Balancing Grace and Truth
Sermon Reflection || Year C: Second Sunday After Christmas
In following the lectionary, I’ve ran into a few situations where a really awesome reading was going to be skipped because of the way our preaching schedule works, so I’ve found myself moving things around a few times a year.
This year, John 1:1-18 was falling on a Sunday that I wasn’t preaching, and I just couldn’t let the passage slip through my fingers, so I effectively sent the Holy Family into a manger and moved the second Sunday after Christmas to the first.
You can still read that sermon on the Holy Family here:
Sermon—December 29th || Year C: Second Sunday After Christmas
Sermon Text
Video
Reflection
During the discussion part of the sermon just before our song leading into communion, one of my friends brought up John’s description of Jesus as being “full of grace and truth.” She made the point that we need to balance grace and truth in our lives. Sometimes we can emphasize grace to the point that we stop worrying about truth, and, more often than that in my tradition, we can emphasize truth to the point that grace is virtually nonexistent.
I think she’s on to something here, but I also think we can even let balancing grace and truth get out of hand.
But we need to ask that question Pilate asked, a question to which he assumed there was no answer: what is truth?
When we think of “truth,” we may think of a list of facts or propositions. We may even think of those who do or don’t accept those facts and how we relate to them on the basis of their ascension to those facts.
If this is what John meant by truth, then grace only falls upon those who have the right ideas, the right interpretations, and the right understanding, and our fellowship, then, is limited to a select few.
In a system like this, grace is only as wide as our mental capacity to understand a chunk of information.
Truth, in the gospel of John, is Jesus. Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life…” (John 14:6).
We might ask, “The truth about what?”
Well as our text for today says, he is the Truth concerning who God actually his. His glory is the Father’s glory, and he reveals or explains the Father to us.
It is his life that is Truth. When we see Jesus, we see the Father, and if we want to know who the Father is, all we have to do is look at the Son.
When we understand truth in this way, then we’ll realize that we can’t help but have grace upon grace because the God revealed by Jesus is Love.
And that is the only thing I wish I would have said differently yesterday.
Creative Process
This is one of those Sundays where I wished I had spent more time wrestling with the text so I could have caught that bit about grace and truth. Like I said in the very first lines of the sermon text, it’s easy to skip over important things in passages we memorized as children.
The creative process for this one was pretty straightforward. With all of the Christmas parties and visits we had over the last week, I decided to stick to a simple expository sermon. I just went verse by verse through the passage and offered some light commentary.
There were no fireworks or creative slides, just a guy with his Bible.