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.