(Jeremiah 10:6-16; 1 Timothy 3:14-16)

A lot of people will tell you that Christianity is all about following a set of rules—the only thing that matters is that you do x and don’t do y. That’s always been a popular view. After all, if Christianity is just about measuring up to particular standards of behavior—whether it’s the “we don’t smoke, we don’t chew, we don’t go with those who do” variety, or the “be nice to everybody” variety, or whatever—then it’s easy to tell who’s a Christian and who isn’t; and perhaps even more importantly, it’s easy to look at yourself and tell how you’re doing. The nice thing about a fence, after all, is that you always know which side of it you’re on. Or perhaps I should say, one nice thing about a fence; the other nice thing is that you know exactly how far you can go before you’ve crossed it. The fence tells you what you can get away with, as much as what you can’t.

I suspect that was part of the appeal to the folks in Ephesus who were following the false teachers there; we know that the false teachers were quite strict in some ways, but it seems likely that they were quite loose in others, such that things like infidelity and drunkenness were becoming problems among the leadership of the congregation. More than that, I suspect it’s a lot of the appeal for people who have followed false teachers like that down through the ages, right up to our present day. As I’ve said before, the longer I do this, the more convinced I become that we really don’t want grace, and we don’t want to live by grace. We may say we do, and we may sing about it, but at some level, we’d rather live by some form of law. After all, if you ask the law, “How many times do I have to forgive somebody before I can give them the punishment they have coming,” the law will tell you, “Three times,” or “seven times,” or whatever; it will give you a standard you have a chance to live up to. If you ask Jesus the same question, he’s going to say, “Seventy times seven”—which is to say, once you lose count, you’re just getting started. Law gives you a limit to what you have to do; grace is like the Energizer bunny—it just keeps going, and going, and going, long after we want to quit.

The fact of the matter is, whatever version of the law we come up with, whatever standard of behavior we set, if it’s our idea and our standard, we’re going to start defining it as something we can meet, something we can live up to in our own strength; we inevitably make it far too small a thing. It sounds all very well to say, for instance, “Christianity isn’t about believing certain things, it’s about living a life of love”; but how do we know what love is? How do we know what it means to live a life of love? The classical Christian answer is to say that we know what love is because God is love, and because he has revealed himself to us in his word—in his living Word who is his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the words of Scripture, which his Spirit inspired to show us the living Word. Our understanding of love is grounded in the truth of Scripture, which shows us the truth of who God is, and thus what love is; we take our definition of love from these pages. If we set this aside, or say that those truths don’t matter, then we’re left to define love for ourselves, according to our own preferences, prejudices, and preconceived ideas; we get to decide for ourselves what’s appropriate and act accordingly, and then pat ourselves on the back for being such good Christians, without ever even asking ourselves what God wants us to do, let alone submitting ourselves to his will.

In the end, that leaves us in the same place as the false teachers who were giving Timothy such fits in Ephesus: elevating our own desires over the demands of the gospel. In this letter, as we’ve seen, Paul shows a fair bit of concern for what we might call “community standards”; some of the women in the church were offending the community with their dress, some of the leaders of the church were scandalizing the community with their behavior, so Paul tells them that what they’re doing is inappropriate. Why? Because the church needs to conform to the standards of the community? No, but because what they’re doing is hindering the preaching of the good news of Jesus Christ. If people are scandalized by the gospel itself, if they’re offended by the call to holiness—as many were then, and are now, and will be in every age until Jesus returns—that’s one thing; but if anything else gets in the way of the preaching of the gospel, then we need to set it aside, no matter what it might be.

We saw this in chapter 2, but Paul makes it explicit here. As he writes, he hopes to come to Ephesus soon to make these points to the church in person, but in case he can’t, he’s sending this letter—why? Because people in the church have forgotten what sort of behavior and what sort of lifestyle are appropriate for a member of the household of God. Any parent expects certain things out of their kids, and God is no different with us, but people in Ephesus have lost sight of this fact. As a consequence, their behavior is casting God’s name into disrepute. The church in Ephesus, like every congregation everywhere, is called to be a pillar and a bulwark of the truth, and they’re falling down on the job, betraying that truth by their behavior. Paul wants them to understand that they have a responsibility to fulfill, and they’d better start taking it seriously.

As every congregation needs to do, including us. We are part of God’s temple on earth—God makes his home on earth in us by his Spirit who lives in us—and that gives us a profound responsibility indeed. The mission of the church is to be a pillar to uphold the truth, and a bulwark to protect and defend it—to speak the truth to a world that too often doesn’t want to hear it, to proclaim and uphold the truth by our words and by our actions, to defend it against those who would rather attack it (and us) than listen. If at any time our behavior undermines or weakens the church, then we are threatening that mission, and we must stop. That’s why Paul rebukes men in the church for their anger and disputes, which were wrecking their prayers and disrupting their worship; that’s why he calls women in the church to restrain their use of their Christian freedom, since their behavior, too, was becoming disruptive. That’s why he rules out leaders who lacked the maturity to lead, because such leaders were drawing the church away from its mission and damaging its reputation in the community, undercutting its credibility in proclaiming the truth. Everything else had to be, and must be, secondary to the mission.

And if that mission was, and is, to uphold and defend the truth, then what truth is that? Some of us would probably start giving a list of details, but Paul goes right to the heart of the matter. “The mystery of godliness is great,” he says—which doesn’t, by the way, mean that it’s very mysterious; indeed, this is a mystery, something hidden from human sight, which has now been revealed. What has been revealed is very great—it’s something no human mind could ever have conceived, or would ever have predicted. That mystery is Jesus Christ—God revealed in human flesh, and the plan of God revealed in human history; and that truth is the truth we uphold and defend, that God was born as a human child. As the British poet John Betjeman put it, “And is it true,/This most tremendous tale of all,/Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,/A Baby in an ox’s stall?/The Maker of the stars and sea/Become a Child on earth for me? . . . No love that in a family dwells,/No carolling in frosty air,/Nor all the steeple-shaking bells/Can with this single Truth compare—/That God was man in Palestine/And lives today in Bread and Wine.”

That is the truth of which the church is a pillar and a bulwark—it is the truth which has been entrusted to us to proclaim to the nations, to preach in season and out of season, in every word we speak and every step we take; not that Jesus was a good man, or a kind man, or a great teacher, or a loving person, but that he was God in the flesh come into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. It is the truth that when we look at him we see God, and that in him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. And it is indeed a truth with which nothing else can compare, and one which is well worth giving our lives for; there is simply nothing we can do which is more important than to let people know that God became a human being, with human skin, human bone, a human mind and a human heart, for them, because he loves them, and to help them grow into a full understanding of what that means for them and their lives.

We’ve heard this so often that familiarity dulls the message, but stop and think about it and you’ll realize what a staggering thing it is: the God of all worlds and all ages, the God who created everything that is and who holds the universe in the palm of his hand, the God who holds all that was, and is, and is to come as a thought in his mind and who keeps it all going by his will, humbled himself to step down into the small space of one human body, living one messy human life, suffering one very messy human death—for us; and then he turned that defeat into the ultimate victory by rising from the dead, in his own power—for us. And then he ascended into heaven—for us—and did he send his angels to trumpet the news across the sky, so that everyone would believe? Did he write a message in the stars and blind the world with his glory? Did the voice that spoke the world into being announce his victory with a deafening thunder that would drive people to their knees? No; he rose from the dead, he returned to heaven, and he left that job—for us. In his great plan for this world, he left us to carry out that part, so that this wouldn’t all just be something God did to us—so that we would have something we could do; and while nothing prevents him from working directly, he lets us do it most of the time, leaving us with the responsibility to tell the world what he has done.

This is our job to do—not in our own strength, to be sure, for he enables and empowers us by his Spirit; but in our own lives, and by our own words and actions, to tell the world that God loved them in this way, and this much, that he sent his only Son into this world, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life. This is our job to do, and our song of praise to sing—with our words, with our voices, with our whole lives—for all the world to hear; it is ours, in the fullness of our hearts, to sing our great Redeemer’s praise, and to sing through all the earth the honors of his name. May our hearts be so full of praise that as we sing, we can only wish that we had a thousand tongues, a thousand voices, to sing his praise that much more.

(Exodus 18:13-23; 1 Timothy 3:1-13)

We’ve seen a spate of high-profile sexual scandals lately; among pastors, the big name was Gary Lamb down in Georgia, and of course in politics we’ve seen the revelations about Nevada Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. I have to say, even as strange as politics can get sometimes, the whole story with Sanford is one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in a long while. Usually those sorts of affairs are targets of opportunity—but Argentina isn’t exactly the next office over; and then to abandon his wife and four sons and the government of South Carolina to sneak down to Buenos Aires for a week (over Father’s Day, no less!), turning his disappearance into the talk of the tabloids . . . it’s hard to imagine how a man that smart could be that stupid. And this was a guy who would have been a real player in the presidential primaries next time around, if his life had matched his image; but now he’s wrecked himself.

The thing that blows my mind, though, is to see people popping up and defending these wretches on the grounds that “people deserve a private life,” and “what they do in private is nobody’s business but their own.” To which I say—and not just me; I say it with St. Paul—no! That is, and I say this very precisely, a damnable lie, because it’s a lie that can bring damnation. The first job of leadership is self-leadership; the first challenge of leadership is whether one can keep in honor the vows one swears. Someone who has failed in leading themselves to the extent of breaking the highest and holiest vow they will ever swear cannot be trusted to lead anyone else, or to be faithful to any other task.

Now, is that permanent? Does that mean that if your sin is bad enough, you can never be trusted to be faithful? No, for there is forgiveness and redemption with the Lord; restoration is possible, with repentance, and time for growth. But leadership isn’t a right, it’s a privilege, and the first qualification is real and demonstrated character. 

That’s why, when Paul lays out what must be expected of the leaders of the church—overseers, whom we would call elders and pastors, and deacons—he doesn’t talk much about gifts or experience or skills; indeed, even though we know overseers were expected to teach, he doesn’t even focus on their knowledge of God’s word, though that’s mentioned. Mostly, he talks about character; he talks about what kind of people should be overseers and deacons. Put another way, he talks about leadership not as a job but as a way of life, and how it must be lived, and what people must be like to be ready to live it.

This goes to the heart of the problem with the false teachers in Ephesus. The crisis in the church was, at bottom, a question of leadership—who would the church follow? Who should the church follow?—and the issue with the false teachers was at its root not an issue of intellect but of character. The folks pushing the heresy in Ephesus weren’t innocent seekers after truth who’d gotten a few of their points wrong—they were doing it deliberately. They were people like the late science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, who said repeatedly that he wanted to get rich, and that the best way to do that would be to start a religion; thus we have Scientology, and Tom Cruise has never been the same since.

 The false teachers in Ephesus had much the same approach, and much the same spirit. They had been given some authority—it seems pretty clear that at least some of them were among the leaders of the congregation—but they wanted more; they wanted to take the church away from Timothy and run it themselves. What their reasons were, we don’t know; but it’s clear that they were determined enough to refuse to listen to any voices telling them they were wrong, even the voice of God.

As such, Paul sets out to tell the church what kind of people they ought to listen to, and what kind of people they ought to follow. He’s already made it clear what message they ought to follow—namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, which he had proclaimed to them and which Timothy was continuing to preach; now he connects the character of the gospel to the character of those who are fit to lead—namely, people whose lives incarnate the gospel, showing its truth by the way they live. Overseers, Paul says, most be “above reproach,” and deacons must be “worthy of respect”; the whole picture of their lives has to add up, with no glaring flaws and nothing that dishonors God—to the extent that even those outside the church honor and respect them.

This is not to say that only perfect people are qualified to lead—were that so, no one would be qualified—but it rules out those who are living unrepentantly in sin of some kind or another, and those who have simply surrendered to their sin. A certain level of maturity in dealing with one’s own sin is necessary for anyone who would lead others in confronting, turning away from and refusing to turn back to their sin. We don’t need sinless leaders, but we do need leaders who show us by their honest example that growth in holiness is possible.

This is true across a range of areas. Sexual morality was a major one in that day, which tolerated a broader range of sexual sin than even our own; as the Presbyterian pastor-scholar Philip Ryken says, “Marriage was undermined by frequent divorce, widespread adultery, and rampant homosexuality.” Thus Paul insists that leaders in the church must, in the words of our denomination’s Book of Order, “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.” (Not the most elegant way of putting it, I know, but it does make the point perfectly clear.) Sexual morality is not optional; it’s not something where you can say, “The culture knows better than that dusty old book”; it’s not something that’s private and has no bearing on one’s fitness to lead. It’s a necessity; it’s a requirement; it’s non-negotiable.

Why? Well, in the first place, because wrong is wrong, whether we like it or not. And as a practical matter, there’s probably no sin short of open idolatry that damages people as deeply as sexual sin; it warps us at the core of our being, and has power like few things do to pull us loose from the vows and commitments and promises that anchor and buttress us for godly living. We can’t simply accommodate ourselves to the way the culture wants to do things—which means we can’t afford to follow people who do. Christian leadership is, in part, an act of standing up to the world and saying, “There’s a better way—let me show you.” We need leaders who are willing and able to do that.

You can see this theme in other qualifications Paul lays out for leadership as well. Leaders must not be greedy—aside from an uncontrolled libido, there’s likely nothing that corrupts leadership faster than greed—but must be able to manage themselves; sins of lack of self-control are explicitly ruled out, and so Paul says that leaders must not be drunkards, must not be violent, must not be quarrelsome. Rather, they must have proven their ability to lead themselves and others, beginning at the most intimate level—with their households. (Even those who were single might well have had households, by the way, of servants or slaves.) As Paul says, if you can’t handle the people who are closest to you, those for whom you bear the most immediate and intimate responsibility, and if you can’t lead them in a godly way, how can you claim to be able to lead God’s church?

There are other things here as well—deacons must not be double-tongued, for instance; this makes sense, because the church entrusts its deacons with the care of those who are vulnerable. Elders must not be recent converts—it’s important to give people time to steady down and grow a bit before handing them that responsibility; name someone an elder before they’ve had time to learn how much they have to learn, you run the risk that they’ll figure they’re mature already and never learn otherwise. Elders must be hospitable, which seems odd to us because we undervalue the gift of hospitality; but it makes sense, because the leaders of the church should be people who make others feel welcome here. And most of all, elders must be able to teach, and deacons must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience: the leaders of the church should be people of the truth, people who know Jesus Christ and his gospel and are able to communicate that with others. That’s what this all comes back to, because that’s what this is all about. This is why Paul cares, because the church is being led astray by people teaching lies, and they need to sit up, realize what they’re doing, and start following the right leaders.

The bottom line here is that those who lead the church need to be people who embody what it means to live the gospel life, and who model that for the church as a whole. Elders, including pastors, and deacons need to be people who understand what it means to do all these things that Paul talks about here—sexual morality, gentleness, hospitality, not being greedy, honesty, integrity, the whole ball of wax—not out of a sense of duty or morality or compulsion, but out of gratitude for grace received. The people whom we call as leaders—whom God calls through us—need to be people who don’t just know the gospel up here as a bunch of things we say, but who know it down here, and in our guts; we need to be people who are viscerally aware of our own sin, and who feel the power and the significance of Christ’s redemption and God’s grace all the way down, and for whom love and gratitude for what God has done for us are driving factors in how we live each day. We need to be people for whom that reality shines through, so that others can see it in what we say and how we live our lives. That’s what it means, first and foremost, to be a pastor, an elder, a deacon; that’s our first and greatest responsibility.

For reasons of length, I opted not to take time in the sermon to address one much-disputed question on this passage:  when Paul addresses women, what wo­men does he mean? Most people offer one of two answers:  either wives of deacons (which makes no sense to me at all), or female deacons. These answers attempt to make verse 11 part of the flow of the paragraph, which is understandable—but, I believe, misguided. It doesn’t fit, and it doesn’t need to.

Remember, Paul didn’t actually write his letters, he dictated them—which meant he had a tendency to forget to say things at one point and then stick them in later. I think that’s what happened here:  in the middle of talking about deacons, Paul remembered something he’d meant to say and just stuck it in. On my read, this is a general comment about women in leadership (whether as deacons or as overseers) which is prompted by the fact that the false teachers in Ephesus were particularly successful among the women of the church.  In describing the qualifications for Christian leadership, he adds a comment specifically about women, not because he’s saying anything new or different—he isn’t—but just to underscore the point that under the circumstances, any women in leadership positions needed to be particularly careful.