Sermon – You aren’t alone

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church, Harrisburg, PA on Sunday July 26, 2026. the sermon is based on 2 Timothy 1:1-14. You can listen to the audio version by clicking this link.)

Pick up your phone this morning and just watch what happens. Open the app. Scroll. Notice what your body does. Your jaw tightens. Your chest gets a little hot. That story makes you angry. This one makes you scared. That one makes you feel like nothing you do matters anyway, so why bother.

That is not an accident. Somebody built it that way. The feed is not neutral. It is engineered, tested, and refined to keep you looking. 

Tristan Harris, who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, has said flatly that these systems were never built to find the truth. What they are built to do is hold your attention, and he has pointed out that the best way to do that is to feed you fear, outrage, and tribalism. 

Scott Galloway, who teaches at NYU, puts the business logic even more bluntly: enragement equals engagement, which equals more ads, which equals greater shareholder value. 

That is not a conspiracy theory. That is the business model. Anger holds attention better than almost anything else. So does despair. The stories that get pushed to the top of your screen are often chosen because they will make you feel like the world is falling apart and there is nothing you can do about it. Add to that the plain stupidity and incompetence we watch play out in the news day after day, and it is no wonder so many of us walk around exhausted before noon.

I want to be precise about that word, stupidity, because I am not using it as an insult and I am not talking about a lack of smarts. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from inside Nazi Germany, argued that stupidity is not mainly a defect of the mind. It is a defect of the soul. He noticed that it tends to show up in large groups of people during a surge of political or religious power, when a crowd starts to hand its own judgment over to whatever authority is speaking loudest. People caught up in that kind of stupidity can become willing instruments of real harm, all while remaining completely unable to see that what they are doing is harmful. That is a chilling observation, and it is worth sitting with, because it describes something closer to what we are watching than simple foolishness does.

I don’t think I have to convince anyone in this room that life is hard right now. You already know it. You feel it in your body. Some of you feel it in your bank account. Some of you feel it in a diagnosis, or a phone call you are dreading, or a kid you are worried about, or a job that might not be there next month. 

We are tired. And it isn’t only the algorithm doing that to us. Watch the news scroll across your phone for five minutes and you will see decisions made by people in power that look, plainly, foolish. Incompetence dressed up as leadership. Cruelty dressed up as policy. 

It would be exhausting even without an app designed to amplify it. Put the two together, the machine built to enrage you and the real foolishness it feeds on, and you have a recipe for despair that is almost too well engineered.

And into that despair, this morning, comes a very old letter.

Paul’s name is on this letter, though most scholars think it was written a generation or two after Paul died, by someone in his circle, carrying his voice forward for a new moment. That matters, because it means this letter was written by people who had watched their community survive one wave of hardship and were now bracing for another. 

They were writing to strengthen a leader named Timothy, who by every indication was worn down. Ashamed, maybe. Afraid, certainly. The letter opens like someone reaching across a table to take both of Timothy’s hands: I remember your tears. I long to see you. I am reminded of your faith, the same faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice, and now lives in you. Rekindle the gift of God that is within you.

Rekindle. Not “try harder.” Not “pull yourself up.” Rekindle, the way you’d stir a fire that has burned down to a bed of orange coals under gray ash. The fire is not gone. It just needs to be tended.

Think about what that means. This is not a letter written in the heat of a single crisis. It is a letter written by people who had already watched one generation of the faithful suffer, bury each other, and keep going, and who were now handing that same endurance to the next generation. Timothy stands in for every leader, every believer, who inherits a struggle they did not start and cannot finish on their own.

This is not the only letter like this in history. Letters like this get written whenever people are trying to survive something crushing. 

Families crossing an ocean with everything they owned in a trunk wrote them home. People enslaved and trying to reach freedom wrote and smuggled them. Prisoners locked up for their politics or their faith wrote them from inside a cell, and some of those names have become famous on their own: Deitrich Bonhoeffer writing from a Nazi prison, Martin Luther King, Jr., writing from a jail in Birmingham, Nelson Mandela writing from Robben Island, though there are countless others whose names we will never know. 

Every one of those letters is doing the same work this letter to Timothy is doing. Reminding someone in the middle of the worst of it that they have not been forgotten, and that whatever they are enduring will not get the last word.

Here is where I want to slow down and be honest with you about something, because it matters for how we hear this letter this morning.

It is very easy to take a letter like this one and bend it to fit whatever fight we are already in. Second Timothy gets quoted constantly in church arguments today, verse 7 especially, the one about God giving us a spirit of power, love, and self-discipline instead of cowardice. People wave that verse like a flag in every kind of modern culture battle. Be bold. Don’t back down. Fight for what’s right.

I get the appeal. Certainty feels good. When you are sure you are right, you feel righteous, and feeling righteous is a powerful drug. 

It also has a track record. When people feel righteous enough, they start to feel justified in using force, in shutting people down, in treating disagreement as enemy fire. History does not speak well of where that road ends.

You have probably seen it yourself. Every year at Pride festivals, somebody shows up with a bullhorn and a sign, absolutely certain, telling strangers they are going to hell for who they are. What strikes me every time is how sure those protesters are, and how completely that certainty seems to have erased the humanity of the people standing in front of them. That is what happens when being right becomes the whole point. The humanity gets lost, and it does not only get lost for the people being shouted at. It gets lost for the person holding the bullhorn too. A human being becomes a mash-up of correct answers defending its territory, and that is a smaller, sadder thing to be than an actual person. 

Being human is messy and complicated. Thank God that God loves us for being human. Being right was never the assignment. That is what grace is about.

When we read this letter as ammunition for our own arguments, we do violence to what it actually is. The people who wrote and received this letter were not looking for a fight. They were living under Rome. 

Following the way of Jesus was not a lifestyle preference back then. It could get you arrested. It could get you killed. The author of this letter was in chains for it. That is the actual context behind “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice.” It was written to people who were being crushed, and it was telling them: do not let shame convince you that you are alone or that you are finished.

That is a completely different situation than a comfortable American Christian deciding that losing an argument on social media counts as persecution. When a group that has always held the power in a culture starts to feel a little less powerful, and calls that feeling persecution, something has gone sideways. 

That is not what Timothy was living through. Timothy was living through a real fight for survival, not a fight to keep the control he already had. When we blur those two things together, we cheapen what real suffering looks like, and we miss what this letter is actually trying to give us.

We are wired for this kind of confusion, by the way. Our brains love confirmation. Give us a verse, a headline, a fact, anything, and we will find a way to read it as proof that we were right all along. It takes real discipline to sit with a text like this one and ask what it actually meant to the people who first received it, instead of grabbing it to win whatever argument is currently eating us alive.

So what is it trying to give us?

I have been sitting with a passage from Ecclesiastes this week, the one you have probably heard read at a funeral. For everything there is a season. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. Whoever wrote that book was not interested in sugarcoating anything. Life has good stretches and life has brutal stretches, and both are real, and neither one lasts forever.

Right now, a lot of us are living in what I can only describe as a time of stuckness. Not quite a crisis you can point to and name. Just a long, heavy, in-between season where the old ways of doing things don’t seem to work anymore, and it isn’t clear yet what comes next. The people who are trying to tell the truth about what’s happening in our country and in our world often feel like they are shouting into a storm of noise designed to drown them out. And we wait. Humans are bad at waiting, especially in a culture that has trained us to expect everything right now.

That is not so different from where Timothy was. His stuckness had a different shape than ours. But the ache of it, the wondering if it is even worth staying faithful, that is the same ache.

Here is the good news buried in this letter, and I want you to hear it as good news and not as a pep talk.

This letter never tells Timothy to fix himself. It never says, work harder, believe more, muster up some extra courage from somewhere deep inside. 

What it says is this: remember what God has already given you. Remember the faith that was planted in you by people who loved you before you could love them back. Remember that God’s grip on you came first, before you ever had a grip on God. 

Later in this same chapter the writer says it plainly. God saved us and called us because of God’s own purpose and grace, a grace given to us before the beginning of time and only now revealed. It has nothing to do with anything we managed to accomplish on our own.

That is not a self-help sentence. That is a very Lutheran sentence. It is God who acts first. It is God who holds. It is God who calls Timothy back to the fire that God already lit in him. Our part is not to generate the fire out of nothing. Our part is to let it be stirred, to let ourselves be reminded, to let ourselves be held by people and by a God who has not let go of us even when we felt like letting go of everything.

I think about long-distance running a lot, because I do a fair amount of it. There comes a point in a race where your mind turns on you. It starts telling you things. It tells you that you are tired. It tells you that your legs don’t work right. It tells you to walk, or to stop, or to just go home. Every runner knows that voice.

Here is what actually gets you through those miles. It is rarely raw willpower. It is almost always another person. You find someone running near you, someone you don’t know, and you match their pace without even talking about it. You may start talking, or you stop talking and just breathe together. And something happens in that shared rhythm that neither of you could manufacture alone. You keep each other moving. One foot in front of the other. One step, then the next one.

I have never once, in all my years of running, willed myself through a terrible mile using nothing but grit. What actually happens is someone comes alongside me, or I remember someone waiting for me at the finish, or I remember why I signed up for a race in the first place. The strength was never really mine to begin with. It got loaned to me, mile by mile, by people who showed up.

I don’t think that is a coincidence. I think that is close to what this letter is trying to say to Timothy, and close to what God is doing for us. We are not out here generating our own courage from nothing. We are being carried by people who ran this road before us. 

Lois and Eunice, carrying faith into Timothy before he even understood what he was carrying. A bishop who shows up on a Sunday and reminds us of the impact that the ministry here has on so many. A congregation in Allison Hill that keeps opening its doors for people the rest of the world has given up on. 

A toddler in worship who wanders down the center aisle, spots a stranger, and reaches up both arms saying pick me up, and the stranger does, and for one small moment the whole room remembers what it looks like to be welcomed without conditions.

That toddler did not invent that welcome. That welcome was already alive in this congregation. The child just showed it to us.

I see it other places too. I see it in our clinics, where a volunteer dentist gives up a Saturday for a neighbor who has been putting off a toothache for a long time because there was nowhere else to go. 

I see it in a nurse who sits with a patient who is clearly high, who does not flinch or lecture, who just offers care and treats the person in front of her like a person instead of a problem to be managed. 

Very little of this gets funded by our own offering plate. It comes from grants, from foundations, from people we have never met who decided this neighborhood was worth investing in. That, too, is a kind of rekindling. Somebody else’s faithfulness stirring the coals for people who had almost given up on finding any warmth at all.

So here is what I want to leave you with this morning, because I think it is exactly what this old letter is trying to say to us across all those centuries.

You do not run this road alone. That was true for Timothy in his chains and it is true for you in whatever is wearing you down this week, whatever feed is making your jaw tighten, whatever diagnosis or bill or fear is sitting on your chest right now.

This will not last forever. Ecclesiastes was right. There is a time for stuckness, and stuckness is not the last word. Seasons turn. God has never once let a winter be the end of the story.

And underneath all of it, holding all of it up, is a love that was placed in you before you had any say in the matter. It was placed there by God, carried to you through people who loved you first, and it is still burning under the ash even on the days you cannot feel the heat of it.

That is not a call to try harder. That is a call to let yourself be stirred. Let the people around you keep pace with you this week. Let the God who lit this fire in you tend it, because that God has not walked away and is not about to start now.

Whatever mile you are in this week, however tired your legs feel, however loud that voice in your head has gotten telling you to quit, hear what this old letter is trying to say across all the centuries between Timothy and us. 

Somebody is running near you. Somebody has been running near you longer than you know, carrying a faith into you before you ever asked for it, the way Lois carried it into Eunice and Eunice carried it into Timothy. And ahead of all of us, holding the whole race together, is a God who lit this fire long before we were born and has no intention of letting it go out now.

Rekindle the gift of God that is within you. It was never yours to create in the first place. It was always God’s to give. Amen.