ. We listen to someone whose voice we haven’t truly heard before, and there’s Christ. We take a drink of cold water on a hot day, and there’s Christ. We pray, and Christ is with us. It’s like the Celtic hymn: Christ before us, Christ behind us, Christ under our feet. And this Christ calls us to follow him in a faith that’s humble enough to care about where the money goes and also bold enough to claim eternal life.

In some seasons, we lean into the humility of the faith; we do what’s right because we know it’s right, and we take care of people because they need taking care of, and we do our best to find contentment in the ordinary. It’s not always a blaze of inspiration, and that’s okay. We’re faithful in the basics. We do what we can to follow Jesus who was good to people.

And other times maybe, the glory of God presses in on us. Maybe we see the spark of divinity in every person and every sunset. Maybe the holy light of Christ in glory is always at the corner of our eye. For a season or for a moment, we find ourselves awestruck, on the verge of bursting out in praise.

The humility and the glory are both holy, both blessed, both true, both part of the life to which Christ calls us. Both these movements are part of our faith because they are both part of who Christ is, the one who calls us. We live here, in the paradox of Christ’s incarnation.

And we follow this calling together. We remind each other how to love well and do simple good in this world, and how to reach out for a glory that is beyond comprehension.

So friends, let us follow in the footsteps of early Christians whose faith was both humble and bold. Let us pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, and gentleness. Let us fight the good fight and take hold of life eternal even now. Let us be ready to share what we have in this world, and also ready to be swept away in praise of the God who is beyond this world.

And so day by day, let us follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, whose gentleness shook empires and whose glory lifted up the lowly.

Amen.