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The Rev. Canon Mary Sulerud Isaiah 61:10–62:3; Galatians 3:23–25, 4:4–7; John 1:1–18 IN THE NAME OF GOD, FATHER, SON AND HOLY SPIRIT. AMEN. I always remember as a child going to church on Christmas Day and then again on the first Sunday after Christmas and being hugely disappointed to hear the Gospel of John that we have heard this morning. Inevitably I would turn to my life-long theological sparring partner, my father, and begin to quiz him closely about why we weren’t still talking about baby Jesus, it being Christmas after all. I don’t remember any explanation that he gave me that ever made sense to me as a child. Frankly when the explanation made sense I had arrived at that theological wilderness called adolescence and really didn’t care. Oh how I remember my close questioning about the infancy and childhood of Jesus as I was convinced that my father, and the rest of the church had some secret knowledge of Jesus that no one wanted to share. Instead every Christmas we would hear this long gospel that sounded so much to my child’s ears like those popular automobile ads, “In the beginning…blah, blah, blah, blah…‘grace and truth’…blah, blah…John the Baptist, blah, blah (hmm thought we were done with him) blah, blah”. The Gospel of the Lord, good now I can sit. There are two conclusions that one can reach from this story. The first is that this is the sort of theological imagination that makes The DaVinci Code a best seller, and the second is that eventually the power of this hymn to God and its majestic cosmic re-telling of the incarnation of the Son of God over time have captured my heart and imagination. The truth repeatedly explained to a child is the truth of this day. The story of the birth of Jesus is vital to our faith. The story of what a difference that makes in our lives personally and communally is equally important. To tell that story on this second day of Christmas we must take our eyes away from the manger and look to the very beginning of creation. God speaks and creation begins, states this gospel according to John. All light, all matter, all creatures, all humanity, all grace, and all truth come into being by the loving voice of God. God’s Word creates a universe physically, morally and spiritually. It is this speaking person of God who is sent to us, takes on our flesh, our substance and our life. Our God, to paraphrase the title of a Restoration era comedic play, “stoops to conquer.” God’s providential care for all that God has made is expressed in shockingly intimate ways. God meets us on our own terms, sharing our humanity with no privileges. Jesus is born into a family with no economic or religious standing. There are no extra points for being the Son of God in this life. In the birth of Jesus God inhabits our newborn vulnerability and dependency, our emotions and senses. This Word Jesus grows to adulthood full of the same temptations that we face, and dies our death in as degraded and excruciating a way as we can imagine. God chooses in this life-giving Word to be born to overcome our sin and death, to create a new potential for our lives now. The Gospel of John doesn’t stint on the scandal of our response to this gracious gift, this glimpse of the heart of God. We degrade it in ways great and small. Think of our culture in which how we speak about bending low and reaching out to others inclusively is dismissively referred to as “blanding,” “dumbing down” or “playing to the lowest common denominator.” Might this be said of what God did in the birth of Jesus? Our human darkness is a chauvinism that says from the moment of this birth that being one of us is ordinary, banal and unimaginative. Martin Luther responded to this pointedly by stating that consolation accrues the more we allow Christ to come down and take on our nature and our flesh. Jesus was born to take on all of our suffering and pain, our sorrows and joys, our dreams and disappointments, our bondage to death itself as the utter end of all. Jesus was born to grow up and journey through our torments and our great joys. As long as we are alive we will never outgrow our need for this extraordinary gift of salvation. What came to be in Jesus is a life that God holds as a gift for all those who love God. What all of our Scripture texts point to this day is the overwhelming desire of God to give such an extraordinary gift of God’s self. Moreover we are being sent this gift not as shirttail relatives or acquaintances. The gift is not an act of social or seasonal obligation on God’s part. This abundant gift is being sent to God’s own children, and it is a gift without strings, offered to us for the pure joy, delight and pleasure of giving. This is what makes it a gift of grace. As it is our privilege to be God’s children, so it is that one of our most precious possessions as children is the freedom to say yes or no to this gift. Exercising this option to say yes or no to God’s redemption and salvation everyday is crucial. It is our free assent, our yes that allows this light to shine in us, bringing the much desired and promised relationship with God not only for us, but for all who learn from us about this light and love of God. Here is the truth we know why this birth matters. Tempting as it is to linger at the manger, succumbing to the eighth deadly sin of sentimentality by keeping Jesus imprisoned in his infancy, God’s Word Jesus comes to us with an adult mission to be the light, the truth, the love of God in the world now as God’s children, brothers and sisters of Christ. God in Jesus is doing a new and unexpected thing. We are invited to show a bleak, sorrowful and sin-filled world that believes that the only way anything changes is at the end of a gun, or through the wretched excesses of power politics, or the well-directed bomb, or by all consuming greed, or by better living through chemistry, that in a single birth God changed the life of the universe forever. We can be so very, very evil, but we can never undo this consummate act of love for us and for all creation. It is a new day. We are not who we were yesterday. Night will fall and countless stars will be born. When the turkey carcass is tossed, the last ornament tucked away for another year, that one stubborn tree needle swept away, when we think Christmas has come and gone, that’s just the time, the beginning in a place we can’t imagine, in a way that we don’t want to believe, for God to be born. We can wait and watch. We can look away or receive, but it is not over. This birth is not over. AMEN. |