F. Harry Daniel
Second Presbyterian Church
Sermons: December 10, 2006

"He Rules the World with Truth and Grace"

The world has many problems this Christmas. Doesn't it need strength and power to set it right? Do you remember those old cowboy movies where at the end the good guy used all his power and strength to coerce and overcome the bad guy? Or all those war movies in which our side annihilated the other side? Violence was justified, was it not, to set things right! The dark times of disorder, hunger, outrage over injustice, legitimate hatred, and well-founded wrath need strength and power, and if coercion is needed, so be it. Ruling by grace and truth doesn't seem very realistic.

We live in a world in which our best efforts are put into managing, knowing, ordering, controlling. We believe in power, restraint, coercion, and money. That's how the world works and how people relate to each other. Power is the capacity to bring about intended results. Force and threats of coercion by various forms of reward and punishment - now that works! That's realism! Persuasion has to be tried of course, but power is the trump card, especially the power of money. But isn't there still anger, manipulation, jealousy, bitterness, silence, injustice, and neglect. Somehow when we have done all that power-stuff, the situation returns. Such efforts leave us hopeless and fatigued because they depend on our own resources and systems, interests and definitions. Deep down we don't want to be treated that way.

And yet we want God to do the same thing: to use power, to coerce, to compel. We transfer to God our ways of doing. And when God doesn't act that way, we wonder if it’s worth it. Doesn't coercion advance the good and limit the wrong? Where is our good guy riding that horse to annihilate evil and wrong? But God doesn't do it that way. God rules with truth and grace. God knows that the method by which something is done is as important as what is done. We tell ourselves other forms of power, discernment, and accountability seem more trustworthy and effective. But Christmas proclaims that truth and grace override every notion of realism and politics.

The gospel proclaims: this world is ruled with truth and grace. God trusts us to recognize and welcome truth and grace. We know better than we do, and we do better than we know. Is that not a mark of truth and grace? Power, coercion, they are external. They don't change us where we need to be changed. They do not speak to our urgent questions, the facts of sin and guilt, tragedy and loneliness, the need to have and to belong. They do not reach us where our hearts ache, in what to hope for, in the pathos of our suffering, in the clamor for freedom and justice, in the meanness of racial prejudice, in the barriers of suspicion and mistrust. Our struggling, agonizing history is in search of meaning and ultimate redemption that neither we, nor any other human beings, can produce. That is the goal of truth and grace.

Truth and grace recognize the woundedness of the whole creation, including each one of us. Coercion can't deal with woundedness. Truth and grace affect internal change. They provide not push, but pull. On the whole people don't achieve great heights out of a sense of duty. Force may be able to compel them to maintain certain minimum standards by stressing duty, but the highest of achievements, moral and spiritual, depend not upon a push, but a pull. People must be charmed into righteousness. We know how much easier it is to admire an ideal character than to emulate it. We know how easy it is to be committed to the cross in principle, but escape it in practice. We know that sincerity is no substitute for intelligent understanding. Truth and grace beckon us onward. Like music, they lure us beyond ourselves into dreams of the future, of other possibilities. Only truth and grace can give meaning and significance to the countless forgotten persons and unmarked graves of history.

Truth and grace teach us that God can only rightly be understood as the One who makes no distinction between friend and foe, who lets the sun shine and the rain fall on the just and the unjust, who bestows divine love even on the unworthy (and who is not unworthy?). Through such love human beings are encouraged and enticed to see themselves daughters and sons of this God and become sisters and brothers instead of continuing to be enemies. Only truth and grace can do that.

God made us wonderfully different and deals with us differently. Parents of more than one child know that while it may be admirable to try to treat all siblings alike from the standpoint of principle, in actual fact what is good for one child may do serious harm to another. Children are different from each other in disposition, abilities, interests, ways of seeing, stamina, and intelligence, and only truth and grace can take these differences into account. That is why God rules the way God does.

Millions are cold and hungry at this moment. Mighty nations are very much afraid and threatened. Factions struggle for power and vie for security and protection. You would have to bear in mind the needs of all manner of people, those who are secure and too callous, those who are adrift and afraid. And at Christmas the poignancy of suffering and the bitterness of strife bring sharpest pain. The diversity of human need is beyond all reckoning. What can be offered? A relief program? A formula? A book to illumine? A great anthem? An organization? A philanthropic foundation? These are quite important. But the best gift would be of a deeper kind. It would be a life once lived in Christ, and now lived again in us, by God's truth and grace.

God comes to us because God loves us. That coming expresses God's very nature. God waits for the right time to show us God's full heart, a heart we can trust for doing right for all from the beginning to the end. God came to us and comes to us because God loves us. That's the truth and that's the grace. God respects us. God shares and participates without dominating. God never forces God's love. God never coerces us the children. In Christmas God gives us a kind of life we can trust, a kind of love that finds us, a kind of salvation that frees life. In that kind of truth and grace God rules. We see what we were meant to be, and what we may yet be. And the rule is effective. God's will is a helpful, healing, liberating, saving will. God wills life, joy, freedom, peace, salvation, the final, great maturity of humankind: both of the individual and of humankind as a whole.

Even in the darkest times we have a right to expect some illumination. And it comes in the lives of human beings who know about the truth and grace, and who in their lives and their work kindle under almost any circumstances glorious light. When he was elected pope John XXIII was not even in the papal picture. There was no garment fitting his size. A compromise candidate, he was expected to be a provisional and transitional figure without consequences. But God's truth and grace rule. And John the pope teaches us that to be humble and gentle is not the same as weak and easygoing. As he said, In essential matters, unity; in doubtful matters, freedom; in all matters, charity. We know that in our relations with human persons there are things that we could never have discovered for ourselves unless some one else has shown them to us. We are not talking about facts, but about the unique qualities of a human life. Such people have been given a faith they do not have to carry, but which carries them. Theirs is the testimony that in the midst of all the uncertainties of life they have discovered that to which they may surrender themselves in complete trust. They have encountered a reality which gives them confidence that the universe is trustworthy. What they have known and experienced is something that they believe will hold firm in all the stresses and tests of life and prove stronger than death itself. Truth and grace rule!

For every fragment of truth grasped, more is offered pulling us into the future. For every grace received, more is given. We are won to a new attitude and outlook by grace and truth in Jesus Christ. We are held in the ultimate reality of God's sustaining and ordering love. We are creatures of God, trusting God, accepted by God, and living life faithful to God. This is the benevolent character of God in Christ: to give himself completely to us without considering his own interest and well-being. You don't explain it, nor can it be explained away. It happens! There is much that we don't and can't understand. But our lack of comprehension neither negates nor eliminates God’s love. Human categories of possibility or impossibility can't be allowed to determine the range of God's possibilities. Human categories result in barrenness, hopelessness, and death. With God new life is possible. Truth and grace call us to let what we know and consider possible to be reshaped by encounter with Jesus. We can't determine who Jesus is, but who we are must be determined by who Jesus is. God does not wish to negate, dominate, humiliate, bind, or paralyze. God wishes to affirm, enhance, respect, and liberate. Truth and grace recognize the primacy and reality of the love of God.

To what end does this rule by truth and grace lead? It cannot be imagined. The author of the book of Revelation attempts to describe it with evocative symbols, but ultimately even he must use a negative way of describing the future glory. In his last vision a sevenfold "no more!" underscores the imagery of what will be: the sea (symbol of chaos) will be no more, death will be no more, mourning will be no more, crying will be no more, pain will be no more, anything accursed will be no more, night shall be no more!

God came into a dark world with a strange light of grace and truth. The world is still dark, but the truth and grace still rules. It is still better to light that candle. As truth and grace give newness of life, the Christmas light trembles with the fairest radiance life affords and out of the darkness there still come voices in the night singing: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will...For unto you is born this day...a Savior, who is Christ the Lord." And our response? May it be: "He rules the world with truth and grace."