The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
October 7, 2007
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Introduction to the
Scripture:
In the letter we will hear today, from Paul’s second letter to Timothy, Paul does something rather remarkable. He thanks Timothy’s mother and he thanks his grandmother. I say it is remarkable, because it does not happen very much in scripture, and in particular in Paul’s letters. All of the letters attributed to Paul tend to be densely theological, with very little reference to other people in his life, especially to women. So when Paul does refer to others, they are so rarely female that these references catch our attention.
Some people have speculated that Paul did not write the letters to Timothy. They have a different feel to them, and some of the ideas don’t fit with other things Paul says. The letters to Timothy sound like they were written later. By the time this letter was written, probably the first part of the second century, at least one generation of early Christians has passed from the scene, and the church was struggling with issues of right teaching and perhaps a bit of discouragement.
But the point is that they were written in the name of Paul, and probably there are authentic fragments from Paul within the text. Timothy was known elsewhere in the New Testament. So these were real people whose names would matter, and that is why the church saved these letters and we read them today.
But here Paul thanks both Timothy’s mother and his grandmother, for the gift of faith, and for teaching Timothy both how to live and how to be a leader in the new Christian church. “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.” Paul tells Timothy.
What makes this more remarkable is that in 1Timothy, the letter that comes before this, in scripture, says something entirely different. In 1 Timothy Paul instructs women to “learn in silence with full submission” and says that they should not be permitted to teach or lead.
In Christian traditions that do not believe women should be ordained as ministers, which still, my brothers and sisters, are the majority of the Christian church, that text from 1 Timothy is the one they turn to: to tell their women that they should be quiet, submissive and stay out of leadership, and definitely out of the pulpit.
Obviously, other Christian traditions have decided to view that text differently, like our own UCC, not as the voice of God but as the voice on one man in a culture that was very different from our own. There are all sorts of verses in scripture about women that today we choose to view as backwards. Women were in no way treated as equals to men, and so it’s no surprise that the early Christians who wrote letters to one another didn’t always treat each other as equals either.
So that’s why this letter is interesting. Here Paul does
acknowledge the power of women, in passing along the faith, with a passage that
despite coming from a different place and time may strike your heart and remind
you of the mighty women from your own past. A reading from Paul’s second letter
to Timothy.
Scripture: 2 Timothy 1: 1-7
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of
God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, To Timothy,
my beloved child: Grace, mercy, and
peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.
I am grateful to God-whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my
ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. Recalling your tears, I long to see you so
that I may be filled with joy. I am
reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother
Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the
gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did
not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and
of self-discipline.
Sermon:
The smell of waffles is what I remember most clearly. It would waft through the small living room, and back to where I was staying, and I would awake to the smell of waffles. Nobody but my father’s mother, Nana, to me, would make me waffles.
She had an old waffle maker that I believe she had gotten
when she first got married, and whenever I would visit her in her modest home
in
There, in that small one story house they had lived in for the second half of their adult lives, after the small home from which they had launched three children, I would sit at that old Formica® table feeling like a little princess. Because grandmothers can make you feel that way.
Now, it wasn’t as if my own parents didn’t love me. It wasn’t as if I was deprived of breakfast at home. But I never got homemade waffles. Grandparents can love in a more extravagant way, can’t they?
For as loving as Nana was, I doubt she was able to hover over each of her own three children with that kind of care. Their schedules and needs would have competed with one another, and besides, she wasn’t born a grandmother. She came into that, I imagine, and I was the happy beneficiary of an extravagant love that was more than I deserved but everything I wanted.
I think of that old waffle iron, and the kitchen table, twenty years older than I was, a table that I never saw replaced in my life time. I think of the simplicity with which Nana lived. I recall the old iron washtub she kept in her basement, and my amazement at discovering an old black and white photograph, of my father, his brother and his sister all under the age of five, being bathed in it, at once.
She never threw that tub away, partly because she was a frugal person, but partly to remind us, her grandchildren, that life had been simpler. They had made do with so much less than we have today, and that tub in her basement was a reminder, as was the waffle iron, kept and cleaned and repaired over the decades when any modern family would have bought a new one at Target.
“I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.” Paul tells Timothy.
And I remember Nana’s sincere faith, her absolute devotion to her church. She and granddaddy never missed a Sunday. and they went on to have two grandchildren, myself and my cousin Dan, who would go on to become ministers. Interestingly, it was not their own children who did this, but their grandchildren.
There is a way in which grandparents may sometimes be better at transmitting the faith than the parents.
And how many of you have experienced that?
The gift of faith that skips a generation, the gift of a grandmother’s unconditional love, the gift of wisdom that comes from another era and reminds us that the way things are today is not permanent.
Older people who have lived through the latest trends ten times over can offer the young the gift of perspective, if we are willing to accept it.
I am not saying all grandmothers are perfect. We don’t all hit the jackpot. Sometimes we have to go outside our families to find our grandmothers. You see, I don’t believe that we have to actually be related to our spiritual grandmothers.
Many of us pick up our spiritual grandmothers here at church, where in this transient world, the generations get to care for one another across the lines of blood or family name. And now that my own parents and grandparents have slipped away from this world to the next, I look to all of you my church family for that wisdom.
And in you, I remember and look back at how my own Daniel grandparents taught me just by doing what they did. They lived modestly but gave generously.
There are so many material things that I have in my life that they simply said no to. They were not frugal in the stingy sense, but frugal in the generous sense. They wanted to save what they had so that they could give it away.
I believe they were tithers, who did not pick a dollar amount to give to the church, but instead gave one tenth of what they had. And they did it for so long and so consistently, that they never missed having that one tenth of their income. It had never been their’s to start with.
My hunch is that they gave away much more than that. They were untroubled by appearances, or flashiness, or even by style. Their lives had an inner substance. And their giving seemed to know no end.
There’s not much about my life that reminds me of my grandmother’s. Nana waited on her husband almost hand and foot. I seldom saw her sitting, only hovering, getting someone the next glass of iced tea, doing the dishes, preparing the next meal even before we had finished the current one.
I know she had once been a teacher, but gave that up when she married a man who had been working for the railroad since he was twelve years old. My father was proud that his mother had attended college, but we never heard from her about that. She was too busy serving others to tell you much about herself.
I do not want to be my grandmother. I don’t think I have the patience, or the temperament, and to be honest, I don’t think she would want me to be. But there are lessons I carry from her, and sometimes, I stop and look at my own life through her eyes, and find myself wanting to make a sort of Nana correction.
I live in an age when if you want to live a simple life, you are supposed to get a magazine subscription that will tell you how to do so. The media machine around the so called simplicity movement is astounding. Ads on every page show items that you should buy or consume in order to live more simply. The perfect shelving system will eliminate your clutter problem. The elegant recipe you can make in thirty minutes and then serve to a party of twelve, illustrated in this glossy photograph of handsome men and elegant women holding wine glasses around spare flower arrangements, probably talking about art, but making it all look so simple.
But do you know any real people like that? Most of us have not solved our own clutter problem. And buying more items in order to solve it probably isn’t the answer. Most of us deal with a broken appliance by getting a new one, but knowing that we don’t really want to buy into a culture of disposability, we hold on to the broken one. We have areas in our houses so full of such useless objects, we can not find the ones we need, and so then it’s back to the store.
And our personal finances reflect some of this chaos as well, as some of us make impulse decisions about the wrong things, only to discover there is not enough for the right things. And what are the right things?
I return here to the faith that is passed down from grandmothers, and a generosity of spirit that came from loving God more than things, and people more than possessions. I think that in being generous with our money, we don’t just change the world, we change ourselves.
Sometimes I think that I am a materialistic person trapped in a spiritual body. Or at least a spiritual job. I am not an ascetic who cares nothing for the things of this world.
I am sort of materialistic. I say this not so that you will excuse it, or tell me that I am ok. I tell you this because if I didn’t say it, it would be obvious anyway, and besides, I think I am not alone.
We live and breathe the air of consumption, and we walk this fine line. On the one hand, the materialist, the person who delights in material things, has an appreciation of beauty, a delight in well-made crafts, a curiosity about art and design, whether it is a fast car or an antique quilt. . It doesn’t have to be bad. We are material beings in a material world and most of us swim in that sea without even noticing the water.
But on the other hand, we can start drowning in it, shopping more when at home there is clutter, spending more when at home there is debt, fetishizing the shiny and the new, and missing out on what matters. And for that, there can be a voice that crosses the generations and says, it doesn’t have to be that way.
That’s why Paul, talking man to man with Timothy, chose to remind him where he came from, and invoked the name not of Jesus, but of his grandmother, who knew Jesus well enough to make the point instead.
“For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you… for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”
Paul didn’t bring up Timothy’s grandmother to make him feel guilty, but to remind him of what life could be. The church doesn’t call us to be generous to make us feel guilty, but to remind us of what life can be.
In a world that caters to desire more than to need, ambition more than our roots, I find that the image of my grandmother’s generosity is counter cultural. It’s what we want for our children, and it’s what we want for ourselves.
So that is why, at least for this materialistic person, I consider the call of the church to give, to be a gift to me. When I part with ten percent of what I have, I remember that amidst all the beautiful things of the world, the most beautiful may be our legacy. And it gives me a sense of balance, and even a little sense of peace.
“for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”
And on top of all that, God gave us grandmothers, to show us how it’s done.
From the Formica® table in a kitchen to the
communion table spread with good things, we remember that food is more than
what we put in our body. There are some foods that feed the soul.