And Lived Among Us (Christmas Day; John 1:1-14; December 25, 2016)

And Lived Among Us

Christmas Day 

John 1:1-14

December 25, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

This is a rare event: United Methodists worshiping on Christmas Day. Lutherans do it every year. They're used to it. We're not. We do up Christmas Eve in style: candlelight, preaching, Communion. It's all there. But when the Christmas Eve services are done, we Methodists breathe a sigh of relief, especially us Methodist preachers.

On Christmas we can sleep in a little, unless, of course, if we have young children at home. We can have Christmas at home and resemble, at least for the day, other members of the church. Having Christmases without any obligation except to be with our families is reason enough to be a Methodist instead of a Lutheran. But one in seven years (on the average) throws us a curve: Christmas falls on a Sunday. We can cancel church on account of snow or dangerous cold, but we can hardly cancel it on account of Christmas. So here we are, Methodists worshiping on Christmas.

Of course, not all of us are here. It's some folks' turn to visit the out of town relatives for Christmas, so they're gone. Others were here last evening and figure they've done their church duty for the weekend, so they're sitting this morning out. So you who are here are the people who take your religion seriously. You're the hardcore church folks.

So what does the Lectionary Committee serve up as the lesson for today? Luke and the shepherds? Matthew and the magi? No! The Prologue of John: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." Not much of a story there. It's hard to imagine squeezing that into a children's pageant.

The Prologue of John is tough slogging. As my first New Testament professor liked to say, "The words are easy; it's the sentences that are hard." And they are. What are they doing there, anyway?

At least Matthew and Luke begin with stories. John has theology served straight: "Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being." My theory is that the Lectionary Committee knew that only the really dedicated Methodists were going to be in church this morning, so they figured we could handle it. But it doesn’t improve the odds of our coming back.

Well, we're here and this is our text. Let's see what we have.

Oddly, John's prologue sets out to accomplish the same task that the birth stories do in Matthew and Luke. This may surprise you, but the birth stories in those two gospels bear traces of being after-thoughts, the product of a conscious decision on the part of the writers to include them. Their source, Mark's gospel, doesn't have any birth stories, proof that it's possible to tell the gospel without them. If we took a pair scissors to Matthew and Luke, we could cut out the birth stories and you would never notice that they were missing. So why were they included?

For the ancients "the boy is the father of the man." That is, everything that a man did was foreshadowed in his childhood. Character was thought to emerge early. In the case of important men--men like kings, conquerors, and traitors--character was set even before birth. Great men were fated and the signs of that fate could be read in the things that they did and the things that happened to them when they were children. Birth and childhood stories were included in biographies to reveal the character and fate that governed a man's life. So, the birth stories in Luke and Matthew are there to introduce the main themes of Jesus' life and ministry and to tell his story in very compact form.

And that's pretty much what John is doing in his prologue: "The light came to his own people, and his own people didn't welcome him." It's a bit of an overstatement, but it introduces even before Jesus comes on the scene the theme of Jewish rejection of Jesus. As I say, it's a bit of an overstatement, well, more than a bit, because the Jews did not reject Jesus. It was more complicated than that. Some did. Some did not. Most were probably not convinced one way or another. But John's community has just broken with its own Jewish roots. It is in pain and it isn't thinking straight.

Little of this is stated straight out. It has to be read in the cracks in the text, in the things that aren't said, and in the way that things are framed. If we don't look there, we get carried away by the language of John's gospel. It's lofty and a little disconnected with real life. Of course, if real life is painful, it's no wonder John shies away from it a little.

This wasn't uncommon in the ancient world. There were whole movements of people who were trying to get as far away as possible from real life as it was lived in the material world. The material world is messy. There are things you can bump into in the material world and it hurts when you do that. There are bodies in the material world, bodies that wear out, get sick and eventually die. And in the meantime, they are awkward. I mean, how many of us really feel at home in our bodies? And bodies produce noises and smells.

In the material world, you have to work. You have to have a job. When you have a job, you always have some sort of boss. You have to do what they tell you to do, because if you don't, you'll lose your job. And then you won't have money to pay for a place to live and the car that you need to drive to your job so you can make the money you need to pay off your car loan.

In the material world, there is violence. Sometimes it's the micro-violence of snide comments and rudelooks. Sometimes it's the violence of a city under siege or Christmas shoppers mowed down by a terrorist with truck.

In the material world, there is politics. I am told that politics has no place in church, still less in church on Christmas morning. But I have found in the last few years that if by politics we mean the process of arranging power, of deciding who will have it and who won't, then politics is hard to avoid. That's especially true at Christmas. The birth stories about Jesus are some of the most political texts in a relentlessly political Bible.

So there is this messy, smelly, chaotic and painful world that we live in. And by that I don't mean that we just hang around. No, we're in it up to our eyeballs. We are involved in it. We are implicated in it. We are a part of it.

Christmas is a time when we'd like to forget all that, forget the mess at home, the decorations that never got put up, the wrapping paper and ribbons littering the floor, the unwashed dishes and unfinished Christmas cookies in the kitchen, and especially we'd to forget about how much Christmas costs. We'd like to forget the political messes in Washington and Des Moines.

We'd like to simply bask in the warm glow of Christmases past and present. We'd like to hear a story about a cute little baby, preferably one who doesn't cry or need his diaper changed.

And then we read John's prologue and we come to these words: "The Word became flesh and made his home among us." Verbum caro factum est. The Word became flesh. God's thought, God's message, God's dream became flesh. Not took on, hid within, or pretended to be. Became flesh, a part of the messy, smelly, chaotic and painful world that we live in. The very stuff we try to avoid, God is running toward.

And that, it turns out, is what Christmas is about. It's about God becoming a part of our world, subject to everything that we are subject to. Christmas is about God becoming like us. It is about God embracing and taking on the conditions of our life for our sake. In SisterParish we have an expression: "Su lucha es mi lucha. Your struggle is my struggle." It's a statement of commitment to solidarity.

At Christmas, God tells us, "Su lucha es me lucha. Your struggle is my struggle." God has committed God's self. After Christmas it's too late to take it back. That's the good news of Christmas, the good news of a Christmas that falls on a Sunday.

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