Christmas 1 2013

+The Gospel for today is John’s Christmas story. I know, there’s not a donkey or a manger or a shepherd or a star in sight. There’s no Joseph, no Mary. No baby Jesus. No silent night, No Angels harking. None of that.
But just what is a Christmas story anyway? A Christmas story is a way for us to make sense of our faith. It’s a way to understand that Jesus is God and that God is Jesus.
See…right there it gets really confusing. Doesn’t it? God is Jesus Jesus is God….what?
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
It’s easier to understand than you may think. You see, in the beginning, when creation was, well, creating….Jesus was there. But not the Jesus we’ve come to know through the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, not the Jesus of Paul’s many letters…no the Jesus who was there was not the man who is God, it was instead the God who will become Jesus.
Jesus the Divine was there, not Jesus the Man.
Jesus the man came later, because Jesus the man is an instrument used by God to reach us.
 This is where that whole idea of “The Word” comes from. “The Word” is a translation of the Greek concept of Logos. Logos has been defined many ways but in our usage Logos is the discourse---the conversation-- between God and God’s creation. We can’t experience God because God isn’t an old white man sitting on a throne. God is Love, God is Light, God is Peace. God is energy. God is not a person. God is not physical, God is not material. So the Logos, the Word, is how God reaches out to God’s creation. Jesus is this Logos, Jesus is this Word.
Jesus is how God touches us and how we touch God. And isn’t that what Christmas is all about—God reaching out to us?
But, because it’s John’s Gospel, there’s still more to this story. You see not only is this Prelude of John a Christmas story, it’s also a Creation story. John writes:
All things came into being through The Word, and without The Word not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
The basic premise of creation stories is that in the beginning God created the light. The very first thing created out of the muck and the mess, the first thing created out of the deep was light.
And with this notion that light was created out of darkness comes one of the cornerstones of John’s theology—that God is the light and that not-God is darkness. It’s as basic as the good guys wearing white hats and the bad guys wearing black hats in those old tv westerns: Light is good. Dark is bad. Light is safe, dark is dangerous. Light is warm, dark is cold.
God is all that is good, “not God” is all that is not good. Jesus is God in the world….God is light, Jesus is in the world, so Jesus is the light of the world.
God is always battling the forces of darkness, because the primordial muck from which creation emanated is always trying to overtake the Good ness that is God.
It's good guys vs bad guys, it's the Empire vs the rebel alliance. It's the Red Sox vs the Yankees.
The light is good the dark is bad and to make sure we're ready to receive the light and reject the dark, the evangelist john introduces us to another John, a herald of the light, a witness to the coming of the messiah--John the Baptist.
We read:
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
And so, here we have a Christmas story all wrapped up in a Creation story, with a touch of Advent thrown in for good measure. This Gospel is trying, in 18 verses, to give us the whole ball of wax in one fell swoop:
God in all of God’s “godness” is intangible, unknowable to us basic humans, so God uses an instrument to reach us, an instrument to engage us in a relationship we can grasp. God does this by taking on flesh in the person of Jesus. Jesus comes to us seemingly as a man just a man, but soon we learn, along with him, that while he is a man he’s also much more. We learn that he is God who has taken on the human form in hopes that we, the regular old humans, will embrace the man and through that embrace, learn to love the God.
So John’s Christmas story doesn’t have a donkey or a manger or a shepherd or a star. His story doesn’t have a Joseph, or a Mary. There’s no baby born in a barn. No silent night, no Angels harking and heralding. Nope, John’s Christmas story has none of that. What it does have is, very simply, a God who wants nothing more than for us to Love one another just as that same God Loves us.

Amen.