Sermon January 1, 2012

Galatians 4:4-7

4But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. 6And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

“In the Fullness of Time”

New Year’s Day is an odd holiday. All our other holidays mark some occasion. Christmas--the birth of Jesus. Veterans Day--the signing of the treaty that ended WWI. Independence Day--the birth of our nation. But New Year’s Day just marks…time.
Have I ever told you the story of my father and the Rose Bowl?
I’m reminded of a member of a church I served who lived to be 104. He would tell stories about World War I and his wife would stop him, and say, “Harold, he’s heard that story before.”
And Harold would look at me and ask, “But you’d like to hear it again, wouldn’t you?”
So, if I’ve told the story of my father and the Rose Bowl, I’m assuming that you’d like to hear it again!
Here it goes. My father played on the 1939 football team at the University of Tennessee. This team was unbeaten, untied, unscored-upon. And at the end of their regular season, they got an invitation from Pasadena to come and play in the Rose Bowl against the Pacific Coast Conference--which would be decided by a game between USC and UCLA.
The team voted unanimously to accept the invitation if they were to play USC, but to decline if their opponent would be UCLA.
Well, USC beat UCLA and the Tennessee team got walloped in the Rose Bowl 13-0. But, my father got to play in the Rose Bowl!
Do you know why his team refused to play UCLA. UCLA had one black player on its roster, a man named Jackie Robinson.
Robinson would go on to break the color barrier in baseball in that decade--but he couldn't break the color barrier in Southern Football.
It wasn’t the right time.
The word time is translated from two Greek words--Kairos & Chronos. Chronos means clock time. Calendar time. The passage of seconds, minutes, hours, days and so on. Kairos means God’s time. The right time. God’s moment. It has nothing to do with days, months, years, decades. It’s the pace at which God works.
In today’s passage, the two concepts come together as Paul writes, “In the fullness of time, God sent his son…” In other words, God’s time and calendar time came together for the birth of Jesus Christ in the “fullness of time.” The right time.
The Nicene Creed gets its affirmation here about Jesus that he was both fully human and fully God at the same time. The human part is particularly strong here. Let’s look at the Nicene Creed at number 358 in your hymnal. By the way, Disciples are a non-creedal church not because the creeds aren’t good documents--we are non-creedal because we don’t believe they make good tests of fellowship. Look at the second paragraph which is all about the person of Jesus. The first part of that paragraph is all about how Jesus is God. The second part of that paragraph is mostly about him being fully human. God in human form. God born of a woman. God as one of us. God to redeem us.
And because we have been redeemed, we are adopted as children of God.
Galatians was written to a group of churches which were struggling with what it meant to be truly children of God. They had been told by some teacher that is nameless that in order to be children of God, they had to keep Jewish law and customs in order to be saved.
Paul writes the letter to the Galatian churches to keep them from thinking they are under the law. That now they, and we are redeemed by grace.
This whole passage is about God’s actions to save. Not one sentence is about what we have to do. And that’s what grace is. God’s love made possible for us.
Paul continues that God sends the spirit of Christ into our hearts so that we can address God as Abba, Father. Abba is the Aramaic word for a familiar relationship--literally, Daddy. That’s the kind of relationship that Jesus’ spirit gives us with God--children of a beloved and loving father.
The last verse of our reading tells the Galatian churches and us that we are no longer slaves to the law, but that we are children of God. And slaves don’t have rights of inheritance, children do.
And all of this is God’s doing. We don’t do any of it. We are heirs to the kingdom of God--in God’s good time.
Speaking of God’s time, we began with a story about racism and exclusion--which is never right in God’s time, but it was what it was in 1939.
Flash forward thirty years to 1970. My father and mother and I were worshipping in the church where I grew up, and in walks Alice Douglas. Alice was a large black woman with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. She walked right up the aisle and sat next to my father. Right next to him. Always polite, my father looked at her and smiled, then looked at my mother with a look of panic in his eyes. This was an all white church and things like this did not happen.
But it did.
And when the communion trays were passed, Alice took the bread tray, snapped off a piece of the matzoh, and she ate it. And then, she passed the tray to my father.
He paused for a moment--a moment in God’s time--and something happened to him. Football couldn’t cross the color line in the 1930s, but the Spirit of God’s Son placed in my Daddy’s heart by God and nourished by bread and the cup crossed the line in my father. He snapped off a piece of the very same matzoh that Alice had had in her hand, and he ate it.
Something happened to him in that moment--God’s moment. It wasn’t of his own doing, that’s for sure. God’s grace called to him across the years by means of the communion bread and changed his heart
And all of this because God, in the fullness of time, became one of us so that his spirit lives on in our hearts--giving us much to live up to as we look around us with eyes of the Spirit within us.
Being a follower of Jesus Christ is not a spectator sport, rather it involves awareness of God’s moments which are placed before us, giving us opportunities to say “yes” to the Spirit.
What do you think?