Rev. Dr. Jared Michelson—Year C Proper 21

Anthony: Our final pericope of the month is 1 Timothy 6:6-19. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 21 in Ordinary Time, which is September 28. Jared, I would be grateful if you read it.

Jared: Of course.

Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment, ⁷ for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it, ⁸ but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. ⁹ But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. ¹⁰ For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.¹¹ But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. ¹² Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. ¹³ In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you ¹⁴ to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, ¹⁵ which he will bring about at the right time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords. ¹⁶ It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen. ¹⁷ As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches but rather on God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. ¹⁸ They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, ¹⁹ thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

Anthony: I’m going to age myself. I went to university back in the nineties and there was a song that had a line, “more money, more money, more problems,” and it became really famous. And yet, here in the West we pursue money, Jared, as with fervor and gusto above everything. We, in the United States, we talk about the almighty dollar. So, what commentary would you give to the church in light of this and what the text declares?

Jared: Yeah, I think we should definitely allow these. Part of what I think is so helpful about being in a church that reads the scripture, part of the helpfulness of the ritual of going through scripture, however you do that, is to be forced as a rich, wealthy person to hear words like this read over you. And by rich and wealthy, I certainly don’t feel rich and wealthy. But I mean that in the kind of global sense and in terms of wealth across time.

But again, even here there is a challenge. But I suppose this has been a theme throughout our conversation. I think there’s a way that this challenge comes to us, which is not for our condemnation, but ultimately for our liberation and for our good. I’m really struck by how later on it warns about the uncertainty of riches. And encourages you to towards another sort of riches. There’s a play on words there, right?

Anthony: Yes.

Jared: Don’t set your hope in the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides for us with everything for our enjoyment. This is a point where to go back to where we started this conversation, I think the message, what might seem to be the challenging message of scripture, actually really resonates with our culture.

How many of our great works of art, or even silly films, are about the uncertainty of riches, about people who think that once I have everything, once I’ve attained success in my career, once I’ve attained a certain status of wealth, then I will be happy. And they find that it utterly fails them.

When, ironically, when I was on my vacation this summer, I was reading a new novel called Perfection. And it was about these digital nomad people that move into a major city and they’re working online and they were seeking the good life. And they and their friends had tried every different way. They tried clubbing for a while, then they tried great food, then they tried great holidays. They were trying all of these different things. And in the end, the story ends with them in this kind of wonderful house seemingly living the simple life they’d been seeking the whole time and yet utterly bereft of meaning and of significance and of the sort of life they’ve really been seeking.

And I think this is the message of this passage —not wealth is really great but you need to obey God and so, you shouldn’t live for it, not this lifestyle would be really wonderful but you’re not allowed to have it. Instead, it’s what it’s pointing us towards — a better, a more lasting, a more satisfying form of riches.

I love Jesus’s parable of the pearl of great price or the treasure hidden in a field where he says, someone goes and finds in a field this buried treasure. And what it doesn’t say is that this treasure was so important that God made him give up everything else. It says, when he found this treasure, it was so surpassingly attractive, so desirable, so worthwhile that out of joy, he went and sold everything else he had so that he could get this treasure. In other words, he’s pointing us towards a deeper, more satisfying form of riches, not wagging its finger at us, and saying, you are trying too hard to be satisfied.

Anthony: Oh, that’s so well said. I love how you tie that together with where the true riches are and it’s in Christ where everything that is good and beautiful is found. And the New Testament tells us that greed is idolatrous. Yeah. It’s idolatry.

And yet so often we hold it up as a virtue. And it’s not that God is withholding for us, he just has the better thing to give to us if we would just receive it. And I think this is what the text is pointing to.

Jared: Absolutely.

Anthony: Yeah. So, what does it look like? This is a big question, and you can go a million different directions, but what does it look like to fight the good fight of faith and to take hold of eternal life? And maybe you can provide some commentary of how we’re doing it well and where you see us falling short as Christians.

Jared: Yeah. I think, maybe to be slightly provocative, verse 7 says we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. There is a quite brazen appeal here to heavenly mindedness. And in the late 20th century, early 21st century theology and biblical studies, heavenly mindedness got a really bad rap. There was this idea that the problem with Christians is that we’re too focused on eternity.

Anthony: Yes.

Jared: And we’re not focused enough on this world, or the material things or physical things or whatever it may be. And I’m not very sympathetic to that way of thinking.

And part of the reason, I almost think the opposite. I think we live in an age that is consumed by the immediate, that is consumed by … sometimes when people would say to me every sermon needs to be practical, I would say I agree with you.

But sometimes what I think we mean by practical is this needs to be something I can put into practice on my way home from church today. And I think the most practical things in life don’t work like that. They’re not just little life hacks that you put into practice to change your life. They’re about who you are as a person. They’re about restoring you and making you new. They’re actually more about virtue than just about following a rule.

And I think something similar here in our culture right now, as you might know, there is a revival —particularly among young people — of Stoicism, of a philosophy of life which is combating this obsession with immediate gratification, which we all have. And Christianity from the beginning has had a very complicated relationship with Stoicism.

When you read these first few verses here about contentment, it’s saying, look, there is something right about that. There’s something right about delaying gratification, about living for something more than immediate gratification, living for a standard or a virtue that goes beyond it. Okay, so there’s a grain of truth to that.

And yet Augustine famously mocked the Stoics as well because he said do you really think that someone — because Stoicism says basically, if you have the right attitude on life, then it doesn’t matter what good things you lose, you should still be able to be happy, and Augustine said that was ridiculous — do you really think that if you’ve lost a loved one or lost a friend that you shouldn’t be troubled, that you shouldn’t be profoundly devastated in the face of that loss? And he looked at the person of Jesus as his is motivation here: Jesus, the one person that of all people was most living not for the immediate but for eternity, whose entire life, as Hebrews said, was for the joy that was set before him.

In other words, the reason he could go through a life of being rejected and of what seemed like failure and ultimately of death was not because he had given up on joy, but because he was living for an eternal joy where humanity was reunited to God along with him. And yet, even though he had that vision, that ultimately all things will be made new, his joy would be made sight, when he looked at his friend Lazarus who died, even though he was going raise him again, he wept.

Anthony: Yes.

Jared: He fully faced the loss and the tragedy and the sorrow of life. And that’s what that Stoic vision misses — the fact that life can be broken and imperfect and tragic. And yes, we have hope but is a hope that is oftentimes through tears facing the reality of a broken world.

And in terms of your final question then, what does it mean to do that well? What does it mean to, on the one hand, yes, not think that I need to be immediately satisfied, to recognize that sometimes I will have desires that don’t go fulfilled, that sometimes life isn’t what it should be, and therefore it can be tragic and I can lament and I can weep, and yet also to do that with hope, trusting that there is a future joy, that this is not the end, and therefore I’m able to face those tragedies without being totally crushed, but still having in some broken way through tears and through suffering and maybe through therapy, hoping in something more. What does that look like? I think part of what it looks like, and this might be a strange thing to say, is accepting that things aren’t going to be perfect in this world.

Anthony: Yeah.

Jared: Accepting that what it means to be faithful is accepting when other people aren’t perfect, when your family lets you down, when the church isn’t what it should be, when the government isn’t what it should be, and saying, do you know what? This doesn’t make me give up. This doesn’t make me stop trying. This doesn’t make me stop fighting for justice and truth. This doesn’t make me hopeless. It makes me think that I can keep going. I can keep trying to fight for justice. I can keep pressing in relationships. I can keep doing all of that because I’m not expecting it to be perfect. I’m living for the joy that was set before me, which is already secured in the person of Jesus.

Anthony: Yeah. That’s so important what you’re saying there. And I think this gets at why Paul can write a letter like that he did to the church in Philippi while he is sitting in prison. It’s sometimes called the epistle of joy. He’s just gushing with joy in the midst of his dark, dank circumstances because of who Christ is, who has been so rich to provide out of generosity to Paul as it is to us. So, even when, say, we have prayed and prayed that we would be healed of some sort of physical infirmity but it doesn’t happen, we don’t doubt God’s goodness, his faithfulness to us because he’s already proven that once and for all in the person and work of Jesus Christ. And so, I think you’re really getting at something — that this life ain’t perfect. It’s just not.

Jared: No.

Anthony: But it’s good. It’s so good because of you guys.

Jared: I think you’re right, that those moments of loss, of prayers that are not answered — long prayers that are not answered — is where you, that’s where you know whether we’re alive.

This doesn’t mean you don’t grieve, it doesn’t mean you’re not incredibly sad. It doesn’t mean you, again, you might not be depressed or anxious or have mental illness. But one of the things I find really comforting, that I do try to encourage people with, is to say, when you say this person isn’t being healed, has God said no?

If it’s not too trite to say, God never says no. At worst, he says not yet. The miracles of the gospels, as a lot of biblical commentators have pointed out, when Jesus is going through this small land and he is healing people left and right, all of the illness and pain, it’s almost as if it’s wiping away what was.

And we say, why doesn’t Jesus do that now? Why doesn’t he do that for everyone? The answer is, of course, he will. That is a foretaste, a sign, the first fruits of the entire world being restored. Every person that was healed was actually a sign for us, that ultimately all tears will be wiped away. Ultimately, all pain and illness will be eliminated. All things will be restored. And so right now, yes, we lament, but we trust that the answer isn’t no, that the answer at worst is wait. The day is coming when those things will be set right.

Anthony: That’s such good news. And for our listening audience, you may not realize this, but often when I’m interviewing somebody like Jared, I’m meeting them for the first time. During the recording, we’ve, Jared and I, have exchanged emails back and forth to prepare for this, but this is the first time I’ve actually talked to him, as is the case for several of the guests that we’ve had, and I’m so grateful that Andrew Torrance connected us. I really do appreciate you, brother.

You’re a researcher, but I hear the pastor-preacher in you, and it’s so exciting to hear you exclaim and explain and herald the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, thank you for joining us. And I really do appreciate the team of people that make this podcast possible. Reuel Enerio, Elizabeth Mullins, Michelle Hartman — just a great team to work with that puts all this together.

But I wanted to remind our audience of something. Our friends, the one who’s gone before us, the great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, said, “Christ accomplishes the reality of our reconciliation with God, not its possibility. It’s done.”

And so, as Jared said during the podcast, let’s go be ministers of the gospel. It is such good news and it shouldn’t stay with us. Let’s share it with all that we encounter. May it be so.

Jared, thank you for being with us and as is our tradition here on the podcast, we end with a word prayer. We’d be delighted if you said a word of prayer over us.

Jared: Yeah. Thanks so much and thanks for your kind words.

Heavenly Father, we just do. We are aware that when we’re talking about these things, it can be very easy to talk about these issues in a podcast, whether it’s issues of racial injustice, issues of loss, of illness. And … speaking in a theoretical, abstract way is totally inadequate before the reality of what people are facing. But we do trust that in Christ you walk with us and enter with us into those injustices and into those tragedies, and you promise that injustice, evil, suffering, pain, none of this has the last word. And so, while we, and certainly my words are inadequate to evaluate those things, we trust that you are not. And in the name of Jesus Christ, your Son, we pray. Amen.

Anthony: Amen.