Hilton Head Island, SC – December 24, 2023
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.
The person who knows me best tells me that 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 always true.
About grammar and punctuation, there is the old grammatical quip, "What's that in the road, a head?" All you add there is a comma and one little space, and it changes the meaning drastically from "What's that in the road ahead?"
Well in our text for today's sermon, there was a comma in the King James Version, the biblical translation which many 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: "This 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."
Christian Christmas people: 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, reconciling the world to himself," because for one thing the "himself" might then mean Christ, that God became Christ so that the world might be reconciled to Christ, and it is quite another to say that "In Christ God was 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 employing Jesus as the means of reconciling the world to Himself, that Jesus was God’s agent, that he was His instrument, 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 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 several 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. Elsewhere Paul says much about His understanding of Jesus as the incarnation of God, but here he is not talking about the incarnation; here he it talking primarily about God, not Jesus. God wants the world reconciled to God, and for reasons known only to Him, He chose to effect that reconciliation by means of a particular human being, Jesus of Nazareth.
For the moment, let us leave the matter there. And 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, sin puts humanity and God at odds with one another. Nevertheless, our trespasses, to use Paul's word, are no longer counted against us because of the reconciliation made possible for us through the life and especially the death by crucifixion 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, and 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 with you. I'll give two illustrations of why we need reconciliation with God, why ordinary human cussedness or perversity, even if only of a mild variety, sets us apart from God.
There was a sign placed on the wall of a Baltimore estate which had been turned into a religious institution. It said, "Trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Sisters of Mercy." It is one messed up world if the Sisters of Mercy should 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 trespasses 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 in Christ, God has.
We got a Christmas card from a church member 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. "Ask him for a receipt," says the male accountant to the man. 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 tight with his money 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. As Charles Wesley said of Jesus in the hymn, "Jesus, lover of my soul," "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 was hardly the epitome of excessive evil, how much more can sin be seen in us.
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, and 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 it and the one who was nailed to it, we might never understand the lengths to which God is willing to go to reconcile us unto Himself. Death would be standing in the wings of our 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.
A couple of weeks ago there was a cartoon of a tombstone in The New Yorker, and on it were inscribed these words: "James Paul Smythe -- 1938-2023 --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, God was in Christ 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 in someone born in a shed for livestock! 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, 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. And so God takes it upon Himself to restore the relationship so that it is the way 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 ultimately about Christ; it is about God.
Sola Dei Gloria; To God Alone Be the Glory.