Sermon 1-5-03
God, In Person - John 1:1-18
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
In the gospel of John we find a very different kind of birth story than we read in the other gospels. There are no angels, no magi, no shepherds. Even Mary and Joseph are absent from this account. There is just the Word, laced through John's poetic language of being, creation, life, and light. These verses were used as a hymn in the early church, praising God incarnate, Jesus the Christ. The problem with such beautiful and poetic language is that poetry is sometimes as hard to interpret and understand as it is beautiful to read and recite. The language flows eloquently, but what is being said does not come so easily to us.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a parent's only child, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
John gets lost in his language because he is trying to express something that goes beyond describing - how to speak about the significance of what has happened? How to tell about the importance of the new thing taking place in his world? The other gospel writers told of Jesus in vivid and concrete images, but John wanted to tell us more - about who this Jesus was and how this Jesus was significant beyond all significance for us.
Listen to this paraphrase of John's words, by Episcopalian priest James Stamper. Hear, in the words, what this new Word means. Initially there was a pattern for everything. The pattern was God's; God was the pattern. The pattern was always God. Everything came from that pattern. There isn't anything else. The pattern is both the source of life and the meaning of life. It is a way of being alive in opposition to death, and death cannot overcome it. God sent a man named John to tell people about the possibilities of this way of being alive in opposition to death so everybody would trust the source of life. John wasn't the source of life; he taught how to recognize the pattern. The true pattern, the source and meaning of everybody's life, was coming to people. To some people, however, life, and what life is all about, is unrecognizable. Some who could be expected to see the possibilities of this way of being alive select death instead. Others embrace life. They trust what life offers. Life offers something more intense than the strongest family ties: obtaining a new parent, God, the source, the meaning of life itself. The initial pattern for everything that is became a human being and lived among us. We experienced how awesome that is: as awesome as a newborn baby is to its mother and father, the gift of life and all its possibilities. God became a human being, and lived among us. That's the key for John.
God became flesh, and dwelt among us, among us. And our passage today closes with the verse that tells us why this is so important: No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Parent's heart, who has made God known. God has never been seen in this way before. Yes, God was always coming again and again to God's people. But, God has never really been seen, face to face, in person, until the birth of this Christ child. John knew the stories that we know from the Old Testament: God came to the people in the burning bush, God came in a whisper, God sent messengers and rainbows, God dwelt in the temple that the people built. But never before had God come, in person, present as God's self.
Here, with Jesus, we find God in person, God incarnated, God embodied, God with us, as one of us. John shares with us a way of seeing God, through the person of Christ. One pastor suggests that while the other gospels ask how is Jesus like God, John asks, how is God like Jesus? It is Jesus, she writes, who imitates the Creator so clearly that it can indeed be shown that God is love and has loved all humanity without distinction or differentiation and reconciles us without any vengeance or retaliation for our sin in rejecting this very Logos of Peace, this very God in person. When we come face to face with Jesus, a human being, in the flesh as we live in flesh, it is easier for us to recognize God, to be close to God, because we have something tangible, something concrete and full of life to relate to. In Jesus, God does not just take on human form with a human body, God takes on the whole of what it means to be human: our joy and love, our pain and suffering. It is this miracle of incarnation, of God-in-person that stirs John to write poetic hymns of praise to the Word.
Yet, we don't get to experience Jesus in the same way as those who lived and walked with Jesus in the first century. We don't get to see the newborn baby in the manger except when we relive these events in our Christmas pageants. We don't get to hear Jesus' teachings except through the accounts of others, like John. We don't get to witness the life and death of God incarnate in the front-row-seat way that the disciples did. How can this God-in-person event still be meaningful for us?
The answer is right in our midst. Today, on the first Sunday in the New Year, we share together in the communion meal. What better sign of God's coming to us in-person can we have? Here, God is truly for us embodied in Christ. In the Eucharist we share in Christ's body and blood, we share in Christ's person, in Christ's self, in that which makes Christ God's child. In so doing, we become the body of Christ, and so take God into our own persons. God with us, God in us. As the church, as the body of Christ, we are people filled up with God's presence in a concrete way. God comes to dwell in person, not only in the person of Christ Jesus, but also in our persons. God comes to dwell within us.
Jesus, though human, was more than that: he was both human and divine. It is this mystery, of God incarnate, that is at the center of the Christian faith. And it is so significant because we are invited, urged, lured, even, to share in this mystery. By sharing in the communion meal, we not only experience the body of the living Christ, of God incarnate, but we become the body of Christ. God dwells within us because Christ is within us. We too can experience this tangible God as John did, within our very selves. And with God within us, dwelling in our midst and in even our very selves, there is no telling what we can do, how our lives can be transformed, and how we can work in the world.
As human beings, we often struggle with feelings of doubt, about each other and about God, but most often about ourselves. We question our own worth and value. We struggle to be confident in our own identities. We spend millions of dollars trying to change who we are, how we look, and how we live, because we are so unhappy and unsatisfied with ourselves. And all this time we are missing out on the truth: we are so valuable that God became one of us to be closer to us, to love us better, to show us more clearly how important we are. We are precious and valuable; so much that God dwells in our midst, and wants to live within us.
God has come to us again, not in a burning bush or a whisper, but in person this time. Look to your left and your right. God is here in our midst, dwelling within those around you. Look around at work and at school, on the streets between here and home - God is among us, walking with us. For John, knowing that God had come in person changed his whole life, and he found himself writing so that the lives of others might be changed as well. How will God-in-person change your life?
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.
Let us pray: Gracious God, you are always coming to us, coming to walk in our midst and to dwell in our hearts. Let us feel more deeply how much you love and value us, and let us see more fully your presence in our lives and in our world. In the name of your son, of God-in-person we pray, Amen.