Sermon: "Unresolved Grace"

Delivered December 27, 2009 by Rev. Eliot Winks.
Sermon Text: 2 Corinthians 5:17-21

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Good morning! I'm the Reverend Eliot Winks, and I moved to Baltimore about four years ago for a whole bunch of reasons, including to get married, but I was also a part of a team that was starting a new Anglican church here in Baltimore up in Green Spring Valley called Church of the Resurrection. I was their founding pastor for a number of years. I've now left the parish and I'm working for a para-church ministry called the Lausanne Committee for Worldwide Evangelization.

We gather theologians and church leaders together to talk about... how can we better partner churches together to spread the gospel and share the ministries we have, and the experience we have? And I get to work with some incredibly gifted people. It's certainly a gift of grace. I don't know I ended up there, but I get to work with some incredible people from Intervarsity and Campus Crusade and from churches all over the world. It's just a real blessing.

In particular, I work on a ministry that's called Mission Africa, which is a series of week-long mission outreach and evangelism events in 16 different countries in Africa next year. We think it's going to be a real blessing to the Church. We're taking churches from all over the world to Africa to do cross-cultural and cross-denominational evangelism and outreach work.

I've been coming here to Central for about a year... a little over a year, maybe a year and a half now with my beautiful wife, Meredith and my lovely daughter, Caroline. Never miss an opportunity to praise your wife and your child. It's been a real blessing for us to be part of this community. I have an opportunity to be in and out of a lot of churches in my ministry, and it's always a joy for me to come back to this place. One of the joys of coming back here is the incredible quality of worship in this place and the gifted worship leaders that inhabit this place. It stirs my soul every Sunday when I come here.

But it's also a pleasure to come back because of the depth and quality of leadership in this church, and I don't say that lightly. It's really, for clergy, it's very hard for us to put ourselves in the hands of spiritual authority and other pastors because particularly we know it all, so what could they possibly know? But it's been my pleasure to put myself and my heart and my family in the hands of John and George and Laura and the leadership of this church. You're really blessed to have some gifted and courageous leaders because they've recognized that as good as Central is, God is calling it to a new place. God is calling it to be better. He's calling all of us together to make this place even better than it is today.

So we've entered into this new process, change of worship times and rearranging of staff and all sorts of stuff so that God can do more in this place. That's a scary thing. The other thing I did in the 10:00 that I didn't do in the either the 10:30, and I lose track. Anyway, I did it in the last service and John wasn't there, but I guess Debbie was there, so now they're both here. Speaking from personal experience, one of the hardest things on a marriage is being clergy. I just want to point out that today is John and Debbie's wedding anniversary, and just... And certainly grab them and congratulate them after the service and be praying for them for it is a call they've received together, so clear, in their ministry in our midst.

Today is December 27. No really, Eliot? Oh, okay. Two days after Christmas, five days before New Year's. It's kind of a betwixt and between time. We've left Christmas behind us and we haven't quite come to New Year's yet. There is all this new stuff and all this cool stuff happening around us, parties. It seems like it's the party time of year. Everyone is having New Year's parties and Christmas parties and Festivus parties and... Sorry, that was lost on most of you. It seems like just a joyful time of year, isn't it? I mean what could be a more joyful time of the year? We're celebrating the birth of Emmanuel, God in our midst.

God chose to become flesh and live in our midst and live this life with us. What could be a more joyous thing? I mean how could the world be more transformed than God coming down to be in our midst and be one of us? Its totally changed history, totally changed everything. That's why Christmas Day is such a wonderful day where we have no health problems, no financial problems, no family problems. Really? That was my Christmas. I mean wasn't that your Christmas? I mean I didn't have a single irritating conversation with anybody on Christmas Day. I didn't worry that I hadn't bought enough presents for my daughter in one moment, and then worried that maybe I bought too many presents for my daughter in the next moment. I wasn't totally schizophrenic.

I didn't look at the dinner table when dinner came and look at the empty seats and think, "Where are the people who aren't there?" Where is my dad who hasn't been with us now for five years? Maybe some of you had that same moment on Christmas Day, and yet this is the day that we celebrate God breaking open history and coming and being amongst us. Huh? And it's in that moment, we start to look around and say, "Well, maybe nothing has changed." Maybe nothing is new. In fact, maybe I'm not new.

We start to hear these voices that say, "No, maybe nothing has happened. Maybe this whole Christmas thing, this whole Jesus thing, this whole God breaking in thing... maybe not." Then with New Year's just five days away, maybe we start to think, "Ah, well, if nothing has changed, if Christmas hasn't done anything, I'll do something. I'll make some resolutions. I'll make myself new next year. I'll change the world next year."

One of the reasons we come to church together, one of the reasons God calls us into the Word is there is so much around us and so much in our lives that challenges the truth of what God says to us, challenges the reality that God has done something in us and in the world, whether we see it or not. And so we come together to worship and we come into the Bible maybe every day, maybe occasionally to get our perspective shifted again, to be reassured and reminded that God has done something and He promises to do something and He's still doing something.

So let's pray and then let's open up God's Word and see what He's saying to us here in this betwixt and between place about what He's doing that's new, maybe what He's already done that's new to reassure us, in the midst of our challenges and our troubles that something has changed two days after Christmas.

Pray with me: Father, we thank you for the faithful witness of your apostle Paul. We thank you that if there was ever a life clearly changed, it was Paul's, but Father, it's so long ago and I never met him. I haven't seen the change in him, so I don't know. So I pray you'd pour your Spirit out upon all of us, Lord. Open our eyes to see the truth that you're speaking to us through Paul's word and give us grace that we might hear that word as a truth about ourselves as well. We ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.

If you're going to follow along in your Bibles, it's on page 1056, as the lovely screen says. Or you can just listen, as I read. This is Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, the church in Corinth. It's a young church. They're wrestling with how do we live out this call to be Christians? What does it mean to be Christians? Is anything different because we're Christians? Can we see the world differently because we're Christians?

Paul says this, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

See the challenge of Christmas is it is only part of the story. It's a great story. Don't get me wrong. Normatively, even if it weren't a religious story, it's pretty great. It has got camels and magi and animals and stars and mystical stuff and little babies. And who doesn't like a story with little babies? And it has Emmanuel, God with us. I mean that's a great story, but Christmas by itself is not enough. We know that. If it's just God came to be with us, that is not enough of a story. It's a great story, but it's not enough. And so as we kneel before our Lord Jesus, as we kneel before the babe in the manger, we have to lift our eyes up and cast them out to Calvary, to the Cross, and to the empty tomb for it is only with Easter that Christmas really gains its context.

God didn't just come to be with us. That's a huge story, but God came to be with us, know what it's like to live our lives, die for us to be sin who knew no sin to take our sins, and then to rise again. That is a game-changer. God broke the bonds of death... game-changer. Everything has changed. And yet, I'm still stuck with the same questions I was stuck with five minutes ago.

There is still an empty seat at the table where someone should be. I still have my worries about my finances, about my family. I still have broken relationships. For some of you, you might not know if you're going to be celebrating Christmas in the same house next year because you don't know if you can keep it. You don't know if everyone in your family will be there next year. Yet we're post-Easter as well, so how can that be?

Well we know that God has done something. Right? We can sense it in our beings. We know that something has changed. The challenge is to look at the right things, not just to look at the things that are presented to us. I opened the newspaper this morning looking for something interesting to read while I had my coffee and my oatmeal before I came here, and by the end of it I was completely depressed and glad I was coming to church because I don't think there was a positive story in there except the one about the Ravens beating the Stealers later today. So where is the good news? Where is the change in the world?

A number of years ago, I was a chaplain at a school in India, and I had a student named Esther. Esther and her family had been missionaries to India almost their whole lives. I think she came to India when she was five, with her parents. She was now 15 in my class, and she had two younger brothers, six and eight, I believe. Her family was very beloved in the community where they worked... incredibly beloved. Had been there just doing medical work and outreach work and education work and all the kind of stuff you can do when you put yourself somewhere for a long time.

Her Dad, Graham, and the two boys went off to do a leadership retreat in another area for a church, and in the middle of the night when they were sleeping in their van, some radicals came and piled straw on top of the car, and poured gasoline on the car, and lit it on fire. And that night, her father and her two little brothers died in that fire. It's still hard for me to tell that story, and yet the thing that makes it whole for me is having been Esther's teacher and chaplain because what I saw in Esther and her mother, Gladys is something I've never seen in anyone. A joy tinged with grief, mind you, there was weeping and sobbing for weeks, but a joy knowing that her father and brothers were with our Lord Jesus.

And in an interview, televised on national TV in India, she and her mother were asked about how they feel about the men who did this. There was nothing but grace and forgiveness. Now I can tell you this was no cheap grace, no cheap forgiveness because I saw Esther on a daily basis. But this was something that oozed out of her. How could this be? The most precious things were taken from her, and yet here she was doing something that defies logic. I mean I can drive through the Towson traffic circle and get cut off by somebody and be incredibly unforgiving, and yet, here she was in a pivotal moment in her life offering forgiveness.

As an aside, as much as Facebook drives me crazy because of the number of emails I suddenly now get in my email inbox, I got an email on... What day is today? Sunday. That's why we're in church. I got an email on Friday from Facebook saying that one of my friends had updated her page, and it was Esther. And Esther got engaged on Thursday, and there is this joy in her eyes. And so it's been a real joy to watch her life and see that this forgiveness has not shifted over time into bitterness, but it still defines her life.

Something has changed, hasn't it? I mean that is not possible simply because we decide we're going to be nice or we're going to be forgiving. That only comes because God has done something. Okay, well that's all well and good. That's an extreme example, Eliot. Good. Someone is doing something in India.

Well, this last summer, I was part of VBS, and my second day as part of VBS, I was got approached by a deacon who was very clearly flustered and had just gotten a call that somebody needed help moving out of their house that day, immediately, because they needed to be gone before their husband came home. They needed to pack everything and their children and go somewhere safe. She didn't know me from Adam... this deacon, but she had the courage to come up to me and say, "Would you be part of this?"

To me that's a sign of the kingdom breaking in something new. But what's even more a sign of that is that unknown to me, this woman we went to help wasn't even a Central member. I thought for sure I was going to do a good thing for the community, and I was. And I said to her at the end, I prayed with her and I said, "Great, hopefully I'll see you on Sunday." And I got here on Sunday and I asked around... Has anybody? They said, "No, no, no. She's not a member here." So you're telling me that 50 people dropped everything they were doing on a moment's notice to go help somebody that none of us knew? Yes. You're telling me something new hasn't happened in this world?

Something new is happening right here. The question is... are we willing to see it? Are we willing to look at it? The challenge for us is not everything has been made new, has it? We know that something has changed in us, and yet we know not everything has changed. I know that I'm a better man than I was before I came to Christ, but I know that I'm still broken and wicked. And that frustrates me.

In 1909, the anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep started to use a term. The term was liminal, to describe the initial process in which a person or a community begins to change. Then in the 70s and 80s, it grew in popularity, and now in the 21st century, it's been grabbed by spiritual writers and theologians and the term now is liminality. The idea that we live in the initial phases of a process that has yet to change. Liminal comes from the Latin word "limen," which is the bottom of a doorway. And so what it means is you've stepped across that threshold into a new place, and yet you haven't fully lived into it. We're only at the beginning edges of it.

Central is in a liminal place, changing worship times, beginning to understand a new vision for itself. It's opened through that threshold, and we know and we want what God has for us, but we don't know what it's going to take to get there. And being in that liminal place is nerve-wracking and tiring and challenging. We want to rush through it to the next thing. When it's time for me to come down off this stage, I have to take a step and okay, I've begun the process of leaving, and now the terror begins. Did I say something that might offend somebody? Can I get out the back door before they get to me? I don't know.

The reality is I have to walk slowly because if I rush out, that will just be weird. And hopefully, some people will come up and say nice things and some people will come up and say challenging things, and that's the reality of being a preacher, but I have to live into the liminal place. That's the truth of our lives. We're in this liminal place. God has done something, and the promise of Revelation is God will complete that work, but it's not there yet. We haven't reached that place yet.

See the challenge for us as human beings is we don't like this liminal place because we need closure, don't we? Do you like to read novels where the last chapter has been torn out of the back of the book? Have you ever done it? I have. Not on purpose, mind you. You know you go to one of those hotels where they have a bookshelf. Give a book, take a book. Make sure the last chapter is there because it's a bummer to read 1,000 pages and discover you don't know how the book ends.

We need that kind of closure. We want to see the story end because we like things in boxes. We like God in boxes. We like our relationships in boxes. We like to put people in boxes because it's neater. In music, the term is "resolve." We like things to resolve. In classical music, the idea in lots of classical music is that you're taken on an emotional journey. And at the end, it all comes together. There are little themes that play out off the main theme, and as you come to the end, all of those themes come together for this big climax with tympani and horns and violins and all sorts of stuff. And finally, bah-boom! It's over. And you take a deep breath and say, "Wow! I'm exhausted, but I feel satisfied because it has come to an end, and now I can leave and go home again."

God is not like that really though, is he? Donald Miller, the very talented young spiritual writer, though I guess he's getting older now, like all of us, in his very first book Blue Like Jazz, wrote in the forward of the book. So if you've ever read the book and skipped the forward, you need to go back and read the forward. He writes in the very forward of the book. He writes, "I never really liked jazz because jazz doesn't resolve." And it doesn't. If you're a jazz fan like me, maybe one of the things you like about jazz is that it never really resolves. It has this kind of gooiness to it, if you will, that just kind of moves and flows. And when the musicians decide it's time to end, they kind of end.

Then he says, "I never really liked God because God doesn't resolve." Ooh. You know I had never thought of that until I read that book. I thought, "Yeah, that's exactly right. God does not resolve." We know there is an end to the story, right? But we're not living in the end of the story. We're living in the fifth act of a play, which hasn't come to an end yet. That's a challenge for us because we want things to resolve.

But you see that lack of resolve, that lack of resolution is what I termed in the beginning, in the title of this sermon, "Unresolved Grace." You see we want it to resolve, but it's grace that it doesn't resolve. You see if this story, if this grand story of God's restoration of the world resolved 50 years ago, I dare say almost all of us in this room wouldn't be here today. If it resolved 20 years ago, I wouldn't be here. Maybe if it resolved before Christmas Eve this year, someone wouldn't be here. So it is grace to us that story hasn't resolved yet because it gives us an opportunity to come to the Lord.

But it's also grace because it's an opportunity for us to be part of the story, isn't it? God does not write this story and use us as pawns or use us as afterthoughts. God writes this story and we're integral players in it. Paul says it clearly that in Christ we are new, and when we're new, our job is to be ambassadors, to be part of this story. Central has been part of that story for me, and I've seen it be part of that story for others. Esther and Gladys have been part of that story for an entire nation. What they did in India, just because of what they said on TV, changed things. It changed laws. It changed the attitude of the government of the time because they stood in the truth of what God was saying to them because they recognized they had a role to play in that liminal place.

But you see for us, the challenge in the liminal place, the place where we've entered in and haven't yet reached the end is that we lose our focus. We get bored. We have limited attention spans. I know I do. Maybe you don't. We push Jesus out of the center. When things don't happen as quickly as we want them to, we say, "Okay, sorry Jesus. You don't seem to know what you're doing, so let me do it here, please."

The equation I wrote down is we take this need for closure... I have to keep looking. I should have memorized it by now. We take this need for closure, and we add to it a dash of distrust in God's grace. Will he really not count my trespasses against us? I mean really, the things I've done are pretty bad. Maybe he'll... no, I don't know. Maybe his grace is sufficient, but maybe I should just do a few things to just make sure I can earn a little bit of it, just a tiny bit, just a dot, just the head of a pin.

No, sorry. Doesn't work that way. It's either all grace or it's not grace. And yet we don't always live that way. And then add to that an unhealthy dose, not a healthy dose, but an unhealthy dose of pride and ego that I know best. And suddenly we start doing it our own way. Suddenly, we start making resolutions that it will be better. Suddenly, we start making bad decisions.

Proverbs 3:5 says, "Lean not on your own understanding, but in all your ways trust the Lord." You know it's true in your own life. When you've tried to take control of it, when you've tried to drive the car, you usually don't get where you want to go, or sometimes you do get where you want to go and you realize you really didn't want to go there because God needs to be running our lives and ruling our lives. Otherwise, we end up doing stupid things.

Perhaps, as we're five days out from New Year's and looking past Christmas and onto New Year's you're looking back at your life this last year and thinking, "I've made some stupid choices this last year." Perhaps this video speaks to where you are right now. I don't know, it speaks to me. I don't know if that speaks to anyone here. I'm sure we all have our own regrets of the year gone by and how we hope to wrestle with them in the coming year.

Video played: Regrets, by WorshipHouse Media
http://www.worshiphousemedia.com/mini-movies/12127/Regrets

Sometimes I think that as Christians we secretly like New Year's better than we actually like Christmas. Sometimes I can't blame you because New Year's does come without fruitcake. It comes without ugly sweaters. It comes without, usually without annoying relatives, so in some ways, New Year's can be better than Christmas, but I don't think those are the reasons why we like New Year's better. I think the reason sometimes we secretly like New Year's better is that on New Year's Day we get to do something physical, something tangible to show that there has been change. We get to close the calendar and throw it out. Or if you're like me, file it away in case we get audited sometime in the next 10 years. But we do something physical to bring closure to that year. Woo hoo! The year is gone and something new has begun.

And at the same time, often we look back over the last year and we look back at the regrets we have and we start to make resolutions. I'm going to be a better father. I'm going to be a better mother. I'm going to be a better son or daughter, or better student. I'm going to be smarter, wiser. I'm going to drink less. I'm going to spend less time looking at pornography online. I'm going to be nicer to my wife. I'm going to spend more time with my children. I'm going to be taller. I'm going to be thinner. I'm going to have more hair. Now those last three sounds stupid, but I tell you what, they're no less stupid than the first ones. It's no more stupid to say, "I will be taller next year," than it is to say, "I will be a better father next year." Because both of those rely on our own strength.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've said, "I resolve next week that I'm going to be a better father and husband." Now I'm not an awful father and husband, I don't think, but I sure could be better. And I can't tell you the number of times I reached the end of the week and said, "Well, okay maybe next week I'll be a better father and husband because there was a lot of work to do this week." To resolve that in our flesh we're going to do something to change us, to make something new in us is absurd! It's to push Jesus completely out and say, "I will be king of my life."

It is, as in the words of our 21-month-old daughter when we try to do something for her, "I do. I do. I do." And we say, "Okay sweetheart, you can do it because it's something that probably won't kill you." That's what God says, "Okay. Really, you want to do it? Okay. Go for it. If you want to try to be a better whatever next year, go for it. I'm not going to force you to be in relationship with me. I'm not going to force you to give this over to me. You do it." The tragedy is next year, we come to the same place five days before New Year's, looking back and generally, we have the same regrets because in our flesh, we can't change it.

Paul, the consummate follower of Christ, said, "The very thing I want to do I cannot do, and the very thing I do not want to do is what I do. Who then will deliver me from this body of death?" Only God moving in us. You see this isn't our work. Second Corinthians 5:18, in the Today's New International Version says, "All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ." All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ. Not, we did it. He did it. And the promise is he will continue to do that if we let him. The promise is you are new and he'll continue that work.

Going back one verse, verse 17, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!" Sometimes I read across this sort of like this, " Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!" Hosanna. Jesus is born. Emmanuel. Easter has come. And the stuff washes over us. We lose the urgency and the drama of it in the midst of the business of our lives and that's understandable, but here Paul is saying something very different, very new. In fact, the Greek grammar speaks to that, which we can't translate into English.

What Paul says is, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old, the old, has passed away. The old has died." And then in the Greek, there is a full stop. And one word. The old has passed away. New! All is new. All is new! And yet how often do we hear that when we wake up every morning and look in the mirror? Do we hear old, unchanged, broken? That's not the word that Christ speaks over you today. The word he speaks is, "New!"

You see you don't need New Year's Day to turn the page on the calendar and start something new. In the book of Lamentations says, "Oh my Lord God, thy mercies are new every day." We have an opportunity every day with Christ to come and be made new again and again. We have the opportunity to let go of the bad choices we've made, the bad decisions we've made, the unholy lives we've lived and hand them over to Christ every day in a new way. He says, "I will meet you in those. I will start a new life in you this day, and I will continue that work every day you come to me in faith."

Pray with me: Father, we thank you that you do do a new thing in us every day. That you promise us that you won't leave us or abandon us. We thank you that it's not because of our work but because of your grace, and it doesn't matter what choices we've made, that you will meet us, that you will continue to make us new and that rather than taking those reins in our own hands, we give them to you. Rather than being resolved that we will be better next year, we commit ourselves to letting go and coming to your Cross and letting your grace and your spirit move in us. Restore us now, Lord and give us new lives this day and every day. In Jesus' name, Amen.

© 2009, Rev. Eliot Winks
c/o Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org