Proper 21C (
I Timothy 6:6-19
Pr. George L. Murphy
St. Paul’s Episcopal
Church,
CONFESSING OUR FAITH
In a few minutes we’ll have an opportunity to confess our Christian faith in the words of the Nicene Creed. Shortly after that there will be another chance to confess your faith when the offering plates come around. And tomorrow and the next day there’ll be other situations – other “cases of confession” theologians call them. Maybe it will be a chance to help someone in need. You could take some time in a busy schedule to pray and read the Bible. Or there might be a time when you can speak up in a meaningful way against injustice and do something about it.
There will be lots of opportunities to express the basic commitment of your life. Sometimes we do that in church with special formality. We’re called to make a formal confession at baptism or confirmation, which is where the church’s creeds originated. That’s why we repeat those creeds on Sunday – to recall and renew that basic faith commitment.
But life presents us with other situations – unexpected, unstructured, messier ones. You’re with a group of friends and one of them starts making some racist remarks about a classmate. You can keep quiet and laugh along with the rest – or you can say something. You’re hurrying down the street and a homeless man tells you he hasn’t had anything to eat for two days. You can ignore him, blow him off with a quarter, or take him across the street to a restaurant for lunch. It’s your call.
Our First Lesson speaks about “Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession.” Jesus didn’t recite any creed in his trial before Pilate. The reference probably isn’t to anything that Jesus said then – which wasn’t much in any case. “The good confession” was the fact that Jesus remained faithful, that he continued to trust in his Father in heaven, even when faced with humiliation and death. His commitment wasn’t shown just by a few words but by what he did with his life when the chips were down.
A big part
of life has to do with money, and one of the concerns of our text is what we do
with it. “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” is the way the
NIV translates that familiar verse. Not
all evil results from greed, but a lot does.
You can make a bad commitment, just trying to amass as much loot as you
can, and end up, as it says, “pierced
... with many pains.” Or you can
make the right kind of commitment. When
we have money we’re told that we are “to
do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready
to share.”
You can give and should give to the church, but that’s not all. If you’re like me you get all kinds of appeals – and I don’t mean just ones from the widow of a Nigerian oil minister. There are real needs – food banks, environmental work, fights against diseases and political oppression, and others. You can’t give to all of those but you can give to some. There may be no religious language in those appeals, but contributing to them can be a way of confessing your faith – of putting your money where your mouth is.
None of which is to downplay the importance of what we do on Sunday morning with the creeds and all the rest. Look carefully at the verses in the middle of that reading from First Timothy. They speak about “God, who gives life to all things, and ... Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession ... [and] the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” You can see there the pattern of what would become the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, which were already emerging in the First Century: “I believe in God, .... maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ ... [who] suffered under Pontius Pilate .... [and] shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”
We are called to put our trust above all in the God who has created us and saved us in Jesus Christ. That is the commitment that was made at our baptism, and that we reaffirm whenever we say the creed. And every day we are given opportunities to confess that commitment and trust, and to express the belief that our words and deeds, small though they may seem, can, through the divine mercy, be means by which God is transforming and hallowing the world.