Gospel Reading: John 1:1-18
In the service of Lessons and Carols, the title for this reading, the last one is "St John unfolds the mystery of the incarnation"
That's a good image. Studying this passage to try and write about it felt like trying to find a route on a map sitting at a stop light: it kept unfolding and unfolding and went in all directions. Then, the light turned green - I needed to give the sermon, so I had to try and quickly fold it all back up again into ten minutes. So, I would urge you to go back and look at the whole map yourself also.
Thhis passage is incredibly dense and compact and also beautiful. That's what I love about great poetry. You can read it in less than a minute but then think about it your whole life. There is so much here to explore. I'm only going to talk about a little bit of it - mainly one sentence.
"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us."
The heart of the entire gospel is contained here: The Word was God. The Word became a man to show us God. The entire New Testament and libraries full of books have been written to expound on this simple, amazing idea. In this passage, it's distilled to one sentence.
The gospel of John is different in some ways from the other three gospels - Matthew, Mark and Luke. One difference is this style of expressing big, complex ideas in simple sentences. One obvious example is John 3:16.
In artwork, the four gospel writers are each represented by a traditional symbol. John's symbol is an eagle, because he has such sharp, clear vision and givs us a bird's eye view of how Christ is related to God and us and all of creation.
Imagine if you could ride on the back of a huge golden eagle, like Harry Potter riding the hippogriff. Gripping under its wings with your knees and leaning forward, you're lying flat on your stomach looking sstraight down as it circles high above the ground. The whole area is laid out under you like a map, the water a piece of wrinkled foil, big patches of green carpet, bright, snaky rivers and thin lines of highways. You can get a feel for where things are in relation to each other and what the land is like on a big scale.
Then the eagle spots his focus, wheels up sharply , folds his wings over your knees and rockets back toward the earth.
This is what the prologue to John's gospel does. It takes us way above the present to show us the scope of events from the beginning of the universe to now. We see the major features: God, the Word, creation, life, light shining into the darkness, the world, people. We get a glimpse of how these relate to each other on a big scale, and then the focus quickly narrows to Jesus as God's word embodied. The rest of the book explores this in depth.
Jesus was not the beginning of God revealing himself and his word to us, though. God has been speaking to mankind since creation, in many ways.
Throughout the Old Testament, God speaks to his people almost constantly. He met with them, he talked to them, he made promises to them, he sent messages through prophets, angels, dreams and signs. He sent them laws, judges, priests and kings.
His message, his Word, essentially was that he loved them and wanted them to respond by trusting him and being faithful to him. Some of the people God charged with delivering his message to the people of Israel presented it clearly, but others garbled it up, and some completely ignored it and led the people in the opposite direction. So God's people were not always his best messengers.
We hear in the Psalms and elsewhere that creation itself tells of God. Job talks about this - even though we normally think of Job complaining to God for not speaking, at one point, he says this about God being expressed in his works of creation:
He spreads out the northern skies over empty space;
he suspends the earth over nothing.
He wraps up the waters in his clouds, yet the clouds do not burst under their weight.
He covers the face of the full moon, spreading his clouds over it.
He marks out the horizon on the face of the waters for a boundary between light and darkness.
The pillars of the heavens quake, aghast at his rebuke...
And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him.
I recognized the tune on the news one night and looked up to see why they were playing it: the reporter was talking about John Glenn's first day back in space and said that he had asked the folks in ground control to play the song to wake him up that morning. It caught my breath to imagine him looking out the window of the space shuttle and listening to these words:
O cratered moon and sparrow's wings
Thunder's boom, Saturn's rings
Unveil our Father as you sing
And my soul wells up with Hallelujas
Jesus embodied both God and God's Word and made it visible and tangible.
It seems to me a little similar, if you've seen My Fair Lady to what Eliza Doolittle was asking when she says, "Words, words, words! I'm so sick of words....Don't talk of stars burning above; if you're in love, show me!"
The idea of a person embodying a word can seem abstract, but we actually use this idea a lot in regular conversation. How often have you heard or said something like:
"He always waits to the last minute. If you look up 'procrastinator' in the dictionary, it's got his picture next to it!"
"Sure, I'll wait another three weeks; 'patience' is my middle name."
"You'll never meet a nicer lady; she's kindness personified."
Jesus is both 'God' and 'God's Word' personified. In Jesus, God expressed his word of love in a new way. He embodied it in his Son and sent his Son to live with his people. In Jesus, people could see God with their eyes, hear God with their ears, and touch God with their hands. But this was still a hard connection for people to make.
While they were eating the Last Supper, Philip said to Jesus, "Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us." And Jesus said, "Don't you know me Philip, even after I have been among you for such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."
Philip may have expected seeing God would be like the Transfiguration - a mysterious, ethereal experience, with lights an clouds, and God would be sitting on a huge throne - and there are times in the Bible when encountering God was described like this. More often with Jesus, though, it was much simpler, like at that moment - conversation, dinner with close friends.
There's a relationship here between church on Christmas and church the week after Christmas.
Christmas is a big deal. It celebrates an amazing event - the Word becoming flesh. We put up special decorations; there's lots of music.. The week after is a bit of anticlimax. We're still talking about Christmas, still thinking about it, but things are starting to get back to their normal, everyday-ness.
The normal thing can seem less important than the extraordinary, but the odd part about the incarnation is that it elevated what had become ordinary by putting God inside it and making it holy. It's not that God is nothing more than the everyday. It's that God comes into the everyday stuff in our lives, making the small details significant, not pointless. That's the meaning of sacrament; it's what communion - and community - is about: God present in us, in our conversation, in our meals together, in everything.
God's word is everywhere revealed, and maybe that's why it sometimes seems invisible - it's hidden in plain sight because we don't realize what we're looking at.
Looking around this room, who would you say embodies 'patience' ?
Who personifies 'kindness'?
Who is the opposite of rude? Who is not easily angered?
Who always protects? Who always trusts? Who always hopes? always perseveres?
In the famous passge from Corinthians, this is how love is described. If we have people who personify these things, then we're on the way to embodying love, and that's quite close to embodying Christ, which is what the incarnation is all about.
Amen.
Given to Vidor Presbyterian 12/31/06There is no shortage of God around us. His fingerprints are everywhere, and through Christ, even human hearts are his temples. God speaks in words written, words spoken, words embodied. He's not trying to hide from us; he's made himself known in every possible way, even to the extent of becoming one of us and living here.Many current songs and hymns express this theme, too. Chris Rice wrote a beautiful song called "Hallelujahs"