How Jesus Can Steal Your Heart

Homily for Sunday, September 28, 2025
The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost
1 Timothy 6:6-19

As of this past Monday, Fall is officially here.  The days are shorter and the temperatures cooler, the trees’ colors are changing, and on Friday nights – if there is a home game and if the wind is right – from the rectory I hear off in the distance the sounds of the Newton South football game.  I hear over the PA the announcer announcing the runner and tackler, the down and the yards to go.  I hear the band.  (Occasionally I hear the crowd cheering, too,but given that it’s Newton South, it’s mostly the announcer and the band that I hear.)  Listening from the porch to the sounds of a recent game, I was reminded of the response that Vic Ketchman, a former beat writer for the Green Bay Packers, wrote to a single mom who had asked Ketchman if there were a book he could recommend to explain “the intricacies of the game” to her six-year-old.  Ketchman’s responses tended to be blunt and a little grumpy, but this time he surprised me:  “Don’t worry about the intricacies,” Ketchman wrote:  

Let him find the charm in the game first. Take him to a high school game. His senses will be awakened by the sound of the crowd, the band, the PA.  Let him feel the thrill when the players charge onto the field in their uniforms.  Let him bundle against the chill, smell the wet grass...  There will be plenty of time for all that cover 2 non-sense when he gets older.  Now, when he’s young, is when he learns to love the game for all the right reasons, which is to say for how it stole his heart.  (Podcast, May 18, 2015)

For the past few weeks, we have been hearing from Paul’s Letters to Timothy.  Timothy, it appears, is young (e.g., 1 Time1:2; 1 Tim 4:12; 2 Time 1:2).  And though in these letters Paul is explaining to Timothy the “intricacies of the game,”as it were, in regards (for example) to how to be a leader in the Christian community, yet Paul also leaves clues as to how Timothy when young learned to love Jesus “for all the right reasons,” for how Jesus “stole his heart.”  Which he did through the persons of Timothy’s mother and grandmother.  From 2 Timothy chapter 1.  “I am reminded of your sincere faith,” Paul writes:

A faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now,I am sure, lives in you. (2 Tim 1:5)

Or again, Paul writes how “gifts of God” such as love and self-discipline were “kindled” in a young Timothy:

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. (2 Tim 1:6-7)

Or yet again, Paul writes of how the scriptures must have stolen Timothy’s heart, about…

…how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus (2 Tim 3:15).  

But as we know, initial enthusiasms are liable to wear off, and we forget our first fervor and love.  Another Midwesterner, the author Marilyn Robinson, describes this “wearing off” as a kind of amnesia.  Speaking (I believe) at Oberlin College in Ohio, Robinson told of how several Midwestern colleges, originally founded upon ideals of standing against slavery and being racially integrated, and which served as stations on the underground railroad – colleges such as Knox College in Illinois, Oberlin College in Ohio, and Grinnell in Iowa – subsequently forgot their early fervor and ideals:

In he 20^th century, these colleges experienced an amnesia… and became resistant to integration… [Indeed,] a great amnesia had settled over the whole society, a forgetfulness that there had been racially integrated towns with black mayors… that there had been regiments of black soldiers in the Civil War.  It is… ominous that such a significant part of our history could slide into eclipse.  This is another thing I learned from moving to Iowa... that a society… can forget that anything bold or generous, anything f interest, had ever happened there.

Of the many “saboteurs” to our spiritual life that lead us into amnesia about our fervor for Jesus,and that delude us into forgetting that there is truly something bold and generous in our following him, Paul in today’s lesson singles out what is perhaps the greatest.  He writes:

Those who want to be rich fall into many temptations and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.  For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to become rich, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

If we are not careful, “the love of money” over time can corrode our fervor to follow Jesus.  Our attachment to money and possessions can trap us (as the Letter to Timothy puts it) in “senseless and harmful desires that plunge [us] into ruin and destruction.” But perhaps just as ominously, to paraphrase Robinson, our attachment to money and possessions can cause amnesia, can cause us to forget the boldness and love, our generosity and self-offering, that enabled us to fall in love with and follow Jesus in the first place.  And over time our discipleship will cool until we, like the rich man in today’s Gospel lesson, can ignore whatever Lazarus might be sitting outside our gate.

Loving over the long-term – staying in touch with what initially charmed us and stole our heart – is challenging.  A sure way to retain that sense of loving and even to grow that love is through generosity. When we resist the love of money and the desire for riches, which only trap us and “that plunge people into ruin and destruction,” and when we are instead generous, then we make space for our hearts to be stolen, not by money,not by things, but by the gracious loving kindness of Jesus Christ.  Consider the rich man in today’s Gospel lesson.  Greed isolates and fixes chasms.  But generosity blesses and brings connection.  

I will leave us with words from 1 Timothy:

As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not… to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.  They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.