Wolves
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, be sober in everything, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.
It’s spooky season, so my choice in books over the past couple weeks has been horror. I’ve been listening to a lot of short stories in audiobook format lately, so on the way to clergy convocation up in Craftsbury this past week, I put on Joe Hill’s collection of crime and horror stories, Full Throttle. One story, called “Wolverton Station” begins with some backstory about a successful and ruthless and American businessman, Saunders, on a trip to England, with the intention of expanding a chain of coffeeshops, gobbling up mom & pop restaurants and cafes in his wake. He’s relaxing in first class on a train, and then as he turns to the figure sitting next him, who’s been sitting there in an expensive suit, calmly reading the Financial Times, he realizes it is, in fact, not a person, but a wolf, or some kind of… wolf-man sitting next to him. The wolf-man talks to him politely, allows Saunders to step over him to go to the bathroom. As Saunders slowly and carefully, in an inward panic, walks to the bathroom, he sees the aftermath of what the wolves in coach have done to another human. He enters the bathroom and starts doing a breathing practice he remembers from a spiritually-inspired trip to India as a young man, repeating a mantra to himself: I will not be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train. I will not be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train. As he practices his breathing and his mantra, he reluctantly comes to the reality of the situation; and our omniscient narrator says,
He remembered how they had seemed to wait at Wolverton Station forever, the way the train shook now and then as if something were being forcibly loaded into coach. He remembered hearing [sobs] and a man yelling orders, Stop! Stop it! He had heard it the way he wanted to hear it. He had known what he had wanted to know. Maybe it was always that way for almost everyone.[i]
The end of the story, spoiler alert, is that his mantra does not come true; and in his denial about the reality of the situation; his blocking out of the violent truths that were all around him leads to his demise.
We continue with 2 Timothy this week, Paul’s letter to his beloved protégé and sort of adopted son, about picking up the work of spreading the Good News—the work that Paul will soon be forced to leave behind, as he seems to be facing imminent death while being imprisoned in Rome for spreading that Good News. You might remember from last week, that 2 Timothy is very different from 1 Timothy; this letter is a deeply personal and emotional one, to a single person rather than rules for a community Christians. But there is one theme that is consistent throughout each—and that is the emphasis on sound teaching, on wisdom, and not being tempted by or falling prey to false teachings:
…convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.
“…accumulating teachers and teachings to suit their own desires, [turning] away from listening to the truth.” Well, unfortunately, it seems that that time has indeed come. Some call the era we’re living in a post-truth era—one in which “people [do] not put up with sound teaching.”
How do we hold onto truth in a post-truth world? How do we trust what’s real and what’s not? I was just lamenting the fact that for the first time ever a couple weeks ago, I fell for an AI video. It was a video, made to like grainy outdoor hunting camera footage, of a bear walking through a yard, and doing a couple quick bounces on a trampoline before walking off screen. I’m still mad at myself for falling for it. And frightened about what I could fall for in the future, as the technology gets better and better.
Between various different AI video generators, and ChatGPT, we can essentially make our own realities now—we can see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, believe what we want to believe, even if none of it is real. The new app Sora from ChatGPT allows people to simply type in a prompt and a video is that created based on said prompt. There are already thousands of AI-generated videos one can scroll through for hours on end. Apparently on the app, you can curate your feed by “mood.” And it’s tempting to do this—to get lost in a fake reality that doesn’t challenge us, that doesn’t force us to think and connect with other people. And it’s tempting for some people, I’m sure, to continue to try to sow chaos by creating videos showing violence and horrors that never happened. As one expert was quoted as saying, “It has no fidelity to history, it has no relationship to the truth.”[ii] Though there are, in theory, some guardrails on these apps, it hasn’t been able to stop people from creating videos showing distant bombs going off, crowds of people who appear to be a political rally with an AI-generated Obama voice in the background.[iii] You can even record yourself and create videos with our own likeness doing, essentially, whatever you want. Clearly, not all of these videos are as innocuous as a bear on a trampoline.
When we can simply hear what we want to hear, our ears are tickled, as Paul says in this letter. The world as it is is hard. We have to face harsh realities, we have to sometimes admit when we’re wrong and feel feelings we’d rather not feel. We may even have to, as Paul says quite a bit throughout this letter, “endure suffering” for the sake of our faith and our values. And like Saunders discovers in Joe Hill’s gruesome story, repeating something we want to be true, pretending what’s happening around us isn’t happening will not save us.
In his book The Twittering Machine, Richard Seymor write of the onslaught of information thrown at us day in and day out that “we make a fundamental mistake if we assume that an increase in information corresponds to an increase in knowledge.”[iv] He explains that the more options you have, whether they be fact or fiction, the more uncertainty, the more we become overwhelmed and vulnerable to misinformation. While Timothy was not plagued with the nightmare out internet has become, he was surrounded by competing theologies and philosophies, all claiming truth in some way— it seems he was overwhelmed and struggling in his faith. Surely he was tempted by theologies around him that promised no friction, that promised no suffering; surely, he was tempted by an easier path. And now it’s easier than ever to look and look until we find something that suits our needs, our desires. And now we can quite literally create videos of the reality we want to see, of the reality we want other people to believe. In a post-truth world, the addition of these AI-generated videos only makes the truth more tenuous. Seeing is no longer believing.
There is good news though. There is always good news. And that is the capital-G, capital-N Good News. It’s the Good News that we can face reality while holding fast to the biggest truth of our faith, the Good News of our faith—the new commandment: that we love one another as Jesus loves us. That is the ultimate truth, Church. Anyone who purports to be a good Christian, a good person, who espouses anything other than love for our fellow humans is gravely misinformed. Anyone who believes hatred is a truth in the Christian faith is lost in convenient lies that allow them to make up a false reality that lets them attempt to hold onto some level of power above other people.
While this world runs through catastrophic events at a breakneck pace, while technology advances far faster than any rules or regulations or ethical standards can keep with, we have our faith— our faith in an all-loving God; our faith in a savior who brought salvation through his own sacrifice and endurance of suffering; our faith in the Holy Spirit and the wisdom that continues to guide us in this ever more confusing and chaotic world. The Love, the capital-L Love that our faith teaches us remains a constant that disinformation cannot change. That Love is a constant that cannot be overruled by hatred being sown by the powerful. That Love is constant truth that cannot be destroyed by convenient lies tickling our ears.
“I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching,” Paul says to Timothy as he’s facing the end of his own life. We will continue to proclaim the message, whether the time is favorable or not. And in the words of James Baldwin, and this is one of my favorite quotes, “Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.” We must work to hold this world together at a time when proclaiming the message of Love is more unpopular, more unfavorable than ever; maybe it’s even about the level of unfavorable right now it was when this letter was written to a frightened Timothy, faith wavering, preparing to carry on the work of Paul, the work of his own mother and grandmother— the work of spreading the Good News under deeply inconvenient and unfavorable circumstances.
Faith may seem like a fantastical thing to have by some— after all, our faith in something we cannot see of ever truly know; but in a time when seeing is no longer believing, it is our faith that can ground us during these overwhelming times. It’s our faith that keeps us safe from the wolves, and that keeps us from becoming a wolf. it’s our faith that can keep us “sober in everything,” as Paul says, to keep us steady as we carry on, leading with Love in a hateful world.
“Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” Paul says early on in his letter, which we read last week in church. He sets the stage here for what we read today. The standards of sound teaching seem to be no more. The time seems to have come in which “people will not put up with sound teaching.” In a post-truth world, in which people only hear what they want to hear, believe what they want to believe, and now even see what they want to see, we must hold hard and fast to the truths of Love and connection that we know to be the cornerstone of our faith. We must hold true to the Love and the strength that we have been taught through Jesus and the apostles, and all those people of strength and faith who came before us and carried whether the time was favorable or unfavorable.
In a time when we can create our own realities and escape sobering and inconvenient truths, we must resist. We must resist the avoidance and denial that leaves us vulnerable to the wolves; and we must resist the temptations that lure us to become wolf ourselves.
And so we hold onto to the truth. And that truth is Love. Amen.
[i] Joe Hill, Full Throttle: “Wolverton Station” (New York: Harper Collins, 2019)
[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/04/openai-sora-violence-racism
[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/technology/sora-openai-video-disinformation.html
[iv] Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (London: Verso, 2020).
