This sermon was preached at Whittier UMC on Sunday, October 6, 2019, based on 2 Timothy 1:1-14.
My friend Sara is a graphic designer in New York City, working in publishing. It’s not exactly where she thought she would end up. See, in high school, Sara wanted to be the first woman on Mars. She was determined to get her PhD in Astrophysics and become an astronaut, which was how I met her, at an astronomy camp at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, after my first year of college and her senior year of high school. In honor of this desire that Sara carried, her mother had a bracelet made for her, a silver one with a custom charm that said, “Ad astra per aspra,” “to the stars through difficulty,” the motto of the Apollo program.
Sara took amazing care of this bracelet. She treasured it. She wore it on special occasions but was always careful with it. She knew how important it was to her mother that she took care of this bracelet, even after she had set down her dream to be the first woman on Mars. Over the course of college, her interests shifted and after she graduated from Carolina with a degree in Environmental Studies, she would be interning with an environmental advocacy group on the Outer Banks, an internship that would spark her interest in graphic design and eventually lead her to her current position. Still, she cared deeply for this bracelet.
Which is how I found myself being woken up by a phone call around 2am on a Saturday. See, in my twenties, I was the person in my friend group who would call it a night well before midnight, because I’ve always liked my sleep, but my friends knew that I would leave my phone on in case someone needed a ride or was stuck in an uncomfortable situation or needed help. I wake up to a phone call from Sara who is in intense distress. She’d lost the bracelet.
Now, I’d heard about this bracelet before. I knew how she got it from her mother and how she treasured it and I knew that there would be no going home until we found it, so I put on my sweatpants and headed out of the house and together, Sara and I looked up and down every inch of Franklin Street before heading to every restaurant and bar she had been to that night, looking in bathrooms and behind commodes, searching under tables and in between booth cushions that probably haven’t been cleaned in longer than we want to think about.
The last place we looked was in a storm drain in which Sara swore she saw a sparkle. I got down on my hands and knees, turned my phone’s flashlight on, and started looking. It is at this exact moment that a policeman came up to us, probably making his last rounds of the night. “Everything okay?” he asked. I looked up from my search and began to explain, but Sara cut me off. “We’re looking for my BRACELET. It’s VERY. IMPORTANT. It is silver and it says AD ASTRA and my mother will kill me if we don’t FIND IT.”
The policeman very calmly nodded and said, “Well, now we have a description of the item. You can call on Monday to see if anyone has turned it or if we’ve found it.” He handed me his card and suggested that I take Sara home, which I was more than happy to do. For weeks after that adventurous night, we would stare at the ground any time we were on Franklin Street, and ask to check the lost and found of every bar or restaurant we went in.
Now, it may be that some of you haven’t gone to such lengths to preserve something you treasure, or maybe you’ve gone to more, but I think we all know that feeling of treasuring something, of holding tight to it and valuing it. That’s why I love it when the writer of 2 Timothy calls the Gospel a treasure. It’s a beautiful image but it’s also a relatable one. We’ve all treasured something in our lives, from our favorite stuffed animal to wedding rings to letters from those dear to us. And the Gospel is no different. We treasure it.
I actually think that the story of Sara and the Bracelet lines up pretty well with what the epistle writer is saying this morning. When we treasure the Gospel, the idea that God came down to Earth and put on flesh in order to set us free from the things that bind us, the things that keep us from knowing God and living an abundant life, when we treasure that idea, it impacts our faith. And the letter writer outlines three ways it impacts our faith: it helps us carry on the faith we inherited, it lets us have a faith based on love and not on fear, and it helps our faith live within us.
Sara, of course, got her bracelet from her mother, just as Timothy received his faith from his mother, Eunice, and his grandmother, Lois. Many of us receive our faith from those who came before us, from parents or grandparents who dragged us to church or from church leaders who cared for us or from the wisdom shared by elders in the faith in books or sermons. We inherit faith. The faith that lives in the ones who came before us lives in us. And this is a good thing, something wonderful and to be celebrated. The treasure of the gospel has been passed on from generation to generation and it’s important that the faith that lives in us be carried on to those who come after us.
But faith also changes over time. This is why the letter writer tells us to hold on to sound teaching. As we Christians learn and grow and as the world changes, so too does our faith. Not the Gospel—Christ always came to this Earth to set us free, to bring us back into God’s deep and astounding love for us—but other facets of the faith change. And sometimes, that means that we inherit knowledge and pieces of our faith that don’t quite work for us today.
I’m sure you’ve heard the story of the ham and the pot. One day, a young husband is making a ham dinner for the family when his wife sees him cutting off part of the hambone. “Why are you doing that?” she asks. “That makes no sense.” “This is the way me and my mama always cooked the ham,” he replies. “I’m sure there must be a reason.” His wife disagrees and so they decide to go to the source of the information. They call his mother. On the phone, his mother says that she doesn’t know why you cut off that part of the hambone, only that that’s how her mother taught her to cook ham. So they all call up the grandmother, who says, “Well, of course I have to saw off that part of the hambone! That’s the only way it fits in my pot!”
Sometimes, we inherit knowledge that doesn’t quite work for us today.
This doesn’t mean that we entirely throw out the faith of those who came before us. Remember, we were handed down the Gospel, the good news that for freedom Christ has set us free, by those who came before us. There will be treasure in what we inherit. But there will also be other things that we can set aside. Part of a faith that is impacted by the Gospel is learning to recognize what is Gospel and what is not.
You know, Sara said something interesting as she was explaining to the cop why we were shining a flashlight into a storm drain at 4am on Saturday. She said, “I have to find this bracelet or my mother will kill me.” Now, that’s a common exaggeration, and Sara was exaggerating too, but there was also real fear behind what she said. She’d lived with her mother all of her life. She knew how important things like this bracelet were to her mother. She knew that it wouldn’t be grace and kindness that she received if her mother knew that she’d lost it. It would be a shouting match and months if not years of snide comments and insults.
Fear can make us do some extraordinary things. She searched and searched and searched for that bracelet before contacting the jeweler who originally made it, swearing him to secrecy, and using the last of her work-study money to pay for a replacement bracelet. While I’m sure that there was some love mixed in with the fear, in some sense, Sara treasured the bracelet because she had to.
But we cannot treasure the Gospel in this way. The epistle writer tells us this flat-out in verse 6: “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice,” of fear, “but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” If our faith is growing out of the Gospel, it’s based in love and not in fear.
I’m sure many of us have experienced a faith that was based in fear. I know I have. Fear of hell, fear of doing the wrong thing, fear that my body would cause others to sin. I grew up in the middle of the Purity Movement and I’ve spent more years than I want to think about dealing with the fear that that faith put inside me. I also spent years of my life deeply afraid that if I didn’t save the souls of everyone I knew, they’d all go to hell. I was paralyzed by these fears time and again. I’ll bet some of you have had some fears like that as well.
But that’s not what the Gospel is. The Gospel isn’t something forced on us, something that we then have to force on others—it’s a gift. We don’t share the Gospel by making people afraid for their soul. Our faith, if isn’t based in the Gospel, isn’t born out of a sense of fear. God will never stop loving us, no matter what we do. That’s the Gospel. And yes, God wants us to grow to be people who live abundant love-filled lives, but the baseline always remains the same, regardless of what we do. There’s nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
We know that because our faith lives in us. Despite no longer having a desire to be the first woman on Mars, Sara has embodied the spirit of Ad Astra in every aspect of her life. She taught herself graphic design and is now working at a publishing company in New York. She was the lead designer on James Patterson’s new website. After taking up skating as a joke, she’s become a competitive inline skater who regularly medals in her division and recently raced down a Grand Prix course in France. When she sets her mind on something, she follows it to the stars.
So too should our faith be with us. Our good Gospel faith, the faith that has been passed down to us, the faith that is grounded in love and empowerment, should live in us such that all our actions grow out of that spirit of faith. When Gospel faith is living in us, when we treasure it, we will become a treasure for others, showing acts of kindness and mercy and love to all we come across. The Gospel shines through us as our faith lives in us. It guides our choices and our actions. If we want to live lives like the saints we’ve known in our lives, who were patient and kind and giving, who never had a harsh word for anyone and always had food and care at the ready for everyone, we need to preserve in letting our faith live in us.
Sara still has her replacement bracelet and she still treasures it. It’s become her own in a way that maybe it never could have while she had the original. It’s freed of the fear and expectation that the first one had. And it’s been a long while since I’ve been called up to go on any late-night wild goose chases. But I think even if it had slipped off her wrist again, there’d be less panic this time. She knows that everything that makes the bracelet important lives in her today.
May it be so with us and the Gospel.
Amen.
All text and pictures (unless otherwise attributed) © Jo Schonewolf, 2019 . To view a full archive of our sermons, click here.