2nd Christmas, Year B
John 1: 1-18
This is the sermon I offered this morning at First Congregational UCC in Eugene, Oregon. The closing mediation is from the book Rhythm of Peace. You can learn more about it and its author at http://www.rhythmofpeace.org
The calendars are giving us several events to work with this morning:
On the Gregorian calendar (what some in our society call the “secular calendar”) this is the first Sunday of the New Year–a day on which we might look forward to the remaining 361 days of 2009 with hope and expectation. 361 open squares on the calendar waiting to be filled. There’s something very satisfying about the look of a wide open calendar.
On the liturgical calendar, today is the Second Sunday after Christmas. This year the twelve days between Christmas Day and the Feast of the Epiphany stretch over two Sundays instead of one, so we get to hold onto the image of hope made real in the Christ Child and sing a couple more Christmas hymns together before the greens come down until later this year.
The liturgical calendar also gives us Epiphany on January 6th. In most ways of reckoning the liturgical calendar in the West, Epiphany is a Principal Feast, a feast with the same magnitude in the life of the Church as Christmas and Easter. So today, we’re anticipating Epiphany by welcoming the wise men into our midst. These mysterious visitors bearing exotic gifts give us–along with Mary–much to ponder in our hearts about the identity of this child Jesus.
These are three powerful sacred moments to be converging all on one Sunday, don’t you think? Can you feel the energy in the air? The expectation? The wonder? To me it feels like that windy moment right before a thunder storm when you can feel the electricity building in the air.
In the midst of this electric expectancy, we hear the familiar words of the Prologue to John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John’s way of telling the Christmas story takes us to the beginning of everything we see, and hear, and know; the beginning of our temporal reality.
In poetry (which may, in fact, be an early Christian hymn text) the author of John paints a picture of the Word–the Christ–who was present with God and, indeed, was God at the dawn of Creation.
Then the Word does something unthinkable–the perfect Word takes on imperfect flesh and lives as one of us, bridging forever God’s realm and our realm.
Why aren’t you gasping in disbelief? I was really hoping for gasps or at least a “Wow” filled with awe.
Perhaps we know this story too well. I think we really do take it for granted that taking on flesh and dwelling among us is a reasonable activity for the Eternal Creator of everything.
For the original hearers of this concept, the idea that God would incarnate God-self as a human being was an idea that turned their world-view on its head. It went against the way they believed their reality was put together.
The Greek world at this time embraced Plato’s explanation of reality. It’s like the Allegory of the Cave from Philosophy 101: Plato says that we live in the shadow world. Our reality is but a shadow of the perfect world that is projected on the wall of our cave. This is not unlike when Paul writes in 1st Corinthians, “For now we see in a mirror dimly….”
What John is saying is that the Word of God, the Christ, the aspect of God that can exist as a physical being, chose to leave that perfect realm and step into the cave with us, sit down next to us and say, “I’m here to illuminate this cave with my light, uniting the perfect realm of God with your dark little cave. Do you want to help me get the lights turned on in here? Together we can change the world for ever.”
As I was preparing for this sermon, I really longed to be more articulate in physics or philosophy so that I could find a way to express in our world view a law of the universe so basic that it would seem unbelievable for even God to break that law to demonstrate the extent of Divine love for us and Divine hope for our world.
The more I sat with this puzzle that I wanted to solve, the more I realized that the original story is still fantastic enough to challenge us.
Emmanuel–God with us. God with us. Whatever images we use to express it, this concept, this reality will always violate the spacetime continuum of the human way of seeing the world.
I talk to people everyday–we all do–who believe that God is remote and inaccessible. We all have moments of saying, “why is God doing this to me?” Deep down, it’s far easier to believe that we’re basically alone in this earthly life. A woman who is experiencing the transformative power of God in her life right now said to me recently, “Mostly, I just can’t believe that God wants to pay this much attention to me.”
The 361 wide open squares on our 2009 calendars will gradually be filled with celebrations, failures, victories, tragedies and mostly, as Janet reminded us last Sunday, the normal routines of our everyday life. Today’s gospel lesson is about knowing that God is equally present in all of these events and, more importantly, that God is equally present in every human being.
The eternal Word becoming incarnate in the person of Jesus bridges for all time the separation between God’s realm and our realm. It was–and always will be–a revolutionary way of understanding the relationship between God and humanity. The wise men felt it, I believe, just as much as they were guided by a star, they felt the shift in the fabric of the universe, immediately traveling to the source of this new reality. John the Baptist felt it, too, and immediately began trying to put into prophetic words and actions what it means to live as witnesses to the light.
We–like the wise men and John the Baptist–are called to respond. We are called to pay homage. We are called to live as witnesses to the fact that there’s no separation between God and humanity. There’s no division between secular calendars and sacred calendars. Our whole lives are illuminated by the light of God, making us bearers of that light at any time and in any place that threatens to put out the light. The wise men and John the Baptist invite us to join the revolution that began the moment the Word put on our flesh, calling us to be God’s hands and feet in the world.
This Christmas season, the cry for Peace on Earth, seems particularly profound. A friend enclosed this meditation on imagining a world at peace in her Christmas card this year. To my ears it captures the revolutionary way of thinking about the world that the gospel calls us to embrace.
Imagine a World at Peace
Where governments respect the rights of all their citizens and settle disputes by the rule of law for the common good.
Where all people have food, shelter and access to medical care, and children are born into and raised by healthy families and communities.
Where literacy and education for all are accomplished facts.
Where economic practices create well being for all stakeholders, including communities and the environment.
Where beauty, the arts, and media inspire the best in people.
Where the benefits of science and technology enhance all circles of life.
Where tolerance and appreciation of diverse religious beliefs are the rule, spiritual practice is encouraged, and reverence for life is fostered.
Where the earth in all her beauty is treasured and its resources utilized sustainably, for this and future generations.
This is a World at PEACE.
You are a Pathway to Peace.
While I’m having all of these thoughts about belief vs. trust, I’ve been reading Matthew Fox’s classic theological work Original Blessing. This isn’t a recent work and it’s been on my “to read” stack for far too long. Simply put, I’m captivated.
