Still Fighting

Rev. Dr. Joel D. Biermann
II Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

October 23, 2016

            Everyone loves fall.  The air is bracing and carries that certain tangy/sweet smell of fallen leaves.  Mornings are cool and evenings are chilly.  Orange and brown and yellow colors dominate, and the time of harvest generates feelings of contentment and accomplishment even for city dwellers who do their harvesting at the grocery store.  Apples abound: covered in caramel and nuts, baked in pies and cobblers, or straight from the orchard so crisp that they snap when you bite them.  There’s college football and we won’t talk about the World Series, and Octoberfests and pumpkin patches.  There are so many reasons to love fall.  Autumn is a time filled with great delights.  Everyone loves fall.  But, not Ilene.  Ilene was a wise and respected woman of many years with a sunny personality evident in sweet and sincere smiles worn before church and after church and most of the time in between.  But, Ilene hated autumn.  She told me so very clearly during a pastoral visit many years ago, now.  Where I saw fresh invigorating air, stunning foliage, and earthy aromas, Ilene saw the unmistakable signs of death and decay.  Falling leaves were dead.  Rustling grass was dead.  Bright blue skies brought killing frost.  Fall smells were the smells of decaying plant matter.  Fall meant the eleventh hour for all living things.  Death was in the air.  It was almost the end.  I had to admit that Ilene had a point.  A kind, gentle, smiling, great grandmother had undone my favorite time of the year.  I still love fall, but I never forget Ilene’s take on the season, and my delight in the days has been forever tempered.  It is almost the end.  The days hold a palpable note of melancholy.

            This seems to be the ideal time, then, to consider Paul’s words to young Timothy recorded in our text.  II Timothy is the Apostle’s final letter written at the end of a life that had been marked by significant accomplishments, remarkable joys, heart-breaking sorrows, shameful regrets, and an extraordinary amount of suffering in body and soul.  Paul had lived through much and had faced imprisonment and trials many times before; but, this time, things were different.  He knew it.  This time he was chained in a dungeon.  This time, the church in Rome had all but deserted him.  This time he was not going to be released to continue his missionary work.  No, this time the trial would end not with an acquittal but with an execution.  Paul could tell.  This was the end—or almost the end.  This was the autumn of his life and ministry.  This is not the way that we like to think of the great apostle.  We picture him operating at the full capacity of his energy and zeal for the gospel: traveling, writing, debating, preaching, spreading the news of Jesus to the Gentiles.  That’s our image of Paul.

            Yet, there is a wonderful consistency to Paul’s story all the way to the end.  Just after he’d been converted on the road to Damascus, God had declared, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”  And he did; and so Paul did…suffer that is.  God laid out a difficult life course for Paul to follow.  The apostle recorded his litany of suffering in his second letter to the Corinthians: 39 lashes—five times, beaten with rods—three times, shipwrecked—three times, stoned and left for dead—once, and the list goes on.  So, when Paul finally arrives at almost the end, when he arrives at his own autumn in a Roman prison, it’s quite understandable that he would reflect back on just how much he had actually endured in fulfillment of the Lord’s bitter promise and for the sake of that holy name.  Yet, as Paul thinks back over his life as a believer in service to Jesus and the Gentiles for whom Jesus had died, he regrets and resents none of the suffering.  In fact, his attitude is positively triumphant.  “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.”  Indeed, he had. Paul had done what he’d been given to do.  The faith had been preserved, the course of a missionary life had been followed, the fight had been fought, all the agony had been endured, the crown of righteousness was waiting.  Paul was sure that his own death was at hand.  But, that reality did not challenge his trust in his Lord.  It confirmed it.  He could look back and celebrate, he could look forward with unshakeable confidence.

            Paul’s confidence is remarkable, still, there is something about his words that strikes me as a bit odd.  In fact, there’s something about them that seems wrong.  Listen again: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.”  You heard it.  The problem is that repeated first person singular pronoun: “I, I, I.”  It almost sounds egocentric.  Most Christian thinkers and writers are quick to insist that no true Christian can ever talk about achieving victory.  We all know better than that.  When it comes to assigning credit for a completed race and a victory won, we know that we don’t deserve it.  We can’t do what needs to be done.  Christians don’t talk about finishing and fighting and winning…do they?  Or, maybe my problem with the repeated “I’s” is not actually with Paul, but with myself.  Perhaps it’s just my own self-awareness that makes me so uncomfortable with Paul’s confident first person singular statements.  I know my own limitations, my temptations, my foibles, my failings, my sins.  In the face of my own daily reality, Paul’s words seem incredible, almost fanciful, or just plain impossible.

            How about you?  Do you resonate with Paul’s strong statements about fighting, finishing, and keeping?  Are you ready to use first person singulars the way that the apostle did?  “I have fought the good fight.  I have finished the course.  I have kept the faith.”  Can you say that?  If, today, was your own personal autumn of life, would you be able to say what Paul said?  It’s not easy to be that confident and certain isn’t it?  Those first person singulars are hard to use when claiming a victory.  The words kind of catch in your throat.  Sometimes the struggle of life takes its toll and you don’t emerge triumphant.  You grow weary of the relentless grind of the routine: too many meals to make, too many schedules to organize, too many bills to pay, too many errands to run, too many obligations to meet, too many demands to fulfill, too many people imposing their agendas on you, too many rules, too much temptation, too much tension, too much pressure, too much hassle, too much pain, too much too much!  It’s not easy to stay on task.  It’s not fun having to grind out life.  It’s hard.  It hurts.  Paul can say: “I have fought the fight, run the race, and kept the faith,” but my own first singular statements would have to be: “I have cowered from the challenge, I have quit the race, I have compromised the faith, I have sinned.”  What have you done?  What verbs follow behind your first person singular pronouns?

            Maybe the problem is that you’re fighting the wrong fight.  Instead of the good fight of faithfulness to God’s will, is it possible that you are actually fighting for your own self-preservation and self-promotion?  Instead of God’s fight, are you caught up in the relentless, impossible battle to justify yourself and to vindicate and affirm your own personal being and worth?  When that’s your fight, instinct will take over, and you will find yourself fighting ruthlessly to assert yourself and your ideas over others.  You fight to defend yourself from any perceived threat to your personal identity and worth.  You fight along with everyone else, you doing what comes “naturally” and fighting to promote yourself and to advance your own expectations and plans.  It’s the wrong fight.  Fighting the fight of selfishness always ends in crushing defeat.  So, what have you been doing?  Have you fought the good fight, run the course God has given you to run, and kept the faith?  Or, have you fought for yourself, dropped out of the struggle to follow God’s course, and neglected the faith?  What have you done?

            Of course, the contrast between Paul and you and me, is certainly not as stark as I have drawn it.  For all of the confidence and certainty that Paul was expressing as he contemplated his own death, Paul was also a man who knew acutely the reality of his own limitations, failures, and sins.  Even after he had become a believer, Paul still knew the hard truth about his own inability and sin.  He knew that he was the chief of sinners.  He knew that he didn’t do the good things he wanted to do, but all too easily did the evil things he did not want to do.  He knew the score about his own performance.  So, then, how could he do it?  How could he have such brash self-confidence to declare his accomplishments with first person singular pronouns?  Paul could do it, because while he knew his sin, he also knew the one who had appeared to him, claimed him, and delivered him from all of his sin.  He knew his failure, but he also knew the one who had come to him and flooded him with stunning grace.  When Christ met him and claimed him, everything changed forever.  Everything Paul did after that, he did in the forgiving and empowering grace of Christ and Christ alone.  Paul had already died.  Christ now lived in him.  So, at his trial, when he was deserted by all men, Christ stood with him.  And after he had won the fight, finished the course, and kept the faith, he did not claim or takethe crown of victory—God gave it to him.

            What we see in Paul, here at the end of his life is the wonder of the core dynamic that drives the Christian faith.  Paul was a creature given a fight to fight and a course to run.  He has a responsibility to keep the faith by proclaiming that faith to gentiles who had no idea what Christ had done for them.  It was Paul who was given that work to do, and it was Paul who did it.  And, he did it with relentless zeal until God brought his life to an end.  There was no such thing as retirement.  Paul lived with a razor-focus on what he had to do and what it would take for him to do it.  And yet all the while that he is giving absolutely everything that he has for the work that he’s been given to do, he knows with certainty everything that Christ has done and will do for him.  Paul knew that he was not earning his crown of eternal righteousness, but he was most definitely working hard for the sake of that crown that Christ would give.  There is no problem, then, with Paul’s use of first person singulars.  He is, after all, the one fighting and finishing—but, of course, he does it all only by the grace and strength of Christ.  This is the heart of the Christian faith.  Paul invests everything into doing what he has been given to do, and then rests in his faith, secure in the knowledge that what he does could never earn God’s grace or the crown of righteousness.  Everything is a gift given through Christ.  Paul works.  God gives.  This is Paul’s great reality.

            And, so it is for you.  You know your sin and your failure.  It weighs heavily.  But, you also know that Christ has come and claimed you.  At the baptismal font, at the communion rail, he comes and he forgives and redeems and transforms and stands by…you.  You.  It’s as real for you as it was for Paul.  Christ has come for you, and in the light of that reality, nothing is the same.  In the light of that reality, the first person singular declarations are also fully redeemed.  “I cower, I quit, and I compromise,” become, “I fight, I run, I keep.”  There’s nothing egocentric about it.  Like Paul’s confident declarations, you also declare the reality of what your faithful Lord works in and through you—in spite of your own inabilities and failures.  It is true for you, just as it was true for St. Paul.  It is true for you today as you sit here in the reality of a St. Louis autumn with death waiting just around the corner.  Today, you fight the good fight, you run the course, you keep the faith.  You live in faithfulness doing what God has given you to do and you delight in the reality of God’s grace to you in Christ.  Through you, God does his work.  Through you, he continues to reach those who still don’t know his love and grace.  You know those people.  When you care for them, and speak to them and share God’s truth with them; He finds them, claims them, and brings them into his church.  God uses you.  What was true for Paul is true for you.  You fight, you run, you keep.  You pour yourself out into what God gives you to do, until the day that your course is also finished.  And on that day God will give the crown of righteousness to you.  Amen.