2 Timothy 4:6-8
Many of you know I have a defibrillator in my chest. It does a lot of things. One of those things is monitor what's going on in my heart. Every 90 days it sends a report about my heart to the Heart Hospital in Wichita, using this other device that sits on the table by my bed.
After the last 90 day report was sent in a couple of months ago, the nurse at the cardiologist's office called and said, "You need to get in here as soon as possible—within the next week. That's a scary call to get. Especially when that's all she'd say.
I went in the next day after she called, and the electro-cardiologist, Dr. Parikh, told me my defibrillator had gone off a couple of months prior. I had no idea. "I thought I'd feel a jolt," I said.
He said, "You probably passed out for a second before the jolt came—then you would have woken right up, not knowing what happened. That passing out and jolting took a second, maybe two. Then Dr. Parikh said, "If you didn't have the device in your chest you would be dead right now." That's what gave me a real jolt—his statement.
The device logs everything, so I was told what day my jolt happened, what time of day, etc. I pulled out my iPhone and checked the date and time. Nothing much happened that day, according to my calendar. Except for the fact that I could have died that day. It was a Thursday, 10:34 a.m.. I would have been sitting in my chair, behind my desk. Totally oblivious to what had just happened.
Leigh Ann Curtis has a similar device in her chest, and has been thumped a couple of times by it. One of those, Joel got in on it, catching Leigh Ann as she was going down. So she knows what it's like, more than me, since, as I said, my heart's disrythmia made me pass out first.
I haven't told very many people about it. I told my friend Gordon Stofer about it one day, when we were chatting, comparing medical notes. He said, "Whoa! That's great! The device worked! You're alive!" And that's true. It's the reason he embodies our Optimist Club Creed. That's what I should be concentrating on. But I confess I have been a bit freaked out since hearing the report from my electro cardiologist.
I feel like I'm caught in this "twilight zone" between Gordon's reaction and the Dr.'s words. I'm alive! But I could have died. When I was talking to my son and daughter, Ryan and Kristin, about it, I said that part of it is the difference between a hurricane and an earthquake. As we saw with hurricane Matthew in Florida, they could track the storm, they had a good idea where it was headed, the computer had given them several models of where Matthew would end up. The storm did exactly as expected.
But with an earthquake, you never know when it's going to hit. My heart problems are not vascular. My issues don't have to do with clogged arteries. It is all electrical: pulses that constantly misfire, and evidently now, misfire between the nerves in my heart that can put me down. For good. And I'll never know when. I won't have any soreness in my shoulder or arm or back to warn me. Or have any forewarnings that feel like indigestion. Nothing that can be tracked and measured and monitored, like other forms of heart disease, or cancer, or other assorted deadly and chronic illnesses. That total lack of warning is part of what has gotten me a bit distressed.
The handwriting is on the wall. Which is a biblical term, if you didn't know. It's from the Old Testament book of Daniel. The king of Babylon has a vision of a huge hand writing an indecipherable message on the wall. Only Daniel, one of the captive Jews from Israel is able to tell the king what the handwriting on the wall means—that he, the king and the Babylonian kingdom, is doomed. That night, the king dies.
For Paul, also, he has seen the handwriting on the wall. When he wrote the second letter to Timothy, Paul was in prison. He wasn't just under house arrest as he was before, waiting to make the gospel known to Caesar, free to come and go as he pleased. Now, he's in a dark dungeon in Rome. He knows his death could come at any moment. The second letter to Timothy is the last he wrote before he was beheaded.
Part of the reason Paul is writing to Timothy is to ask Timothy to come see him. Paul is lonely. Because he has been labeled an enemy of the empire, everyone else deserted him. Maybe they were afraid they would be arrested also if they were associated with Paul. Some were ashamed of Paul—here was someone who devoted his life to Christ and the gospel, and look where it got him. So they abandoned Paul, and feeling that abandonment, he was lonely for his friend Timothy.
In the old Bob Newhart show, Bob played a psychiatrist. In one of the shows, he was standing in front of an elevator door waiting for it to open. He was reading. When the door opened, he hadn't paid attention. The elevator car wasn't there. Unaware, Bob stepped into the empty shaft. At the last second he grabbed one of the cables and swung himself back to the floor he was on. The whole show was about his near death experience.
His wife, at one point doesn't understand why Bob is so worked up. "I just see death as part of life," she says to him matter-of-factly. After a pause, Bob said, "Yeah, the last part."
So it is that Paul is asking Timothy to come and spend that last part with him, so he won't have to face death alone.
But also, here at the end of his letter, Paul is doing something else. Knowing death is coming, he evaluates his life. He talks out loud thoughts about how he feels about his life as he stares the good possibility of the end in the face. He sees the handwriting on the wall, so he ponders his life, what he has accomplished. Which is a bit of what I have been doing these past couple of months since getting the news from the cardiologist.
Paul uses a lot of imagery in his life review. So I want to go through some of that imagery with you. Maybe it can help you pause, maybe just for this moment, and think about where your own life has gone, what you have done with your life, what more you could do, so that when you see your own handwriting on the wall, you, like Paul can feel good about it all.
The first image Paul used is the "drink offering." A drink offering was wine that was poured out upon the altar in the temple. The altar was a huge, natural rock in the temple, upon which the sacrificial animals were slain for the forgiveness of the people's sins. The wine could be poured out on the altar as a cleansing and purification of the altar before a sacrifice was make. Or the wine could be an offering itself given to God. Poured out.
Paul was using that image as a way to describe how he felt his life had been. It was a life poured out for others. It was a life poured out for God. It was a life given in sacrifice to do the will of God. His life wasn't one controlled by his selfish desires. His wasn't a life of narcissism and self-indulgence. Instead it was a life totally given to the will and purposes of God.
As I'm looking at my life, those are the two choices it seems I have. Or, we have. How much did my life sing along with Frank Sinatra, "I did it my way"? Or, how much did my life sing along with St. Paul, "I did it God's way"?
Secondly, Paul says his time of departure is at hand. The word, in Paul's language, for departure literally means, an unloosing. It's like loosing a boat from its moorings. Paul is ready to have his life untied, and set sail for that distant shore.
For most of my life, I was no where near ready to be "unloosed." As a single father, I couldn't stand the thought of leaving my kids, especially by death. Any way I could, I secured that rope to the dock. I'm not so anxious about that now. As I have pondered over the last couple of months, I think we all have to be prepared, at any time, for our departure, our unloosing. No matter what stage or age we're at.
As Ryan has told me a few times, he believes life is precious. And what I've been taught is that life is precious because you never know when you will be loosed from your moorings. So we need to make the most of the time we have, while we are moored, while we are tied to this life. Don't waste what God has given you.
Thirdly, Paul said he "fought a good fight." Life was a struggle. He was in competition with an adversary. And at the end, he felt good about that fight and struggle. It made me think about the times I have struggled with my adversaries, the times I have tripped myself and fallen on my face big time, the times I gave into anger at God and should have kept my mouth shut, the times I have drifted in doubt and self-doubt. I wonder about this one. If I can say, evaluating my life, if I have fought the good fight.
Maybe you have seen the movie, or read the book, about Mother Teresa that describes how much she questioned, her awful times of doubt, her struggles with the great evil in the world. All of that was an internal fight, in which she wrestled with her internal self. I am no saint, like she is. But I feel her internal struggles about "fighting the good fight."
Which leads to the next way Paul pondered his life at the end. He said, he had "finished the course." Finished doesn't mean just ended. Finished means "accomplished" or "fulfilled." It is the same word Jesus used on the cross when he said, "It is finished." He and Paul meant, when they came to the end they hadn't left anything undone. They had fulfilled everything they had been commissioned by God to do.
Fighting the good fight has most to do with coming to the possible end of your life knowing that you have, by fighting the good fight, however old you are, or however along in life you are, that you are confident, up to that point, that you have "finished the course"—you have done ALL God has wanted you to accomplish.
And the last thing Paul says, in evaluating his life at the end, is, "…I have kept the faith." The word "kept" is a great word in the Greek that spoke and wrote. This word, "kept", literally means guarded, or more so, built a fortress around. Paul was writing, at the near end of his life, that he was sure, that above all else, he had built a fortress around his faith. He had guarded and protected his faith above all else. He protected his faith because it was the most important, the most vital, the most meaning-full part of him.
So, I've been asking myself, as I hope you are asking yourself, "What is it that I have built a fort around, and protected above all else?" Has it been my faith in Christ? Or has it been my career, which is something else entirely? Has it been my faith in my Lord Jesus, or has it been my ego? Paul wrote in his last letter, he had kept the faith. I want—and I hope you want too—to say the same.
After doing this self-evaluation, Paul smiles. He knows that his life is solid in the Lord. Because of that, what awaits Paul after death, is the crown. In Greek, it is the stephanos. It's my name. The stephanos is the olive branch crown given the victors either in war, or in the Olympic games. Such a crown was the most honored, the most coveted item a person could attain. Paul knew such a crown was waiting for him, placed upon his head by the Lord Himself—the Lord whom Paul had loved and served his whole life. The Lord whom Paul poured his life out for. The Lord who would one day soon unloose his moorings. The Lord, Paul had struggled and fought the adversary for. The Lord, Paul fulfilled his life for. And faith in the Lord that Paul had built a fortress around and protected.
That's how Paul evaluated his life at the end. It is what I ponder ever since I found out about that fateful Thursday, when death was near, but I was given more.
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