Come All You People

Text: 2 Timothy 1:1-14 Other texts: Luke 17:5

Note: This is a short homily introducing a special combined worship of three churches that make up the Faith community.

I am grateful, my brothers and sisters, when I think of you.

So writes the author of the 2nd Letter to Timothy. Grateful for all the new followers of Jesus, grateful for the churches in different parts of the land, grateful that God had gathered them together, people of all different sorts.

Don’t you feel the same way? Aren’t you grateful that God has gathered us all together today, and has gathered these three congregations, these three communities of faith, into this church home?

Who would have thought it? In a time when Christians are as known for their bickering as their solidarity, known for exaggerating differences, known for even praying that their Christian enemies might be cursed, who would have thought we would gather here in common worship and affection for God and for one another, brothers and sisters?

Each of us comes here for reasons of his or her own, but all the reasons seem to amount in the end to “God brought me here.” We are called, the letter to Timothy says, not by our own works—that is, our own schemes of one thing or another—but according to God’s own purpose and grace. God’s grace, which either means God’s charisma, or God’s gift. You can think of it either way (or both), whichever feels true to you.

We have come to be fed by the word of God, by the sacraments, by prayer and song and silence. We have come, in the words of this epistle, to rekindle the gift of God that is within us. To feed that fire, that metabolism that keeps us moving toward God and to care for each other. God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, it says, but a spirit of power and of love and of steady mind.

We come, some of us, because we were raised in a certain tradition. We are here because, as the letter says, we are reminded of the faith of our grandmothers and mothers, who invited us to come to church with them, or made us come. But others come because once a friend invited us to a church, or someone we were courting. Or we passed by in front of the church and saw the sign and felt that this was the right time to check things out. Or we were alone or frightened and the church seemed safe, or safe enough.

No matter though. We are bound together now. What binds us together is a search to know God, to be with God and God with us. There is no reason why you or anyone has to be here. No one is making you come. (Maybe the Holy Spirit is). We are bound together by the seriousness of a quest, and in that quest there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, woman or man; we are all one in Chris Jesus. So says Paul. We want to be able to say, as the writer of this letter to Timothy says, that we know the one in whom we put our trust.

The gospel reading for today (from Luke, chapter 17) says this:

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “If you had the faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.

It doesn’t take too much to be started off on the quest. Just a tiny amount of trust (which is another way to translate the word “faith”) just enough to get us going. And then we are off.

This epistle to Timothy is one of the three letters in the Bible called the Pastoral Epistles. That’s because they were written concerning pastors. But except for these few introductory remarks and a few prayers, you won’t hear too much from the pastors here today. The church is the people who show up. That means you. Today persons from each congregation will speak to us about their own experience with God, perhaps about their own quest. And perhaps how it is that of all the places they might be today, they are here, now, gathered into one community of faith.