Hilton Head Island, SC – November 21, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
II Timothy 4:1-8; II Timothy 4:9-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. – II Timothy 4:7 (RSV)
With the exception of Jesus, the apostle Paul was the most indefatigable of all the people who are described in the New Testament. After his bolt-from-the-blue conversion experience, Paul was a tireless campaigner on behalf of what he perceived to be the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
When Paul wrote his second letter to his much younger missionary colleague Timothy, Paul knew he was close to the end of his life. He was in prison in Rome. He couldn’t know specifically what would happen to him, but tradition says that he was executed there, perhaps during the reign of the Roman emperor Nero.
Presumably, therefore, the last chapter of his second letter to Timothy contained the last words he ever wrote, and he wrote by far the most words of anyone who contributed to the books that the early church approved to be included in the New Testament. There is a kind of melancholy tone to what Paul says here. He is not an old man; likely he was in his fifties or early sixties. But he was older, and he knew he was never going to be old. So this is his valedictory address to Timothy, the advice of an older Gospel warhorse to a younger and still relatively untested warhorse.
The words in his first paragraph are those of a man who clearly has been “around the block” many times, and he wants Timothy to absorb his advice. Then Paul says something he especially wants the earnest young man to know, and to accept its truth without trying to dissuade Paul from saying it. “I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come” (7:6). Paul seems to suspect that, like Jesus, he is going to die violently because of the convictions he so strongly holds. He speaks of his approaching death as a “sacrifice,” which is how he also perceived Jesus’ death.
Nonetheless, he does not regret any part of the path he chose for his life. In one of the most memorable lines in the whole Bible, Paul forthrightly declares, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (7:7). What a magnificent summation of a life extraordinarily well-lived! Paul “loved to tell the story,” and no doubt it was and is “his theme in glory/ to tell the old, old story/ of Jesus and his love.” When we come to the end of our lives (if we shall somehow be sure we are there), will we be able to make such a fearless statement as Paul made?
I have now served The Chapel Without Walls longer than any of the other four congregations of which I was a pastor. For whatever reason, this congregation has an older average age than the membership of any of those other churches. That may be because when we held our first service almost eighteen years ago, I was already just a month short of being 65 years of age, and perhaps that’s why many of the people who have become affiliated with The Chapel ever since have been longer-of-tooth than the average parishioner of other congregations. We didn’t start out in a retirement home, but I thought we were going to end up in a retirement home until COVID-19 thought otherwise. And now, temporarily to come in from the cold, here we are in a funeral home until we can return to The Cypress. Some of our oldsters seem even more hesitant about a funeral home than they are about COVID, and they may avoid coming here even more strongly than they avoided going to Jarvis Creek Park. Such, from the beginning, has been life in The Chapel Without Walls. We never knew where next we might be, or under what circumstances.
In any event, perhaps most of us feel somewhat as though we are in the situation Paul was facing when he wrote his second letter to Timothy. The end is also somewhat nearer for us, personally, but we hope that “somewhat” is a somewhat malleable and flexible word. Thus, having proclaimed that he has fought the good fight and finished the race and kept the faith, can we, with Paul, proclaim the same thing?
In the best of circumstances all of us relative oldsters may have fought the good fight and kept the faith, but shall we ever finish the race? Is it possible to finish the race until we actually get to the finish line? And can we get to the finish line prior to the very moment of our death?
Is that a sober thought, or what? Is that a sobering thought, or what? What if the finish line can be discerned only when we pass, presumably instantaneously, from this life into eternal life? And what if there is no such thing as eternal life? What if, when we die, we shall be dead forever, in a state of non-existence? But “non-existence” has to be an oxymoron, doesn’t it, a contradiction in terms? Non-existence can’t exist - - - can it? If something doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist, so just thinking of not existing after we die may be to validate that we shall again exist after death. Jesus said to Martha at the grave of her brother Lazarus, that those who believe in him, though they die, yet shall they live (John 11:26). In a way I am playing mental games with you here, but in a way I’m not. At least you might give this matter some thought --- but not any longer now, because we must move on.
I want to return to what Paul was writing to Timothy, sensing that his days on earth had become severely numbered. So I ask again, can we cross the finish line at any time before --- as Shakespeare said --- we shuffle off this mortal coil? I don’t think we can. Even if we have fought the good fight and conscientiously kept the faith, we shall never cross the finish line until the moment our body ceases to function, and “we” go to be with God in heaven. No one can have a flawlessly clear concept of God in this life, nor can we really grasp what heaven is, but “keeping the faith” means doing the best we can with our nebulous views of God and heaven, because we are incapable of doing any better than that.
Does any of us know for certain, now, that we have fought the good fight? Might we have fought it better --- if “fought” is the proper word to use? Does everyone end life on a high note, supposing that absolutely they have done the best they could? For myself, I can’t imagine ever coming to that point in life. I will always have regrets about this, or that, or the other thing. They may not be enormous regrets, but at a minimum they are mini-regrets, melancholy wishes that I might have done more, or done things differently, or said what I should have said but didn’t or done what I should have done but didn’t.
Some people have a piecing awareness of the imminence of death, and their hunch is often correct. But for most of us it may never be like that. It may be as Emily Dickinson said, “Because I could not stop for Death/ He kindly stopped for me.” Death sneaks up on many of us, maybe most of us, and we never know what hit us until we are flat on our back for the ten-count. So we may never know we have crossed the finish line until we have crossed it, and then it is too late to know it was always there, waiting for us to cross it.
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the by-now famous quip, “If I had known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” Well, if you suspect you’re going to live a while longer, maybe even a good while longer, can you be sure that you have fought the best fight possible, or kept the faith as well as you could have kept it? Might you still do a better job of it before you cross the finish line? Apparently Paul had no reservations about the way he had lived his life, or he never would have written what he wrote. But are we truly honest if we conscientiously make that confident claim?
Paul finished all the advice he intended to give Timothy in the first paragraph of the last chapter of the last letter he ever wrote to anybody. He figured he had lived as well as he could. But he still had a couple of requests to make of Timothy. “Do your best to come to me soon,” he said to his friend. Then he listed a few men whom Paul thought had deserted him, and he was not happy about it. (Paul could be a regular Oscar the Grouch, but probably he didn’t see it that way.) Only Luke was with him, he said, and he wanted Timothy also to come and to bring Mark to see him. Mark is the man who wrote the Gospel of Mark, the only one of the four Gospel writers whom all of the scholars say was the writer they know whose name can properly be affixed to a Gospel. Then Paul asks for Timothy to bring his favorite heavy cloak, some particular books he wants, and some parchments. He knew it was going to get cold in his prison cell, but probably he also thought he would have time to write yet something else to somebody else. Paul kept on keeping on, as was his nature.
Finally he excoriated a man he identified as Alexander the coppersmith, whom Timothy presumably also knew. In fighting the good fight, Paul pulled no punches. He also well maintained his grudges. Then he asked Timothy to give greetings to certain people both men knew, and he passed along greetings from some of the Christians in Rome to Timothy.
In the midst of these final words, Paul made another plea to his comrade in Christ. It is inserted into the middle of these greetings to and from various people. It is a short, pleading request. “Do your best to come before winter.” Cold weather was coming, and Paul wanted the warmth of his heavy cloak as well as the reignition of a deep friendship which had evolved between these two quite different missionaries of the earliest Church of Jesus Christ.
Early in the last century, there was a famous Presbyterian preacher named Clarence McCartney. He was the pastor of three churches over a span of 48 years: one in Paterson, New Jersey, another in Philadelphia, and the final one in Pittsburgh. Toward the end of his Philadelphia pastorate, he happened to preach a sermon based on that highly obscure next-to-last verse in Paul’s last letter in the New Testament to Timothy: “Do your best to come before winter” (4:21). Its main point was that we should do what needs to be done when it needs to be done, and not to wait, because the one who is asking us to do it might die soon.
The sermon went over so well that he preached it once a year thereafter until he left the Arch Street Presbyterian Church, and then he preached Come Before Winter once a year for all the years he served at the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. He preached without notes, but it was essentially the same sermon every year, uniquely addressed to the exigencies of each year. Other than Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, it may be the best-known sermon ever preached in the United States of America. Countless other preachers, including yours truly, have preached sermons of that same title.
As I said, the essence of Come Before Winter was this: Don’t put off important things. Do them at the time they need to be done. You can’t fight the good fight if you don’t come before winter, and you can’t keep the faith if you don’t come before winter, either. Don’t put off till tomorrow what you must do today. Carpe Diem, Timothy; Seize the Day.
Paul was going to die, and cross the finish line, soon, and he wanted Timothy to get on the first ship that would take him to Rome. We don’t know whether Timothy made it before Paul’s execution, but in our heart of hearts we certainly hope that he did.
To return to the main point of this sermon, however, will we ever cross the finish line when the race is finished? No doubt, like Paul, we strongly think so, but we may never know we crossed the line until it is behind us. When that happens, finish lines will have become one of the many matters that will no longer matter.