"The Word Became Flesh" Christmas Day 2011

John 1:1-14
Funny, how much we have invested in Christmas being about Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem. While every Christmas pageant in every Christian Church for 800 years has portrayed it that way, only Luke's Gospel of the four has the couple going to Bethlehem, only Luke and Matthew even have the story of a birth. What we celebrate at Christmas is the incarnation of God becoming one with humanity. While the crucifixion and Resurrection of Easter are about the Atonement for our sins, Christmas is ALL about the grace of God, God's desire that we not be alone and broken; and in response, our desire for God

John's Gospel is a different Christmas reading.
Not about a Manger, or Shepherds or Kings, a Virgin, or a Star, not even about a birth of a baby. Instead, the Beloved Disciple identifies the birth of the Savior as having happened before time and space, before humanity, before Moses or Abraham, even before Noah and the flood.

“In the Beginning was the WORD.”
A strange identification for the Savior, the Messiah sent by God, and yet, going back to Genesis, what we hear is that “In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” In the Beginning in Genesis is about creation of Time and Space to fill the shapeless, formless void. And according to John, Creation is also about the Light of God and the Word of God (which already exist) coming into Creation. Human Thought, Reasoning, Language about God, stories of the Divine in Human life offer light in the darkness. Our language, our words, betray our allegiances, our convictions. When we speak of CREATION, what do we imagine? If “Life,” this planet and universe, and the balance between all things, by calling this Creation, are we not naming our predilection that there is a CREATOR?

Genesis 1 tells the Order of Creation, and identifies that before anything or anyone else, rather than hypothesizing a Big Bang (that all life as we know it was formed by the accidental cataclysm of gases), that instead, before anything else, the Creator was/is God.
Genesis 2 tells a different story of Creation, not in contradiction of the first, but emphasizing the role of humanity with God in Creation, having power to name all that exists.
Genesis 3 tells another story of Creation, again not in contradiction of the first two, but explaining the origin of Good and Evil...how it is that God could have formed all creation and Blessed Creation calling it very Good, when there was evil.
Genesis 4 tells yet another story of Creation, as to why there are generations of humanity, and anger and jealousy between us as family members, why as family systems we pass on behaviors.
After which Genesis tells the story of Noah and the flood...
But what about all the rest, all of human understanding and words, language about God...When, How and Why did our caring about who God is, about the possibility of changing our lot in life, come into being? The Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ according to John, is not about the birth of a baby at Bethlehem, but another Genesis of how human thought, human desire to change, human want to know God, came to be.

How much we try to hide in life, how much darkness and gloom and control we try to exercise, how little of life is really creative and how much of all we do is killing? According to the Gospel of John, our darkness, our human control, death, could not extinguish the light that is the WORD from God. This is what the whole of the Good News from God will be about, This Cosmic struggle between the forces of Darkness and of Light. The Empire, Civilization, all Human Knowledge, Logic/Reason, Death and our Fears of Death, human understanding on one side, and a man sent from God on the other. Can one person make a difference? Can one individual change the nature of the whole human race, change the nature of history?
Written down in the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, when taxation for the sake of taxation was the norm, when the Roman Military had been used as a weapon against Rome's own citizens and people, during the worst of human existence, John witnessed that humanity had another nature.

First, there was a man sent from God, whose name was John, who came calling people to “repent.”
He was not the Light, he was not the Word, but he came to bear witness to what was coming.
That John (John the Baptist) and the John who authored the Gospel are not the same individual, but the similarity of their names is not by accident... as John came to bear witness to the Light of God, so also John the author of the Gospel will witness to what he has seen and believes. This is one of the elements we have lost today. The ability to “Witness,” I am not necessarily talking about knocking on doors to ask if the person knows Jesus, but that at somepoint in our lives we speak to those we love, whose lives, whose existence are important to us, to whom our lives are important, naming what we believe and why.

I have a close friend, with whom I have worked on the Clinic for 7 years now, and suddenly yesterday, a woman I knew as a friend in college 30 years ago asked “Do you know my brother?” Until that moment, I never had put the two together, never had thought of other human connections for someone I work with. That is the power of a witness, not to accuse and name the culprit, but to make connections, to identify meaningful relationships without realizing they are meaningful.

Even with this witness testifying that this is the true light sent from God, no one received him, no one believed. People were caught up in their own lives, in their own existence and survival, in the struggles of power and control, good and evil, struggles of women and men, struggles of family systems. As much as humanity has developed, as great of civilizations as we had developed in Egypt, Israel, Babylon, Greece and Rome, as great as our Law, and our philosophy and reason, no one had considered whether we are born of the flesh as animals, or what it might mean to be born a child of God. The Great Philosophers debated whether humanity is basically Good or Evil? The Greeks and Romans theorized a whole civilization of Gods separate from and parallel to Humanity. But no one had considered whether God might care about Creation, or whether Creation might care about God. SO according to this story of Creation, God became human to dwell among us, full of grace and truth.

When did the relationship between God and Humanity begin? It is basic to human life, basic to our Created Order. As we accept the rotations of Night and Day, as we believe in a firmament an atmosphere we cannot see, so also there is a bond and tension between us and God. Is it any wonder then, that Jesus would refer to God as Father? Judaism identifies God as Law Giver. Islam as giver of Prophecy. Christianity claims relationship with God as Father, because the Word of God became Flesh as a Human Messiah.

Even so, while the bond between God and Humanity is intrinsic to who we are and who is our Creator, as Human Creatures one of our Creations is history, the orderly progression of developments in Time and Space. SO when did the Word of God become flesh? For as Poetic and Mystic as John's Gospel, he is also witnessing to the reality of Jesus Christ. According to John, FAITH is not simply thought, not only Philosophy, but that in TIME & SPACE, in our relationship to all the world around us, within the STRUGGLE OF GOOD & EVIL, in our FAMILY SYSTEMS the life and witness of Jesus Christ matters.

So we return to the earlier question, IF at a particular time (actually the most debauched corrupt, evil time in human history) the Word Became Flesh to dwell among us, when in our lives will we witness, will we share with one another not only a tie and perfume, not only a gift in your honor to this wonderful cause, but how precious it is to our lives that this other is part of who we are?