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December 28, 2008
Beth Foote - December 28, 2008
Isaiah 61:10 – 62:3; John 1: 1-18; Psalm 147; Galatians 3: 23- 25; 4: 4-7
We prepare for Christmas for four long weeks in Advent. We had our Christmas Eve services and our Christmas Day service, and now we’re at a unique point in the liturgical calendar between Christmas and Epiphany called The Season of Christmas. Today is a day to celebrate and savor and reflect on the mystery of Christmas. Because Christmas is kind of a Mystery, a kind of who- done it? After all the preparation, all the shopping, wrapping, partying, Adventing, what was that all about? It is a Mystery. Let’s look at the readings and try and unwrap this big mysterious present.
Our first clue comes in our opening Collect which says, “Almighty God, who has poured out upon us the new light of thine incarnate Word.” What does that phrase “incarnate Word,” capital W, mean?
In ancient times, the concept of Word meant something different than our everyday concept of a group of letters on the page. OR a word processing program… Words, and indeed individual letters in the Hebrew language, had mystical meaning. And really, if you think about it, they do to us as well.
If you’ve ever traveled outside the U.S., you might remember the first time you went to a foreign country and didn’t speak the language? You were cut off from understanding, from fluid communication with other people that you always took for granted.
We use language so carelessly, we take it so for granted, that we often forget how powerful it is.
The ancients, who lived in an oral culture, understood the power of communication as something holy and linked it to the concept of Wisdom. Wisdom, accumulated knowledge of the Wise, was largely passed down through spoken language.
In ancient Judaism, Wisdom, the Word, came from God and God spoke to humanity through the patriarchs like Moses and the prophets. Wisdom and the Word were ways of contemplating the mystery of God.
But what does incarnate mean?
The word itself in English means, “in the flesh.” We all know how much better it is to meet someone in person. Think about how much more real it is to speak to someone in person than talking with them on the phone or communicated with via email. So think about incarnate that way, as “in person,” Here is God’s Word, God’s Wisdom, “in person”, in the flesh.
Our reading from Isaiah foretells this as something to celebrate. Isaiah speaks with urgency and excitement about a new thing with images of a wedding, the dawn, a burning torch. This is one of the clues… this mystery is not a murder mystery, it is a good, wondrous mystery.
Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians gives us another clue.
Paul makes one of the earliest written connections between Jesus as God’s Son. When you open the Bible as a book, the letters of Paul come after the Gospels. But Paul wrote his letters before the Gospels were written. Paul says that before Christ, people lived with God under the Law, and people tried and tried to reach God by trying to be good followers of the Law. But something always got in the way. Our flawed humanity, our habit of getting ourselves in the way. Paul asserts that Jesus has come into the world to make the connection to God for us. Jesus reconciles us to God. We do not need to try and be perfect under the law anymore. Jesus has made that connection to God for us. The mystery is getting more and more full and full of good news.
Which brings us to our Gospel reading, the Prologue of the Gospel of John, which is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible, both for its language and its meaning.
This opening of John sounds a lot like the very opening of the Bible, in Genesis, when God creates the world. Like Genesis, it starts with “In the beginning…” But instead of God creating the heavens and the earth out of nothing, John says that in the beginning there was the Word.
So the Word, this mysterious thing we have just talked about, was there before the world was made, and John says “All things came into being through him.” Quite an assertion. Think back to Genesis and how God speaks the world into being. God says, “Let there be light.” God says, “let there be…water and land and all the creatures of the earth.” John equates the act of God speaking with creating life itself.
The Word is one with God, and creates through God’s speech. Besides being beautiful, this passage is also one of the scripture passages that points to the doctrine of the Trinity. Another clue to solve the Mystery of Christmas.
Yet the mystery continues. John says that “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him.” The light of the world, the Word, came into the world quietly, and over time his influence and love became known through the church. Notice how John restates what Paul has said earlier, that through Jesus, those who seek to understand the mystery of the Incarnation become children of God.
In the last paragraph, John says, “The World became flesh and lived among us…full of grace and truth.” And the passage ends with: “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.”
So the mystery of Christmas is that this cosmic force of Life itself, the Word, Wisdom, Christ, came into the world he was instrumental in creating, as a helpless baby and “lived among us”.
David Perry, our priest in residence this fall used the theme, “God is a surprise” for our retreat at Bishop’s Ranch.
The mystery—and surprise--of Christmas is that God did what no one could have expected. God has reached out to us, in person, and lived as one of us so that we may know God in person. Amen.
