Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Grace Upon Grace (Romans 5:6-11)
Date: December 24, 2023
This is a fun day, isn’t it? I mean, it’s Christmas Eve. Who wouldn’t be happy on a day like this? So, on this happy and joyous occasion, I thought we would take a little mental field trip. Doesn’t that sound exciting? Where are we going on this great and special day? Close your eyes for a moment, climb in the mental church van with me (the fun thing about mental field trips is that we can all fit in the same van together without anyone having to worry about being squished in the back), and let’s take a little drive over to one of yours and my favorite places to visit: the DMV.
Anybody’s eyes pop back open in shock there?
Yes, we are going to take a little trip over to the DMV this morning. But only in our minds, so for those of you already starting to feel the tension creeping up your spine, you can relax just a bit. Okay, so, I wasn’t totally on the up-and-up with you there. We’re not going to go to the DMV on our first stop. We’re going to the licensing bureau. For most purposes, though, that’s close enough. Come with me on what was actually my first trip to the licensing bureau after we moved here. I took a weekday and went to get our vehicles properly registered in the state. Everything was going fine. I had all my paperwork in order. I robbed a bank on the way there so that I was prepared for whatever the load of taxes and fees happened to be. (I’m just kidding…I didn’t really rob a bank.) But when I finally got my turn to chat with one of the friendly agents working there…at least I’m sure they were friendly when they weren’t working there…she processed everything as quickly as she could and then presented me with the damages. I pulled out my credit card to pay it and…their credit card machine was down. Could I pay with cash or a check?
Now, I had a little bit of cash in my wallet, but I certainly didn’t have that much. And, of course, I didn’t bring the checkbook with me. I had waited for hours only to find out I couldn’t get it done. If you can imagine my state of mind and attitude, give me an, “Amen.”
I know someone who experienced something similar to that. She needed cash and didn’t have it. And there wasn’t time to get to the bank and back before they closed. And the deadline for the business she needed to take care of there was nigh. In that moment, do you know what happened? Well, if this were a typical DMV story, you can probably guess. She had to make a mad dash to the bank, but got back just after they stopped accepting new people in line. She was already booked up for the next few days, and before she was able to get back to get everything squared away she had already gotten pulled twice for her expired tags. Do you know what actually happened? When she was there in the midst of that potential mess, a complete stranger came up and said she had just felt compelled by the Holy Spirit to give her the cash to pay her fees, and that she wanted her to know that Jesus loved her no matter what was going on in her life.
The woman I’m talking about is a committed follower of Jesus herself and was flabbergasted by being on the receiving end of something she had been called to do herself in other seasons when the shoe was on the other foot. She was humbled and grateful and kind of embarrassed and filled with joy all at the same time. Do you know what that was? It was grace. She didn’t deserve that help. She hadn’t earned it. She hadn’t sought it out. She couldn’t do anything to merit it. She wasn’t going to be able to pay it back. It was an act of pure grace.
Have you ever been on the receiving end of grace before? Forget about salvation for just a minute. Have you ever been in a situation in which another person showed you genuine grace? That’s a pretty incredible thing to experience. It’s humbling in a way not many other things are. Grace like this is something we can only receive. If there’s any input on our part at all beyond that, it’s not grace, it’s merely a returned favor. Grace has to come when we’re most in need and most incapable of returning the favor or it’s not grace. Grace is what makes Christianity different from every other religion in the world. No one else has anything like this. We’ve certainly never come up with anything like it on our own. But there is one place where grace flows in abundance. This morning, as we celebrate the fourth Sunday of Advent with the third part of our series, Broken to Mended, and the coming birth of our Savior, I want to take just a few minutes and talk with you about this place.
Jesus didn’t have to come when He did. Oh, it was the right time for Him to come. The apostle Paul makes that clear. But He didn’t have to come. We certainly weren’t doing anything that would make us particularly fit for receiving Him. When Jesus burst onto the scene of humanity from his mother’s womb while there were lots and lots of people who were looking forward to the coming of the Messiah, none of them were looking for Jesus. Mary had gotten word of her miraculous pregnancy about nine months before. She definitely wasn’t expecting that. And while she was humbly willing to go along with whatever this angel said were the plans of God, she didn’t even begin to understand how it was going to happen, much less how this little child she would one day bear was going to be the Messiah. There’s a reason her initial response to Gabriel’s announcement in Luke 1:34 was, “How can this be, since I have not had sexual relations with a man?” Much to her credit, though, her questions were about the mechanics of the thing rather than the concept.
Her cousin, Zechariah, wasn’t quite so willing to believe. When the same angel announced the birth of his own son who would be the forerunner of the Messiah, his response was more skeptical: “‘How can I know this?’ Zechariah asked the angel, ‘For I am an old man, and my wife is well along in years.’” In other words: prove it. Gabriel’s response was to strike him mute until the baby was born. And while part of this punishment was owing to his lack of faith, you have to think that at least part of it was because he was dumb enough to say that his wife was old. I mean, what kind of husband was he to do something like that?
When Joseph first got the word about Mary’s pregnancy, he was heartbroken. He had their whole life planned out. It was filled with nothing but good things. Oh, sure, there were a few bumps along the way because that’s how life goes, but those were just minor hiccups on the road to a long, happy ever after. And then this news that she was “with child” as the saying goes. This child certainly wasn’t his, and there was only one other option for how she could have gotten herself into this state. Yet he was a righteous man, the apostle Matthew tells us. While he could have thrown the book at her, that wasn’t his style. After all, he had loved her once. A big part of him still did. So, in order to save both of their reputations, and to minimize the shame they were both facing (not to mention their families with them), he “decided to divorce her secretly.” If anyone asked what happened, he would just tell them that it hadn’t worked out. And just in case this point should get lost on you, don’t miss the brazenness of God here. There was a point in time at which our salvation depended on a jilted lover not taking the fullest measure of revenge against what had all the appearances of a gross violation of trust and fidelity. That’s pretty bold.
None of these people were necessarily doing anything wrong. In fact, these three at least were very much on the right track. But neither were they looking for God to do something big in or through their lives. Meanwhile, there were others who were very much not on the right track. First of all, there was Herod who was murderously jealous of his power and position. Any even potential threat to it was executed with extreme prejudice. Not even his own family members were exempt from his paranoia. And as if that weren’t enough by itself, you had Herod’s employers, the Roman Empire. The great Caesar Augustus sitting on his throne in Rome wanted to know just how great he was. The only way he could quantify that was to count just how big his empire was…and tax the people in it so that he could be even wealthier and more powerful.
And so, “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole empire should be registered. This first registration took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. So everyone went to be registered, each to his own town. Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family line of David, to be registered, along with Mary, who was engaged to him, and was pregnant. While they were there, the time came for her to give birth. Then she gave birth to her firstborn Son, and she wrapped him tightly in cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.”
Those are words we have heard so many times. We’ll come back to them again tonight. We know them so well that we don’t really pay very close attention to them. We just take them as warm and familiar and comforting. Yet there is so much brokenness represented by them. There is the brokenness of a tyrannical government that commands its people and expects them to obey unquestioningly. There is the brokenness of a family whose nice, neat plans for a long happy life were upended by an unexpected pregnancy. There is the brokenness of a lack of hospitality and a lack of compassion. There is the brokenness of a fallen family line because of the foolish decisions of some of its more prominent members over the centuries. And that’s only the things that are easy to see.
This was the world Jesus entered. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t all put together. It wasn’t even particularly looking for Him. And yet He came. Writing about half a century later, the apostle Paul tried to help the church in Rome get their hearts and minds around how astounding an idea this really was. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way to Romans 5 with me for just a second.
Paul starts out the chapter talking about the incredible access we have to God through Jesus. He lands here on the powerful hope that we have because of God’s love poured into our hearts by way of the Holy Spirit. This leads him to a reflection on this idea of God’s approaching us in Jesus before we were really ready for such a thing. Listen to what he says here starting in v. 6: “For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.” Now, the word, “ungodly” there sounds pejorative to our ears, but it’s not really if you think about it. It just means that we aren’t like God. We are un-God-ly. That’s not pejorative; it’s true. In any event, he goes on to observe how unusual a thing this is. “For rarely will someone die for a just person—though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die.” Are you with him here? The thought of voluntarily laying down your life for someone else is a pretty rare thing. In Paul’s day, they really didn’t even have much of a category for this kind of thing like we do today, but we only have our category for it because of Jesus’ doing it for us. Absent that, no one does that sort of thing. Only a very great love could motivate such a gift; a love beyond what most of us could even comprehend. Perhaps for our children, yes, but beyond that?
But with God, things are different. He is different. Verse 8 now: “But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God didn’t just lay down His life for us. He did it when we were still separated from Him by sin and not really trying all that hard to deal with that separation. What’s more, it wasn’t just that God laid down His life for us, He laid His only Son’s life down for us. You might give your life up for the life of another person you deemed really, really worthy of it, but there probably isn’t a set of circumstances that would motivate you to offer up as a sacrifice your only child’s life instead. Yet that is exactly what God did. “How much more then, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. And not only that, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.”
Now, Paul says a whole bunch of jaw-dropping things there, but the one that has perhaps captured my attention more than all the rest is that bit about our being God’s enemies. That’s some pretty shocking language. We don’t generally like to think of ourselves as having enemies at all. I mean, sure, there are some foreign nations who have particularly hostile relationships with our own that we talk about as being “America’s enemies,” but that’s different from calling someone our enemy. We are even less inclined to think of ourselves as being someone else’s enemy. That would imply that we are not only not their friend, but that we are working doggedly to undermine and subvert their goals. We are vigorously opposing the direction they want to go. We are intentionally committed to seeing whatever their aims are stopped and are willing to use just about whatever means are necessary to achieve that end. And Paul says that apart from Christ we were God’s enemies. Really?
Well…yeah…we were. You see, there’s no such thing as a neutral position when it comes to God. Either we are following Him and are thus working to advance His aims, or we are not following Him and are thus working to subvert His aims. That’s it. There’s no middle ground between those two poles. We don’t think of ourselves in those terms (something the Devil, who really is our enemy, works rather diligently to keep us convinced of) but that doesn’t make it any less true. In this universe there is only the kingdom of the world in one of its various iterations and the kingdom of God. To be a member of one is to be an enemy of the other. This is one of those hard Gospel truths that isn’t rendered any less true for being so hard. Thankfully, though, Paul wraps this hard truth in a really thick layer of sweetness here. God sent Jesus for us to give up His life in order to reconcile us to Himself while we were still His enemies. He didn’t wait for us to switch sides. He didn’t insist on our cleaning up our acts. We didn’t have to finally get all of the Law of Moses correct. None of that. Most folks weren’t even looking to be right with Him beyond what they already felt like they pretty well had down. None of that. And God sent Jesus anyway. Jesus came to save us from sin while we were still in it.
I don’t know that I can fully describe just how good this news really is. Let’s start here: Whatever shape your life happens to be in, you can be reconciled to God through Jesus. It does not matter how broken you are. It does not matter how much sin you have in your life. It does not matter how big or small that sin is. It does not matter how many lies you’ve told or promises you’ve broken or relationships you’ve shattered. It does not matter if you are caught in the grip of addiction of any kind. It does not matter if you’ve been pretending to follow Jesus for years without having ever actually given your life to Him and no one but you in your most honest moments have been the wiser. No matter how far from God you feel or even actually are, you can be made right with Him in Jesus. Jesus came to save us from sin while we were still in it.
When Jesus came, it was not a grand stepping down from on high to lift us out of our brokenness with some grand gesture. He did something far more powerful and far more impressive than that. He entered into our brokenness to bear it with us. He entered this world as a helpless, little baby so that He could make us whole again from the inside out. He entered fully into our experience of life, got it absolutely right, and opened a pathway for us to get it right too if we’ll just follow Him. And all of this while we were fat and miserable in our sin. In fact, as a reward for all His efforts, we killed Him. But that was God’s plan all along: to make Him the sacrifice we couldn’t make so that we could have the life we didn’t deserve. Jesus came to save us from sin while we were still in it.
There are two things you need to do in response to all of this; actually three. The first is to make sure that you are following Jesus. He was born for you. If you want the life that is truly life instead of whatever else you are living now, He’s the way you can have it. It won’t be instant or easy, but it will be good. And you’ll never take a single step of this journey on your own. Jesus came to save you from your sin even though you are still in it. The second thing you need to do is to share this news with someone else who needs to hear it. This is news too good to keep to yourself. So don’t. Share it with a friend. Invite someone to come and join you in hearing about it here. If you are already following Jesus yourself, this is your command from Him. Don’t keep the life the baby born at Christmas brought with Him to yourself. Jesus came to save us from sin while we were still in it. Be a part of that mission in your own life. And third, have a very, merry Christmas.