John 1:1-18

   

The omens, as we go into the new year, are gloomy.  APeace on earth,@ the angels sang.  But where?  Not today, in at North Korea, Iraq or Bethlehem.

 

AGood will@ we also sang a week or so ago.  Not in Congress. We look for a model there of mutual respect and compromise, and find instead a spitting contest that passes for civil discourse.

 

A>Tis the season to be jolly.@ But the light isn=t shining in our neighbors=BTom and Kim Sweet=sBdarkness, with Katie dead, skinny as a skeleton. 

 

AStrikes for us now the hour of grace.@ Yes, we sang that too.  But there wasn=t much grace, let alone compassion, when Bishop Thomas McCormack, bishop of Manchester,  suggested in a deposition made public Christmas Eve that it was less serious for a priest to have sex with someone outside the parish than with a parishioner.

 

So we wonder.  Can anyone, born and raised in a scientific century, believe that all this lovely mythology of AFirst Noel@ and ASilent Night@ can really say something of supreme importance to the actual world we live in?

 

Some years ago we adopted a Cambodian family, Buddhists all.  At their first Christmas we invited them to come to St. Peter=s for midnight Holy Eucharist.  They all came forward with us to stand around the altar.  We knew we couldn=t exclude them when they came forward.  I left that issue to God.  FloraBshe of whom I am the husbandBwas their adopted mother and earlier had explained to them about the virgin called Mary, the baby in a cow shed, the star in the sky and three wise men westward leading.  Their faces, she later reported, were masks of blank incomprehension.^[i] 

 

I received two books this Christmas.  Brianna Johnson gave me one called, Hey, God, a collection of funny letters to God.  Thanks, Brianna.  One of the letters in the book is from a young woman, named Liesl: ADear God,  I wonder if that Virgin Birth story flew the first time around.  No one=s buying it now for sure.@ 

Thanks, Liesl, but I think you are wrong.  Here=s why.

 

The other book I received this Christmas was from a Muslim friend.  The book is about a Sufi poet,  Nasir Khushraw, who was born a thousand years ago.  In one of his poems Nasir picks up a verse in the Qu=ran that goes, AWhithersoever you turn, there is the Face of God.@  That means, he goes on, that no matter in which direction you turn, Athe power and wisdom of God are manifest everywhere.@  Thanks, Nasir Khushraw, for pointing us to the heart of the Christmas story.

 

We heard again this morning at the end of the Gospel the words, ANo one has ever seen God.  It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father=s heart, who has made him known.@

 

All of us know what it was like to come in to a room this Christmas.  Your heart lifted up when you saw the twinkling lights and the decorations on the tree, the gaudy glory of it all.  But without the tree, the lights and decorations areBembellishments.  They are rich and bright, but they exist for the sake of the tree.  They have meaning only when they are connected to the tree.

 

So many of the stories we tell at Christmas are like thatBshepherds having visions in the heavens, kings in Renaissance robes, right out of central casting.  They are all glorious embellishments.  The heart of the Christmas storyBthe tree on which all the embellishments are laidBis right there in the prolog of St John=s Gospel.  Incarnation.  God=s assuming our human flesh.  That=s the center to which all the stories point.

 

Verse 1. In the beginning was the Word.  Fourteen billion years ago, when the whole universe was compacted into a sphere approximating to a golf ball in size, the Word was one with God and the Word was God.  And since that eternal Word took human form in Jesus, we come to realize that the Jesus we call on in worship was not just a rabbi from the boondocks of Judea but, as Christ, is our living connection with the eternal Word of God, the elemental force implicated in cosmology from quasars to quarks and biology from the primeval soup to stem cell research.

Verse 14. And the Word was made flesh and lived among us.  This means that if you want to see the Face of God, the place to look is Jesus.  No one ever put it better than English poet, William Blake:

 

For mercy has a human heart,

Pity a human face,

And Love, the human form divine

And Peace, the human dress.

 

Verse 18.  No one has ever seen God.  It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father=s heart, who has made him known.  C. S. Lewis was a professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University.  He met the Jewish writer, Joy Davidman.  He said to her once, AI started living when I started loving you, Joy.@  What if, instead of making God a theological puzzle, we began to think of God rather as the one to whom we can say, AHey, God!  I started living when I started loving you.@

 

Let=s end by bringing John 1:14 down to some earthly practicalities.

 

1.  The Incarnation means that we will treat every bodyBevery human buddyBnot as a thing to be abused, cheated or manipulated, but as an image of God to be honored and respected.  Hear this gospel well, you bishops who overlook the abuse of children, and you Protestant pastors whose hidden lives do not bear public scrutiny.  If God Almighty assumed our human nature, then every human nature has something in it of the divine.  Every human nature.  Gay, straight, white, yellow, Trent Lott and Saddam Hossein.  Saddam?  Yes.  For doesn=t Jesus tell us to love our enemies?  I think we=d love him best, not if we killed him, but if we caught him and put him our to pasture on one of the Solomon Islands.

 

2. The Incarnation means that we will pay attention also to the body politic.  Because each of us is baptized, we are committed as Christians to strive for justice and peace among all people.  Every Christian should be involved in some form of political or social activity that is good for the body politic.