SERMON Mandatory Word

Christmas 2 (2010): Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 147:12-20; Ephesians 1:3-14; John 1:1-18

Those of you who were here on December 20 for our beautiful service of lessons and carols will remember that the lessons began with the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. And after readings from the prophet Isaiah foretelling the savior's birth and after we had heard Luke's annunciation account and his and Matthew's two different but similar birth narratives, our service ended -- as these services always do -- with the familiar opening words of John's gospel. John's radically different nativity. John's "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Words that are always read on Christmas Day. Words that are always read today, the last Sunday of Christmas. Words that begin and end the Christmas season. Words that are inescapable.

Inescapable and puzzling. Really puzzling.

Think about it. Christmas is the time that we celebrate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. We celebrate the birth of a real baby. A baby -- and here you can forget Martin Luther in verse 2 of "Away in the Manger" -- a baby who cries. A baby who is circumcised and named when he is eight days old. A baby who has devout and religious parents who take him to the temple in Jerusalem for a special ceremony thirty-two days later because he is a first born son. A baby who is in every respect a real baby who will grow up to be the real man Jesus. Matthew's and Luke's gospels are all about a real baby.

John's gospel is an entirely different matter. There is no birth narrative. Instead of the story of a young Jewish family struggling with the birth, care, and safety of a real baby, John gives us a hymn about Word, and life, and light interspersed with historical references to John the Baptist. A hymn that is beautiful and moving, but acknowledged by all to be dense and hard to understand.

Just how difficult to understand was captured by N.T. Wright, my favorite New Testament Jesus scholar who is now a bishop of the Church of England. Bishop Wright did his earliest major work on St. Paul. In an essay, he describes how once at a job interview he held forth at great length about the writings of Paul. Then someone asked him about John. Deciding to be perfectly candid, he told the interviewer that he feels about John the way he feels about his wife. He loves her very much, but he cannot claim to understand her. He did not get the job.

And in many ways, I frequently have this problem understanding the Gospel of John. (Even though, unlike Bishop Wright, I do make claims for understanding my husband as well as loving him.) Part of my problem in understanding John goes way back. When I was in confirmation in the late 1950s, we had a very bright, energetic young pastor who shared with us the New Testament scholarship that he had learned in seminary in the late 1940s. I found this unbelievably exciting.

One of the things that my pastor shared at Bible Camp one of those confirmation summers was the then-current view that the author of John was a Greek, very anti-Semitic, maybe with dualistic gnostic tendencies. What we hear translated as "Word" -- the Greek word is logos -- is a term in Greek philosophy referring to thought or reason. Read in terms of Greek philosophy, John's "in the beginning was the Word" makes Jesus a sort of a logical and ordered abstraction in God's thought process. A blueprint for creation.

For some reason, this view of the Gospel of John made an impression and stuck. Later, as a philosophy major in college, I could see where this view was coming from. What's more, themes of light and darkness were certainly part of the dualism and secret knowledge that early Christian heretics known as "gnostics" believed in. All this made John pretty abstract and heavy-going. It also made Jesus pretty abstract and incomprehensible. Definitely not stable and manger material.

So what is it that makes John's "nativity" mandatory reading during Christmas -- what besides, of course, its beauty?

Oddly enough, it is the Word -- or the logos -- that makes it mandatory.

This is something I first discovered ten years after my Bible Camp days when I was in divinity school and concentrating in New Testament studies. As a result of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a new interest in Jewish wisdom literature, my professors were just realizing how very Jewish John is. And the core of what they discovered was pretty breathtaking. And, unlike the scholarship of my pastor's seminary days, what they were discovering still holds forty years later. It's been refined. (Elaine Pagel's book Beyond Belief is one of those refinements -- and a good one.) But it still holds.

When John writes, "In the beginning was the Word," he is not only harkening back to Genesis to a time before creation -- and he is doing that -- but he is speaking of a specific kind of Word. Not just any Word. Not just letters on a page. Or spoken syllables of certain decibels.

God's Word in Hebrew -- da'bar -- is anything but abstract reason or thought. Or letters on page. It is God's dynamic creative action. God's word does. Just what it is all about is seen in the psalm that we just sang. The Lord, we are told, "scatters his hail like bread crumbs." The psalmist then asks, "Who can stand against his cold?" The answer? The Lord "sends forth his word”" and God's word and "melts them." As we just heard Jeremiah say, the word of God turns mourning into joy. Just as in Genesis, in John, it is God's word that creates the light and the heavens and the earth and all that is. Light and life. And it is this Word, this revelation, this activity on God’s part, God's care and concern, this light and life, that Jesus is.

This is not an abstract revelation on God's part. In John's words, "the Word became flesh and lived among us." The Greek word here for flesh means whole person. Real man.

And the word for "lived among us" is best translated as "made his tent with us." It is the word used in Exodus when Israel is told to make a tent or Tabernacle so God can dwell among her. The prophets Joel and Ezekiel prophesy that God will tent or make his dwelling in their midst in Jerusalem. In a lesson from Sirach that is read in Roman Catholic Churches today, Wisdom -- God's Wisdom -- says that she will tent or make her dwelling among men.

There is nothing Greek or philosophical or alien or gnostic about today's gospel. It is very Jewish. It is about a god -- our God -- who cares so much that he becomes part of human history in the person of Jesus.

This gospel is mandatory reading during Christmas because it gives us the Big Picture. It reminds us that the baby in the manger is truly God's act of revelation. God with us. Immanuel. The gospel is mandatory reading during Christmas because it reminds us that ours is a God who is known and revealed in concrete action. A God whose Word is action. A God who tents among us. A God revealed in and through the man Jesus. In the words of the great preacher William Sloane Coffin:

Jesus is both a mirror to our humanity and a window to divinity, a window revealing as much of God as is given mortal eyes to see. When Christians see Christ empowering the weak, scorning the powerful, healing the wounded, and judging their tormentors, we are seeing transparently the power of God at work. What is finally important is not that Christ is Godlike, but God is Christ-like. (Credo, p. 12)

A Christ-like God who, in that revelation, gives us the power to become children of God. Through Christ.

This is both mystery and reality. It is a reality that we know in the mystery of faith. It is reality and mystery that we experience in the concrete action of worship, in being with and for others here and in the world, in hearing the Word and participating in the sacraments. In doing. In being Christlike by "empowering the weak, scorning the powerful, healing the wounded. "

And, in all this, John’s gospel reminds us that this reality and mystery of the Word made flesh are part of human history as well as salvation of history. Jesus is born in a manger.

And what this means to us as historical human beings -- historical human beings who are wondrously part of salvation history -- what this means is as empowering as John's words are inspiring. Again, William Sloane Coffin: "All saving ideas are born small. God comes to earth as a child so that we can finally grow up." He continues:

[This] means we can stop blaming God for being absent when we ourselves [are] not present, stop blaming God for the ills of the world as if we [have] been laboring to cure them, and stop making God responsible for all the thinking and doing we should be undertaking on our own. . . . God provides minimum protection, maximum support -- support to help us grow, to stretch our minds and hearts until they are as wide as God's universe. God doesn't want us narrow-minded, priggish, and subservient, but joyful and loving, as free for one another as God's love was freely poured out for us at Christmas in that babe in a manager. (Credo, 10)

In the Word made flesh. In the Word made flesh for us. Today. Amen

January 3, 2010

Ruth VanDemark, pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Chicago