Four words carry this whole Lesson, and they are easy to miss because they sound like a throwaway. Be instant in season, out of season. Preach when the moment is right, Paul seems to say, and also, if you have the stamina, when it is not.

That reading dies one verse later.

For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine. Paul is not allowing for the possibility of a bad season. He is telling Timothy that one is coming. He has just handed a young man a job, and before the ink is dry he says the conditions for that job are going to fail. The phrase out of season is not a caveat tucked into the charge. It is the charge describing the weather it will actually be worked in.

Out of season is where this letter expects Timothy to be standing.

Which changes what the sentence is asking for.

If the bad season is an exception, then working out of season is heroism, and heroism is optional, and you may reasonably wait for things to improve. If the bad season is the forecast, then working out of season is simply the job. There is no version of the assignment that comes with good conditions attached. Paul does not offer one, and he was in a position to know.

There is no season coming in which this gets easier. There is only working out of season, and the choice of whether to.

Look at what the charge does not contain. There is no clause about waiting until people are ready to hear it. There is no clause about the preacher’s own circumstances, his health, his standing, his security, his age. There is no clause that says do this when you are established. The conditions are named only to be ruled out as a reason.

Out of season, then. Not as a warning, but as an address.

And notice how the passage ends, because the ending is doing something quiet.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Three verbs, and all three of them are completions. Not one of them is a result. He does not say I persuaded them. He does not say the church grew. He does not say they endured sound doctrine in the end, and on his own account they did not.

That matters enormously for anyone working out of season, because the season is what determines the yield. If you are measured by what the year produced, then the person handed a bad year is handed a bad verdict with it. Paul’s summing-up refuses that arithmetic. Fought, finished, kept. The measure is what you did with the season you were given, not what the season gave back.

It is the only measure under which a person working out of season can be judged fairly at all.

Then the last line widens without warning. The crown is laid up, not competed for, and it is not only to me, but to them also that love his coming. The reward clause opens at the exact moment you expect it to close.

You cannot be priced out of that by a bad year, and you cannot be priced into it by a good one. It is laid up, and the work goes on out of season regardless.

There is a second thing in this Lesson, and it is the verse the church most often gets backwards.

According to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears. That sentence gets aimed, with great confidence, at people who have left a congregation. You left because you wanted to be told what you wanted to hear. Your leaving is itself the evidence against you.

Read what the verse actually describes. It describes heaping teachers, plural, accumulating them, assembling a supply that suits. It describes an appetite for being told things, ears that itch to hear more. That is a portrait of abundance and appetite.

It is not a portrait of somebody who walked out of one room and stopped going anywhere.

Those two people are opposites. One is collecting voices. The other has gone quiet. Whatever Paul is warning about here, the person who left a church because of what happened to them there is not it, and the verse cannot be made to reach them without being read against its own words.

So I will name who this gets used on. It gets used on gay and lesbian people, on bisexual people, and on trans people in particular, because the phrase according to their own desires is a gift to anyone who wants to argue that a person’s account of their own life is only ever appetite. The claim is that wanting a thing makes your report of it untrue. That your testimony is disqualified by the fact that you would prefer it to be true.

That is not a doctrine. It is a way of never having to answer anybody.

And it can be applied out of season, in any weather, to anyone who is inconvenient. That is what makes it so useful.

On Thursday this offering said something adjacent and it is not the same claim, so I want to be exact. That day was about completion, about whether a person still in the middle of becoming can be counted yet, and it was built on Paul’s promise that the one who has begun a good work will finish it. Today is about credibility. Not you are not done yet, but you would like it to be so, therefore it is not.

Two different refusals, and a person can be handed both in the same year, out of season and out of standing at once.

Apply the plain test to Christianity’s own record and see what that teaching grows. It grows a church where the only person permitted to describe a harm is somebody with no stake in it. It grows congregations that can absorb any amount of testimony without ever being changed by it, because every witness is disqualified in advance by caring. And it grows the specific silence of people who worked out of season for years inside a room that was hurting them, and who left, and who were then told that the leaving proved the whole thing.

That is the fruit. And it ripens out of season, once the people it concerns have already stopped coming.

There is a story sometimes told of a man four years out of prison who wanted to do peer support.

He had done the training inside. Outside, the scheme that could use him took its volunteers once a year, in September, when the funding cycle opened. His release date was October. So he came in October, to a portable cabin at the edge of a community garden, dormant beds under frost, a laminated notice taped inside the window with the intake dates on it. The woman at the desk was kind and told him the correct thing, which was to come back in September.

He came back in January. Different person at the desk, same notice, same answer.

He came back in April, and the beds were being turned over, and he asked whether he could help with that instead, and was told the garden had its own scheme with its own dates. He came back the following September, on time at last, and the intake had been moved to March.

Four visits, each one out of season, each one to somebody who saw him and could not use him.

The fourth time, a new coordinator looked at the notice, and then at him, and sat down on the step outside the cabin and talked to him for forty minutes about nothing much. That is all that happened.

I am not going to tell you it worked out, because it did not, not that year. He did not get the placement. The notice is still taped in the window and the dates on it are still wrong for him. Nothing here gets fixed.

What I will say is that he kept presenting himself in months that were not the month, which is the whole of what Paul asks for, and that four times running he was the only one behaving as though the work were the point rather than the calendar.

He was instant out of season. Four times, in four wrong months.

Albert’s own life reads the same way once you take the legends out of it. He came from a count’s household and joined a preaching order. He was made a bishop and gave it back after two years to go and teach again. And in 1277, an old man by any reckoning, he went to Paris to defend the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who was already dead and could not be helped by it.

That is the most out of season journey I know of in the calendar, and it is the reason his Mass sits beside this Lesson so well. He was old and he went anyway. Yesterday’s Lesson made a point about the men the Church puts in charge, that the one who holds the office is compassed with infirmity himself, and Albert going to Paris at that age for a dead pupil is what that looks like when someone actually does it.

Out of season, past seventy, for a man past helping.

The Gospel closes the loop from the other end. Christ separates two kinds of teacher, and the difference is not eloquence or timing or reception. He that shall do and teach, he shall be called great. Do and teach. Both verbs, in that order, with no third verb about whether anyone accepted it.

Which means the assignment can be completed out of season. It just cannot be completed comfortably.

It is the same Gospel that opened a fortnight ago today, which no man could number, on the mountain, with the Beatitudes. Today’s reading starts at the verse straight after those end. Salt and light come immediately after blessed are the poor in spirit, which is to say that Christ tells you what you are for about ten seconds after telling you that you are not required to be impressive first.

You are salt and light out of season too. The passage attaches no conditions to either.

And if none of the theology is yours, the ethical shape still holds without it. Work that is only done when conditions reward it is not work, it is a response to conditions. The test of whether you actually hold a commitment is what you do with it in the year it costs you something, and a person who shows up out of season is telling you the truth about what they are.

That is what the charge asks. Not that you succeed. That you do the thing out of season, and keep doing it, and let the crown be laid up somewhere you cannot audit.

You can hear the same instinct running under the propers. On Monday the offering built on a Mass whose Introit was this same antiphon, the one about the mouth of the just, where a saint was told he will minister unto them. And the girdle and the robe of glory in today’s Alleluia were printed on the fourth of this month inside a much longer Lesson, on a bishop who was faithful over a few things. The Church keeps handing the same few sentences to very different men, which is its own quiet argument that the charge does not change with the season.

↑ The order resumes below.