Pride, Prejudice or Peace

Text: 2 Timothy 4:6-18

Focus: reconciliation

Function: To help believers forgive each other.

Form: Storytelling

Intro:

We have spent the last two weeks in the heart and mind of the Apostle Paul as he gives instructions to Timothy, his young charge and replacement.

He is near the end of his life, he knows he is going to die and in this last chapter of the letter, he is clearing up some personal items, he reflects on his life, and he worships God again.

I love this chapter, because it is a window into his very soul. It helps us understand preachers and what makes them tick.

Sometimes, we preachers like to swap funny stories of mistakes that we have made, or funny things that we have seen or done. My worse, was the first wedding I did. I decided to place the rings in the bible and pray over them. I was nervous and apparently I was rocking back and forth when the grooms ring rolled out of my bible, hit this little piece of carpet and rolled up to the shoe of the maid of honor.

I expected everyone to be praying with their eyes closed, so I got on my knees during the prayer and grabbed the ring off the floor, right under the bridesmaid’s dress.

Thank God that video cameras had not yet hit the retail market yet! I found out, my wife doesn't keep her eyes closed as well. I sure had some explaining to do!

There are funny things, and there are sad things.

A dear saint, and a retired preacher was in one of my churches. He would come two or three times a year to discuss his funeral arrangements. He was 96 when I buried him.

Preaching his funeral from this passage was important to him. “I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith… a crown is laid up for me.” He had such hope and yet his story was one of profound sadness.

The last time he was in Church while he was still breathing, we honored him with a plaque given to him and his wife by the Governor of Pennsylvania. The plaque commemorated his marriage of 75 years. What a testimony he had!

Unfortunately, this part of the story gets pretty sad.

His wife didn’t come to the presentation. She loved him very much, that wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t that she was too weak or feeble to come.

When I first came to the church, someone hinted that she suffered from depression.

But when I got to know my friend, and his wife, the story was much sadder. He wasn’t from our denomination, but he came from one that is pretty similar.

He enjoyed his pastoral work very much, and his wife was by his side. Until someone spread some gossip. Someone else took it a step further and blew an entirely innocent event out of proportion. He was falsely accused of infidelity.

That was the last time his wife went to church, 50 years before.

It was a great funeral, until… …Until the grandson of the man who made the false accusation stood up and tried to apologize. Except, he didn’t actually apologize for his grandfather’s actions, instead he explained that his grandfather had the person who distorted the first truth to blame…

It was a terrible, and untrue, scandal. But people love a scandal.

Now why do I bring all that up in this passage?

If you are a diligent student of the NT, you catch a name in this passage that might seem odd.

Paul praises some people, and criticizes a few others. He speaks of Demas, who, as “The Message” says, “got carried away by fads” and quit serving Christ.

He speaks of him as if his faith is like the seed planted in the rocky soil. It springs up, but the weeds do as well and it chokes out its effectiveness. He tells Timothy that he has assigned certain other people who worked with him to do some more work in other places. He is glad that Brother Luke, the author of Luke and Acts is still with him, taking care of him, even though he is in prison. He speaks of a pagan, Alexander, a man who made his living by making idols of the goddess Artemis (Or Dianna) of Ephesus. Paul’s message was threatening his livelihood and this man caused Paul a lot of trouble. If you have spent time in the NT, these stories are familiar to you.

But that isn’t the real scandal in this passage.

Paul says about Mark: “Bring him with you, for he is useful to me.”

I told the planning committees of the worship services that the theme would be: “Avoid self-righteous judging.”

Self-righteous judging doesn’t get us very far.

And in this case, Paul is the one who made the scandal up. But by the writing of this passage, he has repented.

The scandal? Well maybe not so much a scandal as a problem blown out of proportion. We know it’s over because Paul asks for Mark to help him. The scandal? Mark ran away. This is the same Mark of the gospel of Mark fame. He is the same young man referred to in Mark’s gospel who, in the garden of Gethsemane ran away the first time and the soldier was left hanging on to his robe.

Mark wanted to be God’s man. He was with the apostles from early on, since he joined the 12 when they went to the garden. He knew everyone and he wanted to be a part.

More than that, he was called by God into pastoral ministry.

So, when Paul and Barnabbas went on their first missionary tour, Mark, who was young at the time convinced them to let him go along.

And in the middle of the trip, he got homesick, abandoned them, and went home.

This left the Apostle Paul very angry.

And I guess I can see why. Paul is much older, he has already been beaten, persecuted, hunted down and attacked for his faith. Mark, being younger would have seemed to have more stamina, strength and endurance. Apparently, in Paul’s opinion, young Mark didn’t have the dedication. He was a quitter.

And that is important. Remember, throughout this book, and this month we have been looking at the sacrificial call that God has placed on our lives.

And apparently Paul is impatient. His attitude is understandable: “If I can do it, why can’t he?”

Maybe Mark thought he would get a bigger role in the ministry, or maybe he had a young bride back home, or if he wasn’t sure of his calling and commitment.

We don’t know why he quit. All we know is that when it came time for the second trip, Barnabas wanted to give young Mark a second chance and Paul refused. And they disagreed so heatedly, that they parted company and went their separate ways.

I want to ask God why he doesn’t just miraculously touch the hearts of Christians. They both had the best interests of the Kingdom in their minds. Why God doesn’t’ just touch them with love, or regret, or sorrow or repentance and change their hearts so we don’t have to go through this pain.

Why did God let my friend be falsely accused? Didn’t God know the damage that it would do to his wife?

Why? Why does God let these men of God who have given everything to serve him suffer persecution at the hands of other believers? Isn’t persecution from unbelievers enough?

I take heart in this. Church conflict is nothing new.

And yet the story, at the end of Paul’s life is this: “Bring Mark to me; he is useful to me.”

Paul and Mark have reconciled.

Maybe, sometimes, only time can heal. But then, there are sometimes when time just seems to make things worse. What is the difference? I guess, if we don’t learn the lesson from God, we are doomed to repeat it until we do.

Here is something even more significant in the story. It is Barnabas. Again, if you are familiar with the stories of the NT, you will remember that Paul started out as Saul, and he was persecuting Christians. He was on the way to the city of Damascus to arrest Christians and bring them back to trial in Jerusalem. On the way, the Lord appears to him and he is converted.

The problem was, he was one of early Christianities biggest enemies. And now, he is one of them and they have the same brains and suspicions as we do. They didn’t trust him.

So Barnabas sticks his neck out, vouches for Paul and gets him an audience with the rest of the apostles. Barnabas has a “second chance” and forgiving nature. As a matter of fact, Barnabas has a nickname given to him by the church: “Son of encouragement.” What a great name! Wouldn’t that be a great thing to have written on your tombstone?

So Barnabas has this generous forgiving nature. It is different from Paul’s “get ‘er done nature.” Both are necessary. And for many years, they were very effective together.

In Acts 15, where we hear about the split between them, the Chapter starts out with the two of them partnering together before the Council of Jewish Christians to convince them about a way to keep division from happening between the Gentile believers and the Jewish believers. They worked well together until someone’s pride and prejudice got in the way.

Maybe Paul was proud of his commitment and in a self-righteous way, judged Mark for not being as committed. Maybe he was prejudiced against him because Mark was Peter’s nephew.

What we do know is this, Paul exaggerated the significance of Mark’s homesickness.

Paul made a mountain out of a molehill. He’s a quitter! I can hear him shouting at Barnabas.

And I can hear Barnabas, gently, in return saying, “but Paul, God is a forgiving God!”

And finally, years later, Paul has forgiven him.

What does it take for believers to reconcile?

Why doesn’t God just take away the feuding?

Do we see the danger of gossip? Do we see the danger of saying things, even true things about others in order to bolster our own importance? Why can't people just accept the fact that we are still far from perfect?

Paul exaggerated the significance of Mark’s homesickness.

I find a clue in that. The clue is exaggerating the significance of someone else’s sins.

Jesus said, “Do not remove the mote in your brothers eye because you have a log in your own eye.”

Well, again those who have studied it hard know I manipulated that. It says, don’t try to remove mote when you have a log… …first remove the log from your eye.

For me, the solution is real simple: I have enough to worry about myself, and my own relationship with God, and the purity and sincerity of my own heart to worry about judging someone else’s motives, purity and relationship with God.

I had this guy in a church who was one of the worse singers I ever heard. But man, did he have a heart for worship! He would stand behind me, and just shout out the praise choruses way off key. But it didn’t bother me it truly was: “a joyful noise!”

So I asked him to testify about why he enjoyed the singing so much.

And instead, he gave 10 minutes on why everyone who wasn’t as excited as him probably wasn’t even really a Christian.

Afterwards, proud of himself, he asked me what I thought. I avoided answering him until later in the week when the significance of the moment wasn’t so big in his mind.

I told him that to judge others sincerity was a sin. I quoted the scripture about the log in your eye and the mote in your brothers and told that it means, you will never be perfect, so you have no right judging the sincerity of others.

I love the way that passage is worded in “The Message” ^1-5 "Don't pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults— unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It's easy to see a smudge on your neighbor's face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, 'Let me wash your face for you,' when your own face is distorted by contempt? It's this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.

I want to be more like Barnabas than Paul.

So what is the solution? Be like Barnabas, the son of grace, the son of encouragement. We need it now more than ever.