Domes - Our Monthly Newsletter
Dunbar UCC
October 7, 2007
2 Timothy 1:1-2, 8-14
Victims of Discipleship
- One of the good things about prison is that, once you’re living there, you have time to do things that you always wanted to do, but you were so busy you couldn’t. Janet was telling me that people in America spend less time reading now than they did in the past. A high school student today spends 4 to 7 minutes a day reading, on the weekend. But they spend more than half of all their leisure time watching TV. Maria’s English teacher (a Ph.D..) told me that people are losing the art of critical thinking where you look at a subject from as many perspectives as you can, and then form an opinion.
- We’re in the age of the sound bite. A politician will say we need to fight a war to “spread freedom” and many people will say, “Well, yes, that’s what I want too. I want to spread freedom. I guess the war is necessary.” Instead of saying, “Wait a minute. What does he mean, “freedom?” What is freedom? He also said we’re addicted to oil. Is an addict free? Can a country of addicts also be a “free country?” Those questions take time to answer. But we often avoid the hard work of digging for truth, so we believe the sound bite and buy a flag and fly it from our front yard or car and think that we’re doing our part to “spread freedom.”
- We should all spend time in prison so we might have more time to think. The apostle Paul was a great thinker, maybe because he spent so much time in jail. He wrote this letter we read this morning from prison, probably in Rome. He was expecting to be executed any and this letter was like his final testament. Timothy is a young man, one of Paul’s few remaining friends, and Paul wanted to give him some final words of wisdom. Paul said, “Join with me in suffering for the Gospel.”
- Jesus promised us that if we followed him, we’d suffer for it. And Paul’s life was proof of that. Before he was a disciple, Paul was a prominent citizen of Rome and a respected leader of the synagogue. His trouble started when he became a Christian. He was arrested, beat, whipped, spat upon, imprisoned many times, humiliated, shipwrecked, snake bit, betrayed. One minister told me that every Sunday he should tell his congregation: “If there are any of you who are visiting today...and you are interested in following Christ, I invite you to join this church. We are going to make you more miserable than you’ve ever been in your life! Come, accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and expose yourself to a great deal of pain that you might not have had, had you not been trying to follow Jesus.”
- When Paul was converted, Christ appeared to a man named Ananias and told him to go to Saul (Paul) and welcome him into the church. Then Christ said: “I’m going to show him how much he must suffer because of my name.” Ministers, and the church, mislead people. We say, “Come to Jesus and everything wrong in your life will be fixed.” That’s not true. Jesus said we can’t follow him unless we pick up our cross and deny ourselves. I think we all have a different cross. For some it will be working to ease people’s suffering in ghettos. For some, it will be fighting the governments in this world who torture people. For some, the cross will be fighting to stop wars. Our cross may be feeding the hungry or visiting people in prison. Suffering isn’t anything special. Everybody suffers. But Paul -- and Jesus -- want us to suffer as a consequence of serving others -- even our enemies. The most amazing thing about all this is -- that in prison, with his body scarred from many times he’d been whipped, and only hours, or days away from his execution, Paul was the happiest man in Rome. Try to figure that out.