The Living Word
Christmas I, 2020
Isaiah 61:10 - 62:3 • John 1:1-18
Here we all are, on this third day of Christmas, complete with those French hens, the beautiful Christmas flowers, the creche with the Holy Family, the resident animals, the angel and the shepherds. We have Christmas cards in our houses, Christmas music still plays, and we’ve probably got a lot of left-overs, because there are some things you just have to cook for Christmas, even if there aren’t the guests to help you eat them up.
Little has been how we would have chosen, but we’ve managed, despite the ache in our hearts for what we have missed and for what we have lost.
And yet, perhaps more than for the last nine months, there has been something to organize around. Instead of an endless stream of days that have blurred into each other in an endless and exhausting present, there has been an event, full of memories and traditions. And that can continue to be special for another nine days – if not longer!
We are living in anxious times. Usually, the Christmas Season is a relatively uncomplicated one, even if the run-up is exhausting. This year, I have found myself identifying with the uncertainty, disruption even squalor of that first Christmas in ways I never have before. I have been reminded that the Word, since the beginning of time, has been born again and again into the world in the darkest of circumstances. And each time it has brought new life, new light into the world that no amount of darkness can overcome.
I don’t know about you, but I think I need reminding of that truth. I need a bit of encouragement to help me keep going. In our first reading did you hear how the prophet Isaiah is encouraging his people? It may have sounded like a simple song of praise. But the Israelites have been in exile in Babylon for nearly forty years. They will be allowed to go home soon, but not yet. And yet the passage is so full of hope, certainty and rejoicing! Isaiah is giving them a vision of the joy that is to come. And I find myself reaching out to share in that hopeful certainty.
In the opening of John’s Gospel, we are given a beautiful spiraling poetic passage, inviting us into the mystery of the incarnation. The word breathed into the world on the breath of God. The word that is both with God and is God: the whisper of the word that has the power to stir the waters. The word that belongs to our first newborn inhalation all the way through to our last rattling sigh: the alpha and omega that will never cease.
We always need this Word, this incarnational reality, full of such transformative power. And while our exile from what we consider normality is not on the same scale as experienced by those ancient Israelites, we can still take encouragement where we find it.
In our yearly celebration of Christmas, while it is true that we remember the birth of Jesus two thousand years, the Gospel of John, supported by all of our canon of scripture, invites and encourages us to grow into the mystery that is way beyond words, and way beyond that lowly stable in Bethlehem. If you think about it: how could it possibly be that God was born into the world just the once at a particular moment in a particular place? What sort of limited god would that be?
And once you start considering how many times, and in how many places this incarnation might have happened, it doesn’t take long to realize that there can be no limit. God is being incarnated, born into the world in every moment. Born into the world bringing life, light, and love.
This third day of Christmas, I invite you to wrap yourself in the comfort of the sweetness and joy of the miracle of that holy birth in Bethlehem, add in some blanket layers of sweet memories from across the years. Then allow yourselves to open to mystery: to the living Word of God, born into the world - in you, in me, in all things for all times.
As today’s collect prays:
God of grace and truth,
whose word brings light to birth
in the heart of a darkening world
which fears a love it cannot name:
may flesh be blessed and born anew
by a truth which leave the heavens
and walks the waiting earth;
through Jesus Christ, the Word incarnate. Amen