Some children were asked to respond to questions about courtship, marriage and family and their answers remind us that children always hear and see more than we give credit for.  When asked what most people do on dates, ten-year-old Martin said, “On the first date, they just tell each other lies, and that usually gets them interested enough to go for a second date.”  When asked how to make a marriage work, ten-year-old Ricky said, “Tell your wife that she looks pretty even if she looks like a truck.”  Finally, when asked how to decide who you should marry, ten-year-old Kirsten said, “No person really decides before they grow up who they're going to marry.  God decides it all way before, and you get to find out later who you're stuck with.”  So, should we blame the family we’re stuck with on something God did to us or something we lied our way into over time?  What do you think?

Speaking for the Father of his own family, Jesus said, “‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.’”  Not the world the way his Father wished it was or planned for it to be.  But, the world the way it had actually turned out.  “‘God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him,’” Jesus went on to say.  Condemnation is about relating to someone based on what they’ve failed to be.  Saving is about loving them because that’s what you choose for them in spite of who they are and what they’ve become.  Condemnation is past-failure oriented.  Salvation is present-and-future-hope oriented.  Condemnation can only be done at a distance.  Saving can only be done up close and personal, face to face, flesh to flesh, heart to heart.

Just before Thanksgiving, a woman from another community that I’ve known for some twenty years phoned.  She and her husband raised their children in the church and they’ve become fine, upstanding people and leaders in their respective communities and churches.  My friend was calling to tell me that her daughter had come home to announce that she was a lesbian.  Mom now finds herself holding her Bible in one hand and her daughter in the other and wondering if loving one can only be done to the exclusion of the other. 

What would you have told her?  What would Jesus tell her, especially today, living in this very moment.  This is not the family she planned or hoped for, with small grandchildren stuck in the middle of it all.  But, it’s her family.  She’s discovering what it means when homosexuality is not just an issue but the person you’ve loved more than your own life since before they were they were born. 

When sin is just an issue, condemnation comes easy.  When sin becomes personal, you can only condemn what you don’t love and only if you’re willing to cut off a part of yourself in the process.  God did not send Jesus to condemn the world, the extension of his very being, but to save it.  Not the world the way he had planned it, but the world the way it was, the world the way it actually is, even now.

I’ve fallen in love all over again with 2 Corinthians 5 this Advent season.  Kind of like my mother-in-law’s turkey and dressing, I can’t get enough.  Going beyond seconds and thirds, the more I get, the more I want.  “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting (men’s sins) against them . . . he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:19, 21).”  God’s not keeping score based on our past.  That’s condemnation.  He has come, is coming, in Christ, to save us to live for him in this very moment and forever more.  In Christ, through Christ, God is loving this world, the way it is right now, even with you and me in it the way we are, right now.  Isn’t that something?!

God has come, in Christ, to save.  Nancy has a friend from Ft. Worth whose daughter just started driving on her own.  Not long ago she was driving to from Ft. Worth to Denton and called her mom at home to say that she was lost.  Her mom said, “O.K.  Don’t panic.  Just tell me what the next highway sign you see says.”  Seconds later, her daughter said, “Bridge may ice in cold weather.”  She was really lost!  And, not just because she didn’t know where she was, either.  All her mom could do, stuck at a distance, was send instructions over the phone and hope her daughter would find her way again. 

That’s the way it is, isn’t it?  Parents often find themselves stuck at a distance hoping their children will find their way again.  God, our heavenly parent, is not so handicapped.  Not standing at a distance, but coming close in Christ, he climbed into, literally “enfleshed” himself into, our sin and lostness with us.  He made our sin his and removed the wrath of God on us because of sin by absorbing it into himself until it killed him, to bring us back home to our Father.

We’re fairly familiar with that, that God loved the world and that he took the world’s sin on himself; we’re far more comfortable discussing sin as an issue.  It’s when sin has a name, it’s someone we know, that the condemnation-to-salvation chemistry gets tough.

Several weeks ago Kenny Wood filled the pulpit for me one Sunday.  Kenny is a recovering alcoholic and psychotherapist who practices in McAllen.  He preaches for me on occasion because, in my opinion, he has a clearer sense of the gospel than most preachers I’ve ever heard, not to mention one of the most creative styles.  No preacher is everyone’s cup of tea.  But, Kenny keeps my cup pretty full and I like to share that with you.  Anyway, the next week, before church started, a dear lady stopped me and said, “I don’t like it when he preaches here.  He’s an alcoholic.”  I said, “He hasn’t had a drink in seven years.”  (Which is more than I can say for some Baptists I know.)  She said, “I know, but it comes up in every sermon.”  I had actually listened to his sermon and pointed out that he had not said a word about it.  She said, “I know, but it’s just always there.” 

I asked her permission to tell this story because I wanted to ask you.  Who sits in these pews on Sunday morning?  Is this church full of people who are living exactly like God planned for them or is this church full of people whose lives are broken and wounded by sin right now?  Not sin past and distant but today’s sin.  Sin yet unconquered.  Every sin imaginable.  How many would we have to name until we got to your personal sin?  My questions is, if they, if we, can’t come here and hear a gospel, from someone who has experienced it first hand, a gospel about our Father in heaven who does not condemn us but moves into our sin with us to save us, then where, pray tell, where will we go to hear it?  The Lion’s club?  Jaycees?  PTA?  All great organizations with their own stories.  But, no one else has this story, this gospel story, this gospel that saves and transforms and rebirths dead people, but the church.  And, we are the church.  This is where we tell the story, and live it out, too.

This church is not full of people whose lives have turned out exactly like God originally intended.  It is full of people who come from the world that is broken by sin but that God loves anyway.  It’s one thing to believe that God loves “‘the world,’” in a universal sense, but when the conversation shifts from “‘the world,’” to “‘whosoever (KJV)’” it gets a little personal, doesn’t it?  But, getting ready for Jesus means loving this world, not the world we hope will someday be, but this world, in this very moment, the way it is.  Because that’s the world God does not condemn.  It is the world he loves, the world Jesus died for.  The world, it so happens, you and I both inhabit. 

Seen from that perspective, there is only one possibility of condemnation left to us.  To reject the love that is our only hope is the highest act of self-condemnation. “‘Those who do not believe in him are condemned already, because they have not believed in the’” only one who loves them absolutely, without limit.  We’re the only ones left who can do the work of condemnation.  We can condemn ourselves.  We can condemn others.  But, God isn’t in the condemnation business.  He’s in the saving business.  Do you believe that, for yourself and others?

It’s easier preached than lived.  After getting back from being with Nancy’s family in Tennessee for Thanksgiving, someone asked me how it went.  I emailed back, “Being with family over the holidays is a lot like getting a pack of stray dogs together in too small a place for a while.  It becomes something of a laboratory for seeing if the gospel I preach to my larger church family has taken root enough in my own life to affect the way I relate to my smaller stray dog family.  As a rule, I walk away realizing I need to be more deeply rooted.” 

My roots went just a little deeper over Thanksgiving.  While we were in Tennessee, we all gathered in a rural mountainside chapel that commemorates the birthplace of the first Cumberland Presbyterian Church in the United States for a wedding.  It was cold.  We moved in close, snuggling with some people we barely knew.  We moved in close to love this young couple into their new life together.  My brother-in-law, the only other preacher in the family, an amateur blacksmith and a decent wordsmith, too, had these words read over them as they shared their vows.  It’s his paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13.  His life didn’t turn out like he planned, either.  These words have been worked out on the anvil of his own failure with the hammer of God’s eternal commitment to love him.  Would you go with me, back to that chapel, for just a moment?  Listen to what he told my niece and her groom, just getting blended into the family himself.  Better yet, would you read them with me?

“Love is slow to lose patience, it looks for a way to be constructive, it is not possessive, it is not anxious to impress, nor does it pursue selfish advantage.  It is not touchy, it does not keep record of wrongs, or gloat over the faults of others, on the contrary, it is glad when truth prevails.  Love knows no limits to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope.  It can outlast anything.  It is, in fact, the only thing that still stands when all else has fallen.”

That kind of love is traceable right back to the cross, where the Son of our heavenly Father died.  Died for us to make us part of God’s family so that family wouldn’t feel like something we’re stuck with but a place where love knows no limits to its endurance, no fading of its hope.  A family where, when all else has fallen, even our dreams of turning out like we hoped, love is still left standing.  Do you believe that?  Will you?