Where I Fall

This is the sermon preached by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, October 5, 2025, drawing from 2 Timothy 1:1-14

I know a lot of us turn up to church looking for a word of hope, inspiration, or something uplifting, but I have to be honest with you today my friends; my heart is heavy today. And I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way, to tell you the truth. Many of us are feeling heavy, burdened, weighed down; not even by the events of the past week or two necessarily, but by the collective weight of things that have been building, and building for years and years. 

I don’t know about you all, but when I look out into the world around me and see the rising tide of radical fascist ideologies, white supremacy, racial discrimination, homophobia, hate crimes against trans people in our communities, police brutality, and the ever-dangling guillotine blade of climate change hanging just above our collective heads….I feel such an overwhelming sense of emotional exhaustion. 

And while we all of us face these problems on the daily, we each have our own sets of bespoke sufferings that we carry on our backs like rucksacks packed to bursting with weighted parcels of pain; abuse, physical illness, mental illness, conflict, money problems, relationship problems, and so much more.

And I don’t know about you, but some days it feels like the weight of all this is truly more than I can bear. It feels crushing, suffocating, like a great weight pinning me to the floor where I can’t move, breathe, or live in any other way that has meaning beyond the six-inches of grimy, dirt-covered floor into which life has been grinding me every day lately. Sometimes, I have to admit, I wake up wondering…

…what’s the point? 

Why in the nonliteral hell am I even doing all this? Is not all this stress and confusion, all this suffering and hurt, a sign from the almighty that the path I’ve chosen is the wrong one? Would not God reward me for choosing a righteous and holy path, and condemn me for wandering astray? They say that God never gives us more than we can handle, and I’m looking at a whole lifetime of stuff bearing down at me which I absolutely, unequivocally cannot handle on my own, so it’s got me wondering:

Am I doing the right thing here? 

I mean, it’s easy to think that, isn’t it? To face these dark and terrible times wondering if the fact that we’re even in this place to begin with means that God has forsaken us, or is punishing us, or isn’t even there to begin with. It’s easy to scream to the heavens that there cannot possibly be a God as loving as we insist, because if there was we would never be cast into this frozen, unloving tundra, spending a lifetime propping open a door with our broken bodies so that others and walk past us into the warm and happy light beyond. 

What about us? What about me? 

Haven’t we done enough? Haven’t we earned a break, a chance to dry our tears, rest our heads, and feel the warm light of joy kindled within us once more? 

And when we pray, and don’t hear the enthusiastic, rapturous sound of the Divine telling us that all will now be well, that our problems will be set right, our healing made manifest, and our issues dissolved into nothing like errant dust in a typhoon, we tend to get angry.

REALLY angry.

Because it’s supposed to be like that, isn't it? We’re supposed to love and serve the Lord, and the Lord is supposed to look out for us, right? That’s why we pray, why we have faith! We ask God for help, and God then…provides that help. If we are out here suffering, hurting, even dying, and we’re not getting so much as one miraculous healing or life-changing course correction, or sudden financial windfall, or something…then of what possible benefit can this faith possibly be to us?

To anyone? 

This introductory section of Second Timothy gives us some hints to this, some subtle and some decidedly less so. Right away, the author of this epistle hits us with one of those lines that we almost miss because it sounds like the kind of “being nice in a letter” flufferey that we all tend to write when we’re sending a letter, but when you put some thought into it turns out to be just…so much more. 

“Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy.”

Our author here doesn’t start out with a declaration of joy, or a statement like “Oh, I remember how bright you smile was when last we met, so I pray that you are smiling still.” He doesn’t mince words, or play around or pretend. 

He recalls their tears before he ever talks about their faith. 

Like Mister Rogers would several millennia later, the author of this epistle - ostensibly Paul, though scholars tend to think that it’s probably not - is telling Timothy that it’s ok to be sad.

Take a moment and consider that if you will, I mean really consider it.

It is OK to be sad.

Because sadness, suffering, pain, and misery are a normal part of the human experience. It’s something we all share, and no matter how painful it might be, it’s something that each and every one of us encounters at one point in our lives or another. Each of us will know the sting of betrayal, the pain of loss, and the brutal, slow tearing of the soul that is heartbreak. Our minds will deceive us, our bodies fail us, and our hearts mislead us. We will lead ourselves into temptation, and all too many times be totally unable to find the way back home. 

And nothing about our faith, nothing at all, spares us from that any more than anyone else. 

So then…what is the point? Why do we hold to this Christian journey if it in no way makes our paths less steep, the winds fairer, or the skies clearer? What is the point of being a Christian if it doesn’t, at least once in a while, net a win or two for the home team?

I’ll be honest with you all, I have wrestled with that question. Very recently, and much, much harder than is generally known. And every time I have wrestled with it, for reasons that by now should be utterly unsurprising to you all, I find myself coming back to an apropos quote not from the Bible, but from that wonderful British science fiction program, Doctor Who, in which the titular Doctor, facing a variation of this same question - being asked by his great nemesis why he would show love and compassion when it would be so much easier, and safer, to just walk away and take a win for himself - responded thus:

"Winning? Is that what you think it's about? I'm not trying to win. I'm not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because, because I want to blame someone. It's not because it's fun and God knows it's not because it's easy. It's not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do, because it's right! Because it's decent! And above all, it's kind. It's just that. Just kind. If I run away today, good people will die. If I stand and fight, some of them might live. Maybe not many, maybe not for long. Hey, you know, maybe there's no point in any of this at all, but it's the best I can do, so I'm going to do it. And I will stand here doing it till it kills me. You're going to die too, some day. How will that be? Have you thought about it? What would you die for? Who I am is where I stand. Where I stand, is where I fall.”

Say what you will about Doctor Who, but you can’t deny it’s got some killer monologues. And, perhaps more relevant to today’s conversation, it summarizes the central point of today’s passage in a single paragraph which I have been thus far trying, with a marginal degree of success, to stretch out into several pages of sermon. 

When we are weak, over burdened, creaking and groaning under the pressure like a submarine sinking far below safe depths, it can be so very easy to just…walk away. To embrace the saving grace of Christ but let that whole “holy calling” business fall to the side. To just give up. To turn around, and walk away. 

For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands, for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

What we are given, my friends, is so rarely the objects of our prayers. What we are given is so rarely those material or relational things our hearts, minds, or bodies cry out for in the darkest watches of the night. What we are given is so rarely the relief from the situations that oppress our very souls, the struggles that smother us in darkness abiding, or the failings that bind us in chains unbreakable.

What we are given, is the calling to endure. To take one step, and then the next, and then another after that. 

God doesn’t answer our prayers with a safe and cozy path away from our challenges and our struggles.

God just gives us the next step. And the one after that, 

And then a pause, to pray once again. 

Because every step is a chance; every breath an opportunity. In every moment we are given not “…a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”

And with that discipline, we can face the struggles boldly and with confidence, knowing that every step forward we are empowered to take is a chance given to us by the Creator to introduce a little more love, kindness, and compassion into a deeply broken world. 

With each step, despite our challenges, we proclaim a Gospel of unmatched love, the divinity of a God who is that love; a love that wants that none should perish, but that all should have eternal life. 

For this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher, and for this reason I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard the deposit I have entrusted to him.

With every painful step through the valley of the shadow of death, we entrust our pain to God as a deposit. We know that God absolutely allows us to face challenges that we very much cannot handle, because these things which we cannot handle ourselves shine to the world like a beacon of love when we rely on God for our strength and endurance, and then boldly handle them anyways. 

Friends, this is our message of hope. It might not be the hope of relief from our burdens and struggles, the promise that all will be well in the morning, but it is something far more wonderful than that, something of far greater value and blessing.

It is the promise we are never alone. 

Do you hear that? We are never alone in our struggles. In our pain, our suffering, and our devastation, the Holy Spirit is literally living within us, giving us the strength not only to carry on through it all, but to shine like a beacon from the hilltops, converting that pain into glorious testimony, so that the world can see that this is what it means to love with the ferocity of the one who created all that is - all the creatures of earth, sea, and air, every mountain and valley, and every planet in the skies - just so that there would be enough, more and again, to love. 

Where we stand is love, my friends. And where we stand, is where we fall. 

But in Christ, we rise again in glory to love more fiercely, love more tenderly, love more powerfully, love more gently, and love more all-encompassingly than ever we could have before. 

It is ok to be sad. It is ok to crack and crumble, to shatter and collapse beneath the weight of it all as we try to stand against a tide that batters us back again and again until we can’t help but to fall no matter how we try to stand.

So let us fall, my friends. Let us fall gloriously, standing against the impossible, standing against the improbable, standing against the rage, the hatred, and the selfish indiscriminate cruelty. Let us fall beautifully, singing songs of the God of eternal and perfect love, taking everything the world might throw at us as we stand, and fall defiantly for God’s unfailing love. 

Because in Christ we rise again in glory, regenerated in love that we might take yet one more step forward.