Hilton Head Island, SC – April 30, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 2:22-32; Romans 5:1-11
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8 (RSV)
I need to give an explanation about this sermon before I deliver it. I have preached this twice before: the first time on August 5, 1995, in the First Presbyterian Church of Hilton Head Island, when I was its pastor, and the second time in 1998 at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, when I was its interim pastor. Nothing particular happened in the House of Hope, because they are an unusually open-minded congregation, and although many may not have agreed with what I said, nobody said boo to me after it was finished, or later in any scathing letters from any steamed parishioners.
It was quite a different story at First Pres here on the island. There were three associate pastors, and at 9:00 sharp on Monday morning, all three came into my office, looking as though I had just thrown some kind of bomb into the sanctuary of the Lord God Almighty. One of them asked, “Why on earth did you ever decide to preach a sermon like that?” I said, “Because I believe what I said.” The second minister said, “I agree with the sermon, more or less, but I never would I have preached it.” Several weeks before this, the third associate had received his first call to his own pastorate at the First Presbyterian Church of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He was so incensed by my sermon that he said, “If I weren’t going to Arkansas so soon, I would bring you up on charges of heresy at the next meeting of Charleston-Atlantic Presbytery.” (A presbytery in the Presbyterian Church is like a diocese in the Catholic or Episcopal Churches, except that there are no bishops in Presbyterianism. Theoretically every presbytery should have an equal number of clergy and lay leaders, who in the Presbyterian Church are called “elders,” and in matters ecclesiastical they act as a collective bishop.) I think I would have enjoyed defending my position before the Presbyterian divines of southern South Carolina, but it never came to that.
Needless to say, I listened very attentively to everything they said, and the ministerial mini-brouhaha went on for a good while. On the basis of the entire meeting and what I later heard from people in the congregation, I later told my three colleagues that probably only 10% of the congregation disagreed with the sermon, 10% of those I did hear from told me it was what they had believed for years, and 80% had no idea what I was trying to say.
Because I have been preaching in The Chapel Without Walls for over 19 years, and you are such an astute conglomeration of Christians, I urge you to listen very closely to this sermon. I will be very interested in what you think as you go out the door or during the coffee hour. But I would remind you that you can’t charge me with heresy, or if you do, nothing is likely to come of it. This is a congregationally governed church, to the degree that we are governed at all. However, if half of you never darken these doors again, I shall assume you will not be pleased with The Cross: The Demonstration of GOD’S Love. So… here goes. And when it’s all over, and you have given me your thoughts, I will be especially keen to learn if the same 10-10-80 percentage holds true here, or if you will understand it better than when I first preached it.
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What happened on Good Friday? What did it mean back then when Jesus was crucified? What does it mean now? We say that Christ died for our sins, but what, really, does that mean? Does it mean He died in our place, that his was a vicarious death? In dying, did he atone for our sins; did he take upon himself the price that presumably had to be paid to somebody for our misdoings, maybe to God, maybe to Satan? If God had to be appeased for the sins of the human race, did the crucifixion represent that appeasement? What was -- and is -- Good Friday all about?
In the fifth chapter of the letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul, the man who talks far more about the meaning of the cross than any other New Testament writer, gives his own explanation of what the cross has accomplished for humanity. "While we were yet helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly" (5:6). And who are the ungodly? You and I, Paul would say; each of us, all of us, everyone. Paul believed that Jesus Christ died on behalf of us all, everyone who ever lived.
"God proves HIS love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (5:8 – my italics). While we were yet sinners! We were not repentant sinners, we were not sinners who were sorry for our sins; we were -- and are -- just ordinary, garden-variety sinners. We did bad things, we do bad things, we will continue to do bad or wrong or evil things. But before any of us ever thought of repenting of our sins, before sin bothered us even one small scintilla, Jesus of Nazareth went to the cross. God didn't wait for us to get right with Him; He got right with us! That is what God does! That is what He has always done! If He doesn't, we are all goners, but He does, and we aren't. That is what the cross demonstrates to us.
Do you catch the significance of what Paul says? "GOD shows His love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." It isn't Christ who proves his love for us by means of the cross; it is God who proves HIS love. The cross is the demonstration of God's salvation; it is not fundamentally the demonstration of Christ's salvation. For you see, Jesus does not save us; God does. But by his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus demonstrates that we have all already been saved, but it is God who has done the saving.
The older I have become (and I was 56 when I first preached this sermon), the more I have experienced a growing conviction that the Christian Church from its very origins has unduly emphasized the life and purposes of Jesus at the expense of the purposes of God, who is the one, after all, who sent Jesus into the world. And one of the places the Church has most done that is in its undeviating proclamation of the meaning of the cross. It has always been claimed that it is Jesus and his cross by whom we are saved. But increasingly it seems to me that neither the cross nor Jesus is able to grant us salvation; it is God alone who can do that. However -- and what a (you should pardon the expression) crucial "however" that is! -- God chose Jesus to demonstrate that we have been saved.
At this moment, and at that moment 28 years ago, I think and thought this may be the most important sermon I have ever preached. I may change my mind about that later, but for now, that is what I think. And if the truth is told, it is also one of my most controversial sermons (of which in my time there have been two or three), although many people may entirely miss the nature of this controversy. But when we talk about the meaning of the cross, which is absolutely pivotal to the life of Jesus, we also are talking about the essential meaning of the death of Jesus. To state it as clearly and boldly as I can, I believe that the life of Jesus Christ does not have primary meaning in and of itself; instead, it has meaning primarily as a reflection of the loving purposes of Almighty God.
Let me try to say it another way. Jesus was the means by which (or more properly the person through whom) God chose to have His love for us enacted. Jesus was thus the human being whose life most fully illustrated the nature of God. Jesus was the actor par excellence on the terrestrial stage of the divine drama, because Jesus was the most God-oriented human being who ever lived. Nevertheless, he was not and is not the essence of that divine drama himself. It is GOD who is the essence.
God is the producer, director, and stage manager of His own drama of salvation, but He never appears on stage Himself, not in His divine essence, not as He truly is, because none of us is capable in the flesh of comprehending Him as He truly is. Those who claim to be able to do that fully are full of well-intended zeal. However, instead of revealing Himself to humanity directly, God has always chosen to reveal His purposes by means of human agents, people who speak and act on His behalf. And of all His agents through all time, Jesus of Nazareth is the agent without peer. Jesus is not the primus inter pares, the first among equals. He is THE First, like whom there is none other, and for him there are no equals. He is the one through whom we most clearly perceive who God is and what God does.
But, again to try to make what I believe is an all-important distinction, it is better to say that we see God through Jesus more than to say we see God in Jesus. Jesus enacts the nature of God, in his person he embodies the nature of God, but by his cross Jesus does not save us; it is God who saves us, and the cross verifies or validates or illustrates or demonstrates the reality that we have been - and in fact - are already saved. Everybody was saved before and after the cross of Golgatha, but, as Paul said – but maybe didn’t really intend to say – “God shows His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Are you absorbing this? Are these very fine, very sharp distinctions getting through to you? Do you see that this might be a heart-skipping sermon, a mind-stretching, spirit-expanding, faith-challenging sermon, or does it seem to you like it is just an exercise in arcane theology and Christology?
The central character in Anthony Trollope's novel Framley Parsonage is Mark Robarts, the vicar of a nineteenth century Anglican country parish. Ever since the Reformation, the spouses of the Protestant clergy have been trying to straighten out their well-meaning but often bull-headed clerical spouses, and it is a trying vocation indeed to be thrust into so thankless a task. A parishioner is about to do something which both Fanny and Mark Robarts know is wrong, but he is too timid to tell the lady the error of her ways, particularly since she is “the lady of the manor.” Fanny says, "I am sure, Mark, I would not give way if I thought it was wrong. Nor would she expect it." The winsomely wimpish parson responds, "If I persist this time, I shall certainly have to yield the next, and then the next may probably be more important.” The brave and wise Fanny comes back at him, "It is true that one must put up with wrong, with a great deal of wrong. But no one need put up with wrong that he can remedy" (Framley Parsonage, Penguin Classics, London, 1986, p. 39).
If we must put up with wrong, it is as nothing compared to the wrong God puts up with. There is in fact so much wrong, so much misguided human behavior, that God the judge is left with only two choices. Either He judges us all guilty of our sins, and all of us are guilty, and therefore we must pay the price, which is eternal death, or else God commutes the sentence of death and grants us salvation, which both now and eventually is eternal life. God would be justified in obliterating us, but because He created us, and loves us with a divine love, which He alone possesses, He long ago decided to save us instead. And in order for us to perceive that not even our sin can thwart His salvation, God sends Jesus of Nazareth into the world as the proclaimer and explainer of His love, and Jesus willingly if also hesitantly goes to the cross, and the cross demonstrates the salvation of God.
In his powerful and dour novel The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne makes a sober and sobering observation. He was referring to how the knowledge of our sin can throw us into despair, and he said, "There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit thus flies away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life. It is like death, without death's quiet privilege - its freedom from mortal care" (The House of Seven Gables, Signet Classics, New York, 1990, p. 64).
If we think seriously about our lives, not with rose-tinted glasses but in the harsh light of reality, sooner or later the weight of our misdoings and misdeeds will get us down. God wants us to acknowledge our sins, and to repent of them, but even more, He insists on commuting the sentence which they deserve. To see any cross of any size anywhere is to see the visible demonstration of the fact that God has overcome sin by His love, and He sent Jesus to tell us and to show us that immutable and saving truth.
But again: what does the cross mean? Does it mean something like what Dorothy Sayers said: "God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own...by a corrupt church, a timid politician, a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators": was God executed on the cross? Does it mean what Isaac Watts said in his great if slightly skewed hymn, which we shall shortly be singing: "Forbids it, Lord, that I should boast, save in the death of Christ my God" --- Is Jesus of Nazareth, a human like all other humans, our God? If God died on the cross, where was Jesus, when God died? And to whom was Jesus praying on the cross: to himself? The cross demonstrates salvation; it does not produce salvation! If truly God died on the cross, then the Death-of-God theologians were right, and we are now forever alone! But we have never been alone! And we shall never be alone! God abandoned neither us nor Jesus! We are saved, don't you understand: SAVED! God shows His love for us, He demonstrates His commitment to us, through Jesus Christ His salvation is enacted for us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us!
Our responsive reading says as much, and it originally proclaimed it perhaps a thousand years before the time of Jesus. Speaking to God, Psalm 65 says, "Arise, O Lord. Lift up thy hand; forget not the afflicted…. Thou dost see; yea thou dost note trouble and vexation, and thou mayest take it into thy hands” (Psalm 65:12; 15). There is none who is cut off from the salvation of God; no, not one. Even those who have never called upon the name of God are saved by God, because He is God, He is their Father, and they are His children. It is His will that none should perish eternally. Temporally, yes; all shall perish in time. But in eternity, not a single one. And the cross of Jesus Christ demonstrates that.
Someone may make the charge that it's all too easy, that this explanation of salvation doesn't really take into account the grim reality of how perverse and mean-spirited some people are. Easy? Easy! Can anyone seriously contemplate the cross and say it's easy? It is inexpressibly hard! For both Jesus and God, it is absolutely tortuous! But that is precisely why the cross is the cross: it's supposed to demonstrate how costly our salvation is! Could anything ever be more costly than that? Could it?
Listen carefully, listen very carefully: We do not repent, and therefore God saves us; God saves us, and THEREFORE we repent! Salvation does not depend on repentance; repentance depends on salvation! We SEE the demonstration of God's salvation of us by means of the cross of Jesus Christ, and THEREFORE we begin to live saved lives! The cross SHOWS us our salvation, but it does not CREATE our salvation! Our lives were never quite right, and despite our best efforts, there was always something amiss, something ajar, something which separated us from God.
But look at the cross, any cross of any size, with or without a body nailed to it! It has been made right! God fixed it! By the one named Yeshua, God shows that the breach is forever repaired! Yeshua: God Saves. That’s what his name means. But remember: GOD Saves. Hallelu-Jah; Praise God. Amen.