Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "Passing Along the Faith"

Text: 2 Timothy 1:1-14

a word or a phrase

will just kind of leap right off the page at you?

As if God had put it there a few thousand years ago

just so that you could find it, today?

Part of this morning’s epistle lesson hit me that way:

"Do not be ashamed, then,

of the testimony about our Lord."

I mean, to heck with Timothy;

that could have been written to us

twenty-first century Christians.

Do not be ashamed

of the testimony about our Lord.

Or, depending on how you translate your Greek participles,

do not be ashamed

of testifying to our Lord.

But that’s not an easy task, is it?

We live in a thoroughly secular society,

in a mostly secular world.

There are plenty of folks around us

who think we are plenty weird

for devoting even one hour in the week

to God, to religion, to the church.

More than that, well,

that makes us practically fanatics.

So, sometimes we are ashamed to testify

because we’re afraid.

Afraid people will think we’re crazy.

Or naïve, or foolish.

Or easy to take advantage of.

Well …

welcome to the Roman Empire.

We tend, I suppose, to think that the early Christians

must have had it easier than we do.

Not true … not at all.

No doubt, we may occasionally get funny looks from people

if we testify openly about our Lord.

But that’s still far preferable to being thrown into prison,

which is what happened to Paul and Silas and countless others.

Some of us may have friends who think we’re hopelessly old-fashioned

to get up on a gorgeous Sunday morning and go to church.

But in the days of Rome,

attending Christian worship could be punished by death.

And fairly spectacular forms of death, at that.

It was definitely not easier

for Timothy, or Paul, to be a Christian

than it is for us.

And yet, they were not afraid …

much less, ashamed …

to testify to their Lord.

So you have to wonder,

what’s the matter with us?

Why do we have such a hard time

giving testimony to God?

It’s a particularly appropriate question to ask ourselves today,

this World Communion Sunday.

Christianity is, today,

a world-wide religion.

(Just look at the music we’ve sung this morning.)

But that’s only because those earliest Christians

risked their necks to go out and tell the story.

If they had not done so –

if they had stayed home where it was safe –

then Christianity today would be nothing more

than a small, splinter sect within Judaism.

If it existed at all..

And we, depending on our ancestry,

might be worshiping Zeus, or Wotan, or Quetzalcoatl, or trees.

Somehow, some way, we need to cultivate

the ability, and willingness, and enthusiasm

to go out and testify to our Lord.

To pass along the faith to others.

Now, most if not all of us here

are pretty comfortable about testifying among ourselves.

We like to share with each other

about how the Lord is at work in our lives.

And that’s a good start!

But it’s only a start.

The challenge for us is,

to take that message outside these walls, outside our comfortable fellowship,

and to share it with others.

With people who have never heard it before.

With people who have forgotten.

With people who learned it wrong,

and so got hurt instead of helped.

We are called, as Christian people,

to testify unashamedly to our Lord.

And even under the best of circumstances, that can be scary.

Sometimes, even when opportunities get dropped right in our lap,

it can be hard to know what to say.

Several years ago,

I was flying to upstate New York for a friend’s wedding …

only the Elmira airport got fogged in, which apparently is not all that unusual.

And the next nearest airport, which was Binghamton,

was also shrouded in fog.

So instead of keeping us in Pittsburgh until it cleared,

they flew us all to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,

and met us with buses to drive us back where we were supposed to go!

Well, as often happens, my seat-mate on the bus and I got to talking,

and it was one of those cases where

you have one of the most amazing conversations of your whole life

with a total stranger!

We talked about our work, and our families,

and the relative merits of Texas vs. New York,

and snow tires, and I don’t even remember what all else.

Except that every once in a while,

he would turn the conversation back to my work,

and ask me something very serious about the Christian faith.

And frankly, it was a little bit scary,

because I could tell that he was serious;

he was really searching;

this was not one of those folks who goes poking questions at you

to see if they can make you squirm …

and I, a complete stranger,

had to tell him what I knew about God.

I had to testify about my Lord,

share my faith,

and it wasn’t easy.

But it was truly amazing.

And even though it was getting on toward two o’clock in the morning,

we found it impossible to stop talking about such things.

And I knew that somehow,

in my own stumbling way,

I had managed to do a good thing.

Paul tells Timothy, in essence:

You have this faith.

It was given to you by your mother, and by your grandmother, and me, Paul.

Now, you must share the task with us.

You are to give the faith to others … pass it on.

It’s not a true faith

if we simply hoard it for ourselves …

"Me and Jesus against the world" doesn’t cut it.

Faith comes as a gift from God …

and we are obligated to go out and share that gift.

Or at the very least,

to help clear the way so that God can offer that gift in the lives of others.

Often, when we think about going out into the world to share our faith,

one of the first thing we probably picture

is exotic missionary trips to somewhere primitive,

to convert heathens, and die from strange tropical diseases!

But that’s not primarily what I’m talking about.

I don’t want to discount that, but,

most Christian people, including most of us,

simply don’t have the time, or the money, or the language skills,

to go out on a missionary journey like Paul

and some of the other early disciples.

It’s a very different world we live in now,

and while there is still a need for those who can go far away,

there is also a powerful need for those

who will share the faith at home.

Did you know that within the past 25 years,

for the first time in centuries,

Christianity became primarily a non-white folks’ religion?

Some time in the last one-quarter of the twentieth-century,

the percentage shifted –

and now, white/Caucasian folks

are a minority in the Christian world.

A large and wealthy minority, to be sure,

but a minority nonetheless.

Now, that’s both good news and bad news.

It’s good news

in that it means our missionary work has indeed borne fruit.

The Christian faith has been brought, or in some cases, has been re-introduced,

in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America,

and it has grown and flourished.

But the bad news is that American and western European Christians

have really dropped the ball

when it comes to sharing the faith in our own cultures.

We have somehow failed

to pass along the faith

to those nearest to us.

And that, really, is what I’m concerned with today.

Most of us don’t have the opportunity, maybe even not the interest,

to travel around the world preaching to non-Christians.

But what we do have is lots of golden opportunities right here,

to tell the good news to people we know,

and/or, people nearby.

To children …

I know that’s not always easy;

sometimes children don’t listen very well,

and many or most of us are beyond the point

where we have our own children to teach …

Nor do I mean that it is necessarily parents’ "fault"

if their children don’t listen –

my parents ended up with one preacher and one agnostic!

Go figure.

But we have to do our best to pass our faith on to them.

And those of us who are not parents,

or beyond having small children,

still, I think, have a responsibility in our society

to help parents be able to do that job.

There are time pressures on families today

that many of us never had to deal with

in terms of Sunday morning commitments.

We need to give parents permission, to help them say no,

to some of the demands on them and their children,

so that they can teach the faith.

What about our friends and our neighbors,

people we work with, people we go to school with,

people who live next door that we see out cutting the grass on Sunday morning?

How can we pass along our faith to them?

I suspect that every one of us here could probably make a list

of at least five people, maybe ten, maybe more …

that we probably ought to testify to about our Lord.

People who are basically good folks,

who are honest, who are loving,

maybe even give to charity,

who perhaps believe in God in a vague sort of way,

but have never gotten around to making a commitment …

We can, and we must, reach out to those people.

And sometimes, we even need to share our faith with people we don’t know:

with a neighbor we haven’t yet met.

With someone we come across quite by accident,

who seems to need our help.

Even with a stranger on the bus.

I don’t mean to suggest that passing along the faith is easy;

no, it can be quite scary.

Because people don’t always want to hear the gospel.

We don’t always want to know

that God is the center of the universe, and we are not.

We don’t want to hear

that we are sinners who need to be forgiven.

Sometimes the gospel is tough news

in addition to being good news!

But God does give us the strength

to share that news,

if we will only ask for it.

God will give us courage, and eloquence,

and opportunities,

it we trust, and ask.

And when that happens,

we will find ourselves becoming more and more like Paul and Timothy.

Unafraid to pass along our faith …

unashamed to pass along our faith,

to the whole world,

one person at a time!

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

© 2004 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)