Barbara Brown Taylor

University Church at Yale
250th Anniversary
Guarding the Good Treasure
2 Timothy 1:1-14

If you don’t slow down and lick at least one of your fingers, you’ll never find Paul’s second letter to Timothy in the Bible. This is especially true if you have one of those compact editions with pages as thin as dragonfly wings. Romans is easy to find—all sixteen chapters of it. So are First and Second Corinthians. If you bend the cover of your Bible back, watching the headings fly by while you flip the pages, you may even be able to find Paul’s letters to the Galatians or Ephesians, but Second Timothy—well, that takes really good reflexes, if not two or three tries.

It’s a tiny letter—just two and a half pages, in my Bible—one of the last three letters in the New Testament with Paul’s name on them. By the time he gets to Timothy, Paul is running out of time. He writes from prison, he says. Most of his friends have deserted him. Paul knows what is going to happen to him: the emperor wants him dead. All he does not know is when. While he waits for the sound of the guards stopping at his door, Paul writes Timothy--his “beloved child”—entrusting him with the good treasure that God has entrusted to him.

Timothy is not his child by blood. Paul, never married, as far as we know. Timothy is his godchild—his child by faith—whose family he has known for generations. He knows Lois, Timothy’s grandmother, and Eunice, Timothy’s mother—salt of the earth women whom Paul credits for raising his young sidekick well. If you do the math, that makes Timothy a third generation Christian, before the first gospel was ever written.

But Timothy’s birth father is conspicuous by his absence. Is he dead? Is he a Greek who has grown weary of his family’s Hebrew piety? Maybe he is just away on business all the time. Wherever he has gone, Paul never mentions him, nor does anyone else—which may account for how large Paul looms in young Timothy’s life. Paul is not just his teacher but also his family’s old friend, whose voice may be the only man-voice Timothy ever heard call him “my beloved child.”

Timothy has traveled with him, carried messages for him--has even, on occasion, stood in for him where Paul could not be present himself. “…how like a son with a father he has served with me in the work of the gospel,” Paul wrote the Philippians (2:22) just before sending Timothy to them. “I have no one like him who will be genuinely concerned for your welfare” (2:20).

Paul is crazy about Timothy and Timothy knows it. Paul is his rock, his mentor, his protector, his friend. When he is with Paul, Timothy does not have to worry about what he is supposed to be doing. He does not have to hunt around for the purpose of his life. As long as he stays close to Paul, he has purpose to spare. Inside the bright circle of Paul’s fiery love for God, Timothy can feel his own face glow.
So this letter has to come as something of a shock, sounding for all the world like Paul’s last will and testament.

"For this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher, and for this reason I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to him. Hold to the treasure of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us,”

Wait, wait, wait Father Paul. Why are you sounding so emo all of a sudden? I’ll help hold. I’ll help guard. Just stop sounding so—final. With all due respect, I mean. You’ve been in worse fixes than this before, and here we still are. Will the God who has brought you this far abandon you now? By no means! See? I didn’t even know how to talk like that before I met you. I’ll help guard the treasure. You have my word. We’ll do it together, the way we always have. Just please stop sounding like you won’t be there too.

But Paul can’t hear Timothy. He’s dipping his pen back in the inkwell on his rough wooden desk, leaning close so he can see to form the letters in what is left of the light.

“Now you have observed my teaching,” he writes his beloved child, “my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions, and my suffering the things that happened to me...” (3:10-11).

“…continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it…(3:14)”

“…proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching (4.2)”

“…always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully” (4:5).

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race. I have kept the faith” (4: 6-7)

That’s a lot to say to someone who could not have been much more than twenty years old. How was Timothy supposed to do all that? He was not an apostle. He was the apostle’s bag-carrier, message-bearer, cloak-fetcher. He didn’t have Paul’s fire. He carried the kindling and he was glad to do it, but how did that equip him to pick up where the apostle was about to leave off?

I thought a lot about you before I got here yesterday. I thought about this historic occasion, this distinguished congregation, this whole legendary place—by which I mean not only this famous chapel but also the venerable university in which it stands like an old but steady beating heart. I thought about the parents sitting here, the preachers before me (both in time in space), including some who have been my own parents in the faith. I thought about 250 years’ worth of Yale tradition backed up by 2000 years of Christian tradition, which is about how long the people of the Way have been communing with Christ in bread and wine.

Thinking about all of that, I decided that I did not have to make Timothy’s case for you. If you are here, then you already understand the full weight of inherited faith, hope and love: the family legacy (Remember where you came from, darling), the high expectations (Yale! We are all so proud of you), the call to responsibility (From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required). Guard the good treasure. I think you understand.

I think you are even allowed to feel faint. I know I do.

“…always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully…” Dang. There goes my fantasy of becoming an older-but-still-good-looking night-club singer in a red sequined dress.

“Hold to the treasure of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” Does this rule out running off with the Cirque du Soleil?

“Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us,” Okay, Poppa Paul. I accept the legacy. I give you my word.

The thing is, I don’t think Paul thought he was placing a burden on Timothy’s shoulders. Is that what you do to the people you love most in the world? Is that what you do to your beloved child? Or do you bequeath to that child everything that has made your own life worth living, and then trust that child to know what to do with it? My conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness—yes, and even my persecutions, my suffering the things that happened to me—because those things were my proof that the treasure was worth protecting, for you and for those who will come after you. If you have ever been lucky enough to suffer for something you loved, then you know what Paul meant. You know firsthand the mystery of pain-turned-sweet, as you guard treasure worth keeping.

I keep a wooden box of index cards by my writing chair, near enough so that I can reach over for them without scaring the cat off my lap. Though they are in no particular order, the cards serve as my own book of proverbs. Each one contains a saying, an image, or a phrase that I want to remember badly enough to go to the trouble of writing it down. The older I get, the more index cards there are, not necessarily because I know more but because I remember less. One card has been there for so long that I have no idea where the sentence on it came from, though I have looked at it so often that I have committed it to heart: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.” --Gustav Mahler.

Isn’t that surprising? Not Abraham Lincoln or Soren Kierkegaard. Not Os Guiness or Anne Lamott, but a late 19th-early 20th century composer who sat down to write music fully aware of what he owed to all who had gone before. I wonder, did he have to chase the ghosts of Schubert and Beethoven out of the room before he could hear the opening notes of his first symphony in his head? Did he have to play scales for an hour before he could forget what Mozart had done with those same notes? It can’t have been easy, conducting “Don Giovanni” with Brahms in the audience, or revising a Schumann symphony instead of finishing one of his own.

I am not a musician, so I cannot tell you when Mahler went out of the business of worshipping ashes into the business of preserving fire. But I know that by the time he died on a spring day in 1911, he had taken his place in the long line of Viennese composers that stretched from Josef Haydn at one end to Anton Bruckner on the other. I know that Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich and Aaron Copland all gave thanks for what they learned from Mahler. They did not worship his ashes. Instead, they learned from him how to preserve the fire, blowing on the coals that he and others before him had left them until their own flames burned bright..

That’s the way it always is, I think, no matter what your field of endeavor: music, math, football, faith. No one can give you fire that you aren’t willing to blow on. No one can give you a legacy that you won’t keep alive with your own breath. “For this reason,” Paul writes his beloved child Timothy, “I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands.” Guarding the good treasure means rekindling the gift.

When the Cherokee nation left my part of Georgia in the mid 1800’s—not because they wanted to, but because government soldiers forced them to with guns at their backs—they did not put their sacred fire out, at least not entirely. Instead, they raked live coals out of that fire and appointed fire-keepers to preserve them all the way to Oklahoma. Thousands of Cherokee died on that Trail of Tears, but the fire did not die. With no plastic cigarette lighters, no charcoal starter, no sulphur-tipped matches, the fire-keepers kept the fire going all the way from the forests of north Georgia to the stockades that awaited them a thousand miles away.

The fire-keepers suffered. The whole people suffered. Those who started out carrying the coals were not the same ones who delivered them. The sacred fire could not keep every person alive, but it kept the people alive. Years later, when the Cherkokee started coming home again, they brought the fire back with them. In the early 1990’s, when the first Native American Sundance was held in north Georgia, an elder showed up with a red jersey cloth that had been in his keeping for years. Inside the cloth were ashes from the sacred fire in Oklahoma, brought back all the long way that the fire had traveled more than a hundred years before.

Only no one had been worshipping these ashes. Instead, someone had guarded this good treasure until the day when the people could blow on it again. As everyone watched, the elder lay the ashes in the center of the cold fire pit, covering them with dry moss, pine kindling, and seasoned white oak logs. Then the fire-keeper stepped forward, striking steel against flint until a spark leapt into the moss and a little thread of smoke rose straight up. Though he was the only one blowing directly on the spark, if you had looked around the circle you would have seen everyone else giving their breath too. Together, they rekindled the gift of God that set their hearts on fire.

There are no third generation fire-keepers, any more than there are third generation Mahlers or third generation Pauls. Instead, there are Loises, Timothys, Benjamins, and Bobs. There are Marthas, Marias, Kwan-Lis and Shanikas--all of us here because one way or another we have consented to guard the good treasure with which we have been entrusted, rekindling the fire from generation to generation--both when we can see it and when we cannot.

Since this is a church service, I think I am supposed to say that this gift of God is the gift of faith, but I am willing to let you decide that. All I know for sure is that it is the gift of life—not just breathing in and out life, not just “getting by” life--but abundant life—life with real purpose, life unterrorized by suffering, life so connected to all other lives that it gives more life to everyone and everything in its vicinity.

If the life of faith is not that kind of life, then I am not sure that the world needs more of it. If it is that kind of life, then God won’t heal the world without it. In a moment, each of you will be given a chance to rekindle this gift, if you choose. The coal this time will look like a little piece of bread, and the fire starter will smell like wine. I am confident, beloved children of God, that you will know what to do.

Barbara Brown Taylor
October 7, 2007