Consider the source. Have the courage of your convictions. Do good by doing right. There’s nothing new under the sun. Practice makes perfect. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. She didn’t lick that up off the grass. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. Goodness is as goodness does. I’m beginning to sound like Forrest Gump’s mother. But these “momilies” seem to just leap out of today’s text. It’s like the apostle Paul (or whoever really wrote this) is giving Timothy little mottoes to jump start him back into doing ministry the way he ought to be doing ministry. “Ought” according to Paul, of course. But holy Toledo! Who would want to do ministry the way Paul recommends? Keep on, even when no one pays attention, stay away from itching ears, but get ready for suffering and persecution. Paul doesn’t say this, but one of my favorite cartoon characters, Lucy from Peanuts, has a reply for Paul: “Why do I have to have ups and downs? Why can’t I have ups and ups?” According to Paul, “ups and ups” are inconsistent with Christian life.

You can tell Eileen’s back. We’re getting another “how to” sermon. Today, it’s “how to tell the truth.” That’s got just a little ambiguous edge to it, doesn’t it? I hope some of you came in this morning wondering, “Does she mean, ‘how to speak truthfully’ or does she mean, ‘How to recognize truth when you see and hear it?’” Paul is telling Timothy he can “tell” the truth because he has been hearing it all along. “Truth” is what he was taught in Hebrew school as a child, what he learned hanging around Paul (especially what he learned hanging around Paul). “Truth” is all that tried-and-true stuff that he has heard forever. In Wisconsin, where I used to live, we would speak respectfully of farmers with “forty years of experience.” My uncle would say, “Yep. The same year over and over.”

Unlike those farmers, Paul is telling Timothy, “consider the source,” inviting him to be a bit more critical in his thinking. To our modern ears, this sounds a little conceited—Paul thinks he is the “right” source—but it was appropriate teaching style for the time. When there were fewer books, teachers lived what they were teaching, they taught by example and dialogue. Paul is saying that he himself—his preaching, his teaching, what he does, his very lifestyle—is an example of how to live into truth. Kids, this would be like Mr. Olds inviting you to come to live at his house, eat dinner with him every night, and learn math and reading by doing what he does. Paul is saying that he himself not only lives the gospel of Jesus Christ, he lives the old Hebrew writings as well—Torah, what we call the Old Testament. And so should Timothy.

Two weeks ago, when I was having lunch with some of the evangelical pastors in Estacada, one of the pastors told me about his grandfather, a heckfire and brimstone preacher who tormented him with scripture at Sunday dinners. His grandfather would “demolish” his opponent, as we used to say in high school debate, by pulling out three irrefutable scripture verses. His grandson, my friend, would counter with three verses of his own, also irrefutable, but from the opposite viewpoint. It was like a verbal boxing match, using Bible verses instead of boxing gloves. The two of them gave each other spiritual black eyes at Sunday dinner using Bible verses. For what? Not for reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, as Paul says, but to demolish each other.

Last week I spent three days at a Presbyterian retreat center on Lake Tahoe, attending a conference called, “Making a Home for Faith.” Barbara Shibley is a much-beloved, highly respected past-president of this organization. The point of the conference was to explore ways that church and families can work together in providing faith nurture for children. I spent three days hearing about ways other churches are living into what Paul wrote Timothy about. At Lake Tahoe, we talked practical how-tos about tools for families to develop for surviving, nurturing, and protecting faith. The question was always, How can the church be good news for families that want to shape and form their children as people of God? Paul answers that by telling Timothy today that scripture is an essential part of how humans participate in a relationship with God—how we are in conversation with God.

This statement that Paul makes about sacred writings—“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching” etc.—does not mean that the Bible is a definitively understood document. That would be like my friend’s grandfather “demolishing” him with Bible verses. As a Jew, Paul understood that Torah was open-ended. The Torah is “truth” as far as any Jew is concerned, but it is a dialogue not a monologue. No single “this is it” interpretations. There is the old story of a group of rabbis around an oven, called in to determine if the oven is kosher or not. They argue, they look up viewpoints in the Torah, they pray for guidance. Just as they finish making their ruling, a bolt of lightning crashes down and an earthquake rocks the area. One of the rabbis looks up and snaps, “You told us we could interpret the Law, now stay out of it.”

Which kind of gets us back to our original question. How do we “tell” the truth? How can we get to the truth of scripture? Educator Howard Gardner talks about “ways of knowing.” He says that there are different ways of approaching knowledge and information, and good teachers know that different students need different approaches. We talked about that this last week at Lake Tahoe, especially regarding children and faith nurture. Some kids, if they are asked to do a book report, want to draw a picture or make a diorama in a shoebox to show what happened in the story. Other kids will tell you the number of pages and chapters and will make a chart to show the relationships between the characters and the plot. Some kids will do a skit or write an original song. Gardner says there are several “ways of knowing” things—language, math, art, music, movement, nature, sociability, inward-looking. Even spirituality. Lots of different ways, and not one is “better” than the others. Before we decide that what Paul tells Timothy is, “You can recognize the truth because it is traditional and therefore don’t learn anything new,” let’s think a little differently.

There is truth to what the rabbis said at the oven koshering. The understanding behind their response to the lightning bolt was that, even though the sacred writing texts are inspired by God, that does not mean there are no new understandings of them. The world we live in changes. God does not change, but our understanding of the texts should be open to faithful discussion with God. Scripture is part of the dialogue of salvation. The rabbis are right: God did give us responsibility for interpreting scripture, and put us in faith communities to help us question our firmly-held opinions about the text. Try thinking of scripture as the document that witnesses to the conversations between God and the community of faith, sort of the “dialogue of salvation.”

I can’t help but hear my daughter now: “And your point?” The point is, there is a usefulness to scripture. It is not just about deciding whether ovens are kosher or not. Scripture is about our relationship with God. Paul, bless his heart, says what scripture is good for. He says it has positive uses (teaching and training) as well as negative (reproof and correction). But I’m an old construction worker. I need something concrete. Give me something I can see or touch.

I come from a family that loves gadgets. My brother may wear a necktie and suit to work, but he straps a Leatherman on his belt! Grampa was the worst gadget lover. He had a gadget for winding fishing line onto his reel, a gadget for taking hooks out of the fish’s mouth, a gadget for making loops in ropes, a gadget for holding the parts you might need if your boat motor conked out, a gadget for holding spare fishing rods, and a gadget for organizing his hooks. This was just his hobby! Imagine what he had for his construction business! But they were always gadgets “for.” My dad just liked the gadget-ness of gadgets. Every Christmas he would comb Good Will stores to find some fantastical, obscure Rube Goldberg device to give to my mother, and then he’d make her guess what it was for. One year, he gave her a gadget that held cherries in a bowl on top, and when you turned the crank, an arm would pop up, grab a cherry, throw it down a chute, another arm would grab the cherry to poke out the pit, and when it was done, it would throw the cherry down another chute into a owl, while the pit fell off the side.

Scripture isn’t like that. It doesn’t have so many moving parts. Like my grampa’s preference, scripture is something for, and we already know what it is for. Paul tells us it’s for our relationship with God. We don’t get it as a paint-by-number kit, nor a kit that says insert tab A in slot A, fold tab B over to meet C. What we do get is sort of a cryptic instruction: use it. Get involved in scripture. Get engaged in it, be as curious as an investigative reporter on 20/20. The first thing is to show up. The second is to bring your questions to it. And then read as if you expect an answer.

If I were you, I’d take that as a promise. Paul says, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” That’s a promise. Show up. Ask questions. Expect answers. Keep questioning. Live into the answers. I promise you, you will learn how to tell the truth.