January 20, 2008 Sermon

Do Not Be Ashamed
II Timothy 1:8-14

Before the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the Allied Command made a harsh decision.  They would place green soldiers, men who had never seen battle, in the first waves to hit the beaches.  They reasoned that experienced troops would not do what had to be done.  Men who already knew the horror of battle would be more likely to dig in, to take cover, to refuse to climb up out of the water once they saw the murderous defense from the Germans.  Thousands of men were scheduled to follow those first waves.  If they did not clear the landing zones the entire invasion would become paralyzed.  Sometimes knowing is worse than not knowing.

You may have heard the old cliché, “Doctors make the worst patients.”  Nurses often claim this is because doctors cannot adjust to not being in control.  There is some truth to this stereotype.  But I would submit there is another reason doctors, and nurses, can make difficult patients: they know too much.  They know how pain can linger.  They know how long recovery can take.  They know the side effects of various drugs.  Sometimes knowing is worse than not knowing.

I have known since this past Monday morning that when I preached this sermon I would need to address what happened the night before.  At some point during that evening the trusses on our building expansion project collapsed.  I discovered this when I drove into the parking lot at about 9:00 a.m.  Bob Thompson “happened” to be there for another reason (though I think he might have been an angel—a big, bespectacled angel sent to keep me from losing my composure in that moment).  Bob and I passed through the stages of collapsed-truss grief: shock, thanksgiving that nobody got hurt, curiosity over why it happened, fear that the insurance company might refuse to cover our loss.  All week long I watched people pass through these stages.  All week long I have known that this Sunday I would need to rely on the Holy Spirit to provide words that would help get our church back on track.

But I found that I had a case of knowing-too-much.  How easy it is to urge others to pick themselves up from a body blow.  How hard it is to climb up on your feet when you have taken the hit.  How easy it is to tell others not to quit when the going gets tough.  How hard it is to keep going yourself.  Now our church—especially those members and friends who have had even a minor part in the building construction—knows how hard it is to regain momentum after a terrible setback.  We want to get angry.  We want somebody to blame.  We want to go negative.  We have experienced the injury.  We know how hard the healing might be.

Nevertheless, heal we must.  We have already begun.  We have begun cleaning the physical and spiritual messes the collapsed trusses created so we can start building again.  When I saw Gene Adams step out into that mess with a power saw and begin cutting up ruined trusses so he could clear them away, my heart filled with gratitude to God.  Here was a man able to stand up after taking the hit.  Following his lead, others have rejoined the project.  One member has committed to covering the $500 deductible we must pay before our insurance policy will cover our damages.  Three other men took off time from work to help in the earliest, and most dangerous, stages of the demolition project.  A person whose name I do not know stopped me on the street and said how sorry he was to see the disaster and that he had been praying for our church.

We serve a gracious God.  Our Lord never promised us pain-free lives.  Indeed, suffering in this life was part even of His own experience.  But he did promise us the spiritual power to prevail over every problem: man-made problems, and problems like the one that happened last Sunday night out on the building site, an event that the insurance company was pleased to call an “act of God”.  But look at what God has to say in the first chapter of the New Testament book we call II Timothy. 

“Do not be ashamed,” our passage begins, “of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner.”  Scholars debate whether the Apostle Paul, or a follower from a generation later, wrote these words.  It does not matter.  They refer to the pains Paul suffered in order to preach about Jesus to a world that did not want to listen.  The “do not be ashamed” part might strike our ears a little strangely.  Why would anybody be ashamed of talking about Jesus?  We need to put this in the right context to understand.  That context is suffering.  The question suffering poses about God never stops challenging our faith: how can a gracious God allow His followers to suffer?  The answer is, that’s the wrong question.  The right question is: do we serve God, or does God serve us?  Does God exist to make us happy?  Or do we exist to freely enter into fellowship with God, a decision that the Bible tells us makes God happy?

The Apostle Paul suffered terribly in order to preach about Jesus.  He gave up a life of security and the promise of becoming a star in his first career as a Jewish Pharisee.  He suffered hunger.  He risked bandits on the road.  Opponents of the Gospel slandered and whipped him.  If Paul had thought that God exists to serve us, then this suffering he endured in the name of God would have “proven” God’s unfairness.  He would have considered his pains as evidence against God’s justice.  In Jewish thought of the day, Paul would have become “ashamed” of God. 

But Paul kept suffering and preaching.  He kept witnessing to his belief in Jesus as the Messiah.  “This grace was given to us,” II Timothy reads, “through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”  The text goes on to tell us that Paul suffered precisely because he could do no other than testify to Jesus Christ, no matter what suffering it might cause him.  Paul kept his eyes fixed firmly on Jesus.  We must do the same.  I say this as a pastor of twenty-three years.  And I say this as the preacher who must speak to a congregation that has experienced a harsh setback.  We now know how hard it is to get back up after suffering the body blow.  Look to Christ, and we can do it. 

Our little section of II Timothy reaches its climax with these resounding words: “I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to him.”  Do you know Christ?  Jesus preached hard truths.  He healed wounds, physical and spiritual.  He accepted torture and death.  And he did it all because he loved us enough to suffer for our sake.  He suffered to pay the price God’s justice demands for our sin: death.  He suffered to move us to love him right back.  He suffered so we would know that suffering, while extraordinarily difficult, pales in comparison to eternal glory.  How could we be ashamed of a Savior like that?

Yet we can be.  We can be ashamed of Jesus.  The very real and very harsh sufferings of this world can make us ashamed in the same sense as Paul.  Suffering can kill our faith.  We can also be ashamed of Jesus because we fear others might see him as a fairy tale.  We might fear shame not that we believe in Jesus, but that we believe in anything.  But faith gets us back on our feet when life has knocked us down.  Faith gets our feet moving forward when injustices stop us in our tracks.  Faith restores our hope when pain takes the air out of our souls.