Rekindling
the Faith
2
Timothy 1:1-14
Ordinary
29
October
20, 2019
For this reason
I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying
on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather
a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline....Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help
of the Holy Spirit living in us.
A
good friend tells about something that happened to him. He was driving one day
to the school where he was teaching, mulling over a series of moments from that
morning.
He
is a contemplative sort of guy and begins each day with stretching exercises and
a long period of silent prayer. This day, however, he was running late on his
usual schedule. Anxiety crept in. His wife commented about it and he snapped at
her. She said, “So what good does it do you to sit in there and meditate?” He
grabbed his car keys and headed out the door.
On
his way to his school he realized he was living through a spiritual crisis.
There was a widening gap between what he professed about his beliefs and the nagging
sense of emptiness in his soul. He was a minister, of all things, going to
teach and converse with adults about matters of faith. But inside it felt like
he had little to share with anybody else. The nameplate on his office door
declared him an expert, a professor of spirituality – and for the moment his
entire professional life seemed like a sham.
Ever
have a moment like that? Maybe you’re sitting here in church and you find
yourself doubting if you believe any of it. Perhaps you’re sitting next to
somebody who sings exuberantly and prays fervently, but you’re not so sure if
anybody’s up there actually listening.
Or
something good happens, and everybody all around you is cheering, but you aren’t
so sure. You might be waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or the whistle to blow
and the referee’s flag to fly. It’s not simply a matter of getting up on the
wrong side of the bed. More likely it’s the feeling that something that used to
fit together has come disconnected and you don’t know how to cobble it back
together.
That’s
what I want to talk about today. If your faith is tuned up and humming
perfectly, this sermon probably isn’t for you; you are welcome to take an
eighteen-minute nap. But for those who wish faith was stronger and the heart was
on fire, let’s have a chat.
The
first thing to acknowledge is the experience of darkness is common. It happens
regularly. After Mother Teresa of Calcutta had died and was on the canonical escalator
to sainthood, they discovered a collection of her letters. She was riddled with
doubt. She wondered sometimes if God was really there, if her work for the poor
actually accomplished anything. She feared the long silences of heaven – and the
Roman church called her a saint.[1]
As
she wrote to a colleague, “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me,
the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen
and do not hear.” This was Mother Teresa, who inspired millions with her
charitable work on behalf of Christ, who wanted those letters destroyed after
her death.
I
cannot judge her because the story is a common one. I’ve had moments, even
seasons, when faith wavered, when clarity became confusion, and I’ll bet the
offering plate that I’m not the only one. Faith comes and goes; that’s the
nature of faith.
In
the letter we heard today, Paul commends Timothy for his “sincere faith.” Yet
this sincere faith did not come naturally. He wasn’t born with it. It was a
gift. The very thing that Paul commends didn’t originate with Timothy. It came
from somewhere else.
The
apostle says, “There was faith that lived in your grandmother Lois. It lived in
your mother Eunice, too.” Lois and Eunice were two Jewish women (Acts 16:1).
There’s no mention of Timothy’s father or grandfather. No, it was the women who
came before him. Faith came to them; now faith came to Timothy. We can presume
they told him Bible stories, taught him to pray, took him to worship.
And
if he had been in my family, he wouldn’t have had a choice about it. He would
have spent three hours in church on Sunday – Sunday School at 9:30, worship at
10:45, and coffee hour with parents who were always the last ones to leave.
Then home for roast beef, potatoes, and conversation about the sermon. That’s
how I was raised. My family shaped me in preparation for my belief.
Some
of you know my story: every Sunday, we sat in the same pew, all four kids strategically
separated by Mom and Dad. The quietest kid got to put the envelope in the offering
plate; it was a contest.
The
sermons were dull, so I took a pencil and filled in all the zeros and O’s in
the worship bulletin. And we sat still, until one day, I began to understand
what the preacher was talking about. It began with the Jesus stories, but then
more and more, comprehension increased. Faith crept in. I didn’t have it. It had
me. It came from somewhere else. Paul reveals the clue to Timothy, “with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.”
Faith sneaks in. It’s not from us, it’s a gift from God. If you
hear enough Bible, and pray enough prayers, and learn the language of belief, faith
can find a home. It can linger a while.
But faith can also slip away. That was my friend’s experience.
It’s happened to me on occasion. Maybe it’s happened to you sometimes. There is
a hint in today’s text suggesting it may have happened to Timothy too.
The hint comes when Paul reminds him “to rekindle the gift of
God that is within you.” “Rekindle” is a word from the fireplace. It’s what you
do when the hot flame has died out and the remnants of some coals remain. You
build a small nest of thin sticks over the coals called “kindling.” You blow on
the coals – or as I saw somebody do, you use a hairdryer. If the fire comes
alive, you must be ready to feed it with thicker sticks and rebuild the fire.
“Rekindle the gift of God within you.” It’s a suggestive phrase.
How might we rekindle a faith where the fire has gone out?
I can tell you what my friend did. He did a few different
things. First and foremost, he gave up on being an expert, especially about
matters of belief. It was very humbling. There he was, teaching graduate
courses on Christian spirituality -- and his own spirit was dry and disconnected.
It was hard to confess, but he decided not to fake it.
That opened him to a series of surprises. One surprise was how
much happened that did not depend on him. The sunrise was brilliant, the sunset
was stunning, and neither happened because of him. The world seemed to get
along just fine without him having to run it. He was free to breathe and take
it in.
He also began to notice how much good there is in the world. That
was significant, because he had just been through a patch of personal mishaps, a
newspaper full of bad news, national tragedies, and international suffering.
Yet, for all of that (and it had been weighing heavily on him), there were
heroic efforts for goodness. All the darkness could not snuff out the light. Maybe
Christ is risen, God is alive, and the Spirit is busy. He had stopped paying
attention.
And then, a seemingly random invitation to visit another
worshiping community refreshed him. He had gotten stuck and overcommitted in
his own congregation. He went regularly, sat in the same place every week, but
it made him grumpy. But when a friend took him to a sanctuary of believers from
another culture, it was disturbing in the best kind of way. Those people were
joyful. The energy was pulsing from the center.
He said, “I had fallen into thinking there was only OTC – one true
church. Suddenly I was thrust into seeing that if, in fact, Christ is risen,
God is alive, and the Spirit is busy, perhaps Christ, God, and Spirit are busy
somewhere else.” It was a jolt, so he lingered a while. In time, he returned to
his familiar church - and he sat in a different pew! A fresh perspective.
Along the way, he had a realization – another gift from the
heavenly headquarters. There was something more than religion, something far
superior to religion – and that was faith. He remembered two quotable quotes.
The first was a stanza from a song by the Grateful Dead:
Once in a while / you can
get shown the light
In the strangest of places /
if you look at it right. (“Scarlet
Begonias”)
The other was a line from the 17th century monk,
Brother Lawrence. He had assigned the text to his students many times, but
until now it had never occurred that the words might speak to him. Brother
Lawrence said, “I can sometimes say, ‘I no longer believe, but I see.” He could
see what matters most, what is living and true – even if it was awkward, even
if he had to give up the old certainties that had become so confining.
His story reminded me of a tale told by a college student. She had
gone off to her fall semester, moved into the dormitory, and started her
classes. A few weeks later her parents moved to another city a couple of hours
away. When she went to visit them at Thanksgiving, “home” wasn’t home anymore.
Same parents, different town. It was profoundly disorienting. All that had been
familiar was gone. The old places were gone.
When she came out of the fog of dislocation, here is how she made
sense of it all. She said, “Home had moved, and I didn’t know where it was anymore.
So I had to figure out where home was now going to be.” At the heart of it all,
she discovered she was on a journey.
All of us are on a journey. It’s the same journey. We come from
God and we return to God. The longer we live, it can seem like God is elusive
and ever on the move. Yet if God is our home, our one true home, faith is
chasing after God until we find God – and God finds us.
In one of her books, the Presbyterian writer Anne Lamott writes,
I have a lot of faith. But I
am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered
something (someone) had told me – that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but
certainty. Certainty is missing the point. Faith includes noticing the mess,
the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense … to go for a walk.[2]
So
we walk on, best in the company of one another. There’s no better way to “rekindle
the faith” within us than by reaching beyond us, welcoming one another as
strangers, building trust, and becoming companions on the way. As Paul reaches
toward Timothy, so we can extend ourselves for one another. None of us ever
need to travel alone.
We
are on the journey of faith and trust together. When we can affirm that, no
matter how far off and distant it seems, it feels like going home. That’s when
we know the journey is God’s journey, too, “with the help of the Holy Spirit living
in us.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment