Sermon for 2 January 2022 John 1: 1-18
[1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
6There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9The true light, which
enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.]
10He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
14And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. 15(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) 16From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, O Christ.
Holy God, give us grace and open our minds and hearts to hear your true and living word, Jesus the Christ – who will transform our lives.
Can you imagine, in around the 90’s AD, a writer named John wrote lines that mimicked the sacred scriptures that had been first written about 1000 years before and had been orally transmitted from one generation to another for another 1000 years before that? Beresit bara Elohim – “In the beginning God
created….” John has the audacity to re-write that to say “In the beginning was the Word” en arche en ho Logos.
The other gospel writers were merely relating the story of Jesus, but John – John is re-writing scripture – in effect saying that we’re starting all over from the very beginning. Jesus is God’s Word made real. Jesus’ presence, life, death and
resurrection has fundamentally changed all of history and gives us a new way to envision God and how God works.
And here it is, the first Sunday in a new calendar year so it’s as good a time as any to perhaps take a pause ourselves and look at what are the fundamentals of our faith. It’s easy to go down rabbit holes and lose sight of the big picture.
First – God, as made known to us in the life of Jesus, is grace and truth. God is love personified, made real, made identifiable/relatable. Jesus then is the light that enlightens everyone. He shows us “the way,” the life that is for all people.
Second, when we believe and trust what Jesus reveals to us, that is when we follow “the ways” of Jesus, we become children of God. By our actions and words, we become part of God’s ongoing effort to reconcile the world back to the basic goodness intended for all of creation.
Next, we have done NOTHING to deserve this. It is purely because of God’s abundant love we have received this gift of grace upon grace, love upon love.
God made love real, identifiable and relatable in Jesus’ life, death and
resurrection so that whoever believes in him, follows him, does what he does, takes on his humility, his quests for justice and exhibits his loving kindness will have a new life deeply connected to God. John writes just a few chapters later,
‘For God so LOVED the cosmos, God GAVE his only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not be fully destroyed, but have life perpetually, eternally.
So – that’s the big picture through which we find our purpose and meaning.
Next, Just in case we missed it the first few times in the Hebrew Bible, Jesus reiterates the Greatest Commandment as “Love God and love your neighbor” –
inextricably linking how we love our neighbor as the way in which we show our love for God.
There are no qualifications here. The neighbors don’t need to do anything, look like anything, behave or believe a certain way. They don’t need to be WORTHY of our love. We aren’t worthy of God’s love, there is nothing we can do to deserve it. Therefore, if we are to act with God’s love, we can’t expect others to do anything to deserve it either. Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic
Worker Movement said it this way “We only love God as much as the person we love the least.”
In fact, as Jesus demonstrates in the calling of his own group of disciples, we need to surround ourselves/form community with a diverse group of people – God’s own children created in God’s image. There is no litmus test, no
acceptance of an ideology or philosophy except to love our neighbor. Jesus has Matthew (a tax collector and Roman sympathizer), and Simon the Zealot (the Zealots being the Jews who wanted to rid Judea of the Romans by violent means or die trying) as part of his group. Jesus was demonstrating in his own life how we “need to bear with one another” as Paul says. Our goal is not to make everyone walk alike, talk alike, think alike, look alike – our goal is to unite BECAUSE of our differences so we can reach out to all corners of the earth, to extend love to the gloriously wide variety of people created in God’s image.
We’re all made different to learn from each other. We are created to learn to practice love in community. Religion comes from the Latin religio – which means to bind together. So in the truest sense, our religion should bind us together. Bind us to creation, to each other, to God. Instead, through our own self-interest and self-centeredness, religion often divides us. We weaponize our religion. People are enslaved – and we abuse religious reasons to justify it.
People are impoverished – and we abuse religious language to justify it. People go to war with others – and we attribute it to religion instead of our own greed and self-interest. And these are just the things that we have done as supposed Christians.
We have to let go of any religion/or religious reasoning we conjure up that
justifies hatred of anyone: Gays, straights, transgendered, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, immigrants, refugees, flag-kneelers, BLM protestors, Trump supporters, Biden haters, liberals, conservatives, reactionaries, anarchists, blacks, latinos, addicts, convicts, whites, white supremacists, racists, homeless, welfare cheats, the poor, people who game the system – you get the idea.
We hate, and we use a ‘religious’ reason to hate, because we frequently create God in OUR image: punitive, angry and vengeful. We do this because it makes us feel powerful and protected, rather than humble, open and vulnerable. BUT - we were created in God’s image, and God is love. We need to exorcise, cast out, banish our hate-filled impulses and stop blaming it on our religion.
We even need to stop practicing our self-hatred. We carry guilt, negative self- images, and we are preoccupied with ourselves and our perceived ‘needs’
because we have created and live in a competitive and self-comparing world.
We have been given grace upon grace, love upon love, regardless of what we have done or said. We are forgiven our trespasses, our sins, our debts by the grace of God.
Paul, in his letter to Romans says “2Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
The late Eugene Peterson re-imagines this verse in his translation The Message as, “Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out.
Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”
Our tendency to conform to this world, to proclaim our ‘rights’ and our moral superiority to others is a pathology. It is a disease that can only be cured by God and by our focusing our attention on God and attending to our responsibilities to God. It is a disease that manifests itself in ever-shrinking enclaves of people who (we think) think just like us. The impulse to divide ourselves, to separate ourselves from others is one of the symptoms. We are in a state of spiritual
emergency that has manifested itself in polarization at almost every level. “The world did not know him… and his own people did not accept him.”
We need a radical re-set. A re-boot. To return to the original fundamental programming in which we were created. In the beginning God created – and saw that it was good. In the beginning was the Word … and we have received grace and truth through Jesus.
So we take this pause, to re-boot, re-orient ourselves to be the good in the
world, to have supportive, life-giving relationships with ourselves, our neighbors, the earth and with God. To continually seek the common good. We need to BE the ear for the unheard, to see those who are not seen, to lift up the lowly, to actively seek to reconnect those who have been or chosen disconnection.
We have been shown the way, to make love real for every one of God’s children.
This is the foundation of our faith on which everything else is built. Let us audaciously begin again this year, let us rise up with love in our hearts, a song on our lips and the willingness to serve in our hands. Amen.
