I Love to Tell the Story
2 Timothy 1:1-7
Broadway Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
David A. Shirey
Well, I’m back. The guy’s here three Sundays and then he disappears. Gone one Sunday. Gone two Sundays. Is he coming back? Did he run away? Was his contract with us for three weeks? Not to worry Broadway, I said to Ellen Flottman, our Elder Chair, in some correspondence last week, “I’m looking forward to getting back home.” And for this season of my life, home is here with you. Glad to be back.
Mason told his faith story last week. My turn now to tell how I came to faith and how my faith has matured over the years.
Paul wrote to Timothy, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you” (2 Tim 1:5). Got that? The faith that lived in Timothy was passed down through the maternal branches of his family tree. Same here. When I was growing up, I had a choice on Sunday. I could go to church with Mom (who had grown up going to church with her mother) or stay at home and work around the house with Dad. Going to church with Mom was the lesser of two evils. So, I went to church with Mom: Central Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Warren, Ohio.
I had another choice to make about church when I was seventeen years old. My dad was transferred to Illinois my senior year and I wanted to finish high school in Ohio, so I lived with my grandparents. My grandmother said, “David, as far as church goes, Poppy and I go to Emmanuel Lutheran for the 8 o’clock service if you want to go with us. Or, you can keep going to Central Christian. Or, you can choose not to go at all. You’re old enough to decide for yourself.” W-e-l-l, I remember sitting in my makeshift room in their basement wondering why I went to church. Was it because it got me out of working around the house with Dad? Was it because I actually believed in something and Someone? I didn’t know. So, I got down on my knees at the side of my bed. Not because I had grown up doing that. I hadn’t. But because I had picked up the notion that if you’re serious about praying, which I had never been, you kneel. So I knelt and said something like, “God, if you’re really there, I want to know it.” And at that very moment … my grandfather flushed the upstairs toilet.
That Sunday, I got up and went to Central Christian by myself. Why? Because there were certain people there – youth sponsors, elders, a couple Sunday School teachers -- who knew me by name, expressed a genuine interest in me, who I would miss if I didn’t go and who I knew would miss me. So, hear me when I say you have great staff in John and Kate and Sarah working with your youth and children, but they need parents, grandparents, and guardians to bring youth and children to church like Lois brought Eunice and Eunice brought Timothy and my grandmother brought my mother and my mother brought me. And those who bring youth and children need the rest of Broadway’s adults to be people who will make their kids feel welcome and valued like Central Christian’s adults did for me over half a century ago. Speaking of which, after my first Sunday on July 9, as I greeted everyone in the Gathering Area, I looked up and looked into the faces of two people standing before me and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Jay and Mona Stevenson were my youth sponsors 50 years ago. They now live in Fayette, somehow heard I was coming to Broadway, and came to Columbia to welcome me. Be such people for the young people at Broadway!
My faith took a giant step forward when I was a sophomore in college. I was a pre-med major who couldn’t get through Organic Chemistry. Our numbers are legion! So, I dropped the course and reluctantly took one of the few electives that was still available: “The Bible as Literature.” I hadn’t read the Bible except for in Sunday School when I had to and I sure didn’t look forward to reading it for a grade. But the professor was a Shakespeare scholar in the English Department who, as he taught the stories of the Bible, did so with a passion and delight that captivated me to the point I wanted to read that book for myself. Long story short, I fell in love with Scripture. I bought a Bible for his class that’s been with me ever since. It's all marked up, underlined, highlighted, dog-eared, pages falling out. Notes and names and dates written in the margins. Jennie had someone rebind it for me for Christmas one year because it was falling apart. To this day, this book shoots off sparks as I read it. As St. Augustine put it in words that are framed next to my bed, “Thou didst strike my heart with Thy Word and I didst love Thee.” Please don’t settle for a 20-minute sermon on Sunday or a one-hour Sunday School class as your sole exposure to Scripture during the week. Explore it for yourself. As the late Bible scholar Bruce Metzger put it, “Parts of the Bible have been translated into nearly 2,000 languages, but the duty of all believers is to translate it into their personal lives.”
But don’t stop there, translate the Bible’s teachings into all of life. Someone taught me early on how Karl Barth, one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, famously said, “Christians ought to live with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” That is, we’re to live our lives looking at current events in the light of the old, old story. Just as these glasses (trifocals now!) help me see the world clearly, Scripture gives us a lens through which to perceive God’s purposes in all things. All things. There are kingdom economics. There is a Master’s decree in business dealings. There is a politics of Jesus (see Luke 4:16-21). There is such a thing as salvation history. There is a psychology grounded in spirit and soul. There is medicine informed by the Great Physician. Bible in one hand and newspaper in the other. Both/and. Not either/or. Too many Christians on the left have left their Bibles behind and sound more like op-ed writers or cable news pundits than people whose words are grounded in God’s Word. Too many Christians on the right have left their newspapers behind and have compartmentalized faith from real world life. They’re too heavenly-minded for any earthly good. Love Scripture and read for all its worth – translate it personally, societally, politically, and globally.
The next step in the deepening of my faith came as result of my dad’s death. He died at age 50 on my 28th birthday in 1987. In addition to my grief that left me physically and emotionally exhausted, I felt spiritually empty. Something was missing. So, I knelt down beside my desk in my office at Compton Heights Christian Church in St. Louis. It was the first time I’d knelt in prayer since I was seventeen in my grandparents’ basement. I prayed, “Lord, I know there’s more than this. I feel like I’m doing a lot of talking about you but not to and with you. I feel like my faith is second-hand rather than first-person. I know how to write prayers and say prayers, but I don’t know how to pray. Would you teach me how to draw closer to you and go deeper with you?” No toilet flushed. Nothing happened. But looking back, that was the most consequential moment in the maturing of my faith because the next day I began what has become a 36-year habit of setting aside time first thing in the morning to read Scripture, meditate on it, pray over it, and write in a journal what I sense God is saying to me or asking of me. I began to learn to pray. I’m still learning. Nothing has been more formative of my faith than prayer.
So it was one morning this week as I was pondering this morning’s passage that Paul’s words to Timothy convicted me: “I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day.” I sensed God is calling me to set aside a specific time each week to remember Broadway in my prayers. So, Thursdays from Noon until 12:30 I’ll be in the sanctuary in prayer. You’re welcome to join me in person or pray for Broadway from home or office – wherever you may be.
And my prayer for you will be inspired by Paul’s words to Timothy, namely, that you would “Rekindle the gift of God that is within you…a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” That word translated power is the Greek word dunamos from which we get our word dynamite. Rekindle the dynamite that’s within you. What dynamite? The Broadway Spirit. It’s still burning in the midst of this place. Like a pilot light that will not go out, the flame of the Broadway Spirit is still burning. Paul’s prayer and mine is for it to be rekindled within each you and among all of us with dynamite power.
It breaks my heart there are untold numbers of people who have checked out Christ’s church, found it to be anything but dynamite power – more like Dullsville – and checked out. I’m here to testify, however, that my experience of following Jesus Christ has been an exhilarating adventure … and since coming to you and looking ahead to our months together, I can see the adventure continues. Years ago, back in the 1900s, I received a flyer advertising a conference titled Discipleship in the 21st Century. What struck me was the photo that served as the background on which the text was printed. It was a whitewater rafting expedition. Eight or so people wearing helmets and life vests, paddling furiously, working together to shoot the rapids, navigating safely through rocks and treacherous passages, water splashing up furiously left and right. The look on their faces was of people utterly alive. That to me is a picture of church at its best. That's how I’ve experienced life in Christ who said, "I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10:10). Oh Lord, “Rekindle the spirit of power that is within us.” Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard says all of us ought to come to worship with heightened expectation. She wrote, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”[1] Join Paul and me in praying for a rekindling of the gift within us—the Broadway Spirit blazing anew.
My dear brother in Christ, Ephraim Calbert, was an elder in the new church Jennie and I and our children began in AZ. For eight years of Sundays we met in an elementary school cafeteria. Just before the service began, a few of us would pray together in a side room like your elder and deacons do here. Every Sunday, as Eph and I walked over the threshold to enter our cafeteria sanctuary, he’d elbow me and say “What’s the Lord gonna do today, Pastor?” And I’d say, “I don’t know, Eph. Let’s go see!”
When I was seventeen, I knelt and prayed, “Lord if you’re really there, I want to know it.” My testimony is that over the past 47 years God has answered my prayer, come to me, drawn me ever closer, and has led me in a lifetime adventure that is continuing with you.
“What’s the Lord gonna do, Broadway?”
“God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”
May it be so!
Let all God’s people say AMEN.
[1] Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper & Row, 1982
