“Fear of Joy”

Scripture Lesson: II Corinthians 5:17-19

Sermon Transcript for December 28, 2008

By Pastor Bob Coleman

The gift that you have given us is profound and yet simple. It is as deep and as wide as life itself and it is straight before us – your love. You give us your love in the form of Jesus, the Christ, born in Bethlehem. May we return our love to you in a simple and straightforward way that we can do so in service, in generosity, in our spirit, in our lives. Let us do so in the name of Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Well, it’s over – Christmas that is. Aren’t you a little relieved? Ok, come on. Four worship services on Christmas Eve, about 650 in attendance. From my perspective, whew, I’m done! And yet we still speak of the joy of Christmas. This is the Christmastide. The Epiphany on January 6th. Odell was asking me before hand, “Aren’t there 12 or 13 days following Christmas?” Yes, that’s the 12 days of Christmas. The idea is to continue the celebration, most of us who are ready to take a break. We speak of the joy of Christmas, but yet, honestly, if we are honest with ourselves, it’s hard to carry that kind of joy throughout the rest of the year. You can’t live at that level all of the time. You definitely don’t want all of those relatives coming in every week. In the back of our minds, we hope there is a break somewhere. And yet our hearts might have a fear – what if that joy was to continue? That’s why I titled it, “Fear of the Joy”. Because, see, the joy would mean we would have to live out what we are saying throughout Advent. We would have to live out those words that we have been saying in song and in worship. Most of us, somewhere in the back, have this piece of memory which we would like to forget. It might be a broken relationship, an unforgiven sin. In fact, we actually fear the joy because if we did live in that joy all year round it would make a radical change for our lifestyle. It’s much easier to sort of get back in the groove of what we did before after we go through the Christmas time. When we understand that we and others would have to change and what that change would mean, even Christians in good spirit will back off a bit from that kind of joy.

Maybe your joy is a joyous moment when you slump in your chair and say, “I’m glad all that shopping and returns are over”. And maybe if they had been, you can have that kind of relief. But truthfully, your Christmas shopping is not over. Not your spiritual Christmas shopping. All those things that you bought, wrapped, given, taken back, whatever, that’s just a small part of your life. The ongoing shopping of Christmas means to understand that there are more presents to be opened. But these are not ones we go out and purchase. They are ones that God gives us. We will spend our lifetimes, in fact, shopping for some of those everlasting, meaningful--love and peace and joy. It may be that Christmas this year for your soul has made you tired of all of the external things. As well it should. There are some people who keep shopping for the “things” in life or even religion on the outside. The experience is fleeting and will never be possible to be lived fully and completely because all those external things do not fill the hole that we find in our heart that comes from broken relationships. For there is one item on your spiritual shopping list still to be received. It’s called “reconciliation”.

Last week I talked about it relative to the meaning of financial reconciliation, keeping in balance your life in that way. Let’s go a little deeper today and talk about life’s endless spiritual shopping trip to find reconciliation between ourselves and God, between ourselves and others. For the Bible says that we are to find ourselves at the feet of Jesus to know that we are made by and for His glory. In God’s own words we are not complete without Jesus. And somehow we know that at the heart of the matter.
We have been incomplete since our creation as long as God is not in our life. God has been pursuing us and we’ve been avoiding Him. God’s been missing our presence because we have been running our own lives. And yet we know, if we are honest, that we have broken God’s laws--Relationship with others, we have hurt and damaged others and we have been hurt and damaged by others. It is what goes along with life. Some action on your part or the part of others may seem to be unforgivable. You may not forgive others for what they’ve done to you and you may not forgive yourself for what they’ve done to others.

But yet our Scripture for this morning, from II Corinthians, Paul is trying to share with us the depth of this gift of reconciliation. Starting in Verse 17 it says, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone; the new has come. 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 and Christ, not counting men’s sins against them, and he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” Moving on in that same passage it says, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors as though God were making His appeal through us.”

Those are powerful words. Paul shares it in that way. Jesus Christ even said it before Paul when he said it in this way in Mathew 5:23-25, “Therefore, if you are offering your gifts at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your gift.” How many of us seriously follow that spiritual journey--that before we present our offering to God at the altar, we settle those matters? We need not fear the joy of Christmas when it brings healing through reconciliation. But, honestly, some of us do.

Last week, reconciling ourselves to external matters of finances is one thing and one action. But today as it says in Colossians I:21-22, “Once you are alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior, but now He, God, has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to the present and to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation. If you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.” Those are wonderful words. They are based upon that God has taken the action and we are to receive the joy of that action. But then we must live in that action. You can not accept the gift of God’s gift and not live it out fully for it to be fully appreciated and to impact your life.

You see, the word reconciliation is like love. It has some depth and meaning to it and some vibrancy which we must bring again and anew into our lives. The word has a beautiful ring to it even in the terms of human life. Marriages that have been scarred by bitterness and distance and hurt, and even divorce, somehow, someway reconciliation needs to be brought. For friends who have fallen out from their relationship with each other, for parents and children who are now not speaking or visiting and definitely not loving each other but live in a broken, hostile, and painful relationship. Reconcilliation is God’s offer to us to accept and live out what God has already done for us. Because it is more than just healing the past--it is reuniting those who have been estranged so that the state of hostility is gone and enmity is removed. Then we can live in a world of peace.

You see, we pray for peace in this world and don’t want to pay the price of peace. We want someone else to settle it. We want wars to stop, we want people to quit arguing, we want genocide to stop in both spiritual and physical ways. But it takes work to do that. The scriptures speak to us of reconciliation between God and human beings. It was not a simple matter on God’s part. God stepped forward and took the choice to become a human being and to live our lives and to sacrifice through His Son in that mysterious way for us to know the joy of Christmas.

For the joy of Christmas is to prepare to live Christmas daily by accepting God’s reconciliation—the first step. The joy of Christmas is to prepare to live Christmas daily by seeking reconciliation with others in this life--those whom you have wronged; those who have wronged you. The joy of Christmas is to prepare to live Christmas daily to be an ambassador for Christ by encouraging others to be reconciled with God through Christ. Do you see the steps? The first is to receive God. The second is to mend those fences that have been broken between you and others. Or might we say, in our terminology, to build that bridge back that’s been destroyed. And then to help others to do so. Those are the actions that are before us that help us to not fear the joy of Christmas but to live it out fully. We need not fear the joy of Christmas when it brings healing through reconciliation.

Last week, to remind you, I shared with you the sacrament of reconciliation in the Catholic tradition and orthodox—conversion, confession, and celebration. When reconciliation is fully lived out there is a celebration beyond words. It is a deep and meaningful one. Just look at the record of what’s taken place in the truth and reconciliation court-like bodies that assembled in South Africa following the dismantling of apartheid. There was great animosity and fear and hatred built up over not just generations but centuries. The whites, basically, were in charge and control and the blacks were not in control and at the bottom of the rung. And terrible things had been done. Anyone who felt, though, that they were a victim of that violence, they were invited to come forward and to be heard. And even the perpetrators of violence were given an opportunity to give their testimony and even request amnesty from persecution. It was held time and time and time again and the miraculous experience of watching reconciliation take place—and it is miraculous—because it takes the power of God to make it possible.

We saw it happen, it can happen, it does happen. It happens because we trust in the spirit of God’s reconciliation. For the church was the leadership of that. The spiritual body of Christ was there to help that take place. Just think what it might be some day for Shiites and Sunnis to sit down across from each other and declare what went wrong but seek amnesty and forgiveness. What if we could do that with Al-Qaeda and Taliban? Maybe some day, with God’s power, that is even possible.

I watched a special program, and if you’ve not seen it, it’s called “Genocide”. The Public Television has produced it. Anyone else seen that? It’s not a pretty one to watch. Most people fear that word, “genocide”, as well we should. But if you want to watch it, see it as it explains generation after generation that that has been carried out in a variety of settings. But the one that I want to focus on was the account that Christiane Amanpour found taking place in the small country of Rwanda. If you don’t remember that, the genocide of nearly 800,000 people—Hutu’s and Tutsis. It doesn’t matter who was killing whom, by the way. But it was an all out war against the other. They were hacked to death for the most part. Machetes were the choice of weapons. Christiane Amanpour finds this woman who watched as a man killed her husband and her children and other members of her family. I believe it totaled about nine. She watched this man hack them to death in the middle of this insanity called genocide. And now ten years later, Christine Amanpour watched this woman prepare a meal inviting the man who had done this terrible deed into her home, sat him down at her table, and served him a meal. When asked why, how could she do this? She said, “I’m a Christian, it’s what Christ calls us to do. I needed to do this.”

Reconciliation, forgiveness, is first of all a gift to you, to the one who forgives. We can not carry it off, those burdens of broken relationships. It’s not spiritually healthy for us to do so. What a wonderful, powerful, and meaningful testimony of a woman who could sit down and serve that meal. Now were they hugging each other and in love in that way? No, at least not at that moment! The man who had committed that, with tears in his eyes said, “I don’t understand.” You see, that’s what we do when we face the joy of Christmas. We say to ourselves, we just don’t understand why God would do that? How in the world God could take such a step to come as a baby for us, for you, for me! But the world fears that kind of a joy. The world shies away from it, believes that we can do so in our own way. But ultimately, it has to be God’s way.

In just a few weeks, in coincidence of two days, when we remember one man who lived for peace and preached it, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We’ll remember his birthday on one day. And the next day we will have a new president. There is some message of reconciliation in that now today. We can have a man who is not white who is elected. That’s powerful enough in itself. It means there is potential for reconciliation because our past is terrible in that way. There is always the hope, and we must live in that hope. We must not fear the joy of God’s powerful spirit of forgiveness for us so that we might share that spirit of forgiveness with others, be forgiven, and to forgive. And then, as Paul says, and we are to be ambassadors to Christ meaning that we are to help others come to that table of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Do not fear the joy. Do not shy away from it. Do not find yourself troubled by the past when you need to really have it healed in the present. What a powerful gift God gives all people if we would but accept it. We must not fear the joy but live in it. So if you have a broken relationship in your past, and if it is at all possible for you to have that broken relationship healed, seek God’s help in that matter. Possibly seek another person of the faith to help you in that way so that they might be an ambassador. But do not wait hoping it will just go away. You need that forgiveness. You need to be forgiven. You need to offer forgiveness. For it is Christ’s way of having the joy in our hearts throughout the year.