Sermon: Our Need for the Prologue to John

 

Sermon. St Mary’s Little Ilford. 25.12.20 (live-streamed only).

Christmas Day

John 1.1-14

 

As the Church throughout the world has her traditions, so individual churches have their traditions. You know the sort of thing. These are the expected carols. The tree goes up then and goes there, and is taken down then. We call the candle of the Third Sunday of Advent the pink, no the rose, no the pink, no the rose candle.

 

Well, families and persons have their traditions too. (I am not telling you anything you do not know.) Here is one of mine. Whenever I preach on Christmas Day on today’s Gospel reading, I first apologise. I apologise in case there are people in the congregation, perhaps guests (who are very welcome), who came to church precisely to hear what gets called “the traditional Christmas story”. You know its parts: the angels, their song, the shepherds, their listening, the Holy Family, the journeys, the lack of room, the child bound up safe in a manger. You get none of that in today’s Gospel. None. So I always allow for the possibility of disappointment, at precisely this point in the service. (And this year I can’t see quite how disappointed you are! And I am quite a connoisseur of your disappointed expressions, for reasons to obvious to name!)

 

Some may even feel more than disappointment. They may feel a frustration bordering on resentment. “Why do we have to have this Gospel reading?” they may be thinking.

·        They may think: it’s poetry, doubtless melodious in the original, but it has no point of contact with my life.

·        They may think: it’s abstract theology, that just shows us that some people in the early church had too much time on their hands, and turned to empty speculation about the inner workings of Gd.

·        They may think: in truth it’s ideology. It’s a power thing. All that talk about our Founder (and only our Founder) being one with Gd and being Gd is just an elevated way of saying “Our Gd is bigger than your god”.

Well, I won’t surprise you one tiny iota, if I say that any who are thinking any of these things have got things really rather wrong. I go further: I feel this Gospel reading - this Prologue to John – this headline message to the whole Gospel of John - may be just what we need to hear, here and now.

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

The Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd. There is in truth nothing abstract here. Here is Gd’s revelation, Gd’s promise to us that Gd is (in Gdself) communication. Even before – outside of – the creation of the universe, Gd is love and communicative Love. It is not so much that we find love in the world (though we do), as that we find the world in Love.

 

Anything but abstract, here is our bedrock hope. If in this strangest of all years, at this strangest of all Christmasses, we have found ourselves close to rock-bottom, then we need to hear and dwell on the fact that at the bottom is this Rock. This. Rock. Love, communicative love - love which finds the words, the gestures, the silences, the actions, the songs, the dances which show love, which show you how loved you are – this love, in all its varieties, is there to be found and always will be. Because it is out of such communicative Love that the world is made, that you are made. 

Preachers often preach about the love of Gd. Perhaps too often. In any event, we can hear the words of the love of Gd, and have them wash over us. We can think: "That's the reference to Gd's love, done and dusted. So far, so predictable." So I cannot know if anything that I say here will hit home. But I do insist: whether we can hear it fully or not, here is bed-rock. Here is the rock. 

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

That the Word became flesh is

·        both a natural development of the Hebrew story, because in that story Gd is constantly accommodating Gdself to be alongside weak and foolish human beings,

·        and something utterly shocking, for flesh is weak.

We know it, brothers and sisters. Our flesh is weak. Not only is it vulnerable to knives and guns and such, but this year we have had it put right in front of our eyes how our flesh is vulnerable to microscopic attack, how invisible entities that are so insubstantial that biologists aren’t even sure they can be called organisms in their own right, can enter into our flesh, and send us into agony, and kill us. (Over time, you wouldn’t thank me for dressing this up.)

 

Gd knows just how weak we are. In our weakness (in all of its parts) we have not shocked Gd, or let Gd down. Gd knows our weakness. From the inside Gd knows – is acquainted with – our weakness (all its parts). He is in solidarity with us, and our anxieties and sadness, our legitimate anxieties and sadness. We are flesh, and Gd knows how fleshly flesh is.

 

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

Do we see the Word’s glory? Our instinctive answer may be: No. Not now, no. The glory has departed. All we get to do is muddle through at best, and desperately fight stress, and heaviness of heart, and terrors, and harm, and pain, at worst. No glory here. Except there is – there is – glory here. When we care for each other, picking up the phone (as you do). When we care for ourselves and others, donating to food banks and refugee organisations (as you do). When we care for the world by speaking out about the wrongness of racism and all the rest of it (as you do)…

if we have eyes to see – when we have eyes to see – there is the Glory of Gd the Word.

 

Not that that is all is all that is to be said about the Glory of Gd the Word. We are here – and I do want to say that we are all “here”, we are gathered as one - to worship. We are drawn to worship. We know – even if we don’t say it – we know that Gd is attractive, is beautiful, draws us in. Our orientation to worship already intimates the Glory that is there to greet us. And this is our birth-right. (That’s a message in today’s Gospel too; I invite you to read it over again in the course of the day.)

 

It is true that so many of the prompts that make for the sense of the glorious worship of the Glorious One are diminished or just plain absent right now.

·        No singing together.

·        No processions or elaborate liturgical flow.

·        And, saddest of all (or at least joint first with not singing together – I am a realist), no sharing of a meal of bread and wine, such as has sustained us, year in, year out.

But Gd is unchanged.

 

The angels, their song, the shepherds, their listening, the Holy Family, the  journeys, the lack of room, the child bound up safe in a manger. We have given you none of that in today’s Gospel. But if ever there were a need to replace the microscope, which examines the story in its finest details, with the telescope, which enables us to see the biggest possible picture, to see the panorama, that need would be ours today.

 

Seeing the panorama

·        reveals Gd is Love, is communicative Love, with a longing to communicate love to you, not because you’re always simply lovely, but because that is who Gd is;

·        reveals that Gd knows what it is to be flesh, to be weak as flesh, and so is alongside us in our weakness (in all its parts);

·        reveals that Gd’s Glory is found in every single act of kindness, and overflows (precedes) all our actions and intentions, such that Gd is saying to us always, in season and out of season, in church and out of church, in pandemic and out of pandemic, “Come to my Glory, bathe in my Glory, rest in my Glory".

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

Merry Christmas. Christ is born. Glorify him. Amen.