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Christmas Day, 2004
Sermon on John 1:1-14, by Hubert Beck
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THE WONDER AND AWE OF CHRISTMAS

Scarcity begets value. Many generally begets cheapness.

If there were only four oranges in a city of 100,000 people, each orange would be far more costly than if there were 500,000 oranges in the same city. It only makes sense. You don’t even have to be an economist to understand that.

Words are like that, too! We live in a world of words. They surround us on every side. They fill newspapers and books and magazines and radios and TVs and media of every kind. We get so used to words that they hardly phase us any more. They have become cheap by virtue of their multitude. We do not know which words to trust and which words are simply filling air space. We find ourselves beleaguered by so many words that they are losing power year after year.

Words are meant to be meaningful, though. They are the ways by which others enter into our lives and we enter into the lives of others. They are as much windows to the soul as are eyes and facial expressions and other forms of interpersonal interactions and relationships. In fact, they may be the most important of all those forms by which our lives are intertwined.

Words have power, whether we acknowledge their power or not. They influence us . . . sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. We may receive them in trust, believe them implicitly, learn from them and live by them. Or we may reject them in distrust, renounce them as incredible, decide to act in just the opposite way from that toward which they are attempting to influence us. Either response to words is possible. But both are in effect with almost every word that is spoken to us or by us, no matter what the medium.

Much depends on who speaks the words, of course, as to whether we accept or reject those words. The words both tell us about the speaker and, depending on what we have decided about the speaker, influence us positively or negatively depending on how reliable we have judged the speaker to be.

Is this a strange way to speak on the day of Christmas? Should we not be standing near a manger, speaking about angels delivering messages in the heavens, telling about kings coming from afar to bring gifts to the newborn child? Why talk about words?

Well, in a sense you are correct in asking such a question. Christmas is not about words. It is about THE Word. That is how John introduces us to the story of Jesus. He has no story about a birth when he begins his gospel account. He takes us back much further than a manger, long before Bethlehem, even further back than the ancestry of Jesus in David or the early beginnings of the story of God’s people Israel in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

John takes us back to “the beginning” to discover the meaning of Christmas. Way back then, when the world was called into being, the Word was already. Before fleshliness, before humanness, before the world was begun, in fact, the Word was! “In the beginning was the Word.” Think about it! When “the beginning” was begun, the Word already was! He pre-dates even “the beginning,” for he is from eternity. He was “with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” Now there is a Christmas story for you!

What you do or say or believe about this Word will depend on what you do or say or believe about God! All words about THE Word have something to do with God’s relationship with us. In and through this Word God reaches out to us, calls to us, lets us know what the heart and will of God is, gives us a point of entrée into the very life and self-understanding of God. Here words as such are important, but they all revolve around THE Word or else they are just words filling the air, words from humans to humans about humans . . . and they only tell us about humans. But THE Word tells us about God, and therefore we must pay close attention to this Word. And that is what Christmas is all about!

This child “through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made that has been made” was the Word of creation. “Let there be,” God spoke – and there was! That is who we find in the mangerthis morning! John does not tell us about words in general. There is no plural in these opening phrases of John’s Gospel. There is only a singular word. “In the beginning was the Word!” And this Word is not identified as an “it,” but a “he.”

“In him was life, and that life was the light of men.” All life from its origin sprang from him, and he comes among us to bring that spark of life back into the darkness of sin. "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” Some translations say, “The darkness has not overcome it.” In either case the point John makes is powerful! Light itself cannot be seen. Shining through a vacuum it is invisible. It only appears when it strikes an object, and it is the object that reveals the presence of the light.

The Word is the light that shines through the darkness, and try though it may, the powers of darkness cannot stop it from shining. The darkness can neither understand this strange quality of light, nor can the darkness arrest its presence. The darkness hates the light, but its best efforts at obliterating it are in vain. Herod may send his soldiers to Bethlehem to stop it dead in its tracks, but it is all in vain. The child is God’s Son and rests under his protection.

The light shone on John as an early forerunner of this one who was himself the Light, but “he came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe.” Yet “he himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.” Just as we, ourselves, are only “witnesses to the light” by letting that light fall on us so that we become bearers of the Light of God. “The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world,” and to that truth John and we are to give testimony.

So the light shines in the darkness. “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” Darkness did not recognize him. He was a complete mystery to those among whom he lived, walked and spoke words. Everyone recognized that there was something extraordinary about him . . . even the shepherds who visited him in his earliest moments. After all, had angel messengers not revealed that much to those keepers of the flock? Surely angel messengers must signify something very special about him! Nor did that fact escape the notice of those among whom he moved and spoke.

“He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” Is John deliberately understating the case? Not only did his own not receive him. They crucified him. They not only denied that he was the light, but they decided to extinguish whatever light anyone might see in him or through him. Crucify him they did. But they did not put out the light! For “in him was life, and that life was the light of men.” His life was hidden in the grave for three days, to be sure, but a light hidden is still a light! And upon his resurrection it was clear that everything had changed about life . . . or even more specifically, everything had changed about death!

For if this light that shone among men was not extinguished by death, then surely he must be the Lord of Death . . . and anybody who is the Lord of Death is surely the Lord of Life. In fact, the very Word of Life must dwell within him. In him all life originated as the Word that was in the beginning, from whom all life on earth sprang forth. That life now proved to be more powerful even than death! Although the deathliness of sin had darkened the hallways of life from its very early moments, it could not keep the Lord of Life from haunting its passageways throughout all its history.

And now, behold, the Lord of Life is found lying here in this manger, a tiny baby, a child of promise born by the movement of the Holy Spirit in the womb of a virgin named Mary. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Is this not the wonder and awe of Christmas?

It is tempting to turn Christmas into little more than the sentimental viewing of a little baby lying helplessly in a manger, being tended by a mother and father fawning over him, cooing and singing lullabies to him. It is tempting to make of the child one who “no crying he makes,” as a favorite Christmas lullaby has it – as though here in this cradle a doll-like image lies such as we place in the creches of our Christmas nativity scenes. How marvelously wonderful it is to have the peace that surrounds our dream-like Christmas imaginations.

But to have the Word that was already in the beginning lying here in a human form, becoming flesh and making his dwelling among us as a full-fledged brother in bodily form with all the ordinary needs for night-time feeding, the changing of diapers, warm swaddling cloths to keep him warm in the cool of night. How can all this be?

It is the question of Mary from the time the angel Gabriel first visited her with the announcement that this child would be born of her. “How will this be?” she asked. And we ask it as we stand alongside her on this morning of Christmas day. How can the singular Word by which all things were called into being be encapsulated in this tiny little child? It is, as Gabriel replied to Mary: “Nothing is impossible with God.” And so we cease our attempts at understanding. We put aside our questions. We simply stand alongside the crib in wonder and awe, seeing in and through this child “the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Only one word remains to be said. It is the word of John, the narrator: “To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” With wonder and awe we stand at this point where God intersected the darkened and deadly-aimed course of this world with light and life. The light pours out from eternity through the porthole of a crib, striking us, becoming visible not only in the Child, but also in all of us who are struck by the light that now comes from this Child. It is not a light born of anything worldly – not natural descent, nor human decision, nor the will of humans, but born of God!

This is the light that we are to carry into the dreadful darkness hovering over all the world, trying desperately to keep the light from penetrating it He is the Word we bear to the world, for the Word is made flesh, dwelling among us, full of life and light . . . and lying in a manger!

Hubert F. Beck, retired pastor
Austin, Texas
Comments?  hbeck@austin.rr.com


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