Sermon 16A -- 2 Timothy Chapter 1-1

Sermon 16A -- 2 Timothy Chapter 1-1

Last week we presented a review of the career of the Apostle Paul. We heard reports of his many travels and of his ultimate martyrdom at the hands of Nero. Today we offer the first of a two-part examination of the first chapter of 2^nd Timothy. 2nd Timothy is the last of the letters we have from Paul, written shortly before he was beheaded. The theme of the letter is commitment. Today we will begin with establishing context for the letter, then we will get into a discussion of the Faith Vs Good Works controversy:

From Wikipedia we read:

“The date of 2nd Timothy is shortly before Paul’s death. In many respects, this epistle is his last will and testament. In our view, Paul died in the summer of 64 CE. He had already gone through a preliminary trial, and the outcome was not promising. This letter should be dated within weeks of Paul’s actual death, for Paul’s request that Timothy try to come before winter would hardly have been uttered in the spring, and could not have been written in the late autumn.

Like several of the letters of Paul, there is some doubt as to who actually wrote 2^nd Timothy. Three main reasons have been advanced by those who question Paul's authorship of 1st Timothy, 2nd Timothy, and Titus—also known as the Pastoral Epistles.

• First, they have found a difference in these letters' vocabulary, style, and theology from Paul's acknowledged writings. Defenders of the authenticity say that they were probably written in the name and with the authority of the Apostle by one of his companions, to whom he distinctly explained what had to be written, or to whom he gave a written summary of the points to be developed, and that when the letters were finished, Paul read them through, approved them, and signed them.”

[Sidebar: This is not a trivial point: we read practically the same words when we introduced the letter to the Hebrews—noting differences in vocabulary, style, and theology, between Paul’s acknowledged works and Hebrews; we also noted that Paul’s students were known for paraphrasing expressions originated by him, with subtle variants as to style and content. Thus, more than any of the Synoptic Gospels, the writings of Paul were, by in large, produced by a committee—a committee whose various points of view created a perspective that was both slightly self-contradictory on the one hand, and gloriously amalgamated on the other.

Back to Wikipedia:]

• “Second, some believe there is a difficulty in fitting them into Paul's biography as we have it. They, like Colossians and Ephesians, were written from prison but suppose Paul's release and travel thereafter. 
• Third, 2nd Thessalonians, like Colossians, is questioned by some on stylistic grounds, with some noting, among other peculiarities, a dependence on 1st Thessalonians—yet a distinctiveness in language from the Pauline corpus. This, again, is explainable by the possibility that Paul requested one of his companions to write the letter for him under his dictation.” 

Whenever we have undertaken to examine ancient texts, the identity of the author always comes into question. The authorship of these documents is very important to many people—apparently they think that God speaks through people that they have heard of, but not through nameless figures from a distant past; many people think it is more important to know who wrote something, than to know what it is that what they wrote means. Indeed, it is a miracle that as much well-preserved material from this period has survived as it has, because of the wholesale destruction of entire libraries, (as in the case of the destruction of the library in Alexandria in 30 BC), that took place whenever a conquering people, with its beliefs, replaced a conquered people. Furthermore, we have seen that authorship of many ancient texts may be claimed by several anonymous writers. Nevertheless, many people still need the authority of legitimate authorship in order to put their faith unreservedly in the written words--words that supposedly came from God anyway. 

[Sidebar:  

“The Royal Library of Alexandria or Ancient Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. It was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the 3rd century BC until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 48 BC, with collections of works, lecture halls, meeting rooms, and gardens. The library was part of a larger research institution called the Musaeum of Alexandria, where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied.

The library was created by Ptolemy I Soter, who was a Macedonian general and the successor of Alexander the Great.  Most of the books were kept as papyrus scrolls. It is unknown precisely how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height.

Arguably, this library is most famous for having been burned down resulting in the loss of many scrolls and books; its destruction has become a symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge. Sources differ on who was responsible for its destruction and when it occurred. The library may in truth have suffered several fires over many years. Possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria include a fire set by the army of Julius Caesar in 48 BC and an attack by Aurelian in the 270s AD.”

I love the fact that all these subtly contradictory texts all add up to the same spiritual truth, and we must praise God for our good fortune that so many of these texts escaped destruction in the various purges that have plagued our social history. If anything, the controversy surrounding the legitimacy of these texts (texts that were either unknown, or were rejected by the Nicene Council of 325) adds to our appreciation of the texts that were ultimately accepted by the Church Fathers. All of the various interpretations of ancient writing yield contradictory doctrinal items, but we MUST remember that the bottom line remains the same—and this bottom line resonates in the depths of the inarticulate Cloud of Unknowing.

Now we will go through Chapter 1 of 2^nd Timothy line by line, guided by this summary provided by Wikipedia:

“II. Argument

After a brief salutation to Timothy, Paul commences the body of this his final epistle. The body of the letter begins with personal encouragement. 

“1:1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, according to the promise of life which is in Christ Jesus,

1:2 To Timothy, my dearly beloved son: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Paul begins by encouraging Timothy in light of his own desperate situation. He offers thanks for Timothy, expressing a desire to see him once more and reminding him to “fan into flame the gift of God” because “God did not give us a spirit of timidity”.

“1:3 I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my prayers night and day;

1:4 Greatly desiring to see thee, being mindful of thy tears, that I may be filled with joy;

1:5 When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.

1:6 Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.

1:7 For God hath not given us the spirit of timidity; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”

This naturally transitions into Paul’s own courage as an example for Timothy to follow:

“1:8 Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God;”

[Sidebar: There is a point here that deserves comment: it is hinted at in one of the commentaries below that Paul’s incarceration was considered shameful, as in the sentence, “Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner.” We moderns have seen so many movies and TV shows where the noble underdog is unjustly accused, that we automatically assume that being held by the bad guys is a good thing. Apparently this was not so in Paul’s day; in fact, much of what I have read recently indicates that many of Paul’s contemporaries did not unanimously believe him to be the hero that we now believe him to be; what seems to us to be unjustly shameful, must have appeared to most of the people back then as JUSTLY shameful. Paul was controversial even in his own day; thus, his imprisonment was not universally considered to be unjust. Who knew?

Going on:] 

“1:9 Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began,

1:10 But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel:”

This is the first clear-cut declaration, in the book, of the “Salvation through Faith Alone” doctrine. The Apostle Paul must have had a deeply personal relationship with Jesus to put so much stock in His saving Grace; notice the Word was given to Paul “before the world began”. More on this below.

Going on, Paul claims the role of teacher, and upholds his sufferings as the authority through which He transmits his Divine Knowledge:

“1:11 Whereunto I am appointed a preacher, and an apostle, and a teacher of the Gentiles.

1:12 For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

[Sidebar: That last sentence is quoted in one of my favorite hymns. I have only recently contemplated its meaning: what is it that Paul has committed unto Him? Clearly it is Paul’s suffering for the Good News, and the good works he has performed in Jesus’ name that are recorded in THE BOOK, and which constitute his personal restitution for Adam’s original sin. We perceive that these expenditures of Paul’s life energies will be recorded in the book and be repaid on THAT DAY—the day of resurrection and entry into Heaven. Thus, as Jesus will hold Paul accountable for his efforts and will reward him accordingly, we must admit two contradictions:

1. The law of Karma is clearly referenced here; Paul is saying that everything he has done for Jesus will pay him dividends in the afterlife—fair is fair, what goes around comes around. However, karma and the law were done away with through the sacrifice of Jesus-- thus Paul’s belief in his ultimate reward because of his works contradicts a basic premise of Jesus’ teaching.

2. Therefore, since Paul expects to be rewarded in Heaven for his belief AND his ACTIONS, we have an example of “Salvation through Faith and Good Works”, NOT “Salvation through Faith alone”.

These contradictions do not bother me—I have always maintained that the somewhat hostile disagreements, between people who believe in salvation through faith and those who believe in salvation through good works, was pretty dumb; as I have mentioned before, working from the inner to the outer was the path to salvation favored by Jesus, but working from the outer to the inner is also a powerful technique for enhancing spirit consciousness; it is hard to think that Jesus disagrees with this, since He was the master of Good Works. 

To reconcile this contradiction I have sometimes thought that possibly there is a natural progression here: first inner Faith leading to outer Works; and yet I must admit that very often external works, initially performed for their own sake have a beneficial effect on the soul. Back/forth, male/female, particle/wave —everything is connected and the ordering of events of a spiritual nature must always take place outside of time. This dichotomous problem of inner vs. outer bears on the argument of predestination vs. freewill, and is resolved by the same concept: OUTSIDE TIME.

As we have heard before, William Blake had a radical interpretation of the Inner/Outer dichotomy:

“One of Blake’s most famous works is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he brings together things traditionally seen as opposites: subject and object, inner and outer, soul and body. Thus, where both the orthodox Church and orthodox Science sought to demonize and downgrade the body – for being sinful, bestial, mortal or (worst of all) mechanical – Blake declares it to be the source of divinity in the world, and the embodiment of Imagination itself: “The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is, God himself, The Divine Body” (from Laocoön, Blake’s extraordinary piece of graffiti art, 200 years before Jean-Michel Basquiat or Banksy!). As he explained:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

Another provocative take on Inner vs Outer appears in The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment by Aldous Huxley:

 “Take the piano teacher, for example. He always says, Relax, relax. But how can you relax while your fingers are rushing over the keys? Yet they have to relax. The singing teacher and the golf pro say exactly the same thing. And in the realm of spiritual exercises we find that the person who teaches mental prayer does too. We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity…

The personal conscious self being a kind of small island in the midst of an enormous area of consciousness — what has to be relaxed is the personal self, the self that tries too hard, that thinks it knows what is what, that uses language. This has to be relaxed in order that the multiple powers at work within the deeper and wider self may come through and function as they should. In all psychophysical skills we have this curious fact of the law of reversed effort: the harder we try, the worse we do the thing.”

Another ramification of the Inner/Outer paradox appears in the writing of Carl Jung:

“For Jung, synchronicity is not a surprising coincidence of two outer events. It is a coincidence of inner and outer events. In addition, the coincidence is necessarily meaningful in the sense that it serves to advance the process of psychological development Jung called Individuation. Synchronicity is also necessarily acausal in the sense that the inner experience is not an efficient cause of the outer experience, or vice versa. As a result, synchronicity phenomena are by their nature inherently spontaneous and unpredictable, placing them squarely outside the scope of repeatable scientific study by means of controlled experiment.

Because the phenomenon of synchronicity involves an acausal coordination of the inner and outer worlds in a meaningful way, Jung viewed it as not exclusively a psychological or physical phenomenon, but as a "psychoid" phenomenon, meaning that it somehow essentially involves both psyche and matter. Thus, Jung interpreted synchronicity to imply the existence of a profound level of reality prior to any distinction between psyche and matter. In other words, phenomena of synchronicity represent a manifestation of psychoid structures present in the depths of a transcendental unitary reality Jung called the Unus mundus.”

I am particularly attracted to the expression, “transcendental unitary reality”, a “profound level of reality prior to any distinction between psyche and matter”. Thus, our discussion of the inner vs the outer really becomes moot when we ascend up the ladder of spirit consciousness beyond any semblance of duality. I have wondered many times about the void we seem to be engulfed by in sleep, and have been persuaded that that black world we enter is not absence of consciousness, but a higher consciousness that seems not to exist because our literal consciousness can find no expressions to describe it. As Jung says, a UNITY obtains at the higher level, and the paradoxes of material reality, that so confound us here, are simply diffracted radiations of the same sacred universal light. Thus, dreams (personal myths) and mythology (public dreams) simply constitute discrete elements of a consciousness continuum rising to an ever-more-focused identity, culminating in the level of consciousness we call GOD.

David Bohm, the great physicist who wrote Wholeness and the Implicate Order, has insisted that for every explicate order there is an underlying implicate order

"I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment...." 

Recently I have been reading Swedenborg’s Heavenly Secrets, and I found these wonderful paragraphs concerning the relationship between Inner and Outer; he begins by discussing the character of an “image”:

“What the people of the earliest church meant when they spoke of the Lord’s image involves more than can be put into words. People have no idea whatever that the Lord governs them through angels and spirits, or that at least two spirits and two angels accompany each of them. The spirits create a link with the world of spirits, and the angels create one with heaven. 

We cannot possibly live without a channel of communication open to the world of spirits through spirits and to heaven through angels (and in this way to the Lord through heaven). Our life depends totally on such a connection. If the spirits and angels withdrew from us, we would be destroyed in a second.

As far as an image is concerned, it is not the likeness of another thing but is after a likeness of it, which explains the wording “Let us make a human in our image, after our likeness.” A person with a spiritual character is an image, but a person with a heavenly character is a likeness or exact copy.” 

Now, here is where he gets into the Inner vs. Outer question:

“Genesis 1 deals with the spiritual person, Genesis 2 with the heavenly person. The Lord calls the person of spiritual character (or an “image”) a child of light, as he does in John: Those who walk in the dark do not know where they are heading. As long as you have the light, believe in the light, in order to be children of light. (John 12:35, 36) He also calls such a person a friend: You are my friends if you do whatever I command you. (John 15:14, 15)

 But the person of heavenly character (or a “likeness”) he calls God’s child in John: As many as did accept him, to them he gave the power to be God’s children, to those believing in his name, who had their birth not from blood or from the flesh’s will or from a man’s will but from God. (John 1:12, 13) 

As long as we are spiritual, we rule the outer self first and from this the inner, as illustrated here in Genesis 1:26: 

“and they will rule over the fish of the sea and over the bird in the heavens, and over the beast, and over all the earth, and over every creeping animal that creeps on the earth.” 

When we become heavenly, though, and do good because we love to, we rule the inner self first and from it the outer. The Lord describes this as being true of himself; and as it is true of him, it is also true of the heavenly type of person, who is a likeness of him.”

Here, we get into the main subject of the book which is about revealing symbologies hidden in the text of the Old Testament:

  

“In this passage, animals receive the first mention, next the bird, then the fish of the sea, because the heavenly person proceeds from love, which belongs to the will. Things are different with the spiritual person, for whom the fish and birds come first and the animals follow; fish and birds are associated with the intellect, which concerns itself with faith. 

Genesis 1:27: 

“And God created the human in his image; in God’s image he created them.” 

Image comes up twice in this verse because faith, which belongs to the intellect, is called his image, but love, which belongs to the will, is called God’s image. Love comes second in the spiritual person but first in the heavenly person.” 

Here we have presented a technique for spiritual advancement, similar to those recommended in other ancient texts—a step-by-step progression from one discrete level to another.

“While we are being reborn and learning to concern ourselves with the spirit, we are in constant battle (which is why the Lord’s church is described as militant). 

Up to this point our cravings have controlled us, because our whole being is cobbled together out of nothing but those cravings and the distorted ideas they spawn. We cannot rid ourselves of those longings and distortions instantaneously during regeneration; to do so would destroy us completely, since we have not yet acquired another way of life. Consequently, evil spirits are left with us for a long time to trigger our appetites, which then break down in countless different ways, and break down so thoroughly that the Lord can turn them into something good. This is the way we reform. 

If the Lord were not protecting us every moment, every split second, we would be wiped out instantly. Hatred against any aspect of love for the Lord or faith in him dominates the world of spirits, and the hatred is so deadly that it defies description. I can testify to the truth of this absolutely. For several years now I have visited the next world and the spirits there, though remaining in my body, and the evil ones (the worst, in fact) have crowded around me, sometimes numbering in the thousands. They have been allowed to spew out their venom and harass me in every possible way, but still they were unable to hurt a single hair on my head, so closely did the Lord guard me.

All these years of experience have taught me a great deal about the nature of the world of spirits and about the conflict that those who are being reborn inevitably suffer if they are to win the happiness of eternal life. No one, however, can learn enough from a general description to develop an unshakable belief in this information, so the details, with the Lord’s divine mercy, must come in what follows.

Genesis 1:31: 

“And God saw all that he had done and, yes, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.” 

This time it says very good but previously it said simply good, because now the components of faith combine with those of love to make one entity. A marriage between spiritual and heavenly things has taken place. 

In sum, they see spiritual and heavenly realities in the Word, completely separate from the words and names.”

In a crowd of wonderful expressions, the crowning words are left for the very end:

“In sum, they see spiritual and heavenly realities in the Word, completely separate from the words and names.”

In this short sentence the Saving Power of Jesus is proclaimed! How so? you say. In this way: the words and names, mentioned in the text, refer to the LAW, from which Jesus gave us our freedom. Thus, by reminding us, at last, that no single word of our doctrine may ever be said to be true, but only the spirit of these things. How does all this tie in with the inner/outer dichotomy? Like this: the inner/outer conflict depends on self-images reflected onto the screen of consciousness; only through the opposition of charged poles can such repulsion take place; thus, by defusing the IMAGE, by denying the power of words to summarize it, we achieve spiritual freedom in the Cloud of Unknowing.

There is much to ponder here. 

To reprise this material:

1. We heard that 2^nd Timothy is Paul’s last will and testament, making this letter a crucial summation of all that Paul thought was most important;
2. We heard Paul thanking his forefathers and friends for their support throughout his trials;
3. We paid homage to Him ”Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began”;
4. We talked a lot about the different between the LAW of Karma, and faith alone.
5. Finally, we talked about the role that the inner IMAGE plays in articulating heavenly ideas and carnal actions.

Let us pray:

Jesus, You see us trying to expand our consciousnesses to embrace the Divine Image. Bless our efforts, and protect us from false images. Amen.