Fight the Good Fight, Finish the Race, a sermon based on 2 Timothy 4: 6-8 and 16-18, preached on October 26, 2025

My friends, have you ever been overwhelmed by the problems in our world? Is that a rhetorical question? Two weeks ago, my oldest friend, Matt Buchanan (I’ve known him since I was 8), invited me to help him replace a woman’s windows. She’d been referred to him by a school social worker. Her son, a student in Marietta City Schools, suffers from multiple challenges. Unable to express himself verbally, he’s prone to violence, and often punches walls or breaks windows. With cold weather coming, this school social worker asked Matt for help. Matt, who is a carpenter, agreed. I was his assistant. He replaced three broken windows with a shatter-resistant fiberglass, while I picked up broken glass in the yard. That was the job I was most qualified to do. At one point, the son, prone to violence, came outside to sample the snacks we’d brought. When he took them back into the house, we didn’t fight him on it, not knowing exactly how prone to violence the boy was. Really, he just wanted to talk and interact. As it turns out, he’s just a kid. The real challenge we were faced with was that despite our efforts, there was still so much that this family needed. Matt replaced three windows, but unfortunately, between the time Matt went out to measure and assess the situation and the day we showed up, the kid had broken another. Since there were only supplies for three windows, to cover up the fourth, we used cardboard. Now that’s a particular feeling. That feeling may make you wish for a superhero, but none was available. It was just Matt and me. We showed up. We worked hard. Yet, because the need was so great, our efforts felt like a drop in the bucket. Sheet rock on every wall of that house had been damaged. One window was covered by cardboard. The boy suffers from a disability. His mom is sick. When we finished up, we stood on the street, and I asked Matt if he felt good about what we’d accomplished. He said he did, but he mostly felt overwhelmed by what all there was still to be done. You know this feeling. In fact, our church knows this feeling so well that coming out of the early service, a retired teacher told me that she had so many students in her classes that she’d only see for 9 weeks. How could she make a difference in their lives if they were only with her for 9 weeks, then they’d move? After a few years, she was tempted to write their names in pencil on her roll because they wouldn’t be in her class long enough to be written on the rolls in pen, yet for 9 weeks, she did her best. For 9 weeks, she worked hard, all while asking, “Have I done enough? Have I made a difference?” You know this feeling. What are we to do about the issues that our world faces? How can we make a difference? This morning, we turn our attention once again to the letters to Timothy. Tradition tells us that 1st and 2nd Timothy were written by the Apostle Paul, stuck in prison, anticipating his execution. He wrote these two letters in prison to a young Christian just starting out his ministry, and what would the Apostle Paul say nearing the end of his life and his ministry? “Dear Timothy, I hope your retirement is better than mine.” “I hope that in the end it feels like you’ve done more than added a drop to the bucket.” No. That’s not what he wrote. Instead, he wrote: Fight the Good fight. Finish the Race. Don’t worry about the outcome. Leave that in the hands of God. My friends, today is Reformation Sunday. I told the first service a whole bunch about the history of the Protestant Reformation, and I realized I was telling them too much when the third person fell asleep. For this service, let me give you an abbreviated version. The Protestant Reformation starts with a simple act of defiance. Martin Luther, a monk and scholar, read the Apostle Paul and was so amazed by the way he described God’s grace that he felt led to write down all the things that the Church was doing wrong. 95 complaints he wrote on a sheet of paper, and he nailed that paper on the church door in Whittenburg, German in 1517. What happened next had little to do with him and a lot to do with God: for example, because he complained about the church when he did, what he wrote was mass produced using the printing press. His words spread throughout Germany and into France, where John Calvin read them. John Calvin was so inspired that he wrote a book, which was read by John Knox, and John Knox took those same ideas to Scotland. In Scotland, John Calvin’s teaching, delivered by John Knox, combined with the ideals of democracy and gave birth to the Presbyterian Church. The Presbyterian Church was so meshed with democracy that as Presbyterians migrated to this country, they stirred up a rebellion, frustrated by monarchy and longing for self-government. Half the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Presbyterian. So many Presbyterians fought in the War for Independence that many in England called the American Revolution, the Presbyterian Revolution. Those Presbyterians started half the Ivy League. They formed schools. They laid the groundwork for American Democracy, but remember it started when Martin Luther nailed his 95 complaints to a church door. The echo of that first defiant act still resounds throughout our world today. The author Eric Metaxas recently wrote a biography of Martin Luther, titled, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World, which begins with this introduction: In 1934, an African American pastor from Georgia made the trip of a lifetime, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, through the gates of Gibraltar, and across the Mediterranean Sea to the Holy Land. After this pilgrimage, he traveled to Berlin, attending an international conference of Baptist pastors. While in Germany, this man became so impressed with what he learned about the reformer Martin Luther that he decided to do something dramatic. He offered the ultimate tribute to the man’s memory by changing his own name… not long after the boy’s father changed his own name, he decided to change his [young] son’s name too, and Michael King Jr. became known to the world as Martin Luther King Jr. Let me stop right there to summarize what I just told you: Martin Luther’s defiant act set in motion a movement that led directly to Martin Luther King Jr., but it started with one man nailing 95 complaints to a church door. Martin Luther didn’t change the world. He just fought the good fight. He just ran his race. The outcome can only be explained by the power of God, who takes our feeble, faithful efforts and magnifies them. One act of faithfulness can change the world. One act of love does resound through history. We are not weak, but powerful, so on this Reformation Sunday, I want to read to you a poem written by Marianne Williamson: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God… We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, Our presence automatically liberates others.” Today, as we remember what is called the Great Reformation, know that what we celebrate is not just an important event in the past, but the impact one person can make when he dares to believe that the Good News of Jesus Christ is relevant and worthy of proclaiming loudly and defiantly. It may take years. It may start with a mustard seed, but mustard seeds grow, and so the Apostle Paul did not end his life wondering if he had made a difference. Instead, he celebrated what he had done while leaving the results in the hand of his Creator, and so he wrote: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I love that image of being poured out because it’s the opposite of a vampire. This time of year, vampires are all around us. Kids put in those plastic teeth with fangs and wear capes to look like vampires, but always all around us are people who act a little like vampires in the sense that they look out at the world and think to themselves: Whose blood might I drink? What’s in it for me? What can I get out of this? That’s no way to live. That’s not how we were created to be. We were created to give and to be poured out, yet to go on pouring ourselves out for the good of the world, we must remember that our call is not to fix the world but to fight the good fight and to run our race. That’s what the judge told my friend Moc Lee. If you know Moc, don’t think he got into trouble. He was hearing from a judge because he was called to do jury duty. He had to cancel lunch with me a couple weeks ago because he was on a jury for 10 days. I felt so sorry for him. When we got our lunch rescheduled for last Friday, I told him so, but he told me that as soon as I have a chance to be on a jury, I should seize that opportunity because it will make me feel better about the world. When he said that, I got really interested. Right? He told me that, “There were 12 of us deliberating this case for six hours.” That was after 9 days of listening to arguments in the courtroom. Rather than rush to get out of there, they deliberated for six hours. “Do you know how good I feel to live in a community where 12 strangers care that much about the defendant and the accused, two strangers whom they don’t even know?” he asked me. And he’s right. They fought the good fight. They ran their race. That’s what we’re called to do whether we are preachers, teachers, or members of a jury, but Moc got stuck worrying over what would happen next to the victim, and how the defendant would be punished, but the judge told the jury to focus on their role in this process. Their job was to give them a fair trial, and so they did. Fight the good fight. Finish the race. Leave the rest in the hands of God. Amen.