Back in 2009 the Brewers were searching for a particular piece of the team, one
which was sorely needed. They needed a closer, a pitcher who comes in at the end
of the game when the team is ahead and keeps the other team from rallying back.
When a pitcher is successful in keeping the other team from rallying in the last
inning, he is credited with a save. If he gives up runs and allows the other
team to score and tie or go ahead, he is credited with a blown save.
The Brewers had lost their previous closer, Francisco Cordero to the Cincinnati
Reds, and they didn’t have someone in their organization who could come in from
the minor leagues and fill the role.
But the San Diego Padres were opting not to re-sign their closer, Trevor
Hoffman, who had more saves than anyone else in the history of baseball. The
Padres must have figured that Hoffman’s best days were behind him, and that he
wasn’t worth the expense of re-signing him.
The Brewers jumped at the chance to get Hoffman, and last year he seemed to
prove the Padres wrong by saving 37 games for the Brewers. It looked like a real
good deal for the Brewers until this year, when Hoffman did seem to have lost
his sharpness. He entered this year with 591 saves, and stated his goal was to
get no. 600 this year with the Brewers.
Those last nine saves were like pulling teeth. I remember going to many games
and seeing Hoffman come in at the end and give up the lead to the other team. In
the first ten games he pitched in, Hoffman gave up the lead half of the time.
He was so bad that he lost the job to a young Rookie named John Axford. Now
that’s gotta be humiliating. Hoffman is 42, the major leagues all time saves
leader, and he get benched for a rookie half his age.
It doesn’t get any worse than that. Lots of folks said he should have retired
last year. Instead, Hoffman worked with the pitching coach on his delivery and
took a cortisone shot to his elbow. His wife began travelling with him in June
and July to give him moral support.
By August Hoffman began getting back on track and rebounded to the tune of a
2.63 ERA in his last 29 appearances. So on Tuesday when Lamar and I went to
watch the game, Hoffman came on with 599 saves and a chance to save #600. Here’s
what we saw: cue video
He most exciting part about this for me was that he was able to bounce back from
the biggest slump he had seen in his career and do what he was meant to do.
Because in baseball, as in life, you can always make a comeback.
But can you make a comeback in your spiritual life? When a person hits one of
those periods in life where things that used to bring so much meaning to us are
not so meaningful anymore, when our lives were driven by our sense that we were
doing something on God’s behalf; and then all of that starts to change, what do
you do?
Is it possible to take stock of your life and make a comeback? Or are we all
really at the mercy of whatever comes our way in life? I think the answer to
that question sometimes depends on which day you ask it.
That was certainly the case for the Apostle Paul, a follower of Jesus who
honestly hadn’t met Jesus until after Jesus died and came back from the dead,
according to the New Testament.
There are many places in the New Testament which talk about how low Paul had
fallen in his vain, misguided attempt to do what he thought God wanted. And he
eventually came to a point where all of the things he thought were so important
just didn’t matter anymore.
This passage in 1 Timothy is generally thought to be written by someone at a
little later date than Paul’s own life, written as a letter from Paul to one of
Paul’s assistants named Timothy.
This practice of writing in someone else’s name was widespread back in that day,
and was not seen as plagiarism or fraud. It was actually considered a tremendous
show of respect. There are actually a number of these kinds of writings in both
the New and Old Testament.
In this letter the author, writing as Paul, instructs Timothy on how to
administer a church, how to decide on the church’s leadership, and how to deal
with certain problems that crop up in churches.
This letter was probably circulated among many churches in the area as a way of
helping them deal with some of the problems they all faced. Since it looked like
a letter from Paul, most church leaders took it quite seriously.
In the passage we read for this morning, the author, who was certainly familiar
with Paul’s story, writes about how he used to work as hard as he could do stop
what he later realized was God’s work through Jesus.
He describes Paul as a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man. That sounds
terrible, but from Paul’s perspective, he originally thought he was doing God’s
work.
Paul was a God-fearing Jew who believed that the Old Testament was God’s word,
as we do. In the Old Testament God commands Israel to follow all the laws that
God gave to Moses. Those laws were supposed to be in force forever. There are
many places in the Old Testament where God says so.
But Paul heard that Jesus talked about the Laws of Moses coming to and end. He
thought that Jesus told his followers they no longer needed to follow the law.
He thought Jesus was teaching some kind of heresy or perversion of Judaism.
So after Jesus died, Paul, who was an expert in the law and an authority in some
circles, set out to have Jesus’ followers arrested and taken to court. It was
illegal to teach people that God had changed God’s mind about the law. Anyone
who taught what was considered heresy could be put in jail or executed in some
cases.
The author describes Paul as acting in ignorance and unbelief as he went from
town to town hunting down Jesus’ followers and hauling them off to jail. Paul
later considered his actions against Jesus’ followers to be the low point of his
life.
It’s one thing to be indifferent towards Jesus. It’s quite another to actively
and violently work to stomp out Jesus’ movement. In Philippians Paul looks at
his efforts to please God by harassing Christians and calls them garbage. The
very thing on which he used to pride himself became the source of his greatest
guilt.
He wasn’t aware of it until one day when Paul said he saw the risen Jesus with
his own eyes. He knew Jesus’ followers had claimed to have seen the resurrected
Jesus, but he thought they were lying. When he saw Jesus himself, he knew they
weren’t just making it up.
That experience changed everything for Paul. As he later reflected on what he
saw, he realized that everything he had believed and stood for had to be
reconsidered in the light of the fact that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
He came to the conclusion that God had indeed ended the time when people had to
follow the law in order to be good. Now he believed that Jesus’ Spirit entered
into people when they believed in Jesus, and that the Spirit would show people
how to be good.
But what really bowled Paul over was the idea that instead of punishing Paul for
trying to stop Jesus’ movement, God showed even more mercy to him than God might
have shown to someone else.
Paul wouldn’t have been surprised, and would have thought he deserved it if God
had struck Paul dead for what he deserved. Instead, Jesus himself appears to
Paul and says, “Hey buddy, what are you trying to do to me here?”
Paul considers himself one of Jesus’ apostles, but he thinks of himself as worse
than the rest of them for what he did. Instead of God making an example of him
in a bad way by punishing Paul for what he did, Paul thinks that God made an
example of him in a good way by showing just how much of a turnaround someone
can experience through God’s grace.
Paul made a real comeback in his life. He’s very up front about his belief that
he ended up doing much more for Jesus’ movement than the rest of Jesus’
followers ever did. He has no modesty about what he’s done in comparison to
them.
But he gives all the credit to God for his comeback, because God took someone
who seemed to be God’s worst opponent and made that person the greatest champion
for the cause of Christ.
Paul’s story is an incredible example of someone who came to a point where he
stopped, took stock of his life, realized he was going the wrong direction, and
went full barrel in the right direction.
Unfortunately it is not quite so straightforward for most of us. It is difficult
to completely reverse direction in life after we’ve been going the same
direction for years. And even if you decide to reverse direction in one part of
your life, you may be unclear whether or not some other parts of your life also
need to be reversed.
We need to take a balanced approach to making a comeback, one where we keep who
we are but also change the direction in which we are headed. God does not ask us
to be someone we’re not. God asks us to be who we are - for the kingdom of God.
There are a couple of things we can learn about living a new life in Christ as
we reflect on this ancient letter. First of all, the idea that the worse we do,
the angrier God gets, and the greater the punishment we can expect, is one which
needs to be placed in the recycle bin.
Paul’s experience was the exact opposite. The worse he was, the more God did to
try to lure him toward Jesus. The same theme appears all over the gospel of
Luke, as Jesus speaks of God as a shepherd who leaves his entire flock of 99
sheep to go and seek out the one which got lost.
This is an image of a God who never gives up on us, whose greatest concern is
for us and our welfare and our happiness. Certainly there are places in the
Bible where God is less patient, but the New Testament describes this image of
God as new way of relating to humanity through the person of Jesus.
The further we stray from God, the harder God works to get us back. I’m reminded
of this trick that we do with my cat James. He’s a master manipulator – an
expert in cajoling us into giving him cat treats.
He starts by meowing loudly at us, giving us this look that says, “Feed me now!”
Then he walks around in circles and keeps giving me the sad eyes. If that
doesn’t work, he’s learned to do all sorts of cute things to win us over. But
the ultimate tool in his toolbox, one he feels he’s too dignified to use, is
when he rolls over.
I’ve never seen a cat roll over in order to get treats. Sounds like the kind of
thing a dog would do, which is why he’s so reticent to do it. It’s really
beneath him, and he hates doing it.
I’ve literally stood there for twenty minutes telling him to roll over while he
stalled. Sometimes lays on the floor, acts like he’s going to roll over, and
then gets up and complains about it. Sometimes the other cats appear to tell him
to stop whining and just roll over.
The longer I wait, the more involved his overtures become, until finally he
gives in and rolls over for me. Then I go to the drawer and give him treats and
everyone’s happy.
Now we generally don’t speak in the Baptist church about God rolling over for
us; usually it’s the other way around when we want something from God. But I
just want you to see how much God seeks us out and just how much God’s willing
to overlook in order to give us a chance to be the people we can be through
grace.
The other thing I want to point out is Paul’s sense of perspective in life. Even
though he thinks he’s done more than any other apostle in telling people about
Jesus and starting churches, he’s constantly aware of the fact that he screwed
up worse than they did in his life.
You could say that he’s never really gotten over the guilt he felt about
persecuting the church, but on the other hand his remorse motivates him to be
more productive in life than he would be otherwise.
Now I would be the last person to tell you t hat the Christian life should be
lived in guilt. Guilt is what Jesus came to deal with. That’s what his death was
meant to overcome.
But what I would say is that we should live our lives as people who have been
redeemed, people who have been saved, people whose mistakes have been forgiven,
not as people who consider themselves God’s gift to the church or to the world.
I live my life knowing that I’ve made lots of horrible mistakes. And I’ve seen
some folks whose lives were really hurt by those same kinds of mistakes. And the
fact that I’m here today, serving as a pastor, despite my mistakes, is testament
to God’s ability and willingness to overcome my flaws.
If that’s the case, then I have to always see myself as someone who is
fortunate, not as someone entitled to what I have. Like Paul, my life is lived
in the shadow of God’s grace, not in the shadow of my own accomplishments.
And yet Paul has come to a place where he’s OK with all that. It’s part of being
human, and God calls us human being to God’s service, with all of our warts, as
well as our talents.
In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called, “Tapestry,” Captain
Picard has an experience of seeing what his life would have been like if one
particularly embarrassing chapter had been removed from it.
Afterward, he confides to his first officer, "There are many parts of my youth
that I'm not proud of. There were... loose threads—untidy parts of me that I
would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads, I unraveled the
tapestry of my life."
God doesn’t want us to unravel the tapestry of our lives; God just wants us to
allow God to tie the loose ends together and go on and do something great for
God’s kingdom. God comes to us in our most lost times of life, seeking to make
an example of us, as the author says.
This past week an episode of Primetime Live was aired in which Diane Sawyer was
revisiting – eight years later – several young people she had interviewed on the
streets of a city in Oregon.
These kids were definitely lost children. One young boy was asked to describe
his dream home. He answered quickly, as if he had dreamed of it often: his dream
home would have a marble staircase and a big entrance hall (doesn't that sound
like someone who feels the need to be welcomed?).
Asked to describe his dream parents, he said "They would have their mouths taped
shut so they couldn't yell at me and their hands tied so they couldn't hit me."
Years later, this same young man looked back on the years he spent as a runaway;
when Diane Sawyer asked him, "Is that what you wanted – for someone to come and
find you?" His response: "Yes, that's what I wanted – I wanted someone to care
enough to come looking for me."
For Paul, Jesus was the one who came looking. Jesus is still looking, still
trying to entice us, trying to persuade us to come home. Jesus wants to show us
grace, even if we don’t think we deserve it. He wants to take us and make us an
example of what God can do. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the
only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.