Enlarging Boundaries
1 Timothy 2:1-7
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and acceptable before God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For
there is one God;
there is also one mediator between God and humankind,
Christ Jesus, himself human,
who gave himself a ransom for all—this was attested at the right time. For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth; I am not lying), a teacher of the gentiles in faith and truth.
There’s a popular protest sign I’ve seen at different rallies over the past… almost decade now. I saw it a lot during protests after Trump’s inauguration in 2017; I see it less so now, but it still resurfaces once in a while—in 2017 the sign read, “If Hilary won, we’d be at brunch right now.” In 2021, “If Kamala won, we’d be at brunch right now.” Now… it’s cute, sure, but I don’t think it’s quite the right message—it wasn’t in 2017, and it certainly isn’t now.
I found myself thinking about that sign again in reading our passage for today, particularly when I read the end of verse 2, about praying for those in power so that “…we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.” Over the past couple weeks, in reading excerpts from 1 Timothy, we’ve talked about how, while there are some important lessons to glean in the book, it’s very much a product of its time and place—that time being long after the death of Jesus, after the death of Paul (though this is attributed to him, it is almost definitively not written by him); and the place being Ephesus under Roman rule, where the official religion was that of the imperial cult and polytheism. It was hard to be a Christian in these times. Persecution and jailtime were to be expected; and depending on the whims of Roman nobles and soldiers, your life could even be at stake; not to mention the fact that this being written decades after Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and the time of the Apostles, some of the original tenants of Christianity may have begun to be overlooked, watered down a little. For all these reasons, the writer of 1 Timothy is very preoccupied with keeping the peace, essentially. That’s why, as we’ve talked about over the past couple sermons, he seems to be adhering to and encouraging Greco-Roman cultural and domestic norms—the norms of the oppressive empire—more so than the original egalitarian, communal, almost utopian ideals of the very earliest days of Christianity we read about in Acts, for instance.
So I think about the people in 2025 especially, wishing that the election had had different results so their anxiety could be quelled; so they could go back to being sort of apolitical, so they could stop caring, essentially—while realistically, Russia would have continued to encroach on Ukraine; while Palestinians would have continued to die in the hundreds, something that was indeed allowed to continue under the last administration; wishing they could be brunching while voting rights would continue to be eroded on a state-by-state basis; while people would continue to go into bankruptcy because of school and medical bills—not trying to be too much of a pessimist here, but the point is, we need better than ‘quiet and peaceable.’ And the language that comes after that part in our passage, about “godliness and dignity—” that’s very much language of the Roman Empire, not the Jesus movement. It’s language about not just reverence, but also decorum. It’s language that encourages its readers not to make a big fuss about things, to not rock the boat, to draw as little attention as possible so that they can continue to worship quietly and peacefully without the Romans butting their heads in. Yet another reason most scholars don’t believe this was written by Paul—Paul was never one for going about his call quietly. He was thrown in jail constantly for spreading the Good News; he was encouraging the communities he ministered to not to shrink back in fear. He was not one to abide by the societal norms that he was once bound by as an oppressor himself, before his conversion.
So now that I’ve essentially refuted a good chunk of our sacred text for today, is there actually anything we can take from this that makes sense for us today? I mean, yes, of course. We can learn not only from the good this passage includes, but the not-so-good as well—if we’re going to be Jesus followers in these times, we need to do everything in our power to show what that really means—that might mean making trouble. It might mean not blending it. It might mean differentiating ourselves from those who call themselves Christians and yet fall in line with the oppressors— and not falling in line publicly is always a risky move.
And there is something from this passage we cannot refute—that we must pray for those in power—not to those in power, as the Roman authorities would have preferred (they saw those in power and placed by the gods, and they expected prayers and sacrifices not just for them, but also to them, as if they were deities themselves). But the reason for our prayer, the sentiments behind our prayers matter. We must not pray out of fear, as, I believe is being encouraged in 1 Timothy— fear of further oppression and the hope that they can fly under the radar. We also must not pray out of pity or arrogance, assuming that we know best, and praying for what will make our lives easier… praying to be able to stop going to protests so we can enjoy a guilt-free brunch with friends, for instance. Rather, we have to pray with real compassion.
In his meditation “Not Pity, but Compassion,” Howard Thurman writes,
There is pity in me—pity for others. But there I something in it that cannot be trusted; it is mixed with pride, arrogance, cunning. I see this only when I expose myself to the eyes of God in the quiet time. It is now that I see what my pity really is, and the source from which it springs.
God is making room in my heart for compassion: the awareness that where my life begins is where your life begins; the awareness that the sensitiveness to your needs cannot be separated from the sensitiveness to my needs; the awareness that the joys of my heart are never mine alone—nor are the sorrows. I struggle against the work of God in my heart; I want to be let alone. I want by boundaries to remain fixed, that I may be at rest. But even now, as I turn to [God] in the quietness, [God’s] work in me is ever the same.
Thurman begins and ends this meditation with the same sentence: “God is at work enlarging the boundaries of my heart.”
We want our boundaries to remain fixed, because when they’re enlarged, we see so much more—we don’t just see our own rights being taken away; we notice the injustices towards people of color in cities hundreds of miles away; we notice cruelty and inhumane treatment of immigrants being held in cages thousands of miles away; we notice the deaths of children in Gaza and Sudan, across countries and oceans. We want the boundaries of our hearts to remain fixed because having compassion is painful. Realizing no one is free until we are all free is a frightening realization. But it’s also liberating. It’s liberating to have compassion for all people, instead of hatred, or maybe even worse— indifference.
A couple weeks ago, in my note to the church, I wrote about an essay of John Ganz’s I had just read that touched on the life of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, a German noble and one of the founding members of the German resistance against the nazis. An privileged and educated man, he was drafted into the Nazi military intelligence service, and worked from the inside to subvert the Nazis any way he could. Ganz was writing about Moltke because amidst all the talk over the past couple weeks of martyrdom and what it really means to be on the right side of history, what it really means to do God’s work in a broken world, someone like Moltke, who was found out and executed by the Nazis shortly before the war ended, is the true definition of a martyr. And Ganz writes that in reading about him he thought, “This was a truly civilized man.”
What does it mean to be “civilized?” what does it mean to act with “godliness” and “dignity?” Does it simply mean to have decorum? To not rock the boat? To stay under the radar and let the world run its course however it’s going to? Can we consider ourselves a “civilized” people if there are people going hungry, going without shelter, going without safety or comfort? No—because as Thurman writes, “my life beings where your life begins.” We are all connected, and when one is in bondage, we all are.
“Christ Jesus, himself human / …gave himself a ransom for a all.” For all. Not for a few. Not for some. Not for most. For all. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve talked about how, in spite of how contradictory some of 1 Timothy can be when it comes to following Greco-Roman cultural norms and what the true following of Jesus actually calls for, but there are constants of Christianity that remain in this strange book— and this week, it’s the concept of all. It’s the universality of Christ’s sacrifice and capital-L Love. It’s the idea that we all beloved by God, and God wants us all to be saved, and to know we are loved. And therefore, we must pray for and love one another in turn. Yes, in 1 Timothy, there is a focus on praying for kings, but not-Paul writes “that supplications, prayers, intersessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone…”
Thankfully, we have help in the spirit of Christ Jesus. The mediator, and it’s written in today’s passage, between God and humankind, the one who walked around in the dust and the mud with us, who cried with us, who celebrated with us; who suffered with and for us… I love the use of the word mediator here—as one of the commentaries noted, a mediator is someone who empathizes with both parties in order bring peace. Jesus showed us, told us, in his time on this earth as a mediator between us and God, how to live a good life, how to bring about an earth as it is in heaven. It was to love God and to love our neighbor. All our neighbors. It was to “enlarge the boundaries of our hearts” that we are able to allow anyone in. But the work is hard. When our hearts are big enough to truly and genuinely, and without pity, pray for and love all people, pain comes before paradise. Because the compassion that comes with breaking borders and boundaries opens our eyes to see beyond the façade of shallow decorum that our current society claims as civility. That compassion opens our eyes to the inner workings of the selfish and the powerful, and we see the vast damage it does. And then, after our eyes are opened to all that pain, we must then pray for and love those who cause that pain. And to make this nearly impossible task even harder, we must do it, not out of pity or arrogance, but out of genuine compassion.
We pray for everyone from homeless and starving children to ruthless dictators because “our lives begin where their lives begin.” Because we are all one, we are all connected, we are all beloved by God; because to truly survive, and to truly be good Christians, we need a world in which justice and equity is valued and encouraged over a façade of decorum and civility. And while the writer of 1 Timothy may have been, I believe, a little misguided in his emphasis on not rocking the boat and living “a quiet and peaceable life,” he was right that in order to get where we need to be, in order to the work to which Jesus calls us, we have to pray for everyone. And we have to do it out of true compassion and love.
The work is hard. But it is liberating because it is truly the work of liberation; to pray and work for a world in which all are free from oppression, from greed, from hatred, from the divisional confines of this world the separate us into factions. So let’s join together in opening our eyes and our minds to the possibility of a world in which the universal compassion and Love of God rule over a façade of civility; let’s join together in the work of enlarging the boundaries of our hearts. Amen.
