January 27, 2008 Sermon

Endurance
II Timothy 2:8-19

“Remember Jesus Christ, raised,” begin our verses.  That is as good a summary of a Bible passage as ever you will find.  Remember Jesus Christ, raised.  Remember, and keep on remembering, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.  Endure.  Do not quit believing in Him. 

Not too long ago I used long-distance runners as an illustration of the good that can come from endurance.  But even the most dedicated distance runner has nothing on the Apostle Paul.  His life proves my point.  From the Book of Acts we learn that he suffered repeated imprisonments and beatings.  His fellow Jews considered him a traitor.  The leaders of the new Christian movement never completely trusted him.  He spent his life—literally spent it—on the road for Jesus.  We do not know for certain where or when he died but we do know this much: he was not at home.

“Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel,” reads our full opening sentence.  That says quite a lot.  It says that the author believed Jesus truly rose from the dead.  Many people today do not.  Many people put Jesus in the same category as Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.: great men, prophetic critics of their times, tireless workers for justice, hall-of-fame teachers, but not God on earth, Immanuel, with the power to defeat death itself.  The author of these verses believed in Jesus as the Son of God.  Do we?

Our topic sentence continues with a mention of Jesus as “a descendent of David.”  This roots Jesus in his Jewish family tree.  It reminds us that he belonged to the “house and lineage of David”.  The ancient Jewish prophets had agreed that when the Messiah came, he would come from that family.  In other words, God planned it all before the beginning of time, and God made it happen just as he had promised.

“That is my gospel,” ends our sentence.  Gospel means Good News, but in a deeper sense than we normally use.  Gospel is the Good News, the best news you will ever hear.  Gospel is the Good News that God saves us from the powers of sin and death.  The Gospel is the Good News that in Christ we find our salvation.  The man who wrote these words not only spent his life preaching this Gospel, he bet his soul on it.  And he made that bet again and again, through decades of hardship.  Do we?

Do we truly hang onto our faith come what may?  Do we endure, or do we quit? 
Our passage tells us that no matter what forms of imprisonment we might face, the word of God is not chained.  Some of us face horrible chains: mental illness, wasting physical illness, destructive family ties, soul-sapping groups of people at work.  If the Good News of the
Gospel, that Jesus saved us by rising from the dead, cannot survive these and all the other horrible chains that can enslave us, what’s the point?  Paul himself wrote that if his belief in Jesus proved groundless then he was among all men to be most pitied.  But with the gift of faith we can endure.  With the gift of faith we can experience the blessed hope granted by the Gospel.  With faith, we are free.

“If we have died with him,” our passage continues, “we will also live with him.”  In this context “dying with (Jesus)” means dying to the killing power of our own sin.  Baptism has many symbolic meanings; one refers to this “dying” business.  When Jesus walked down into the River Jordan to get baptized his fellow Jews understood that his actions stood for a kind of climbing down into the grave.  People getting baptized ritualistically killed their sins.  Jesus had no sins to kill, but he submitted to baptism anyway.  He did so, in part, because of the next movement involved: climbing back up onto dry ground.  This symbolized rising from the dead, entering a new life freed from the killing power of sin.  Jesus led the way for us.  Will we follow?
Do we endure in that faith in Jesus that constantly reassures us we will never die?  Do we endure in that faith in Jesus that constantly reminds us he freed us from the killing power of our sins? 

If we endure, our verses promise, we will reign.  We will have power through Jesus Christ.  And with that power we can endure through the worst that life can offer.  A while back I mentioned the chains that bind our souls.  No honest person can deny these chains.  They grip us with the very hand of death.  Television and movies make fun of the Twelve Step movement.  That’s a shame, because this movement pioneered the way to recovery through an honest admission of our powerlessness to break free from these chains on our own. 

We get basic cable, with fourteen channels.  I never watch seven of them.  I also keep to a strict “no commercials” policy.  This means that when my show goes to a commercial I often find myself watching something I normally would not.  One time last week I plinked through the channels and landed on an episode of a highly rated sitcom.  I saw a circle of adults sitting in metal folding chairs in what looked like a church basement.  “AA” I immediately thought, but it turned out to be a depiction of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.  “I’m Brenda, and I am an addict,” a woman opened.  You all know the next line.  Everybody together now: “Hi Brenda!”  We think we know how these twelve-step groups operate.  But the media usually add one thing to them that never happens in real life, and the media always subtract their most important tool.

As this scene played out the camera cut back and forth between “Brenda”, who was spilling her guts about her addiction to pain pills, and two wiseacre guys sitting across the circle from her.  Brenda said she had gone three days since taking her last pill.  One guy laughed that three days was how long it sometimes took him to figure out where he was after getting drunk again.  Brenda talked about how excruciating it was for her to face bedtime, knowing the ache to take pills would only intensify as she lay awake.  The other guy made a sarcastic, off-color comment.  On and on it went.  This kind of mockery would never happen at a real meeting.

I am not any sort of addict.  But I have attended two AA meetings.  Several groups met in our church basement at the congregation I served before coming here.  A member of our church attended one of those groups.  He asked me if I would like to visit it—with its members’ prior permission, of course.  I knew this was an unusual offer, and an honor.  I accepted.  Sure enough, at the meetings I saw a couple of people I knew, yet did not know were addicts.  And as my host had hoped, I learned a great deal from the experience.  Perhaps most importantly, I learned that the spiritual component of AA is the power that drives the whole program.  And this, of course, is the part the media take out.

People in every community know the power of hanging on to Jesus through twelve-step groups.  It would not surprise me in the least to know that at least one person listening to me speak these words belongs to such a group—and knows first-hand how remembering Jesus Christ, raised, can raise us from the deepest pit imaginable.  The church cannot, and should not try to, function as a twelve-step group.  But like the recovery movement the church can reinforce its members’ contact with the most critical force available to humanity: faith in the risen Jesus Christ. 

The church must worship the risen Christ relentlessly.  Twelve-step groups meet regularly and strictly enforce attendance.  Grim experience has taught them that when members fall away from the group they tend to fall away, also, from recovery.  A family in this church recently shared, in the most caring, gentle way, that they felt disconnected from us—and a little from God.  “But you have not come to church very frequently,” I replied.  “How can you stay close to God and God’s people if you don’t hang around with us?”  I spoke with fear, because grim experience had taught me that people often do not want to hear that message.  But to their credit, these folks listened and agreed to try to change their pattern.