Hilton Head Island, SC – December 25, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 2:1-20; II Corinthians 5:16-21
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - ...that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. - II Cor. 5:19
Words have not only meanings, but they also have nuances of meanings; have you noticed that? Grammar matters; have you noticed that? Punctuation is important. A little thing like a comma can make all the difference in the world.
Sometimes I get so caught up in the meaning of words I miss what people are trying to say, and I confess I am frequently guilty of that. I am so intent myself to say what I mean and mean what I say that I assume everybody else is like that, but I know it isn't true.
About grammar and punctuation, there is the old grammatical quip, "What’s in the road ahead?" All you do there is to add a comma and one little space, and it changes the meaning drastically from "What's in the road ahead?” to “What’s in the road, a head?”"
Well, in our text for today's sermon, there was a comma in the King James Version, the biblical translation which most of you grew up with. (Incidentally I know that good grammar insists that a preposition is a word you're not supposed to end a sentence with. But, the incomparable Winston Churchill said this about that: "That is nonsense up with which I will not put.") In the King James Version of the Bible, II Cor. 5:19 says this: "To wit, God was in Christ, (comma), reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses against them." The Revised Standard Version, with which I grew up, at least from my high school years on, says, "...that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" --- and so on. The NRSV says almost the same thing, except that it is translated as follows: "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself."
There's a very important difference between those translations, and the difference is created by the insertion of a mere comma. Do you see it? It is one thing to say that "God was in Christ (comma), reconciling the world to himself," because for one thing the "himself" might conceivably mean Jesus, that God became Jesus so that the world might be reconciled to Christ, and it is quite another thing to say that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself," because in that instance the "himself" is clearly God. God meant to reconcile the world to Himself (God) by means of Jesus Christ. In the first, the meaning is that God was equated with Jesus, that He was contained within the person of Jesus, that He was incarnate (in the flesh) in Jesus, but in the second, the implication is that God was utilizing Jesus as the means of reconciling the world to Himself, that Jesus was His agent, that Jesus was God’s messenger, but not that God was Jesus.
What did you think, that Christian faith was easy? Did you think that all you have to do is believe? But what shall you believe? What should you believe? What do you believe?
II Corinthians 5:19 is one of the most important verses of scripture in the whole Bible, and anyone can make a case for either translation, with or without the comma, because the Greek language in which Paul wrote did not have any punctuation, such as commas. But the more I have thought about it -- and I have thought about it a lot; what is behind that verse and others like it has absorbed more of my deep ponderings in the last fifty years than anything else -- the more I have thought about it, the more I have concluded that the RSV and the NRSV are correct in the way they have translated this crucial notion of the apostle Paul. Paul, however, probably intended this verse to have the nuance that was written by the translators of the Authorized Version in 1607. In any event, Paul says almost nothing elsewhere about his understanding of Christmas or of Jesus as the incarnation of God, but here indirectly he is talking about the incarnation. However, he is talking primarily about God with respect to Jesus. God wants the world to be reconciled to God, and for reasons known only to Him, He chose to effect that reconciliation by means of a particular human being, Jesus, born in Bethlehem, according to two of the Gospels. Otherwise Christmas is not even obliquely referred to anywhere else in the New Testament.
For the moment, let us leave the whole Christmas story there. Let us turn instead to the word "reconcile"; God wants to reconcile the world to Himself. What is reconciliation? Frequently that word is used when marital strife is somehow overcome, which often is little less than miraculous. In those circumstances, a reconciliation means that two people who were at great odds with one another overcome their differences, and they return to a marriage relationship of harmony and growth rather than one of discord and atrophy.
In just such a way, human failings put humanity and God at odds with one another. Nevertheless, our trespasses, to use Paul's word and to try to follow his theology, are no longer counted against us because of the reconciliation made possible for us through the life and teachings of Jesus. Prior to what God accomplished through the person of Jesus, we were far away from God, Paul implies, but now we have been brought near, into the very saving presence of God.
For this to happen, Paul believed everyone must be "in Christ," to use his phrase. We find ourselves in Christ through faith, said Paul, which comes to us by grace, the grace of God, as a gift. I know this is not easy, but it is terribly important, it is absolutely vital, so I hope you are listening as hard as you can. However, for a little while I'm going to go lightly on you. I'll give three illustrations of why we need reconciliation with God, why ordinary human perversity, even if only of a mild variety, sets us apart from God.
There was a sign placed on the wall of a large Baltimore estate which had been turned into a particular kind of religious institution. It said, "Trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Sisters of Mercy." It seems to be, you should pardon the expression, a hell of a world if the Sisters of Mercy have to warn trespassers that they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if they set foot on their convent grounds. Such trespassings surely put people at enmity with God, particularly when they are perpetrated against the Sisters of Mercy. When such things happen, somebody needs to do something about it, and through Jesus Christ, God has taken matters into His own hands, if God has hands, which almost certainly He doesn’t.
We got a Christmas card from a friend who is a CPA. The card was perfect for a man in his profession. It showed a man dropping a couple of quarters in a pot shaped like a chimney, beside which stands a Santa Claus, ringing a bell. A man and a woman walk up behind him, each with a briefcase, upon which the word "Accountant" is written in bold letters. The male accountant says to the man, “Ask him for a receipt!”. Well now, in circumstances where one might give sufficient funds to warrant a receipt, asking for one is fine, and it makes writing a tax form much easier. But anybody who is so cheap as to give fifty cents and ask for a receipt is in trouble, not with the IRS, but with the Great Auditor from the Great Beyond, and such a person is in pressing need of reconciliation with God.
These, of course, are illustrations of peccadillos, of little sins, if indeed they are truly sins at all. But there are serious sins, and all of us have committed some, whether we admit it or not, which truly put us at odds with God. After Charles Wesley was ordained as an Anglican priest, he came with his brother John to the Georgia colony not long after it was established in 1733. Charles became the private secretary to James Oglethorpe, the governor and founder of the colony. It is recorded that Charles became personally involved with some adventurous Savannah women, and as a result, Oglethorpe fired Charles and sent both him and John back to England. It was through the influence of some Moravian Anabaptists that both brothers had overpowering conversions experiences within days of one another when they returned to England. The result of that life-changing experience, eventually, was the Methodist denomination. Charles went on to write the texts to over 6500 hymns. In retrospect, that may have been at least 6000 or so too many. Most of those hymns are never sung anymore, but some became classics.
One of the hymns that made it into many hymnbooks is Jesus, lover of my soul. Perhaps remembering his wild days in Savannah, Charles wrote of Jesus, "Just and holy is Thy name/ I am all unrighteousness/ False and full of sin I am/ Thou art full of truth and grace." If such grace is perceived in Jesus, how much more can it be seen in God. And if such sin was perceived in himself by Charles Wesley, who sowed some wild oats in his early years but was hardly the epitome of excessive evil, how much more do all of us need to be reconciled to God.
Many people get emotionally mushy at Christmas, and many carols and other Christmas songs foster theological squishiness. Up to a point, that is probably inevitable. But Jesus did not come to earth primarily to make us feel good about either him or ourselves. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. That is why Jesus was born. Jesus had a unique calling from God, compared to everyone else who has ever lived. Jesus was God’s messenger to connect or re-connect us to God, so that in our living we might glorify God and enjoy Him forever, as it says in the Westminster Catechism. The purpose of Jesus was not simply to be Jesus. Jesus’ purpose was to initiate into or to restore everyone to a proper relationship with the One who created us. Because all of us are mere humans, we need someone to be the Go-Between for us and God if we never get on track or whenever we get off the track.
All of us have a fierce approach/avoidance conflict with God. We want to be near Him, but we know we are unworthy of such intimacy, and we fear being too close, for we know He knows; He knows everything about us. Samuel Ajzenstat, a Canadian Orthodox Jew, writes about this in an essay entitled "Theses on Tradition and the Ethics of Ambiguity." He says, "Religious faith is a combination of a comic understanding that we must run from transcendent experience as hard as we can, and the tragic understanding that however hard we run, consummation (with God) will catch us when it wants us. The sustainable crisis is the tension between running away from, and wishing to be caught by, God."
Without reconciliation between us and God, we are goners. Knowing that, God took matters into His own hands, and so a baby was born in a stable in Bethlehem. He grew up to become the means of our reconciliation. The cross is the clearest indication of that truth. "God loves us like that," the cross declares, and so the gap between Him and us is forever closed.
Without Jesus, humanity might never have fully understood the lengths to which God is willing to go to reconcile us to Himself. Death would be standing in the wings of our personal life's drama, ready to swallow us up forever. But God showed us that it is thwarted once and for all time by means of the illustration of the dying carpenter-rabbi.
There was a cartoon of a tombstone in The New Yorker. On it were inscribed these words: "James Paul Smythe -- 1935-2019 --Never Sick a Day in His Life --- And Now This."
Is that the pits, or what? What kind of a cockamamie arrangement is that? How can we ever get over or around or through all the vicissitudes of a precarious existence, the goofs and gaffes of human waywardness, the certainty that uncertain determination will fail us, that we shall be unable to save ourselves? Where should we turn when the visceral realization of our humanness convinces us as nothing else can that we are hopeless on our own?
"All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us." God is a poor loser, a sore loser, an incorrigible loser! He can't stand losing us, to have any seemingly insurmountable obstacles between us and Him, so He sent one to show us who He is and what He is like and how He loves! To see this man is to see that the barriers between us and God have been broken down! It is to know that the impasse has been eliminated! It is to become convinced, once and for all, that He who created us is also the one who redeems us, and the confirmation of that redemption was made visible by someone who was put into a feeding trough for livestock when he was born! It is God who saves us, but we need to know that it has happened, and the Nazarene carpenter is the earthly demonstration of a prior heavenly decision.
The purpose of Jesus was not to do the work of Jesus. The purpose of Jesus was to do the work of God. Jesus was not the totality of God, or one-third of God, miraculously crammed into human flesh; He was the reflection of divinity, shining forth from a human spirit. The amazing thing about Jesus is not that He of all people was born in a stable; the amazing thing about Jesus is that He was born at all. And yet, God being God, it could not have been otherwise. The wrenching rift between us and Him happened, it happens, and it shall happen yet again. Therefore God takes it upon Himself to restore the relationship so that it is re-established as He wants it - - - shatter-proof. He does it because He is God, and in the end God always gets what He wants. Which is to say that in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting our trespasses against us. So in the end Christmas is not about Christ; it is about God.
Sola Dei Gloria; To God Alone Be the Glory.