The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



Proper 25, Year A, October 23, 2011, Trinity Church Winchester & St. Agnes’ Church Cowan

“So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us” (1 Thess. 2:8).

Today I want to share myself with you, a piece of my own story. In our second reading this morning the Apostle Paul talks about sharing himself with the Thessalonian Church: he’s probably talking about sharing in the work load, supporting himself by his own labors, but we can apply his words to our own situation and take them in a broader sense. So the story I want to share, the piece of myself, is about how I came to faith. I was a “cradle Episcopalian,” a “hereditary Anglican,” baptized as a child but not brought up in the Church. When I was a teenager I did not know the Lord’s Prayer and never attended services. I was a modern pagan, an agnostic, a person who was certain that you can’t be certain of anything (except lack of certainty) when it comes to the unseen world of faith. Now there’s nothing logical about being certain that you can’t be certain of anything, but that’s pretty much where I was. I wouldn’t be caught dead staking my life on the truths of faith.

But like everyone else growing up in the South at that time I was exposed to the Christian faith, breathing it in with the air as it were, but I did not really understand what I was experiencing and didn’t care for what I heard or saw. I thought Christianity was narrow and unintelligent, for people who not too bright and too sure of their own certainty. I thought others were naïve and ignorant when really the person who was most ignorant was myself. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was the one who was too sure of my own certainty, about the impossibility of the truths of faith.

God has a great sense of humor, however, in taking a person like myself and using my own pretensions to work his perfect will. One day as a teenager I picked up a book by C.S. Lewis with the title Mere Christianity, thinking it was a book that dismissed the Christian Faith! The joke was on me. It made all the difference in my life. What I encountered was a reasonable presentation of historic Christian Faith, which appealed to both head and heart. Faith was both intellectually credible and beautiful as well. I discovered that Christianity was something different from what I had assumed it to be, and that faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection was reasonable and just sure enough to stake your life on.

I’m telling you this story to encourage you as you follow the Master, as you pursue the path of Christian discipleship and seek to live your own life of faith. In sharing myself I’m also seeking to share the Gospel of God, as St Paul says in our reading. When Christians share their faith, the things that are of fundamental importance to them, the Church is built up and Christians are encouraged. We see how God is at work in our lives and in the lives of others, of how God is present and not absent. God turns our own scarcity into abundance, our own weakness into strength, our own self-assurance into faith. God undermines our own certainties with Gospel truth, and invites us into relationship with Jesus Christ, a Person not a proposition.

Can this community of faith be a place where we share not only the Gospel but also our very own selves? Let’s go back to Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians and conger for a moment. We know the context: Paul laboring and sharing his resources in order to equip the members of the church. We do the same thing in our church and in our diocese when we share our resources (time, talent, and treasure) in order to build up the community of faith and to make its mission and ministry possible. That’s not a bad message for us right now, as churches everywhere take stock and consider their stewardship for the coming year. There is an opportunity for all the members of the Church to share themselves and what they have in order to make possible the sharing of the Gospel. So we have that opportunity right before us, to walk in St. Paul’s footsteps as apostolic men and women who are sharing their very selves because others have become very dear to them.

But in the midst of this let’s not lose sight of the call to share who we are in terms of our faith, with our fellow Christians and indeed with anyone who is open to hearing our story. There is an incredible richness and variety to the stories that faithful people have to tell about the ways in which God has been active and present in their lives. Jesus Christ is alive not dead, and so we presume that he’s at work in my life and your life, in the lives of people who know him well and of people who hardly know him at all. The Church resounds with the stories of faith; it’s a great echo chamber in which the proclamation of the Good News reverberates and gains in volume as it goes. We see this proclamation echoing in the lives of those confirmed today, and in the lives of each of us as we go to the altar rail. Can we not find a way in the Church to share these fundamental stories and in the process build up our Church for its work? In sharing these stories we share the Gospel because in some sense they are the Gospel: the story of how Jesus Christ has risen from the dead and become powerful in our lives. He rose from the dead centuries ago but he is alive now and hard at work in your life and in the life of the world, with grace and power to save. We discover this truth afresh when we gather and go forth to do his work in the world.

- The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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