Our waiting is almost over. The day is here. It is nearly
time to light the candles and sing Silent Night and
receive the gift of Christmas. In our Advent sermon
series, only John’s Christmas story remains. We have
spent time in the wilderness with Mark, gathered around
the family tree with Matthew, listening with Luke to Mary
sing God’s praise. And John seems to understand that
we are here now only to celebrate. He doesn’t take the
time to describe the details of Jesus’ birth or consider
the complexities of its context. No, John begins his
gospel in the mind of God. He starts “in the beginning,”
at the creation of the cosmos. He echoes the opening
words of the Hebrew scriptures, “In the beginning…”
Genesis and now John frame the story of creation. “In
the beginning was the Word.” And so, we wonder, which
word? What did God say?
And we don’t have to wait for long. John’s Christmas
“story” comes in verse fourteen: “And the Word
became flesh and lived among us.” In John’s typical
fashion, it is dramatic, succinct, and comprehensive.
“The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
Everything we need to know about Christmas,
contained in one simple sentence.
I’ve been reflecting on that phrase this season as we
we’ve explored each gospel writer’s Christmas story.
Mark’s wilderness message. Matthew’s beautiful and
complicated story. Luke’s poetic praise. What John gives
us is a vision. He sees the miraculous coming true, and
he paints a picture of that truth.
God chose life with us. There is something central to
the very being of God that could not abide the distance
between Creator and creation. And so, God lived among
us. Not as a conquering warrior but as a vulnerable
infant. Flesh and blood.
This year especially, I think we need a reminder of the
reality that God did not wait until everything was right
with the world to show up. Instead, God’s love arrives in
human form when we need it most. In all our weariness
and wandering and wondering.
Yes, our world is weary. Exhausted. Fed up. Undone
by the unraveling of community, the senselessness
and cruelty of violence, the deep sadness and grief of
inexplicable loss. Our world is weary, and words often
fail. When we do not know what to say, we remember
that our silence carries the prayers too deep for words.
We give expression to God’s own tears and compassion.
We remember that it was into our world of darkness
that the Word of God became flesh. We remember that
God spanned the distance of time and space to be in
relationship and redeem not the world as it might be,
but the real world, the world as it is.
This week as I have walked with those in our own
community experiencing unimaginable loss, I have been
thinking of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s book Lament for A
Son. The theologian wrote the book following the tragic
death of his twenty-five-year-old son. He struggles to
understand God in light of such a horrific loss. As a
father, he reflects on the comfort he eventually found.
Wolterstorff writes: “The history of our world is the
history of our suffering. Every act of evil extracts a tear
from God, every plunge into anguish extracts a sob from
God. But the history of our world is also the history of
our deliverance together. God’s work to release himself
from his suffering is his work to deliver the world from
its agony; our struggle for joy is our struggle to relieve
God’s sorrow. When God’s cup of suffering is full, our
world’s redemption is fulfilled. Until justice and peace
embrace, God’s dance of joy is delayed.”i
Today we remember. We remember the heart of the
gospel: that God could not keep distant from human
pain. Not then, and not now. As my teacher Shirley
Guthrie wrote, “The birth stories of Jesus remind us that
God is with us not in the sense of a beautiful idea or
an abstract truth. It happened at a particular time, in a
particular place, in connection with a particular mother:
‘In the days of King Herod’ ‘In Bethlehem’ ‘of Mary.’”ii The
glory of the real presence of God on earth is the heart
and soul of the Christian story.
God’s glory, John sings out, has been embodied. Not
distant, but close. In Jesus, we are given a permanent
picture of God. This is the truth of incarnation: that God
comes close enough to touch and hold. No otherworldly,
disembodied, abstract, remote idea, but a flesh and
blood picture of the God who is with us now.
Eleven years ago, I tucked a prayer into one of my
Advent books, and each year, when I open that book,
the prayer falls out. It is a prayer of lament and hope
written just days after the horrific shooting at an
elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, just eleven
days before Christmas in 2012.
“Your world seems a bit darker this Christmas. But
you were born in the dark, right? You came at night.
The shepherds were nightshift workers. The Wise Men
followed a star. Your first cries were heard in shadow.
To see your face, Mary and Joseph needed a candle
flame. It was dark. Dark with Herod’s jealousy. Dark
with Roman oppression. Dark with poverty. Dark with
violence. Herod went on a rampage, killing babies. Oh,
Lord Jesus, you entered the dark of your day. Won’t you
enter ours?”iii
Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not—
cannot—overcome it.
This final day of the waiting season of Advent, John’s
vision has an important truth for us. God shows up
in human form. The light shines in the darkness of a
broken world.
Each year, I read again W. H. Auden’s powerful
Christmas Oratorio titled For the Time Being. I’m
particularly drawn to his words of poetry. Auden writes:
To those who have seen The Child, however dimly,
however incredulously, the Time Being is, [in a sense] the
most trying time of all.
Remembering the stable, where for once in our lives
everything became a You and nothing was an It.
That’s the vision. That’s the light shining. We know the
destructive force of evil in our world, but John calls us
to remember the vision we have seen of God’s glory, full
of grace and truth, embodied in a vulnerable innocent
infant child. Immanuel. Born for us into a broken
creation still waiting, still waiting for redemption. Having
seen his glory, we now live in its light. Because of this
vision, you and I can find the courage and the strength
to claim our identity as God’s children and extend that
grace to all. This morning, take hold of a vision of God’s
love. The Word becomes flesh and lives among us. And
so, Christmas comes again. Amen.