Rekindle the Gift of God

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
Sunday 26 July 2026

2 Timothy 1.1–14
Luke 17.5–6

There's a particular disappointment nobody warns you about
            when they send you off on sabbatical.
 
Everyone assumes -
            and, if I'm honest, you rather assume it yourself -
that three months away will send you back to the work
            with the fire roaring, the tank full, the batteries charged,
and every other weary metaphor we reach for
            when we mean ready.
 
And for a fortnight or so, that might even be true.
            Then the emails resume their steady tide.
            The diary fills up again.
The ordinary weight of things settles back onto your shoulders,
            and somewhere around the third week you notice
            that whatever it was you thought had been rekindled
            has quietly banked itself back down to a glow.
 
I say this not to complain -
            it was a gift of a sabbatical, and I'm grateful for it -
            but because I doubt the experience is mine alone.
 
Most of us know what it is
            to have something that once burned brightly settle,
            almost without our noticing, into embers.
 
It doesn't usually happen dramatically.
            It's rarely one catastrophe.
 
It's the accumulation:
            small disappointments, unanswered questions,
the quiet discouragements that come
            simply from living and loving
            and trying to follow Jesus
in a world that often seems set
            against everything he stood for.
We keep going. We show up. We do what needs doing.
And yet something beneath the surface has cooled -
            something that once felt alive begins to feel fragile.
 
And this summer, of all summers,
            the world is not exactly helping.
 
You only have to glance at the newspaper -
            and old Brock, who built this church in the 1840s,
            always insisted the preacher needs
            the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other -
            to feel the temperature of our anxious age.
 
There's war back in the headlines,
            the drumbeat of it,
            the old imperial reflex of settling arguments with weapons,
and the uncomfortable question
            of how far our own government's bases and choices
            are bound up in it.
 
It is, by any measure, a fearful season.
 
And it's into precisely this kind of season -
            personal and political, intimate and global -
            that the opening of the second letter to Timothy
            speaks its first, startling instruction.
 
Rekindle the gift of God that is within you.
 
It's a striking phrase, and worth slowing down over.
            Not receive a new gift.
            Not go and find the thing you've lost.
But rekindle.
            Which quietly assumes that the gift is still there.
            Present, but dimmed.
Real, but not fully alive.
 
The word underneath it is a fire word -
            to breathe a dying flame back into life,
            to stir the embers and blow across them
            until they catch again.
 
And that assumption matters,
            because it tells us something
that the whole culture around us tends to deny:
            which is that the life of faith
            is not a constant upward trajectory.
 
It is not a story of uninterrupted growth
            or ever-increasing confidence.
 
It has seasons. Ebbs and flows.
 
Times when faith burns strong
            and times when it feels thin as paper.
 
Timothy, it seems, knows this from the inside.
            And so, I suspect, do you.
 
This letter is personal
            in a way that catches you off guard.
 
You can hear it in the tone, the affection,
            the urgency of someone writing to someone they love
            who is, perhaps, close to giving up.
 
And notice where it begins -
            not with a rebuke, but with an embrace.
 
I remember you constantly in my prayers, night and day.
            I remember your tears.
 
We're not told what those tears were about.
            But we can guess.
 
The tears of exhaustion, of frustration, of grief;
            the tears that come
            when the responsibility feels heavier
            than the results seem to justify.
 
And the response isn't to talk Timothy out of them.
 
It's to take them seriously,
            and then to speak into that space
            a reminder of who he is.
 
And here is where I think
            the original power of this passage really lies,
            and it's the part we most often hurry past.
 
I am reminded of your sincere faith,
            a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois
            and your mother Eunice,
            and now, I am sure, lives in you.
 
Two women. Named. Lois and Eunice.
            Timothy's faith did not begin with Timothy.
 
It was carried, and handed on, and kept alight,
            through a grandmother and a mother,
through two generations of women
            whose names the tradition happens to have kept -
and how many more, in that household and ours,
            whose names it didn't.
 
This is not decorative detail.
            This is the mechanism.
 
This is how faith actually travels -
            not chiefly through the great and the ordained
            and the named-on-the-plaques,
but through the patient, unglamorous,
            mostly unrecorded faithfulness
of ordinary believers
            keeping the fire going in their own kitchens.
 
Which tells us something about the letter itself.
 
Many of us think these words
            come from a later hand than Paul's own -
a second generation, writing in his name,
            wrestling with a question
            every ageing church eventually has to face:
how do you keep the fire alive
            once the founders are gone
            and the first excitement has cooled?
 
That's not a threat to the sermon.
            That is the sermon.
 
Because the answer this letter gives
            is not "find a bigger, more charismatic leader."
 
It's this: the faith is already among you.
            It's in the Loises and Eunices.
 
It's in the community itself,
            holding one another's flame
            when any one person's begins to gutter.
 
That is about as Baptist a conviction as I know -
            that the treasure isn't locked
            in an office or a hierarchy,
but distributed through the whole gathered body,
            entrusted to all of us together.
 
And when your own faith feels fragile,
            it can be a mercy to remember
            that you're not carrying it alone.
 
Other people have believed on your behalf.
            Other people are praying for you while you sleep.
 
That memory, sometimes, is what keeps us going -
            not because everything is resolved,
            but because we remember the story is bigger
            than this particular low moment of ours.
 
And it's out of that web of memory and love
            that the well-known line arrives:
God did not give us a spirit of fear,
            but of power and love and self-discipline.
 
Now, we have to handle that carefully,
            because it can land like a slap.
 
It can sound as if fear itself is a failure of faith -
            as though, if we only trusted a bit harder,
            we'd stop feeling anxious,
            or hesitant, or overwhelmed.
 
But that's not how life works,
            and it's not how faith works either.
 
Timothy is afraid,
            and not in some abstract, tidy way.
 
He's leading in a hostile context.
            He's publicly associated with a man in a Roman prison.
 
He's carrying weight that feels beyond him,
            and he's wondering, as most of us do,
            whether he's really up to it.
 
Fear, here, is not the opposite of faith.
            Fear is the room in which faith has to be lived.
 
What the letter does is not deny the fear but demote it -
            it refuses to let fear be the thing that runs the show,
            sets the agenda,
            draws the boundaries of what's possible.
 
Fear can be in the room.
            It just doesn't get to chair the meeting.
 
And instead, three other things are named
            as already at work in him.
 
Power -
            but let's be clear what kind,
            because the word gets dangerous fast.
 
Not power as domination.
 
Not the power currently making the headlines,
            the power that jails apostles
            and settles disputes with force.
 
This is the Spirit's own enabling courage,
            the strength to act
            and to keep loving under pressure.
 
It's the counter-power of a crucified Messiah,
            which is a completely different currency from Caesar's.
 
Then love -
            not sentiment,
            but a steady orientation towards others
            that costs you something.
 
And then a third word
            our translations render as "self-discipline,"
            though it's really closer to a sound mind,
                        a settled sanity,
            the capacity to stay grounded and rooted
            when everything around you is shaking.
 
Power, love, and a right mind.
            That's the shape of the gift.
 
And notice -
            so often the gifts we're being asked to rekindle
            are precisely the ones
            fear has talked us out of using.
 
The conversation we've avoided.
            The stand we haven't taken.
            The risk we've quietly declined.
 
Not because we don't care,
            but because we're tired,
            or unsure, or wary of the cost.
 
Which is exactly why the next line is so bracing.
Do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord,
            or of me his prisoner.
 
His prisoner.
 
The empire has locked the man up,
            and the letter's response
            is not to be embarrassed by that
            but to name it as no shame at all.
 
This is where the gospel quietly refuses
            the world's whole scoring system.
 
Rome measures power by who holds the keys to the cell.
            The gospel measures it by who holds on to hope inside it.
 
And the reason it can do that -
            the reason any of this holds -
            is buried in a verse we almost never linger on.
 
This grace, the letter says,
            was given us before the ages began,
and has now been revealed
            in the appearing of Christ Jesus,
who abolished death
            and brought life and immortality to light.
 
There it is.
            That's the engine of the whole thing.
 
When the letter says God "saved us,"
            this is what it means -
not a transaction to settle a debt,
            not a ledger balanced by someone else's suffering,
but death itself broken open
            and life dragged out into the light.
 
Resurrection.
            That's the fuel.
That's what makes the fire more than wishful thinking.
 
We're not being asked to manufacture courage
            out of our own dwindling reserves
            and grim determination.
 
We're being invited to warm ourselves
            at a fire God has already lit,
in an empty tomb,
            on the far side of everything that frightens us.
 
The prisoner isn't ashamed
            because the prisoner knows how the story ends -
has, in a sense, already seen the ending arrive early,
            in a garden, at dawn.
 
And then, tucked into the lectionary beside all this,
            that strange little scrap from Luke.
The disciples come to Jesus and ask,
            reasonably enough, "Increase our faith."
 
Give us more. Top us up.
            And Jesus rather refuses the question.
 
If you had 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's a faintly absurd, almost comic image,
            and it's meant to be.
 
A tree flung into the ocean by a fleck of faith.
 
He's not scolding them for having too little.
            He's telling them they've misunderstood the whole economy.
 
It was never about quantity.
            You don't need more faith.
            You need to use the spark you already have.
 
Even the smallest ember,
            given breath and fuel and attention,
            can catch.
 
Even the smallest act of faithfulness,
            offered honestly,
            turns out to be enough to be going on with.
 
So rekindling, it turns out,
            is not a single dramatic moment of spiritual fireworks.
 
It's a practice.
            It's slow, and ordinary, and often unspectacular.
 
Returning to prayer when it feels dry.
            Returning to scripture when it feels over-familiar.
            Returning to this community when you feel distant from it.
 
Giving thanks for the Loises and Eunices
            who first handed you the flame.
 
And - this matters -
            being honest about where you actually are,
            because it's only what we bring into the light
            that can be rekindled at all.
 
The pretence that everything's fine
            is precisely the wet blanket
            that keeps the embers from catching.
 
But here's the thing I most want to leave you with,
            and it's the thing the letter is finally driving at.
 
This gift was never given to Timothy for Timothy.
 
The fire isn't lit
            so that we can sit privately in its warm glow
            and feel spiritually topped up.
 
It's lit to give light -
            to others, to the street outside, to the city.
 
We are a church in the heart of London,
            on Shaftesbury Avenue,
and the temptation of every tired church
            in a fearful season
            is to pull inward,
            to bank the fire low and simply survive.
 
This letter won't let us.
            The rekindling and the sending are the same movement.
 
To stir the gift back to flame
            is to be turned outward -
towards the frightened, the imprisoned, the grieving,
            the people this anxious summer is grinding down.
 
Contemplation that never becomes solidarity
            has misunderstood the fire.
 
The flame that only warms itself
            has already started to go out.
 
So we don't wait until we feel strong.
 
We don't wait until the fear has gone,
            or the headlines have improved,
            or the confidence has come flooding back.
 
We begin where we are, with what we have -
            a flicker, a spark, a mustard seed -
            and we trust the Spirit who is already at work
            to breathe on it.
 
Remember who you are.
            Remember whose you are.
 
Remember Lois and Eunice,
            and the great cloud of ordinary saints
            who kept this fire burning
            long enough for it to reach you.
 
And then go out -
            Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go -
and let it burn
            for the sake of a world that badly needs the light.
 
The gift is still there.
            It hasn't gone.
 
And by the grace of the God
            who has already abolished death
            and dragged life out into the open,
            it can burn again.
 
Amen.
 

Take Hold of Eternal Life

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 19 July 2026

1 Timothy 6.6–19
Luke 16.19–30

I want to start with a confession,
            which is that on the way in this morning
I passed at least two people sleeping in doorways along Shaftesbury Avenue,
            and I'm fairly sure I didn't really see either of them.

I registered them, the way you register a lamppost or a bin.
            And I kept walking, because I had a service to get to and a sermon to preach,
            and the sermon, as it happens, was this one.

I mention that not to perform some tidy little guilt,
            but because it's the honest place to begin with these two readings.

Because both of them are about seeing, and about not seeing.
            And both of them suspect that the not-seeing is something we practise,
            something we get good at,
            something a whole way of life can be quietly organised around.

Last week, as we began this short series in the letters to Timothy,
            we started with grace.

We heard that extraordinary testimony –
            that even a life marked by violence
                        and opposition to God could be turned around,
            that no one is beyond the reach of mercy.

And that gave us confidence. Not in ourselves, but in God.

But grace, if it's real, has to go somewhere.
            It isn't a single event that we can file away and admire.
            It's a beginning.

And so the question shifts this week,
            from has grace reached us
            to what does it look like to live that grace out,
                        over the long haul, day after ordinary day.

Because we all know that beginning something is one thing,
            and continuing it is another,
            and finishing it well is something else again.

That's true of gym memberships and it's true of discipleship,
            and the author of this letter knows it.

And I should pause on that word, "author," for just a moment,
            because although this letter comes down to us in Paul's name,
            most scholars now think it was written a little after his lifetime
            by someone standing within his tradition
            – holding his voice, carrying his gospel forward into a new situation.

That doesn't make it any less Paul's in spirit.
            It just means that when I keep saying "the author" this morning
                        rather than simply "Paul," that's the reason why.

And the author knows, as we all know,
            that finishing well is the hardest part –
which is why the end of this letter reads less like theology
            and more like a coach's final word before sending the team back out.

And the world he's sending Timothy back into is Ephesus.

Now, we tend to hear "Ephesus" as a sort of neutral biblical backdrop,
            but it was nothing of the sort.

It was one of the great cities of the Roman Empire –
            a port, a banking centre,
            a place where the imperial economy did its work in plain sight.

Wealth flowed through Ephesus,
            and it flowed the way it always flows in an empire: upwards.
Patronage, status, the visible display of who mattered and who didn't.

And in a place like that, certain assumptions settle into the water supply.
            That those who have more are, somehow, more blessed.
            That prosperity is a sign of divine approval.
            That security is a thing you accumulate.

And the church in Ephesus is breathing that air along with everybody else.
            Of course it is.
Which is why the warning here isn't abstract moralising –
            it's a survival question.
How do you live faithfully in a system
            that has already decided what a human being is worth,
            and measures it in coin?

And into that comes the line everyone half-remembers and usually misquotes.
            Not "money is the root of all evil,"
            and not even "the root of all evil,"
            but "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil."

The precision matters,
            because the writer isn't staging a naïve war on money itself.
Money can be used well;
            the letter will end by telling wealthy Christians exactly how.
What's being named is something further in –
            a love, a trust, a devotion that has attached itself to the wrong thing:
                        the moment money stops being a tool in your hand
                        and becomes a master over your imagination.

And the author traces what happens when that shift takes hold,
            and it's worth slowing down over,
because he's describing a process, not a single dramatic fall.

It begins with the illusion of security.

Wealth makes a promise –
            that if you have enough, you'll be safe,
            that you can insulate yourself against the future,
                        manage the risk, seal the cracks.

And there's a grain of truth in it,
            which is exactly what makes it so persuasive;
resources really do open doors and steady the ground.

The danger isn't that money does nothing.
            The danger is the moment it becomes the thing we finally trust,
            quietly taking the place that belongs to God.

Then comes the distortion of desire,
            because we're shaped by what we chase.

If the horizon of a life becomes more,
            then slowly, almost without our noticing,
            our wanting gets retrained.

We start to measure ourselves by what we hold.
            We compare. We feel the pull.
And after a while it stops feeling like a distortion at all and just feels like life –
            while underneath, the older desires,
            the desire for God and for justice and for our neighbour,
            get crowded quietly out.

And then, thirdly, what I can only call erosion.
            The author says that some, in their eagerness to be rich,
            "have wandered away from the faith."

Notice he doesn't say renounced it, or rejected it, or argued their way out of it.
            They wandered. It's a drifting word, a slow word.

And that, I think, is the most searching thing in the whole passage –
            the suggestion that the real threat to faith
            isn't usually persecution or crisis or some frontal assault.

It's the steady, ambient pull of a rival set of values
            that never once announces itself as the enemy.

Wealth rarely destroys faith with a bang. It just fills the room.
            It occupies the space where trust and dependence
            and openness to God might have lived,
until one day you look up and your life is pointing
            in a direction you never consciously chose.

So that's the diagnosis.
            And if that's the diagnosis, then everything hangs on the alternative –
            and here the whole tone of the passage turns,
            from warning to invitation.

Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith,
            love, endurance, gentleness.

And the word to hold on to there is pursue.
            These aren't things that happen to us while we're looking the other way.
They're things we go after, seek out, practise into being.

Faith, it turns out, is not something you receive once
            and then leave in a drawer.
It's cultivated. It takes shape over time,
            through habits and choices and the slow orientation of a life –
which is why it can be lost the same way,
            by drift, and found the same way, by pursuit.

And right at the centre of all this sits the phrase I want us to take home.
            Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called.

Now, we hear "eternal life" and we reach almost automatically for the future –
            for something on the far side of death,
            something we wait for,
            something that begins when this life ends.

But that isn't how it's being used here, and this matters enormously.

Eternal life here is not a reward stored up for later.
            It's the life of God, shared with us, now –
            a different quality of living that's already available, already breaking in.

Not simply more of the same life stretched out forever,
            but a transformed life, a life shaped here and now
            by the presence and the purposes of God.

Which changes everything about that little verb in v.12, take hold.
            You don't take hold of something you're waiting for.
            You take hold of something that's already within reach.

And so the language here is active and deliberate and slightly urgent,
            because this kind of life doesn't arrive by accident
            and it won't settle on us while we drift.
It has to be grasped.

And when you start to look at what it actually looks like when it's grasped,
            you find it looks like generosity instead of accumulation,
            like justice instead of exploitation,
            like love instead of the endless project of securing yourself.

It looks like a life that's stopped being organised around self-protection
            and has been set free, at last, to give itself away.

And it's precisely there that Jesus tells his story,
            and the story turns out to be a mirror
            held up to everything the letter has just said.

There's a rich man, and there's a poor man at his gate,
            and here's the first thing worth noticing,
            the thing that would have made Jesus' hearers sit up.

The rich man has no name.
            He's the somebody, the man of substance,
            the one the whole world would have known –
            and Jesus doesn't give him a name.

The beggar, though, the nobody at the gate covered in sores,
            he gets a name. Lazarus.
He is, in fact, the only character in any of Jesus' parables who is ever named.
            And that's not decoration.

In the economy of the empire,
            the rich man is a name worth knowing
            and Lazarus is invisible refuse.

In the economy of God, it's the other way round entirely –
            God knows the name of the one the world walked past.

And notice what the rich man's sin actually is,
            because it isn't what we might expect.
He isn't cruel.
            He doesn't kick Lazarus, or have him moved on,
            or do a single dramatic wicked thing.

His failure is quieter and far more familiar than that.
            He simply doesn't see him.
Day after day Lazarus lies at his gate,
            visible, present, close enough to touch –
and the rich man's whole life is so thoroughly organised
            around his own comfort and his own world
            that a suffering human being at his own front door
has become, to him, part of the scenery.
            Not hidden. Just unseen.

And that's the danger for us, isn't it?
            Not that we'll wake one morning and decide to renounce the faith.
But that we'll grow so accustomed to a certain way of living,
            so at home in a culture that treats deep inequality as simply the weather,
            that we quietly stop noticing.

Stop noticing who's missing.
            Stop noticing who's excluded.
            Stop noticing who is at the gate –
                        which, for us, is not a metaphor,
            but the actual doorways of the actual streets
                        around this actual building,
            where actual people will be sitting again this afternoon
                        when we've gone home.

And then the story does something almost unbearable.
            From beyond death, the rich man finally asks for something
            on behalf of someone else –
send someone to warn my brothers,
            send them a sign, someone from the dead, something undeniable.

And the answer comes back: they already have what they need.
            They already know.
They have Moses and the prophets.
            They don't lack information.
            They lack the will to act on what they already understand.

And that lands very close to home for a congregation like ours,
            because let's be honest – we are not people who are short of information.
We know the call to love our neighbour.
            We know the call to share what we have.
            We know the call to seek justice.

Nobody here needs a sign from heaven
            to tell them there are hungry and homeless people in this city.
The question was never whether we understand.
            The question is whether we'll live it.

And there's one more turn of the screw,
            and it's the one I can't preach past,
            because Luke lets the rich man say it out loud:
if someone rises from the dead, then they'll listen.

And we sit here on the far side of Easter and we know – someone did.
            In the central story of our faith, someone has risen from the dead.
And here we still are, still capable of walking past the gate.
            Which tells us something bracing and true:
            resurrection doesn't override us. It invites us.

The empty tomb doesn't force our hand;
            it holds the door open and waits to see
            whether we'll walk through it into a genuinely different way of living.

So how do we live differently?

The author has already given Timothy the word,
            and it's a word we badly misunderstand.
"Godliness with contentment," he says, "is great gain."

And we hear "contentment"
            and we think of a kind of soft passivity,
            of settling, of the absence of ambition.

But that's not it at all.

In that world, "contentment" was a proud word –
            it named the self-made ideal of needing no one and nothing,
            of being sufficient unto yourself.

And the letter takes that word and turns it inside out.
            Christian contentment isn't the fantasy
                        of the self-sufficient individual who needs nobody.
            It's the freedom of the person who has stopped believing
                        that more will save them,
            and has learned instead to depend – on God, and on one another.

It isn't settling for less.
            It's discovering, at long last, what is actually enough.
And from that place, and only from that place,
            real generosity becomes possible.

Which is why the closing instruction isn't a threat and isn't a shaming.
            It's an invitation held out to those who have plenty:
don't be arrogant,
            don't set your hope on something as unreliable as wealth,
be rich instead in good works,
            be generous, be – and here's the word that ties the whole thing
                        back to who we are as a church – be ready to share.

Because that word is the koinonia word, the fellowship word,
            the same root as the shared life
            we're always talking about at Bloomsbury.

Generosity, for our author,
            isn't a private virtue you practise alone with your bank statement.
It's the shape of a community that holds its life in common.
            This is how we take hold, he says, of the life that really is life.

And so we come back to where we started,
            on the pavement outside, walking past the gate.

We become what we pursue.

Chase wealth, and we'll be shaped, in the end, by its anxieties –
            always comparing, never safe, never seeing.

Chase Christ, and we'll be shaped by love, and by freedom,
            and slowly, mercifully, we might even start to see again.

Last week, grace reached us.
            This week, we're invited to answer it –
to take hold of the life that is really life,
            and to live it here, and now, and together.

Amen.  

The Patience of Christ

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 12 July 2026

Ezekiel 34.1–6, 11–16 1 Timothy 1.12–17
Luke 15.4–7

Friends, it’s good to be back.

And "good to be back" is doing rather a lot of work in that sentence,
            not because I’m not glad to be here, I am.

But because there is a particular strangeness
            about walking into a building which is at once entirely familiar
            and somehow not quite where you left it.

Old friends greet you, and you remember them perfectly,
            but they have lived three months you’ve not been part of.

New rotas have started, new people have joined the church, (I hope!)
            …and one quietly discovers, walking back in,
that whatever sense of identity one had as Minister of this church
            doesn’t survive a long absence entirely intact.

It has to be picked up again, gently,
            like something fragile that someone has been keeping safe for you
            while you were away.

So before I say anything else this morning, I want to say thank you.
            To those who have preached and prayed and led,
            and served and made coffee and opened the door to strangers,
                        and wept with those who weep,
                        and rejoiced with those who rejoice,
            over the last twelve weeks.

A church does not stop being itself when its Minister steps away for a season.
            It does, however, become differently itself.
And one of the gifts of a sabbatical, perhaps the chief gift,
            is that you come back and discover
that what you thought you were holding together
            was being held together by something else all along.

Which is, I think, why this morning's reading
            from the first letter to Timothy lands where it does.
Because this is a letter written into precisely that situation.
            A church that is no longer in its first flush.
            A community that has lived through the absence of those who founded it.
            A second-generation Christian community in the city of Ephesus,
                        working out what it means to be the church
                        on the far side of the apostles.

Most scholars now think that the Pastoral Epistles,
            the two letters to Timothy and the letter to Titus,
were not written by Paul himself but in his name,
            by someone in the Pauline tradition perhaps a generation later.

That is not a scandal.
            It was an accepted way of writing in the ancient world.
And what it tells us is that there was a community who,
            faced with new questions and new pressures,
reached back to the voice of their founder
            and tried to speak with him into their own moment.

They asked, in effect, what would Paul say to us now?
            And then, with reverence and considerable nerve, they tried to say it.
That is, when you think about it, a deeply Baptist thing to do.
            To reach back into a tradition and to ask it to speak again.
            To trust that the voice of those who went before us
                        still has something to say,
            even when we are the ones who have to say it.

So here is "Paul," in the broadest sense,
            speaking into a church that is figuring out its identity.
And here is what he says.
            "I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me,
            because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service,
            even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor,
            and a man of violence."

Notice those three words.
            A blasphemer slanders the holy.
            A persecutor hunts down those who follow a different path.
But the third descriptor is the one that makes me stop:
            The man of violence here is not just a thug.
The word carries the kind of arrogance
            which the ancient world thought even the gods would punish,
            the violence of the one who believes they have God on their side.

Paul is not merely confessing that he did harm.
            He is confessing the precise quality of the harm.
He had Scripture. He had tradition.
            He had the conviction that he was doing God's work.
And he was, in fact, terrorising the church.

That is not a small admission.
            And it doesn’t come from someone trying to soften his past.
It comes from someone who has looked at it with both eyes open
            and has refused to look away.

And the move that follows is the one I want us to sit with this morning.
            Because Paul does not say
            that he was forgiven despite his religious violence.
He says that he received mercy
            because his life now stands as a worked example,
                        a kind of living illustration,
            of what God's patience can do.

"I received mercy for this reason," he says,
            "that in me, as the foremost,
            Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience."

And the grace, he says, overflowed.
            Not abounded. Overflowed.
Grace did the thing, and then did more of it, and then did more.

I don’t want to leave this in the first century,
            because the text doesn’t let us.

The figure of the religious persecutor
            whose violence is sanctioned by sacred conviction
is not a museum piece.

We have seen, these past two and a half years,
            what religiously authorised violence looks like in real time.

We have watched the destruction of Gaza,
            and increasing settler incursions in the West Bank.
And we have heard Palestinian Christian theologians,
                        Munther Isaac chief among them,
            call out and critique the use of Scripture
                        to justify the killing of children.

Their gift to the wider church has been to insist that we name what we are seeing,
            and naming – as Paul came to discover – is where grace begins.

We have seen our own government equivocate and arm
            and refuse to call things by their proper names.

I name this not to score a point this morning,
            and not because I have come back from sabbatical
            with a list of things I am angry about,
though I will not pretend that anger has been absent from these three months.

I name it because the text is about precisely this,
            and a sermon that reads 1 Timothy 1
without naming the religious violence of our own moment
            would be a sermon that has lost its nerve.

But of course this is not only Gaza and the West Bank,
            it’s also Hamas and Hezbollah,
            and it’s the evils of European Antisemitism,
            and it’s America and the religious nationalist right,
            and it’s Sudan, and it’s Ukraine, and I could go on.
And it’s not just Christianity or Judaism or Islam,
            because all religions, and all nations that claim religion,
            are capable of enacting violence that they claim to be divinely sanctioned.

But notice what the text does and doesn’t do.
            It doesn’t say that the violence does not matter.
            It doesn’t say that grace makes the harm disappear.

What it says is harder than that.
            It says that grace can reach even there.

That a man who held coats while Stephen was stoned,
            who breathed threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,
            became the apostle to the nations.

Not because his past was erased,
            but because his life was turned around,
            and the very thing that had been a weapon became a witness.

If grace can do that,
            then there is no one for whom we are permitted to give up hope.

Not the soldier. Not the settler. Not the politician.
            Not the person who uses God's name to justify cruelty and harm.
And, lest this become too comfortable, not ourselves either,
            on the days when we have stood by, or stayed quiet,
            or signed a petition and decided that was enough.

And friends, this is hard.
            Holding hope in the face of what we've watched is hard.
Refusing to give up on anyone,
            including the ones doing the harm,
including ourselves
            on the days we have not been who we wanted to be,
this is not something we can do
            by gritting our teeth and trying harder.

It is, in the end, a contemplative discipline before it is an activist one.
            Or rather, the two are the same discipline seen from different angles.

We can only hold space for the transformation of others
            because we have known ourselves held.
We can only refuse to draw lines around grace
            because we have felt the lines we drew around ourselves dissolve under it.

The patience that this text speaks of, the patience of Christ,
            is something we learn by being on the receiving end of it
            before we are ever asked to extend it.

And one of the things I'm grateful for, after three months away,
            is having had time to sit with that again.
Time to listen.
            Time to be reminded that whatever we do for justice and for peace
            is sustained not by our resolve but by being held.

Which brings us to the shepherd.
            Jesus tells the story, in Luke 15,
in the hearing of Pharisees and scribes
            who are grumbling that he eats with sinners.

A shepherd has a hundred sheep. One is lost.
            He leaves the ninety-nine in the wilderness,
            and goes after the one until he finds it.

And when he finds it, he puts it on his shoulders,
            and he calls his friends and neighbours, and he throws a party.

We have domesticated this story. We have made it sweet.
            But it’s not sweet. It’s barbed.
Because the people Jesus is telling it to
            would have heard the echo.

Ezekiel 34. The great chapter on the shepherds of Israel,
            in which God indicts the religious leaders of his own people
            for being shepherds who feed themselves and not the flock.

"You have not strengthened the weak," God says through the prophet,
            "you have not healed the sick,
            you have not bound up the injured,
            you have not brought back the strayed,
            you have not sought the lost."

And then God says, in the most extraordinary turn in the prophets:
            Very well. I will do it myself.
I will be the shepherd.
            I will go and find them.

So when Jesus tells the story of a shepherd who goes after the one,
            he’s not telling a pastoral parable.
He is telling Ezekiel 34.
            He is saying, this is what God's shepherding looks like,
            and you, religious leaders who are grumbling
                        because I eat with the wrong people,
            you are the shepherds who would not go.

Jesus is claiming that the party he is throwing with these tax collectors and sinners
            is a foretaste of the party heaven is throwing.
And he is critiquing those who are standing outside it
            complaining about the guest list.

The story of the lost sheep, in other words,
            is not a parable about how God loves us all very much in a general way.

Rather, it is a parable about a God
            who goes where the religious leadership refuses to go,
            and brings home the ones the religious leadership has written off.

Including, by the way, the religious leadership themselves,
            on the day they finally let themselves be carried.

Which brings us back to our writer in Ephesus,
            and the way he ends this passage.
Because if you’ve been paying attention,
            you will have noticed that the section closes
            not with an instruction but with a song.

"To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God,
            be honour and glory ever and ever. Amen."

It is easy to read this as decorative. A pious flourish.
            But it’s not.

In Ephesus, in the late first century, this is a fighting sentence.
            Ephesus was a city of many gods
                        and of one emperor who was also a god.
            To say that there is one King who reigns over all the ages,
                        immortal where Caesar is mortal,
                        invisible where the imperial statues are everywhere visible,
                        the only God where the pantheon offers so many,
            is politically pointed, to say the least.

The doxology is not an escape from the violence the passage has just named.
            It’s the alternative to it.

It is the declaration that the powers which license cruelty in God's name
            are not, in fact, God.

There is one King of the ages,
            and he is not on a throne in Rome,
and he is not in Washington or Westminster or Jerusalem,
            but rather he is the one whose patience has met us in Jesus Christ.

So. First Sunday back.
            What are we being invited into, you and I,
            as Bloomsbury, in the season ahead?

Three things. And I will be specific.

First, we are being invited to tell the truth about ourselves.

Not in a spirit of morbid self-examination,
            but in the sober honesty that this passage models.

The church that can name its complicities
            is the church that can be free of them.

We are not a perfect community.
            We have, like every church, our own histories of harm
            and silence and failure of nerve.

The invitation is to name them, gently and clearly,
            and to put them down at the feet of the King of the ages,
            who already knows.

Second, we are being invited to refuse to give up on anyone.
            And that includes the people we find easiest to write off.

The politicians we cannot bear to listen to.
            The Christians whose theology we believe is doing damage.
The members of our own families who have hurt us.
            The version of ourselves we have decided is beyond help.

Grace overflows, refuses to be measured,
            and we are not authorised to draw a line
            on the far side of which it cannot reach.

Third, and this is the one I most want us to hear this morning,
            we are being invited to keep singing.

To let the doxology be the floor under our feet.
            Because the work of being a church that tells the truth
            and refuses to write people off will cost us something.

And the only way to sustain it is to remember,
            every Sunday and every weekday in between,
who the King of the ages is,
            and that he is not, in the end, any of the kings
            who are trying to bend the world to their will this week.

It is indeed good to be back.
            And so let us go on together, in the patience of Christ.

Amen.