One of my favorite preachers, Fred Craddock, says that the only sermons of any interest are sermons that give the congregation practical “how to” information about being Christians. So here we have it: how to be NOT ashamed. It might be natural for you to imagine I’d have three pieces of advice for you, since sermons are supposed to have three points, but I’ve never been good at that kind of stuff. I’ve got four points today, but in the interest of good teaching, I’m going to tell you the points up front, and then fluff them as we go along. These are words of advice, right from Paul to Timothy. Here they are: 1) Remember the past. 2) Imitate people older and wiser than yourself. 3) Be in a community that can help your faith grow. 4) Give more than you were born with.

Advice reveals a lot about the person receiving it, and what Paul advises Timothy gives me a brand new understanding of this young pastor. I grew up thinking of Timothy as a child prodigy, the apostle Paul’s nominee for the Christian of the Century Award. The way today’s text reads, it sounds like Timothy had joined the ranks of most of Paul’s church friends, who were weaseling out on him, now that he was in prison. If you read this whole letter, it sounds like it was starting to dawn on Paul that it was more than a coincidence that everyone was out of town every visiting day at the State Pen in Rome. When Paul heard that Timothy turned down the invitation to appear on the telethon they were doing to raise money for his legal defense fund, Paul guessed that Timothy was having problems with logic. You know. That logic that asks, if God is so powerful, how come Jesus died? If the gospel is so right, how come Paul gets imprisoned and publicly humiliated for preaching it? If God is so powerful, how come God didn’t stop the terrorists?

I can’t answer that. Today I’m only working on how to be not ashamed. Which, as it turns out, gets more important all the time. If you’ve been following news analysts, it seems that “polarizing faiths”—making Christians the “bad guys”—is the aim of the Islamic terrorists. If this is to be war, your faith will be under attack sooner rather than later. You are going to need the advice of these four “how to”s.

What do I mean by, “Remember the past”? What’s so helpful about this? Paul tells Timothy to remember his mother and grandmother. This may mean for us to literally remember our parents’ faith ( if our parents were the folks who got us to church in the first place). For us at Springwater, to remember the past also means remembering those sainted women who decided that there ought to be a Sunday School here. Their witness developed into a church that’s still here, 111 years later. The tradition in this church is a rich one of family, fellowship and friendship, of years when Christian education was so valued that there were more people in Sunday School than there were in worship services. Remembering these stories help us to be not ashamed.

The next how-to is “Imitate people older and wiser than yourself.” The influence of Baby Boomers has led our culture into an idolatry of youthfulness, which often means that the wisdom and experience of older people is undervalued. In this congregation, we are blessed with evidence to the contrary—people like Bill and Dorothy and Lillian, who themselves are great wealth to our community. It is not common in the world at large to have such a large percentage of people over 90 contributing to the common life—let alone so many people over 70 and 80, energetically and generously leading and contributing. We are blessed to have the immediate, first-hand memories of people who remember our past, who remember the successes and the failures, who are a wealth of what-to-do in the face of challenging situations. But don’t think the “older and wiser” folks are limited to Bill and Dorothy. Think about this: you might be an older and wiser person who is being looked up to. To some younger person in our congregation, you might represent wisdom, and an example of faith. This trust is about the most ordinary of things. There is the story of a young man going off to study with a wise rabbi. As his friends watch him pack they become concerned because he’s not bringing any books. What can he learn without books? The young man says he expects to live with the rabbi and watch how he ties his shoes. There are many young people here, watching us. They will learn how we tie our shoes, and that will be only the beginning of how they learn from us how to live like a Christian.

Which brings us to our third how-to: “Be in a community that can help your faith grow.” This might be another way of saying, “Imitate people older and wiser than you,” but I think it’s more. One of my seminary professors talks about faith nurture in terms of community. Her latest book is called, “Making a Home for Faith.” I will be absent from you next Sunday, attending a seminar based on that book. What is behind this “how-to” is an understanding that church is not the only place where we learn about faith. Church is not even the best place to learn about faith. We live in human community, no matter our age—not just families with parents and children, but in schools, with groups of friends, in workplaces. To live and work in community is how God made us, and these communities will have an impact on how our faith grows. People who grow up without adults who can be trusted, people who do not feel loved just for who they are--these folks have a hard time hearing that God loves them unconditionally. What this means for us as families (parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles) is that we literally make a home for the faith of children. We provide an environment where children learn how to love and be loved so that they can accept God’s love. Because we in Springwater are a faith community, because we are close-knit, everyone’s children see each one of us as a model for faith. When, as a church community, we show love for each other, we model accepting love as well giving love. They are both important.

Making a home for faith isn’t just for children. Faith nurture does not end at confirmation. It continues our whole lives. We may say to children, “this is how to act,” but for adults, we dignify what we mean with a title: Christian ethics. How we act is an example to children as well as to adults of how Christians ought to be in the world. We might say, “Don’t lie,” but our actions are more effective teachers. When people see us “not lying” (even when it’s not easy), we are nurturing their faith as well as our own. While it may be convincing to say “be truthful,” when we live with integrity, we and our faith are credible. Remember when your parents warned you about choosing friends? Maybe they said, “birds of a feather flock together.” Parents worry about who their kids hang around with, because they know the kind of people a person hangs with will influence their interests, their world views, the kinds of things they find fun. This goes for adults, too. Who you hang out with makes a difference.

The last how-to is “Give more than you were born with.” What this “how-to” means is that God isn’t limited by who we think we are. The church has long understood that God gives gifts or graces to individuals to use for the good of the church. By this we don’t mean just the gifts that are in-born, like being a musician or artist. These are gifts that God gives to people for certain times and places. For instance, when a person is ordained as a deacon or an elder or a minister of word and sacrament, Presbyterians understand that that person has been given particular gifts appropriate to that office, and that these gifts are to be used in the church for that time and place. A person may serve as an elder, using gifts of administration, but may later serve as a deacon, using gifts of compassion. In God’s tender care for the good of the church, God may choose to give someone a gift to use for a time, but this person may not literally have been born with that gift. Some gifts are given for a time, to be used in the church, for the good of the community. In that case, we almost have an obligation to use those gifts.

Four pieces of advice about how to be not ashamed: remember the past, imitate people older and wiser than yourself, be in a community that can help your faith grow, give more than you were born with. Paul gave this advice to Timothy because he didn’t want Timothy to be ashamed of his faith. What this table represents is a dramatic re-enactment of the scandal that Paul worried Timothy might be ashamed of. It is a scandal. If God is so powerful, how come Jesus died? World Communion Sunday reminds us not only of our own tradition in this community, but by the very fact of its celebration over the entire globe today, it reminds us of how powerful and dangerous this table is. Today, there are places where people are literally taking their lives in their hands to eat this meal. Will communion be celebrated today in Afghanistan where the Taliban considers this meal a crime? Or in Egypt where it is a crime to tell a non-Christian about your faith? When we eat this meal today, we are eating in solidarity with these brothers and sisters. We are eating it because we are NOT ashamed. Of them or of the scandal this meal represents. Eat this meal today remembering those for whom this is a dangerous act. Eat this meal today in memory of the One who promised eternal life, sealed that promise by dying, and then by defeating death. Amen.

God, we thank you for your power, which put on human flesh and died in that flesh. And then, in your very re-living, you call us to fullness of life. Amen.