God's Dream in the Flesh (Fourth Sunday of Advent; John 1:1-18; December 24, 2017)

God's Dream in the Flesh

Fourth Sunday of Advent
John 1:1-18
December 24, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Carol and I are in an uncomfortable position this Fourth Sunday of Advent. We know that we will be leaving Decorah in just a little over six months. We know roughly where we'll be going. We know half a dozen people there already, which was certainly more than we knew when we moved here. Carol will be able to keep her present job with the Iowa City VA hospital, which blows my mind a little.

But there is a disconcerting lack of detail about our future. Where, exactly, will we live? We don't know. This absence of specific knowledge is upsetting, troubling. It isn't homelessness. We are privileged people who, while we have no guarantee, are more than likely to find ourselves comfortable enough. It is dislocation. It is launching from one shore without being able to see the other side. It is walking along a path in the woods at night with a flashlight, unable to see our destination.

I don't make too much of this. Anyone who has faced a major turning point in their lives, anyone who has uprooted themselves and their family to relocate, has gone through a similar process.

This experience of dislocation touches on the experiences of the community for whom the Gospel of John was written. Maybe that is part of the reason why it is so popular. I have been clear that John is not my favorite gospel. But it is the featured gospel in the Narrative Lectionary this year and will be the Sunday morning reading through the second Sunday of Easter! Preaching eighteen Sunday sermons from John will be for me an extended exercise in empathetic reading.

I have had to do this sort of thing before. I preached my way through readings from Paul one Lent and came to the place where I can say that, while I don't always agree with him, I think I understand what he was trying to do, and I respect and appreciate him and sometimes even like him. That's not a bad outcome for any relationship. That's my goal for John and me. Stay tuned, folks. Prayers would be in order.

What I have come to so far is this: John's gospel was written for a wounded community. It was a mostly Jewish community that had been forced to leave the Jewish synagogue because of their commitment to Jesus. The conflict that led to this divorce was bitter and destructive. When a community comes to the place where a disagreement is handled by expelling part of itself, the wounds are deep, painful, and lasting. Trauma of that kind doesn't simply go away. Even when it is healed, it leaves scars behind.

In John we have an effort on behalf of part of this traumatized community to make sense of its wounds and to move toward healing. Sometimes those efforts are successful and other times not so much. As we use what I am calling a "traumatic reading" of John, we will trace those wounds—John's attempt to apply a healing touch—and even see some of the results.

But today our attention is drawn to the first part of John, often called the prologue. Readers are always struck by these verses. They are an odd way to begin a gospel, at least to judge by our other examples. You can launch right into the story, like Mark does. Or you can frame the story with a story about the birth of Jesus, a story that contains all the themes of the gospel, as both Matthew and Luke do with their different stories. But John begins in the beginning with a capital "B."

"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." You just can't get any more cosmic in scope than that. The perspective of this story-teller is so far above the earth, the dwelling place of human beings, that it can hardly be seen from there. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn't put it out." The mood is serene; nothing can disturb it. The troubles that humans face are insignificant. Whatever powers face God and God's Word are trivial in their opposition.

This story begins as a story of a God who is further above it all than the stars in last night’s sky. The prelude of John's song is poetry of exquisite abstraction, far from the bodiliness of human history.

Wounded people often abstract their experience; it's one of the ways we have of bearing the unbearable. If we don't notice it when we do it ourselves, we can certainly detect it readily enough when others do it. A reporter sticks a microphone in the face of a refugee from a wildfire, their house together with all their belongings reduced to a few still-smoldering sticks in the background. They have suffered a terrible wound and, when asked, they do not reply in the first person. The reporter asks, "What are you going to do now?" They don't answer, "I don't know. My home is gone. We escaped with the clothes on our backs, but we have lost everything else." Instead, they retreat into the second person, "You know, when something like this happens to you, you don't really know what to do next. When you lose everything, all of your belongings, all of your memories, it's just hard to know what to do."

Wounded people often cope with their wounds by getting as far away as possible from them. If they can be spoken of as someone else's, that's some distance, not a great deal, but some. In John's prologue, his wounded community takes flight into abstraction, to God and "Word," as far away from their bodies where the wounds are, where the pain is, as they can get. And it works, kind of, a little, for a while.

It works right up until verse 14: "The Word became flesh and pitched its tent among us." The serenity of the earlier verses is set aside. God will not sit in untouchability; God becomes body, our bodies, the place where we hurt and where we bear our injuries: in our backs that spasm when we are carrying too much, in our guts that burn when we can no longer stomach our lives, in our hands and feet that twitch nervously with the anxiety that we have taken on, in our compromised immune systems, in the damage done by the poisons we breathe, drink, and eat, and most of all by the hostility we have experienced and harbored. The Word dives into our flesh into the deep end of all the damaged humanity we have decided it is okay to carry around. The Word swims deep down into our world until it touches the jagged edges of the wounds we have been hiding from each other and from ourselves. And begins to heal them.

This, says John to his wounded community, is what God is up to. This is what the Word is about in John's dislocated, rejected, ejected, isolated community. They try to meet God in the heavens, far above and far away from their hurt, only to find that God has already met them in their deepest pain. So that those who have lost friends, whose mothers and fathers have disowned them, whose cousins and nieces and nephews will not look them in the face, discover that they are God's children. No one can ever say they are not loved; no one can ever say they do not belong; no one can ever say to them that they are not at home Ever again. They are beloved. They belong. They are home forever more.

And that is John’s message to us this Fourth Sunday of Advent not because we have found God, wherever we were looking, but because God has found us wherever we were hiding: We are beloved. We belong. We are home, now and forever. Amen.

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