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josephholubsermons
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November 2, 2008
All Saints Sunday
2 Timothy 1:1-7
Naming and Claiming the Gifts of the Saints
“I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that first lived in your
grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in
you.”
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2 Timothy 1:5
Paul and Timothy had a close
relationship.
They were friends – even more.
Paul was Timothy’s
mentor.
Numerous times in his letters, Paul mentions
Timothy as a trusted companion and colleague in ministry.
In
1 Corinthians Paul writes to a troubled and divided church in Corinth,
“I send you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child of the Lord,
to remind you of my ways in Christ Jesus…”
In
our epistle reading for today Paul mentions a time when they had shared
“tears”
and
that Timothy was constantly in his prayers.
Obviously, a close and powerful bond
linked Paul and Timothy, and it was very much a mentoring
relationship.
I think of the letter of 2
Timothy as a mentoring letter from Paul to Timothy.
At the beginning of his letter Paul notes
that Timothy has had other positive mentors in his life,
specifically his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice.
Paul named the faith that lived in
the hearts of Timothy’s grandmother and mother – and he encouraged
Timothy to claim their faith as his own.
And, it wasn’t just any kind of
faith.
A few verses later Paul writes these words to
Timothy, “be strong in the
grace that is in Jesus Christ."
“If
we have died with him, we will also live with him."
Paul
named these
two important elements for Timothy to claim as his own: 1)
the grace that was in Jesus; 2) the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Paul encouraged Timothy to live and minister
with the same attitude of
grace that guided Jesus’ life; and to live within the
regular rhythm of dying to an old way and being and being
raised up to a new way of being.
Timothy was, in part, the
product of the influence of his mentors:
his grandmother, his mother and Paul.
Of course, those weren’t his only mentors.
The Book of Acts tells us his father was
Greek, so he certainly had an understanding and appreciation of Greek
culture that was a powerful resource for him as he ministered and made
his way with the gospel message in Greek oriented world.
Timothy had been shaped by his mentors.
Recently, I read an anecdote about Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish
abstract artist of the 20th century. You may be familiar with
not only his name but his rather bizarre art that you can almost tell
what it is. My favorites include the guitarist who
looks like he has a broken neck and his legs on backwards; his depiction
of the Spanish Civil War called Guernica, where the cow comes out
of the steak, and the woman comes out of the cow, and various other
bizarre images of suffering; and finally his self-portrait that
reveals the complexity of his own soul where his face is split in two,
misaligned and grotesquely misshapen. The story goes that one
evening Picasso came home and caught a man burglarizing his house. The
intruder took off and Picasso called the police. The police came to
interview him and excitedly Picasso said, "I saw him! I saw him! I can
draw you a sketch of what he looks like." On the basis of Picasso’s
sketch, the police arrested a nun, a washing machine, and the Eiffel
Tower, all in one sweep!
If asked, how would you sketch yourself, and I am not referring
to your physical attributes, but who you are at the core of your
being? We are all, in part,
complex expressions of the people, circumstances and events that
have exerted their influence upon us. Who are you?
How would you sketch yourself? And
today, on this All Saints Sunday I would ask the question this way,
“Who are the people that have
exerted the greatest shaping influences upon you?”
Who are your mentors?
About 16 years ago I called a
“time-out” in my life.
I stepped back from things and entered a
period of deep reflection in the context of counseling and structured
guidance.
The process involved identifying the
various forces, events and people that had a shaping and formative
impact on my life.
It turned out to be an incredible time of
self-discovery and revelation.
Like
you I am sure, I discovered that my “life-sketch” was complex. A myriad
of people, forces and events, both positive and negative, had made a
profound imprint upon me.
I
discovered that negative forces, particularly from childhood, had
dominated my landscape and greatly overwhelmed the positive
influences that were also present in my life.
My process of healing and empowerment involved
culling out the positives and negatives and then naming and
claiming the positives.
As I moved through the process, to my great
joy, I discovered that there were many positive forces in my life that I
had never really claimed and truly integrated.
Since that intense time, I have
lived with a heightened awareness of the people and events of daily life
that exert their influence upon me, and I continue an ongoing
discerning process of naming what I see to be positives and
negatives, and then claiming and celebrating the positives.
All Saints Day for me has become a deeply personal and a
sacred ritual of reflecting, especially upon those persons
in my life who have blessed me with positive Christ-like gifts – and
then naming them and claiming them anew.
That’s exactly how I now think
of “saints.”
For me,
“saint” is
synonymous with
“mentor.”
Those I name as “saints” are my “mentors.”
The saints are the ones who have passed on
to me the equipment that I use along the way of my faith journey.
The “saints” in my life are far from
perfect, but the light of Christ-like-love and grace shines in their
beings.
They modeled Christ-likeness and passed it
on to me.
Like signs, their lives point beyond
themselves to the way of following Jesus and living in the kingdom of
God.
I urge you to take some sacred
moments this morning to name those “mentors” in your life.
Name and claim anew the gifts of
grace they passed on to you.
It could be someone past or present.
Maybe it was a parent or grandparent; a
spouse, a teacher; a pastor; a youth leader; a colleague; a friend;
someone is this room; an author, someone you have known only through the
written word.
Think of them this morning; name them
and reclaim the gifts of grace they have given you.
My community of mentors grows larger every year, and I
name a few of them as examples:
·
My
mother, who demonstrated that a
life could still be lived with grace, nurturing love, and a heart of
hospitality even when surrounded by forces of selfishness, conflict and
condescension.
My friend Jack,
who long ago named gifts for ministry he saw in me even though at the
time I was blinded to them.
My colleague and
friend Keith who I’ve repeatedly turned to over the
years for his wisdom and guidance when facing difficult challenges.
Julielu,
who taught me
that one person can make a huge difference in the lives of others both
near and far away; that no challenge is too big and no person too small.
Julie Kay who
showed me how to tap into latent creativity I never knew I had;
and gave me the courage to try new things and not worry about failing.
Kendra
who mentored me to think outside the box; to see that God lives
in the unconventional and outside of confining boundaries that I
sometimes construct around God.
Children, of this congregation and others who
constantly model for me the beauty of spontaneity and being open to
experience the wonder of the moment, especially when I am blinded by my
own self-seriousness and burdened by a sense of self-importance.
These are but some among the “saints” I
name today, and
in giving thanks for them, I also
reclaim the Christ-like gifts of grace they have given me.
Finally, I must lift up my “First Mentor,” the Lord Jesus.
This is the mentor to whom the lives of all the others point me
toward. I experience and
encounter my “First Mentor” in a myriad of ways:
through others who name and claim him, and others who don’t, but
bear a remarkable resemblance to him.
I encounter him in the pages of the gospels where I see his life at
work, and what his living presence meant for the earliest of his
followers, and how it transformed them. Through
the scripture he becomes “sacramentally alive,” that is real and
life-giving to me now in this time and place.
In the throes of worship he sometimes comes: in a bite of bread or sip
of wine; the embrace of a fellow worshipper; in a word of affirmation or
concern; in the face of a child; in the cry of a baby.
I often experience him in the faces of the suffering and needy, the poor
and oppressed inviting me into their experience, moving my heart to help
alleviate their suffering, and to care about the causes of their misery
– and in the process give me my truest humanity back as a gift.
My “first mentor”, the Lord Jesus is always beckoning me beyond who I am
today towards the person he is inviting me to become tomorrow, so that I
never arrive but am always becoming.
He calls me out of the comfort zone of dogmatic certainty into the
discomfort territory of uncertainty, for he knows that if I get
comfortable I will likely get defensive, narrow, and stop growing.
He calls me into an abundant life
that is filled through self-emptying; a life full of vitality
by dying to old ways living, thinking and being – and being raised up to
new ways of thinking, living and being.
Sometimes I perceive his voice as clear as a ringing bell, and sometimes
it is barely a whisper, or all I see is his elusive shadow, but always,
always, leading me beyond into new expressions and new dimensions of
love and grace in the kingdom of God.