Wandering Away to Myths

II Timothy 4: 1 – 4

Christopher H. Edmonston

Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church

His name was Mr. Mitchum. He was a gigantic, hulking man. He had a large, overgrown, and quite frankly unkempt beard. He wore huge black-rimmed glasses. He wore a flak jacket that I think he had since his days walking patrol in Viet Nam. But he was known for carrying a meter stick – not a yard stick he always pointed out – a meter stick. His was a crusade to rid the country of the English system of measurement and bring the world into line with the metric system, which was to his scientific mind, the only proper way to measure anything.

Mr. Mitchum was my 7^th grade Earth Science teacher, and he was a brilliant, scientific man. He only spoke in terms of fact. He didn’t speculate. And in his class you neither did you if you wanted to pass.

One day, two girls sat in the back of our room putting on makeup. Mr. Mitchum slapped the meter stick on the desk – everyone jumped! – and he said, coldly and scientifically, “Ladies, this is a science class room, and here we deal in science. We don’t waste our time on fantasy or mythology.”

II.

Fantasy is the belief in, or the telling of, the impossible and the downright fanciful. Its first cousins are fairy tale and tall tale. Stories about Hanzel and Gretel, Dorothy and Toto, Paul Bunyan, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, Spider Man and Braire Rabbit fit the bill. Mythology, though it can be just as fanciful as fantasy, is a little different. One very famous preacher and writer puts it like this: “The raw material of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once.”[1]

It’s not that myths are completely untrue, like fantasies. It is that most of them are true in some way – most of them explain why life is like it is, why the world looks like it does. Most of them end well enough or draw a fair enough conclusion. But they are not true enough to follow or believe or base a life upon them – to be sure there are some exceptions – like the Tower of Babel which is part fact, part fiction, and tells a truth about the people of the earth. Or the myths about great men of the world – the most told one probably being George Washington and the Cherry Tree – a story created to show us he was honest but lacking in historical teeth.

The vast majority of myths in our world, though pointing to the truth, lack fact and faith, and usually amount to fiction when placed under a microscope of serious inquiry. And this is true about myths, whether they are ancient or modern.

III.

One of the mistakes that we make is to think that mythology is thing of the past. Our world is rife with myths, good and bad, left and right, cheap and expensive that rob the soul of hope and purpose and deceive their believers into illusions of grandeur.

And this is strange, because we have become a scientific people. Even if you don’t think yourself scientific, you are. Just look at how we think about the weather. We don’t daily pray for rain, or leave offerings of food or money on the doorstep for a good harvest, which they still do in some parts of the world. No, we tune into WRAL or the weather channel and the science of the radar screen tells us from when and to where the rain is coming and going. And yet, despite our science, we are drawn to the myths; sometimes the myths are even scientific.

IV.

Just drink this protein-enzyme-energy-bar-like-pineapple-flavored stuff, and never exercise, don’t change your diet and you’ll lose weight.

Order this book and the government will give you money! It’s so easy! Everyone just wants to give you money!

Melt your problems away…just go see your doctor…whether your problems are in your heart or in your head just take this pill…get along with your family better, make more friends, be more attractive to the opposite sex…and the commercial trails off.

And there are the darker myths. The ones that say that if you are just more beautiful people will like you more. That if you just go along with the flow of the crowd people will respect you. The ones that teach that life is about power, and money, and popularity, and influence. The myths that say you have accomplished nothing unless people quiver in your presence. Those myths that teach that real devotion to God has little to do with service, love, and compassion.

Don’t think that myths abound, just watch your television in this political season. We have just spent the last months watching two political parties trying to out mythologize one another – his service in Viet Nam is a myth, says one side.

His leadership and valor in Viet Nam is a myth says the other: and these are but two of the political myths that we have to judge and evaluate in a sea of political myth.

What it is so strange about human nature is that we are drawn to these fantastic truths and ribald claims. Who here doesn’t love a good conspiracy or an intrigue? Who here doesn’t watch the infomercial with its grandiose claims just a moment too long in the hopes that something of its promises are more than wishes and that its claims just might be true?

There is one more quality that we must point out about myths: the difference between their purveyors, the people that tell and share them, and salesmen or tellers of old yarns, is that the myth-tellers believe that the myths are true, and they tell them with the conviction of truth.

The end result of this combination of factors is the very power of myth itself. And we are drawn to myth like butter to biscuits, even when we know that they are misleading us. I have said this before, and I will say it again, but the problem we have with sin is the same problem we have with myth – while we are sinning it just feels so good and so easy; while we wander away with the myths of our day the same is true: it just feels so good and easy.

VI.

If there are more beautiful words in scripture than these, I don’t know them. Listen again to this word from 2 Timothy:

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.

Myths, unlike lies, don’t kill the mind and spirit quickly, but allow us to wander into them. I describe them as the crock-pot deception – slowly changing the nature of whatever comes in contact with it.

The saving word this morning is that the gospel is the corrective to the problem of myth in our world. For the gospel is not only spiritual, it is also historical. It transcends myth by both faith and history, by belief and record, and is not only based upon a truth, it is the truth! Or to extend the metaphor – not only can the gospel pull life out of the frying pan, it can also cut off the crock pot as well.

VII.

Paul’s word to Timothy here is a powerful one. Not because of charge (which is strong), but because of warning (which is the purpose of giving the charge to begin with). “Timothy – beware of myth. People wander into, and they cannot get out. Always understand that the truth of God is both a promise that breaks every myth of the world, and a calling that demands more than any of the myths dare to demand.”

For you see, most myths promise that life is easier and more fun, and that we will look better, when we live by their standards and desires. They promise that the problems and the work of life will just melt away while we party ourselves to death.

God makes no such promise. One scholar writes, “We do not obey the law of God to make ourselves look good or upright in our communities. As Christians we obey the law of God out of gratitude for what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.”[2] Paul knows what we know but easily forget: to go with God on the way with Jesus is to go against the grain. It is to proclaim what it is right and what is true in the face of what is easy and expedient. It is to tell the truth about God even when it is hard. It is, sometimes, to slam the meter stick down on the desk and stop the illusions, end the myths, and stand with God in the muck of reality.

VIII.

As a pastor, I am only one person: a sinner saved by grace. I struggle with the myths just like we all do. I won’t always be able tell you where they are because I don’t always know myself. Very often I wander into them, and have to pray to be pulled out.

For example, I can’t tell you who to vote for next week. I will only tell you that there are myths on both sides, and my hope is that you will spend as much time praying for both candidates, and all candidates, and praying for guidance to see the truth about all who are running for office. For it is only with God’s help that we get a clear-lens in a blurred world of myth and doublespeak. I pray that none of us wander off into myth, in this political season, or any season of our living.

IX.

In what might become one of the essential theological texts of our age, Dallas Willard in a book called The Divine Conspiracy opens with a story of a pilot who crashed her plane thinking that she was flying right-side up, when the whole time she was flying upside down. So her move to climb into the sky was actually a great fall.[3] Myth will truthfully tell you that you are flying. And then mislead you about being right-side up or upside down. May God give us his grace that we would let Jesus be the guide of our lives, and that we would, each of us, not wander into myth, but purposefully go where we are led; for the sake of the gospel and the building of the kingdom. Amen.

[2] McKim, Donald. Presbyterian Beliefs. 107.