Today is the 4th part of a 6-week series on instructions Paul is giving to Timothy, who was a young pastor serving a church in the region of Ephesus. Unlike today where becoming a pastor can be a long time of preparation that includes a Master of Divinity degree, pastor’s licensing school, and a very in-depth credentialing process, Timothy had to learn on the fly.
Actually, Timothy had spent a lot of time with Paul during his missionary journey and now Paul is giving Timothy some helpful information in what it means to be a pastoral leader of a church.
For the first Sunday of our Dear Timothy series, the pastoral advice was for Timothy to set a culture where God’s overflowing love and grace welcomes all people. For the second Sunday, the pastoral advice was to emphasize the importance of prayer which includes praying for our needs, the needs of others, and offering prayers of thanksgiving. Paul wants Timothy to have a praying church.
Last Sunday, Paul’s spiritual advice to Timothy was for him to continue to pursue a godly life, a life that Paul describes as filled with faith, love, endurance, and gentleness. Paul also refers to pursing a life in which we take hold of the life that really is life.
For today, we move to Paul’s 2nd letter to Timothy in which he encourages Timothy to rekindle the gift of God that is already in him. Paul knew the heart strings that he needed to pull in encouraging Timothy because he mentions Timothy’s mother and grandmother and their sincere faith.
Actually, Paul is also pulling on my heart strings as well. This scripture passage here in II Timothy always reminds me of my mother and grandmother. My mother was a woman of sincere faith. She attended church, served through the church, read her bible every morning, taught Sunday School, and she always had us pray before our meals.
My grandmother also had a sincere faith. When I was in elementary school, my grandmother who was now widowed, moved into a mobile home that was next to our farmhouse. Everyday after I got off the bus from school, I would visit my grandmother. There waiting for me would be a piece of cake and some sweet tea that had way too much sugar in it.
But there was a catch! She also would have me read a bible lesson which included a quiz at the end of my reading. She would grade my answers and any that I got wrong, she would help me find the right answers. In addition to going to church on Sundays, this was how I was able to become familiar with a lot of the Bible stories and it provided me with a strong spiritual foundation from a very early age.
For Timothy, it was Eunice and Lois. For me, it was Janelle and Ida.
I’ve had many people tell me how their faith was formed through a loving parent or grandparent or some other family member. This is the wonderful thing about our faith, that it’s not only through the church, but it’s also through the faith of family members. And ideally, our faith should begin in our families and from there extend to the church family.
This comes up a lot when I meet with families in preparing for a funeral service. Even if family members have strayed from attending church, they will often tell me how their grandmother or their great-grandmother prayed for them or shared their favorite hymns or recited scriptures with them. And those are special memories for them.
Paul knew what he was doing when he referred to Timothy’s mother and grandmother in helping to rekindle the gift of God that was already within him. Paul doesn’t just want Timothy to depend on his mother and grandmother’s faith. He wants Timothy to build on that sincere faith so that it’s not just a warm glow but a bright flame.
The best way to pay tribute to a loved one who has passed down the faith to us is to live out that same faith in our own lives. And that doesn’t mean that we live out our faith in the same exact way of those who have gone before us, but it does mean that we take what we have received and make it our own. If we don’t make the faith our own throughout our lives, then our faith can easily burn out.
Speaking of family and rekindling our faith, I was reading about a pastor who shares this family story from his childhood.
He recalls a time when he was around 7 or 8 years old, and it had been snowing during the night and the living room was cold when he came downstairs that morning. He said that he can still remember shivering as he huddled on the sofa and waited for one of his parents to come downstairs to build a fire and warm up the house.
Before long, his father appeared and began to work on the fireplace. He twisted some newspaper, laid some fresh sticks, placed coal around the edge, and then, kneeling down, blew very gently at the base of the fire.
His father didn’t even need to use a match because he had seen that the coal in the very bottom of the fireplace was still glowing. So, all his father needed to do was to blow a little on it and sure enough, the coal began to glow brighter and brighter and then suddenly the newspaper burst into flame. Within a few minutes, the sticks were alight, the fire was going, and the room began to warm up.
In a similar way, the Apostle Paul knew that something was already glowing deep down within Timothy, a warm faith that had begun in the life of his mother and grandmother. And all Paul is doing in this letter is to simply ignite a faith that is already there to help bring it to full flame.
It’s important to remember that Timothy is a young leader in the church he is serving, and you get the sense that he might be feeling overwhelmed with the responsibilities that are facing him. Paul understands this and he is reminding Timothy that he has everything he needs to be the pastor that God is calling him to be.
Paul doesn’t want Timothy to be somebody that he’s not. He simply wants him to live out the same sincere faith that began with his mother and grandmother and is now at work in his life. If Paul was using the language of today, he might have added the line, “you do you, Timothy.” “Be yourself, Timothy as you lead the church.”
I remember when I first began the ministry, I wanted to make up for my lack of pastoral experience by attending as many church growth seminars as possible to copy what other churches were doing and bring those ideas back to the church I was serving at the time. And there’s certainly nothing wrong about learning from other churches as long as I don’t forget to simply be the unique pastor, preacher, and leader that God has called me to be.
When I came to that realization a little over 20 years ago to focus more on being the pastor God was calling me to be rather than someone I wasn’t, I experienced a greater sense of joy and confidence in my ministry. Sometimes, we just need to remember, “You do you, and remember the faith that is already glowing deep within you and allow it to rekindle.”
Wow, I think I’m starting to sound really old in sharing these reflections with you! I should write a book on the things I wish I could have told my younger self. But don’t we all? The good news is that we are never done rekindling our faith.
In addition to having Timothy reflect on the sincere faith of his mother and grandmother as well as the sincere faith that he already has, Paul reminds Timothy of when he laid hands on him and commissioned him to serve as a pastoral leader in the church.
The laying on of hands is what we think of today as ordination when a Bishop lays hands on someone who has been called into pastoral ministry and has fulfilled the credentialing and educational process.
My ordination was over 35 years ago, and I still remember like it was yesterday. I don’t remember it simply because it took place in an unairconditioned auditorium while wearing a heavy clergy robe on an extremely hot and humid June day for a two-hour long ordination service.
No, what I remember most about that day, was when Bishop Ammons placed his hands upon my head and he said, “Robert Vincent McDowell, take thou authority as an Elder to preach the Word of God, to administer the Holy Sacraments, and to order the life of the church, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The memory of the Bishop’s hands upon my head while saying those words was one of the most powerful moments in all of my life. My faith is always rekindled when I think back to that holy moment.
This is what Paul is wanting Timothy to remember when he says in our scripture reading, “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.”
In addition to the laying on of hands in the commissioning and ordination of pastors, the phrase, “the laying on of hands” can just as easily be applied to our baptism. Our denomination’s Book of Discipline says how all of the baptized are ministers of Jesus Christ. We call this “the ministry of the baptized.”
There are also times when we offer a blessing on those who are serving in a particular ministry of the church. Those can be powerful moments where God is present in a very real way not only for those who are being commissioned for a specific ministry, but for those who are offering the blessing.
When we say share in a closing benediction together, we are receiving a blessing from Jesus to go from this place to live out our faith until we meet again. We all receive God’s blessings, and we are then all sent out in Jesus’ name. If you are in need of a rekindled faith, remember that you have been commissioned and sent forth in the power of the Holy Spirit.
I felt my faith rekindled one summer when I was a youth. During a youth retreat, we were singing the hymn, “Pass It On” and that’s when I felt Jesus’ love for me in a very real way. I couldn’t stop singing that hymn the entire summer.
I still think of that summer whenever we sing this hymn here in church. It brings back so many good memories.
Kurt Kaiser wrote this hymn back in 1969 and it eventually went from being in youth group songbooks only to making it into our current church hymnal. I love the story of why Kurt Kaiser wrote this hymn which ties in with Paul’s words to Timothy.
In Kaiser’s own words, he writes why he wrote this song,
“On a Sunday night I was sitting in our den by the fireplace where there were remnants of a fire, and it occurred to me that it only takes a spark to get a fire going…and the rest of that song came very quickly. My wife suggested that I should say something about shouting it from the mountain tops, and that ended up in the third verse. It only took about 20 minutes to write the lyrics. Afterwards my wife and I went for a walk, letting the song ruminate in our minds.”
In each one of us, there is a warm glow of faith just waiting to be rekindled. Maybe that happens when you sing a hymn that takes you back to a time when you felt loved by God in a very real way and singing that hymn rekindles your faith.
Maybe that happens when you are reminded of a loved one who shared their faith with you at an early age and that memory rekindles your faith. Maybe that happens when years later, you can still feel the weight of the Bishop’s hand upon your head, or the words from that closing benediction, or when you came forward during a worship service to remember your baptism, and your faith is rekindled.
Maybe what Paul was trying to tell Timothy and is now saying to each one of us is, “It only takes a spark to get a fire going.”
